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 Little Birds (1979)

  My lover, Marcel, had to go home that night; he lived quite far away. I was free. I left him at eleven o’clock and went to see Mary. I was wearing my flounced Spanish cretonne dress and a flower in my hair, and I was all bronzed by the sun and feeling beautiful. When I arrived, Mary was lying on her bed cold-creaming her face, her legs and her shoulders because she had been lying on the beach. She was rubbing cream into her neck, her throat—she was covered with cream. This disappointed me. I sat at the foot of her bed and we talked. I lost my desire to kiss her. She was running away from her husband. She had married him only to be protected. She had never really loved men but women. At the beginning of her marriage, she had told him all sorts of stories about herself that she should not have told him—how she had been a dancer on Broadway and slept with men when she was short of money; how she even went to a whorehouse and earned money there; how she met a man who fell in love with her and kept her for a few years. Her husband never recovered from these stories. They awakened his jealousy and doubts, and their life together had become intolerable. The day after we met, she left Saint-Tropez, and I was filled with regrets for not having kissed her. Now I was about to see her again. In New York I unfold my wings of vanity and coquetry. Mary is as lovely as ever and seems much moved by me. She is all curves, softness. Her eyes are wide and liquid; her cheeks, luminous. Her mouth is full; her hair blond, and luxuriant. She is slow, passive, lethargic. We go to the movies together. In the dark she takes my hand. She is being analyzed and has discovered what I sensed long ago: that she has never known a real orgasm, at thirty-four, after a sexual life that only an expert accountant could keep track of. I am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her. Mary says, “It is very hard to talk about sex, I am so ashamed.” She is not ashamed of doing anything at all, but she cannot talk about it. She can talk to me. We sit for hours in perfumed places where there is music. She likes places where actors go. There is a current of attraction between us, purely physical. We are always on the verge of getting into bed together. But she is never free in the evenings. She will not let me meet her husband. She is afraid I will seduce him.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  I started to leave. He said, “You know, there is an understanding here about models who do not know how to enjoy themselves. If you take this attitude nobody will give you any work.” I did not believe him. The next morning I began to knock on the doors of all the artists I could find. But Ronald had already paid them a visit. So I was received without cordiality, like a person who has played a trick on another. I did not have the money to return home, nor the money to pay for my room. I knew nobody. The country was beautiful, mountainous, but I could not enjoy it. The next day I took a long walk and came upon a log cabin by the side of a river. I saw a man painting there, out of doors. I spoke to him. I told him my story. He did not know Ronald, but he was angry. He said he would try to help me. I told him all I wanted was to earn enough to return to New York. So I began to pose for him. His name was Reynolds. He was a man of thirty or so, with black hair, very soft black eyes and a brilliant smile—a recluse. He never went to the village, except for food, nor frequented the restaurants or bars. He had a lax walk, easy gestures. He had been on the sea, always on tramp steamers, working as a sailor so that he could see foreign countries. He was always restless. He painted from memory what he had seen in his travels. Now he sat at the foot of a tree and never looked around him but painted a wild piece of South American jungle. Once when he and his friends were in the jungle, Reynolds told me, they had smelled such a strong animal odor they thought they would suddenly see a panther, but out of the bushes had sprung with incredible velocity a woman, a naked savage woman, who looked at them with the frightened eyes of an animal, then ran off, leaving this strong animal scent behind her, threw herself into the river and swam away before they could catch their breath. A friend of Reynolds had captured a woman like this. When he had washed off the red paint with which she was covered, she was very beautiful. She was gentle when well treated, succumbed to gifts of beads and ornaments.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “Not if you don’t want them to.” “But do they try . . . ?” I saw that he was anxious. We were walking to my house from the railway station, through the dark fields. I turned to him and offered my mouth. He kissed me. I said, “Stephen, take me, take me, take me.” He was completely dumbfounded. I was throwing myself into the refuge of his big arms, I wanted to be taken and have it all over with, I wanted to be made woman. But he was absolutely still, frightened. He said, “I want to marry you, but I can’t do it just now.” “I don’t care about the marriage.” But now I became conscious of his surprise, and it quieted me. I was immensely disappointed by his conventional attitude. The moment passed. He thought it was merely an attack of blind passion, that I had lost my head. He was even proud to have protected me against my own impulses. I went home to bed and sobbed. ONE ILLUSTRATOR asked me if I would pose on Sunday, that he was in a great rush to finish a poster. I consented. When I arrived he was already at work. It was morning and the building seemed deserted. His studio was on the thirteenth floor. He had half of the poster done. I got undressed quickly and put on the evening dress he had given me to wear. He did not seem to pay any attention to me. We worked in peace for a long while. I grew tired. He noticed it and gave me a rest. I walked about the studio looking at the other pictures. They were mostly portraits of actresses. I asked him who they were. He answered me with details about their sexual tastes: “Oh, this one, this one demands romanticism. It’s the only way you can get near her. She makes it difficult. She is European and she likes an intricate courtship. Halfway through I gave it up. It was too strenuous. She was very beautiful though, and there is something wonderful about getting a woman like that in bed. She had beautiful eyes, an entranced air, like some Hindu mystic. It makes you wonder how they will behave in bed.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His ideas spread among the Jews of Southern France and Spain, so that by the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was what amounted to a Jewish philosophical enlightenment in the area. Some of these Jewish Faylasufs were more vigorously rationalistic than Maimonides. Thus Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344) of Bagnols in Southern France denied that God had knowledge of mundane affairs. His was the God of the philosophers, not the God of the Bible. Inevitably a reaction set in. Some Jews turned to mysticism and developed the esoteric discipline of Kabbalah, as we shall see. Others recoiled from philosophy when tragedy struck, finding that the remote God of Falsafah was unable to console them. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian Wars of Reconquest began to push back the frontiers of Islam in Spain and brought the anti-Semitism of Western Europe to the peninsula. Eventually this would culminate in the destruction of Spanish Jewry, and during the sixteenth century the Jews turned away from Falsafah and developed an entirely new conception of God that was inspired by mythology rather than scientific logic.

• From A History of God (1993)

  I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate—and highly self-contradictory—doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem? Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Almost as worrisome is Lecia’s grim focus on a brisket Mother promised to fix. Whenever we drive home, Mother tempts Lecia with some childhood dish—chicken and dumplings, fudge, red beans and rice—but never, not once, follows through. Lecia’s ongoing capacity to hope for these dishes just stumps me. On the road before her, there’s a shimmering mirage of meat shredded in lush gravy with a side of buttery potato hunks. Does she bounce up and down a little in anticipation like a kid on a carousel? I believe she does, though the next instant, her face clouds. It won’t be there, will it? she says, shooting me a look. There’s a newspaper cartoon of a bucket-headed boy repeatedly talked into running at the football held by a wicked pigtailed girl who yanks it away so the boy falls on his ass every time. How many times, Lecia says, am I going to run at that football? Many, it turns out. With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago. But Lecia had once hired Mother to pick up her son Case at kindergarten until—a few weeks in—Mother forgot the boy in the parking lot. Given fat sums to answer Lecia’s insurance office phones, Mother tended to snipe into the receiver What? The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties—Lecia’s overfunctioning, Mother’s under. On any given holiday, Mother sits on her spreading white ass on either porch glider or couch. Which idleness—in some perverse way—I also envy. It takes fortitude to station yourself immobile before the classic-movie channel for days at a pop while hordes of individuals bake and whip, sauté and sear; serve and clear; and eventually scrub cheese crusts off casseroles and pan drippings from a blackened oven. For weeks I’ve hounded Mother daily about brisket, and she’s sworn to ante up. But yesterday her corns hurt, and as late as dawn this morning, the meat hadn’t been bought. She was having palpitations, but I swore if the stove was cold when we walked in, I’d head back to the airport. It could kill me to go to the store with my heart fluttering this way, she said. If you drop dead making this brisket, I said, you’ll go straight up to live with Baby Jesus . I’m thinking of going back to being a Buddhist, she said. Then you’ll escape the wheel of rebirth, I said. Minutes after we pull in, my sister’s face floats cherublike above an electric skillet holding a mess of peppery brisket. She uses her hand to wave toward her nose the white ribbons of steam swiveling up. Mother breathes frost on her big square glasses, then wipes them. She looks stunned we’re making such a big deal. Oh, she says with a distracted look, I forgot to get the blow-up mattress.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of God will not work. Not only is Milton’s God cold and legalistic, he is also grossly incompetent. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, God sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him how his descendants will be redeemed. The whole course of salvation history is revealed to Adam in a series of tableaux, with a commentary by Michael: he sees the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law on Sinai. The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God’s unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses—through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth—it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton’s God can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spensers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. Yet a God who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble. At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in God. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional “mysteries” as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal “Deus” which man could discover by his own efforts. François-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God’s unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses—through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth—it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton’s God can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spensers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. Yet a God who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble. At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in God. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional “mysteries” as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal “Deus” which man could discover by his own efforts. François-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible. Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?... which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity? 21 The churches had only themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive. The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  They got married. They took a trip around the world together. What Edna discovered in their travels was that the social captain supplied a great deal of the sexual intrigue in person. Edna returned from the trip estranged from her husband. Sexually he had not awakened her. She did not know why. Sometimes she thought it was because of her discovery of his having belonged to so many women. From the first night, it seemed that his possession was not of her, but of a woman like a hundred others. He had shown no emotion. When he undressed her he had said, “Oh, you have such thick hips. You seemed so slender, I never imagined you could have such thick hips.” She felt humiliated, she felt that she was not desirable. This paralyzed her own confidence, her own outflow of love and desire for him. Partly in a mood of revenge, she began to look at him just as coldly as he had looked at her, and what she saw was a man of forty whose hair was growing thin, who was soon going to be very fat and looked ready to retire into a familiar and stolid life. He was no longer the man who had seen all the world. Then came Robert, thirty years old, dark-haired, with burning brown eyes like some animal that looked at once hungry and tender. He was fascinated by Edna’s voice, enchanted by the softness of it. He was completely spellbound by her. He had just won a scholarship with an acting company. He and Edna shared a love of the stage. He renewed her faith in herself, in her attractiveness. He was not even quite aware that it was love. He treated her somewhat like an older sister, until one day backstage, when everyone had gone home and Edna had been rehearsing him, listening to him, giving her impressions, they acted out a kiss that did not stop. He took her, on the sofa of the stage setting, awkwardly, hurriedly, but with such an intensity that she felt him as she had never felt her husband. His words of praise, worship, cries of wonder, incited her, and she bloomed in his hands. They fell on the floor. The dust got into their throats, but they were still kissing, caressing, and Robert had a second erection.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Therefore, far from being something which might be piled up to make the sinner acceptable to God and help reach salvation, good works can do nothing to make us other than what we are — imperfect people. But while Karlstadt and Luther denied that human beings had free will, Eck argued that this would lead to antinomianism — a state of affairs where people reject all laws and commit all sorts of sin. This matter would soon become a major fissure within Reformation thought. Leipzig was a defeat for Luther, as he bitterly recognised when he told Lang that Eck was boasting of victory.” His supporters tried to put a positive gloss on the affair; Mosellanus proclaimed that “Eck triumphed with all who either follow like donkeys and understood nothing of the whole matter . . . or who wished the Wittenbergers ill for some other reason’, while Amsdorf wrote to a friend that comparing Eck with Luther would be likening ‘stone or rather dung’ with ‘the most beautiful and finest gold’. But even Amsdorf had to admit that Eck ‘screamed’ better than Luther; and that to every one of Luther’s arguments, Eck had responded with eight or nine of his own, making sure always to have the last word.” Popular opinion also gave Eck the laurels. He had taken on two opponents all by himself, producing “Herculean and Samsonite arguments’ that were delivered in a voice ‘like thunder and lightning’. Luther and Karlstadt had been accompanied by a whole posse of assistants: Lang, Melanchthon, three THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 137 jurists and a host of graduates who all pored over the protocol of the debate by night and who helped Luther during the day.® Yet all their scholarly learning combined had not managed to get the better of the bluff Eck. Luther was particularly irked by the fact that the Leipzigers had presented Eck with a robe and a beautiful chamois coat.* No such honour had been shown the Wittenbergers, who also had been given only an obligatory welcome drink on their arrival, whilst Eck was feted all over town. Luther thought that Eck was motivated solely by self-glory and envy, an allegation which became a leitmotif of every account of the debate he gave for the rest of his life, most strongly in his brief autobiographical reflections that prefaced the collected edition of his Latin works in 1545.» Eck’s supporters accused Luther of the same self-interest. The recriminations, the insults and the obsession with ‘envy’ on both sides suggest that the debate raised disturbing emotions in all the participants.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Soon there would be more than enough of the ‘excitement and dissension’ Luther had welcomed in his speech at the Diet. Ulrich von Hutten, the German knight and humanist, identified so closely with the event that he wrote two letters to his ‘amico sancto’, exhorting Luther to stand firm but warning of the ‘dogs’, his opponents, and talking of the need for swords, bows and arrows. Both letters were soon printed, joining a flood of pamphlets Hutten had authored which bemoaned the burning of Luther’s books and called for ‘manly’ resist- ance against the ‘effeminate’ bishops.” Luther also had the enthusiastic support of the knight Franz von Sickingen, who made his living as a mercenary and by levying ‘protection’ money from the rich towns along the Rhine. Opportunistic attacks on merchants by armed knights and bandits were a frequent occurrence — in fact, one such raid had occurred not far from Worms itself earlier on during the Diet.” By a fine irony Sickingen had undertaken a feud against the city of Worms almost a decade before. Hutten had convinced Sickingen of the rightness of Luther's cause, and Sickingen now offered the monk sanctuary at Ebernburg, one of his castles. Luther, however, was careful to keep his distance. These knights not only offered armed protection but were willing to take up arms in support of the gospel. In the autumn of 1522, they would 186 MARTIN LUTHER take on the archbishop of Trier, who had been prominent in attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with Luther in the wake of the Diet, expecting the peasants to flock to their support. But the peasants did not rise up, and within a week Sickingen ran out of gunpowder. The knight was forced to retreat, first to Ebernburg and then to his castle at Landstuhl where in May 1523 he was besieged by Philip of Hesse and the Palatine Elector. He counted on being able to hold out for four months in his newly reinforced castle, but modern artillery blew it to bits in short order, and Sickingen perished from a wound soon afterwards. Hutten too died that year. Their revolt was not quite the last hurrah of the power of the knights, a group that found itself becoming marginalised as the wealth and political reach of the princes increased, and as the cities grew richer and stronger: such feuds were to continue throughout Luther’s lifetime. Their defeat in 1523, however, did mark the end of the ideal of the united ‘Christian nobility’ of which Luther had dreamed three years before, when he wrote To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. * On the evening of 18 April 1521 in Worms, Emperor Charles himself composed a reply to Luther in his own hand.* He was careful not to pretend to have theological knowledge of the issues Luther had raised, stating simply that ‘Our ancestors, who were also Christian princes, were nevertheless obedient to the Roman Church which Dr Martin now attacks.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems that Luther did not write to Staupitz again for over a year. For his part, Staupitz wrote sadly to Wenzeslaus Linck in October 1521 that he was now his only friend, ‘destitute of the other, oh sorrow, whose voice I never once hear nor whose face do I see’.* Luther's disenchantment was complete when in 1522, Staupitz suddenly became a Benedictine abbot and retired to his beloved Salzburg, to which he had earlier invited Luther. ‘It is my wish, that you should leave Wittenberg for a time and come to me, so that we may live and die together’, Staupitz had written, probably in December 1518.” Yet although Luther felt this as a betrayal, it is hard not to see this decision as utterly in character for a man who loved a good and ordered life, whose friend Ursula Pfeffinger, abbess of the Frauenchiemsee convent, secured the best fish for him, and whose other friend Christoph Scheurl sent him oranges.” For Luther, the betrayal would have been multiple. Church law only permitted a monk to transfer to a stricter order, not to one which was more lax. The principle naturally led to much argument over which order was the most demanding but it could hardly be contended that the Benedictines were stricter than the observant Augustinians. The move also marked Staupitz’s retreat from the dramatic changes that had been taking place in the Augustinian order, at just the moment when, as Luther saw it, the transformations for which Staupitz had fought seemed to be coming to fruition. Last but not least, even if Staupitz shared some of the fundamentals of the Augustinian theology Luther espoused, Luther was not wrong to believe that his confessor’s retreat to Salzburg — where he would be near the implacable opponent of the Reformation, Cardinal Matthaeus Lang — was a withdrawal of affection. The favourite pupil, protégé and confessional son, had (in Staupitz’s words) ‘shat through his hands on his head’.” Each man had idealised the other; now both were bitterly disappointed. In June 1522, after sixteen months of silence, Luther wrote to Staupitz, incredulous at his decision to leave the order, but determined not to judge. The tone was now distant, telling him what ‘we’ — he, Linck and others — were doing to ‘publicise the pure Word among the people’.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Jeanette was amazed to see Pierre grown suddenly limp in the very middle of his fervent caresses. She felt contempt. She was too inexperienced to think that this might happen to any man in certain circumstances, so she did nothing to revive their lovemaking. She lay back, sighed and looked at the ceiling. Then Pierre kissed her mouth, and this she enjoyed. He lifted the light dress, looked at her young legs, pulled down the round garters. The sight of the stocking beginning to roll down and the tiny white panties she wore, the smallness of the sex he felt under his fingers, aroused him again, giving him such a desire to take her and do violence to her, so yielding and moist. He pushed his powerful sex into her and felt the tightness. This enchanted him. Like a sheath, her sex closed around his penis, softly and caressingly. He felt his power coming back to him, his usual power and deftness. He knew by each move she made where she wanted to be touched. When she pressed against him, he covered her little round buttocks with his warm hands, and his finger touched the orifice. She leaped under his touch but made no sound. And Pierre was waiting for this sound, a sound of approval, encouragement. No sound came from Jeanette. Pierre listened for it while he continued to pound into her. Then he stopped, half withdrew his penis, and with the tip of it alone, he circled the opening of her little rosy sex. She smiled at him and abandoned herself, but she still did not utter a sound. Wasn’t she enjoying herself? What was it that Jean did to her that wrung such shrieks of pleasure from her? He tried all his positions. He raised her towards him by the middle of her body, brought her sex up to him, and he kneeled to better push into her, but she made no sound. He turned her over, and took her from behind. His hands were everywhere. She was panting and moist, but silent. Pierre touched her little ass, caressed her small breasts, bit into her lips, kissed her sex, thrust his sex into her violently and then softly turned and churned in her, but still she remained silent. In desperation he said, “Say when you want it, say when you want it.” “Come now,” she said immediately, as if she had been waiting for him to do it. “Do you want it?” he asked again, filled with doubts. “Yes,” she said, but her passivity made him uncertain. He lost all his desire to come, to enjoy her. His desire died inside of her. He saw an expression of disappointment in her face. It was she who said, “I suppose I’m not as attractive to you as other women.” Pierre was surprised. “Of course you are attractive to me, but you did not seem to be enjoying yourself and that stopped me.”

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Robert and Dorothy left on a trip. They wanted to revisit the places they had traveled through a few weeks before, recapture the same pleasure. But when Robert tried to take Dorothy he found that she could not respond. Her body had undergone a change. The life had ebbed from it. He thought, It is the strain, the strain of having seen Edna, of the wedding, the scene made by Donald. So he was tender. He waited. Dorothy wept during the night. The next night it was the same. And the next. Robert tried caressing her, but her body did not vibrate under his fingers. Even her mouth did not answer his mouth. It was as though she had died. After a while she concealed it from him. She pretended to feel enjoyment. But when Robert was not looking at her, she looked exactly like Edna on the day of the wedding. She kept her secret. Robert was deceived, until one day when they took a room in a rather cheap hotel, because the best ones were filled. The walls were thin, the doors did not close well. They got into bed. As soon as they put out the light they heard the springs of the bed in the next room squeaking rhythmically, two heavy bodies pounding into each other. Then the woman began to moan. Dorothy sat up in bed and sobbed for all that was lost. Obscurely she felt what had happened to be a punishment. She knew it was related to her taking Robert from Edna. She thought she could recapture at least the physical response with other men, and perhaps free herself and return to Robert. When they went back to New York she sought adventures. In her head she was always hearing the moans and cries of the couple in the hotel room. She would not rest until she had felt this again. Edna could not cheat her of this, could not kill the life in her. It was too great a punishment for something that was not altogether her fault. She tried to meet Donald again. But Donald had changed. He had hardened, crystallized. Once an emotional, impulsive young man, he had become completely objective, mature, searching for his pleasure.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Indeed, in a previous letter to Staupitz on 20 February Luther had opened dramatically, saying he wanted to be ‘still’, but was seized and driven by God, and ‘thrown into the noise’."° The entire October letter is full of noise: news about disputations, envy and argument. So what does the dream mean? Is Staupitz’s moving hand reaching out to Luther or waving him goodbye? Is his confessor’s return dependent upon Luther becoming ‘calm’ or ‘still’ (‘quietus’), or indeed, on his keeping ‘quiet’, as the Latin word may also imply — that is, halting his struggle against the Pope? It was psychologically prescient. Staupitz almost certainly sent back the copies of the commentary on Galatians that Luther had enclosed with his October letter, refusing his protégé’s gift: he could hardly have made it clearer that he would have no truck with the new theology." In January 1521, Luther reminded him of the words he had spoken at Augsburg: ‘Remember, Friar, you began this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ’, warning him that now matters were becoming serious.” By the time the final bull of excommunication was published on 3 January 1521, Luther could no longer be sure of Staupitz’s loyalty. In February he was complaining that his confessor had already betrayed him by writing to the Pope, accepting him as judge in the matter, for Leo would certainly force him to deny Luther's teaching. Luther underlined the extent of Staupitz’s capitulation: if God loved him, he would force him to revoke his acceptance, for in the bull the Pope had condemned all that Staupitz had himself taught and believed until now. ‘But this is not a time to fear, but to shout’, Luther expostulated, adding that ‘As much as you exhort me to humility, so I exhort you to be proud.’ He concluded: “You have too much humility, just as I have too much pride.’ Luther contrasted what he termed Staupitz’s ‘submission’ with the Elector's prudence, wisdom, and — in a dig at his confessor’s pusillanimity — constancy; and he described how others, like the humanist and knight Ulrich von Hutten, were standing by him. ‘Your submission has saddened me, and has shown me another Staupitz than the earlier Staupitz, the proclaimer of grace and of the Cross’, Luther wrote. ‘If you had done this before 150 MARTIN LUTHER finding out about the bull and the insult to Christ, you would not have saddened me so greatly.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Some of the toll that Luther’s overwhelming personality must have taken on his family can be glimpsed in the fates of his children. Hans, the eldest son, named after Luther’s father, was destined for theology and had been enrolled at the University of Wittenberg at the age of seven, gaining the degree of bachelor six years later in 1539. The lad could not live up to expectations, and the pressure on him must have been unbearable. Reversing his father's trajectory, Hans ended up trying his hand at law, eventually becoming an advisor in the Weimar chancellery, a position he achieved more out of respect to his father than because of his own merits. By contrast, Martin, the second son, had been intended for the law and switched to theology, but never managed to win a post as a preacher.™ Paul, the youngest, aged thirteen when his father died, enjoyed a full and successful career as a court physician, settling finally in Leipzig, and fathering six children. Luther’s youngest daughter Margarethe made a good match, marrying a Prussian nobleman who was a student at Wittenberg; she gave birth to several children but died in 1570, aged only thirty-six.» By 1564 the vast monastery that had been left to the family in perpetuity had been sold. Bucer — the sly ‘fox’, as his Lutheran opponents had dubbed him — went into exile in England after the Interim and worked with Thomas Cranmer on revising the Book of Common Prayer. He lived out the rest of his life in the damp cold of Cambridge, hankering after his warm German stove back in Strasbourg.” If he had failed to accomplish the union between Lutherans and sacramentarians for which he had worked so hard, he left a lasting legacy in shaping the Anglican Church. As for Karlstadt, Luther’s old opponent, no church commemorated him as its founder, and only one crude woodcut image of him has survived. But his influence lived on, both in the Swiss sacramentarian tradition and within Anabaptism, where his adoption and development of the old mystical stance of Gelassenheit inspired a sceptical attitude to secular power, and a separatist tradition of devotion as well as commitment to martyrdom. Indeed, in the first half of the seventeenth 412 MARTIN LUTHER century, the new religious stirrings that would eventually give rise to Pietism began to recover elements of religion that had been lost within Luther’s mature theology.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Albertine branch now took over most of the electoral territories, including Wittenberg and its university, whilst the other line had to content itself with a court at Weimar. The legacy of the Protestant defeat was long-lasting throughout German lands, for Charles V punished their disobedience severely. The governments of proud imperial cities like Augsburg were reformed, and a new political system was established in which small groups of mainly Catholic patricians could now dominate local politics, while all political power was removed from the guilds. This made it much more difficult for a populist movement based around religious conviction to gain traction there again. It marked the end of Augsburg’s, Ulm’'s, Strasbourg’s and a host of other cities’ distinctive versions of evangelicalism, though it would not mean the permanent obliteration of alternatives to the Lutheran model. In Geneva, Calvin would develop his theocratic vision of a reformed community, an inspiration for a new generation. 408 MARTIN LUTHER 72. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1548. This woodcut portrait produced after Luther's death shows his bulky frame as authoritative and comforting. In the German lands, Charles V imposed the ‘Interim’ on 15 May 1548, a settlement which required Lutheran preachers to accept many traditional Catholic practices, including the existence of seven sacra- ments, although it did permit married clergy and Communion in both kinds. It split the Lutheran movement between those who were willing to compromise and those who were not: many preachers went into exile. Long-standing divisions among the Lutheran leadership also became evident, as Melanchthon was prepared to reach an accord while Amsdorf angrily rejected any deviation from what he saw as THE CHARIOTEER OF ISRAEL 409 73. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, 1553. Luther’s legacy. The tensions which had long underlain the alliance between Luther and Melanchthon began to play themselves out in public; Luther was no longer there to arbitrate and balance the opposing factions, and Melanchthon lacked both the authority and the personal charisma to lead. The movement started to splinter. This was also part of Luther's legacy, because, as he opposed the hierarchy of the papal Church he had not created an institutional struc- ture to replace it. While his 1539 tract On the Councils and the Churches had grandly rejected conciliarism, it failed to detail how his new Church should function, or what the relationship should be between the indi- vidual congregation and the Church as a whole. No overall organisation constrained the haphazardly created ‘superintendents’, who were, as Luther recognised, bishops in all but name. Lutheran preachers, subor- dinate to the secular authorities who paid their salaries, now had to plot their own course through the doctrinal wars and wishes of the local political powers; if they modelled their behaviour on Luther’s prophetic 410 MARTIN LUTHER mode, they often found that charisma availed little against local author- ities.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Live coals are more readily held in men’s mouths than a secret! Whatever you talk of at home will fly forth in an instant, Become a swift rumor and beat at the walls of your city. Nor is it enough that your confidence thus has been broken, As rumor but grows in the telling and strives to embellish. The covetous servant who feared to make public his knowledge A hole in the ground dug, and therein did whisper his secret That told of a king’s hidden ears: this the earth straightway echoed, And rustling reeds added that Midas was king in the story. “Every word of this is true,” I insisted, “and no one deserves to get into trouble more quickly than he who covets the goods of others! How could cheats and swindlers live unless they threw purses or little bags clinking with money into the crowd for bait? Just as dumb brutes are enticed by food, human beings are not to be caught unless they have something in the way of hope at which to nibble! (That was the reason that the Crotonians gave us such a satisfactory reception, but) the ship does not arrive, from Africa, with your money and your slaves, as you promised. The patience of the fortune-hunters is worn out and they have already cut down their liberality so that, either I am mistaken, or else our usual luck is about to return to punish you!” CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIRST.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  18. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 138; Was gesagt ist, fo. A [iv] (r). Luther makes the charge in “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” 1524, LW 40, 81, and throughout; WS 18, 63:32–33. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 155; Sider, Karlstadt, 216. In 1540, the year before he died, Karlstadt wrote a series of theses on Gelassenheit, which he termed “abnegatio.” This was intended to be part of a greater synoptic work of theology; Bubenheimer, “Gelassenheit und Ablösung,” 256. On Gelassenheit as works righteousness, see Sider, Karlstadt, 220–23. He argues Karlstadt was not guilty of the works righteousness with which Luther charged him, but he did place emphasis on self-mortification. 19. Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 153–54 (Zeitung aus Wittenberg): Krentz, Ritualwandel, casts doubt on its reliability, but it does convey the evangelical mood. 20. Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 135, 163, 170; Preus, Carlstadt’s Ordinaciones, 28 and n.62; Krentz, Ritualwandel, 154–69. 21. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 266; Uon Gelubden Unterrichtung, the preface is dated St. John’s Day (June 24) 1521. 22. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 132; 407, n.7, for translation of the Latin. It was to be prayed by Lutherans in honor of the Resurrection. 23. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 364; “gelertter, dapffer leuth”: Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 155–56 (Zeitung aus Wittenberg). 24. Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 170 (Thomas von der Heyde, Neue Zeitung); Kolde, ed., Analecta Lutherana, 25, Dec. 4, 1520, letter of Thomas Blaurer to Ambrosius Blaurer. 25. WB 2, 449, Jan. 13, 1522, 423:45. 26. Die Messe. Von der Hochzeyt D. Andre Carolstadt. Vnnd der Priestern / so sich Eelich verheyratten, Augsburg 1522 [VD 16 M 5492], fo. A ii (v), “Er ist zu ersten worden ain fischer der eeweyber.” 27. Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 155–59 (Zeitung aus Wittenberg); Barge, Karlstadt, I, 366, n.125. 28. See Bubenheimer, “Scandalum et ius divinum,” 266, n.6; Johann Pfau to the mayor of Zwickau, Hermann Mühlpfort, c. Jan. 15, 1522; Spalatin’s report of the events says they even burned extreme unction: Müller, Wittenberger Bewegung, 169; see also the account of Albert Burer, who dates it to January 11; 212. 29. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 107; Karlstadt, Von abtuhung der Bylder/ Vnd das keyn Betdler vnther den Christen seyn sollen, Wittenberg 1522, [VD 16 B 6215], fo. B i (r-v); interestingly the pamphlet features a lush title page woodcut illustration of a naked Adam and Eve holding aloft a decorative pediment and niche, with a peasant scene of harvest and sowing below, images almost certainly not produced for this pamphlet. Barge, Wittenberger Bewegung, I, 389. 30. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 115, 117; Karlstadt, Von abtuhung der Bylder, fos. C iii (v), C iv (v). 31. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 122; Karlstadt, Von abtuhung der Bylder, fo. D iv (r). 32. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 422.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther had originally approved many of the changes that Karlstadt had introduced—Communion in two kinds, a service in German—but in 1523, when he introduced a new liturgy, it was in Latin, and until 1523, Communion for the laity was to be bread only. The distinctive features of the Wittenberg Mass, with priests wearing secular clothing, and the congregation permitted to touch the bread and wine themselves rather than receiving them from the priest, were abolished. In other respects, however, Luther’s later German liturgy of 1526 was little different from Karlstadt’s. Indeed, although Luther later rewrote the story of the dispute as a doctrinal breach, Karlstadt had been no sacramentarian at this point: To all intents and purposes he held the same position on the Eucharist as Luther. It would be tempting to conclude that the real breach was over the leadership of the nascent Reformation movement. And yet this would be only half the truth. At a deeper level Luther grasped a key difference between himself and Karlstadt. Although they were shaped by the same spiritual tradition, the Theologia deutsch, and both were influenced by Staupitz, they were taking different paths and this led them, in time, to take different attitudes to the sacrament. Two years later, Karlstadt would argue that Communion was a memorial act only—the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was his spiritual presence, not his actual existence in the bread. Luther had already sensed Karlstadt’s hostility to the flesh when he read his treatise on vows. Soon the two men’s theologies would become irreconcilable. With Luther back, Zwilling brought into line, Karlstadt muzzled, and the council’s radical ordinances overturned, it seemed that the Wittenberg Reformation had been comprehensively defeated. And yet not every trace was obliterated. The begging ordinance and the common chest remained in force. The monks could not be brought back, and the smashed images could not be restored. In the end, most of Karlstadt’s reforms would be reintroduced—although Luther pointedly waited until he died in 1541 before abolishing the elevation of the sacrament in Wittenberg. Still, the council had resigned from its religious role, and thereafter the Wittenberg Reformation was a princely Reformation, not one driven by a popular civic movement. It was Luther who decided when weak consciences were strong enough to graduate from pap. The visionary excitement of the Wittenberg movement, the sense of the great things that could be done with the funds liberated from Masses and monasteries, the feeling of evangelical power as thousands of citizens took Communion in both kinds—all this was lost as Luther insisted on his leadership, not collective action.