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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Maybe she had the clap, yes-— but she is not pregnant.” “But why does she want to marry him? Is she really in love with him?” “Love? Pfooh! She has no heart, Ginette. She wants someone to look after her. No Frenchman would ever marry her—she has a police record. No, she wants him because he’s too stupid to find out about her. Her parents don’t want her any more—she’s a disgrace to them. But if she can get married to a rich American, then everything will be all right. ... You think maybe she loves him a little, eh? You don’t know her. When they were living together at the hotel, she had men coming to her room while he was at work. She said he didn’t give her enough spending money. He was stingy. That fur she wore—she told him her parents had given it to her, didn’t she? Innocent fool! Why, I’ve seen her bring a man back to the hotel right while he was there. She brought the man to the floor below. I saw it with my own eyes. And what a man! An old derelict. He couldn’t get an erection!” If Fillmore, when he was released from the château, had returned to Paris, perhaps I might have tipped him off about his Ginette. While he was still under observation I didn’t think it well to upset him by poisoning his mind with Yvette’s slanders. As things turned out, he went directly from the château to the home of Ginette’s parents. There, despite himself, he was inveigled into making public his engagement. The banns were published in the local papers and a reception was given to the friends of the family. Fillmore took advantage of the situation to indulge in all sorts of escapades. Though he knew quite well what he was doing he pretended to be still a little daffy. He would borrow his father-in- law’s car, for example, and tear about the countryside all by himself; if he saw a town that he liked he would plank himself down and have a good time until Ginette came searching for him. Sometimes the father-in-law and he would go off together—on a fishing trip, presumably—and nothing would be heard of them for days. He became exasperatingly capricious and exacting. I suppose he figured he might as well get what he could out of it. When he returned to Paris with Ginette he had a complete new wardrobe and a pocketful of dough. He looked cheerful and healthy, and had a fine coat of tan. He looked sound as a berry to me. But as soon as we had gotten away from Ginette he opened up. His job was gone and his money had all run out. In a month or so they were to be married. Meanwhile the parents were supplying the dough. “Once they’ve got me properly in their clutches,” he said, “I’ll be nothing but a slave to them.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  An Education for Life [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] I was eighteen when I reluctantly started my undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was not where I wanted to go. For years I had kept in the back of my jewelry box a red-enamel-and-gold University of Chicago pin that my father had given me; it had a delicate gold chain linking the two parts of the pin, and I thought it was absolutely beautiful; I wanted to earn my right to wear it. I also wanted to go to the University of Chicago because it had a reputation for tolerating, not to say encouraging, nonconformity, and because both my father and my mother’s father, a physicist, had gone there for graduate school. This was financially impossible. My father’s erratic behavior had cost him his job at Rand, so, unlike most of my friends—who went off to Harvard, Stanford, or Yale—I applied to the University of California. I was bitterly disappointed; I was eager to leave California, to be on my own, and to attend a relatively small university. In the long run, however, UCLA turned out to be the best possible place for me. The University of California provided me an excellent and idiosyncratic education, an opportunity to do independent research, and the wide berth that perhaps only a large university can afford a tempestuous temperament. It could not, however, provide any meaningful protection against the terrible agitation and pain within my mind. College, for many people I know, was the best time of their lives. This is inconceivable to me. College was, for the most part, a terrible struggle, a recurring nightmare of violent and dreadful moods spelled only now and again by weeks, sometimes months, of great fun, passion, high enthusiasms, and long runs of very hard but enjoyable work. This pattern of shifting moods and energies had a very seductive side to it, in large part because of fitful reinfusions of the intoxicating moods that I had enjoyed in high school. These were quite extraordinary, filling my brain with a cataract of ideas and more than enough energy to give me at least the illusion of carrying them out. My normal Brooks Brothers conservatism would go by the board; my hemlines would go up, my neckline down, and I would enjoy the sensuality of my youth. Almost everything was done to excess: instead of buying one Beethoven symphony, I would buy nine; instead of enrolling for five classes, I would enroll in seven; instead of buying two tickets for a concert I would buy eight or ten.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  They have an easy conscience, the rich. If a poor man dozes off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified; he imagines that he has committed a crime against the composer. In the Spanish number the house was electrified. Everybody sat on the edge of his seat—the drums woke them up. I thought when the drums started it would keep up forever. I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or throw their hats away. There was something heroic about it and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had wanted to. But that’s not Ravel. Suddenly it all died down. It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake, in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed. My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away from me, now that the drums have ceased. People everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand. He looks as if he were posing for the “Balzac” of Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail—marvelous if she were to have a hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies! Sleep is the keynote. No one is listening any more. Impossible to think and listen. Impossible to dream even when the music itself is nothing but a dream. A woman with white gloves holds a swan in her lap. The legend is that when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins. Everybody is giving birth to something —everybody but the Lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears. Little phrases from California, whales with big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar. When along the Guadalquivir there were a thousand mosques ashimmer. Deep in the icebergs and the days all lilac. The Money Street with two white hitching posts. The gargoyles... the man with the Jaworski nonsense... the river lights... the... In America I had a number of Hindu friends, some good, some bad, some indifferent.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  But then she was so drunk that when she tumbled out of the cab she began to weep and before any one could stop her she had begun to peel her clothes off. The driver brought her home that way, half-naked, and when Jimmie saw the condition she was in he was so furious with her that he took his razor strop and he belted the piss out of her, and she liked it, the bitch that she was. “Do it some more!” she begged, down on her knees as she was and clutching him around the legs with her two arms. But Jimmie had enough of it. “You’re a dirty old sow!” he said and with his foot he gave her a shove in the guts that took the wind out of her—and a bit of her sexy nonsense too. It was high time we were leaving. The city looked different in the early morning light. The last thing we talked about, as we stood there waiting for the train to pull out, was Idaho. The three of us were Americans. We came from different places, each of us, but we had something in common—a whole lot, I might say. We were getting sentimental, as Americans do when it comes time to part. We were getting quite foolish about the cows and sheep and the big open spaces where men are men and all that crap. If a boat had swung along instead of the train we’d have hopped aboard and said good-bye to it all. But Collins was never to see America again, as I learned later; and Fillmore ... well, Fillmore had to take his punishment too, in a way that none of us could have suspected then. It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea. ... Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked. I returned to Paris with money in my pocket—a few hundred francs, which Collins had shoved in my pocket just as I was boarding the train. It was enough to pay for a room and at least a week’s good rations. It was more than I had had in my hands at one time for several years. I felt elated, as though perhaps a new life was opening before me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The word must be missing from his Gujarati dictionary. The day I arrived at Nanantatee’s apartment he was in the act of performing his ablutions, that is to say, he was standing over a dirty bowl trying to work his crooked arm around toward the back of his neck. Beside the bowl was a brass goblet which he used to change the water. He requested me to be silent during the ceremony. I sat there silently, as I was bidden, and watched him as he sang and prayed and spat now and then into the washbowl. So this is the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York! The Rue Lafayette! It sounded like an important street to me back there in New York. I thought only millionaires and pearl merchants inhabited the street. It sounds wonderful, the Rue Lafayette, when you’re on the other side of the water. So does Fifth Avenue, when you’re over here. One can’t imagine what dumps there are on these swell streets. Anyway, here I am at last, sitting in the gorgeous suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette. And this crazy duck with his crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself. The chair on which I’m sitting is broken, the bedstead is falling apart, the wallpaper is in tatters, there is an open valise under the bed crammed with dirty wash. From where I sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down below where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke their clay pipes. I wonder now, as he chants the doxology, what that bungalow in Darjeeling looks like. It’s interminable, his chanting and praying. He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain prescribed way—his religion demands it. But on Sundays he takes a bath in the tin tub—the Great I AM will wink at that, he says. When he’s dressed he goes to the cupboard, kneels before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats the mumbo jumbo. If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will happen to you. The good lord what’s his name never forgets an obedient servant. And then he shows me the crooked arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance. His arm looks like a broken compass; it’s not an arm any more, but a knucklebone with a shank attached. Since the arm has been repaired he has developed a pair of swollen glands in the armpit—fat little glands, exactly like a dog’s testicles. While bemoaning his plight he remembers suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal diet. He begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu with plenty of fish and meat. “And what about oysters, Endree—for le petit frère?”

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

  There are people who keep on saying that what was good enough for people in the past is good enough for them. There are Christians in whose faith there has been no development for thirty or forty or fifty or sixty years. There are Christians who have deliberately refused to try to understand the advances that biblical scholarship and theological thought have made. They are grown men and women, and yet they insist on remaining content with the religious development of children. They are like surgeons who refuse to use the new techniques of surgery, refuse to use the new anaesthetics, refuse to use any new equipment and say: ‘What was good enough for Lister in the nineteenth century is good enough for me.’ They are like a physician who refuses to use any of the new drugs and says: ‘What I learned as a student fifty years ago is good enough for me.’ In religious matters, it is even worse. God is infinite; the riches of Christ are unsearchable; and to the end of the day we should be moving forward. (2) There are people who have never grown up in behaviour. It may be forgivable in a child to sulk or to throw fits of temper, but there are many adults who are just as childish in their behaviour. A case of arrested development is always pathetic to see; and the world is full of people whose religious development has been arrested. They stopped learning years ago, and their conduct is that of a child. It is true that Jesus said the greatest thing in the world is the childlike spirit; but there is a tremendous difference between the childlike and the childish spirit. Peter Pan makes a charming play on the stage, but the person who will not grow up makes a tragedy in real life. Let us take care that we do not remain in the religion of childhood when we should have reached the faith of maturity. THE NECESSITY OF PROGRESS Hebrews 6:1–3 So, then, let us leave elementary teaching about Christ behind us and let us be borne onwards to full maturity; for we cannot go on laying the foundations all the time and teaching about repentance from dead works and giving information about washings, about the laying on of hands, about the resurrection from the dead and upon that sentence which lasts to all eternity. God willing, this very thing we will do. THE writer to the Hebrews was certain of the necessity of progress in the Christian life. Teachers would never get anywhere if they had to lay the foundations all over again every time they began to teach. The writer to the Hebrews says that his people must be going on to what he calls teleiotēs.

• From The Girls (2016)

  to help me with my bag, but I’d already hefted it into the backseat before he reached me. “Thanks, though,” I said, trying to smile. His hands spread at his sides, and when he smiled back, it was with the helpless apology of a foreigner who needed directions repeated. My brain, to him, was a mysterious magic trick that he could only wonder at. Never bothering to puzzle out the hidden compartment. As we took our seats, I could sense that he was gathering himself to invoke the parental script. “I don’t have to lock you in your room, do I?” he said. His halting laugh. “No breaking in to anyone’s house?” When I nodded, he visibly relaxed. Like he’d gotten something out of the way. “It’s a good time for you to visit,” he went on, as if this were all voluntary. “Now that we’re settled. Tamar’s real particular about the furniture and stuff.” He started the ignition, already beyond any mention of trouble. “She went all the way to the flea market in Half Moon Bay to get this bar cart.” There was a brief moment I wanted to reach for him across the seat, to draw a line from myself to the man who was my father, but the moment passed. “You can pick the station,” he offered, seeming as shy to me as a boy at a dance. — The first few days, all three of us had been nervous. I got up early to make the bed in the guest room, trying to heft the decorative pillows back into completion. My life was limited to my drawstring purse and my duffel of clothes, an existence I tried to keep as neat and invisible as possible. Like camping, I thought, like a little adventure in self-reliance. The first night, my father brought home a cardboard tub of ice cream, striated with chocolate, and scooped free heroic amounts. Tamar and I just picked at ours, but my father made a point of eating another bowl. He kept glancing up, as if we could confirm his own pleasure. His women and his ice cream. Tamar was the surprise. Tamar in her terry shorts and shirt from a

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

  Even if the sermon is poor and the worship uninspiring, the church service still gives us the chance to show to others what side we are on. (b) They may not go because they are over-particular. They may shrink from contact with people who are ‘not like them’. There are congregations which are as much clubs as they are churches. There may be congregations where a form of social snobbery is practised. We must never forget that there is no such thing as a ‘common’ person in the sight of God. It was for all, not only for the ‘respectable’ classes, that Christ died. (c) They may not go because of conceit. They may believe that they do not need the Church or that they are intellectually beyond the standard of preaching there. Social snobbery is bad, but spiritual and intellectual snobbery is worse. The wisest person is a fool in the sight of God; and the strongest person is weak in the moment of temptation. There is no one who can live the Christian life and neglect the fellowship of the Church. If people feel that they can do so, let them remember that they come to church not only to get but also to give. If they think that the Church has faults, it is their duty to come in and help to correct them. (3) We must encourage one another. One of the highest of human duties is that of encouragement. There is a regulation in the Royal Navy which says: ‘No officer shall speak discouragingly to another officer in the discharge of duties.’ Eliphaz unwillingly paid Job a great tribute. As Moffatt translates it: ‘Your words have kept men on their feet’ (Job 4:4). The writer J. M. Barrie somewhere wrote to Cynthia Asquith, the wife of the Liberal statesman: ‘Your first instinct is always to telegraph to Jones the nice thing Brown said about him to Robinson. You have sown a lot of happiness that way.’ It is easy to laugh at people’s ideals, to pour cold water on their enthusiasm, to discourage them. The world is full of discouragers; we have a Christian duty to encourage one another. So many times, words of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer have kept people on their feet. Blessed are those who speak such words. Finally, the writer to the Hebrews says that our Christian duty to each other is all the more pressing because the time is short. The day is approaching. He is thinking of the second coming of Christ when things as we know them will be ended. The early Church lived in that expectation. Whether or not we still do, we must realize that none of us knows when the summons to rise and go will come to us also.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  benches outside the houses, apparently in perfect contentment, letting the children play a little longer, one man reading a book, a woman talking to her neighbor, many of them just taking their ease at their windows, arms folded, in a way once common at the onset of dusk. At first I could get none of these images into my head; they merely flickered before my eyes as the source of continual irritation or vexation, which was further reinforced when, to my horror, it turned out that the Berlin cassette inscribed with the original title of Der Flihrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt had on it only a patchwork of scenes cobbled together and lasting some fourteen minutes, scarcely more than an opening sequence in which, despite the hopes I had entertained, I could not see Agata anywhere, however often I ran the tape and however hard I strained to make her out among those fleeting faces. In the end the impossibility of seeing anything more closely in those pictures, which seemed to dissolve even as they appeared, said Austerlitz, gave me the idea of having a slow-motion copy of this fragment from Theresienstadt made, one which would last a whole hour, and indeed once the scant document was extended to four times its original length, it did reveal previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether, which I have since watched over and over again. The men and women employed in the workshops now looked as if they were toiling in their sleep, so long did it take them to draw needle and thread through the air as they stitched, so heavily did their eyelids sink, so slowly did their lips move as they looked wearily up at the camera. They seemed to be hovering rather than walking, as if their feet no longer quite touched the ground. The contours of their bodies were blurred and, particularly in the scenes shot out of doors in broad daylight, had dissolved at the edges, resembling, as it occurred to me, said Austerlitz, the frayed outlines of the human hand shown in the fluidal pictures and electrographs taken by Louis Draget in Paris around the turn of the century. The many damaged sections of the tape, which I had hardly noticed before, now melted the image from its center or from the edges, blotting it out and instead making patterns of bright white sprinkled with black which reminded me of aerial photographs taken in the far north, or a drop of water seen under the microscope. Strangest of all, however, said Austerlitz, was the transformation of sounds in this slow-motion version. In a brief sequence at the very beginning, showing red-hot iron being worked in a smithy to shoe a draft ox, the merry polka by some Austrian operetta composer on the sound track of the Berlin copy had become a funeral march dragging along at a grotesquely sluggish pace, and the rest of the musical pieces accompanying the film, among which I could identify only the can-can from La Vie Parisienne and the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, also moved in a kind of

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation62 the soldiers of Israel want God to support them, they take the Ark of the Covenant into battle. But in a stunning turn of events, God’s judgment unfolds by allowing Israel’s army to suffer defeat. In battle, the ark of is captured by the Philistines, and the corrupt priesthood at the sanctuary is brought to an end. Act 2: Saul’s Rise to Power ‹ By the end of Act I, the old era has reached its end, and Samuel has begun to serve as a fair and honest judge for the people. But soon, Samuel’s sons fall into corruption, and it becomes clear that the old patterns will persist. Act II begins in chapter 8, where the people tell Samuel that they no longer want the old system of leadership by judges. They want a king in order to be like other nations. ‹ This request is an enormous misstep. It is a point of conflict between human desire and the purposes of God. The people assume that a king will give them prestige, status, and security, yet Samuel warns that kingship will bring the opposite—oppression, abuse of power, heavy taxation, and more. In the face of their insistent demand, however, Samuel discerns God’s response to let them have a king. Here, we can see the dimension of human responsibility emerging more clearly. The new phase begins when God gives in to human demand, and their misguided intentions set the course of events. ‹ In chapter 9, we are introduced to a young man named Saul, who seems to have considerable promise as a leader. Indeed, Samuel discerns that Saul is to be the new king over Israel. Samuel performs a symbolic action—anointing—that will enable Saul to rise to the heights of royal power. After Saul is anointed, he is filled with God’s spirit, which empowers him for leadership. ‹ Saul then encounters his first major challenge as king. The crisis involves a town on the eastern side of the Jordan River that is under attack from a neighboring warlord. The people of the town send messengers to Saul, pleading for help. Saul responds with a show of strength that saves the city. His triumph establishes his reputation as a leader.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 148 164 B.C., three years after Judah’s return, the restored sanctuary was ready for dedication. The festivities lasted for eight days, and the celebration was known as Hanukkah (Hebrew: “dedication”). In later times, people began telling the story of the lamp oil that miraculously lasted for eight days on the first Hanukkah, but that’s not part of the narrative in 1 Maccabees. ‹The Maccabean resistance movement eventually forced the Seleucids to halt their attempt at suppressing Jewish practice. In chapter 5, the Maccabees achieve a series of military victories that extend their influence over much of the country. Then, in chapter 6, the success of the Maccabees is contrasted with the failure of Antiochus, who tries to plunder other cities but cannot do so. According to the author of 1 Maccabees, Antiochus becomes sick with disappointment and dies full of regret. His successors agree to lift the ban on Jewish religious practice in the interests of peace. Judah Maccabee would earn his nickname by “hammering” the Seleucid armies with his victories on the battlefield.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Violet was going to be married in September, they would then live in London, for Alec was a barrister. Their house, it seemed, was already bespoken: ‘A perfect duck of a house in Belgravia,’ where Violet intended to entertain largely on the strength of a bountiful parent Peacock. She was in the highest possible fettle these days, invested with an enormous importance in her own eyes, as also in those of her neighbours. Oh, yes, the whole world smiled broadly on Violet and her Alec: ‘Such a charming young couple,’ said the world, and at once proceeded to shower them with presents. Apostle teaspoons arrived in their dozens, so did coffee-pots, cream-jugs and large fish slices; to say nothing of a heavy silver bowl from the Hunt, and a massive salver from the grateful Scottish tenants. On the wedding day not a few eyes would be wet at the sight of so youthful a man and maiden ‘joined together in an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency.’ For such ancient traditions—in spite of the fact that man’s innocency could not even survive one bite of an apple shared with a woman—are none the less apt to be deeply moving. There they would kneel, the young newly wed, ardent yet sanctified by a blessing, so that all, or at least nearly all, they would do, must be considered both natural and pleasing to a God in the image of man created. And the fact that this God, in a thoughtless moment, had created in His turn those pitiful thousands who must stand for ever outside His blessing, would in no way disturb the large congregation or their white surpliced pastor, or the couple who knelt on the gold-braided, red velvet cushions. And afterwards there would be plentiful champagne to warm the cooling blood of the elders, and much shaking of hands and congratulating, and many kind smiles for the bride and her bridegroom. Some might even murmur a fleeting prayer in their hearts, as the two departed: ‘God bless them!’ So now Stephen must actually learn at first hand how straight can run the path of true love, in direct contradiction to the time-honoured proverb. Must realize more clearly than ever, that love is only permissible to those who are cut in every respect to life’s pattern; must feel like some ill-conditioned pariah, hiding her sores under lies and pretences. And after those visits of Violet Antrim’s, her spirits would be at a very low ebb, for she had not yet gained that steel-bright courage which can only be forged in the furnace of affliction, and which takes many weary years in the forging. 2 The splendid new motor arrived from London, to the great delight and excitement of Burton. The new suits were completed and worn by their owner, and Angela’s costly gold bag was received with apparent delight, which seemed rather surprising considering her erstwhile ban upon presents.

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

  The seat of sin is the intention, which is the root, bearing good and bad fruit.1387 Desire or concupiscence is not sin. This intention, intentio, is not the simple purpose, say, to kill a man in opposition to killing one without premeditation, but it is the underlying purpose to do right or wrong. In this consciousness of right or wrong lies the guilt. Those who put Christ to death from a feeling that they were doing right, did not sin, or, if they sinned, sinned much less grievously than if they had resisted their conscience and not put him to death. How then was it that Christ prayed that those who crucified him might be forgiven? Abaelard answers by saying that the punishment for which forgiveness was asked was temporal in its nature. The logical deduction from Abaelard’s premises would have been that no one incurs penalty but those who voluntarily consent to sin. But from this he shrank back. The godless condition of the heathen he painted in darkest colors. He, however, praised the philosophers and ascribed to them a knowledge through the Sibylline books, or otherwise, of the divine unity and even of the Trinity.1388 Bernard wrote to Innocent II. that, while Abaelard labored to prove Plato a Christian, he proved himself to be a pagan. Liberal as he was in some of his doctrinal views, he was wholly at one with the Church in its insistence upon the efficiency of the sacraments, especially baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Because Abaelard stands outside of the theological circle of his day, he will always be one of the most interesting figures of the Middle Ages. His defect was in the lack of moral power. The student often finds himself asking the question, whether his statements were always the genuine expression of convictions. But for this lack of moral force, he might have been the Tertullian of the Middle Ages, whom he is not unlike in dash and original freshness of thought. The African Father, so vigorous in moral power, the Latin Church excludes from the number of the saints on account of his ecclesiastical dissent. Abaelard she cannot include on account of moral weakness.1389 Had he been willing to suffer and had he not retracted all the errors charged against him, he might have been given a place among the martyrs of thought.1390 As it is, his misfortunes arouse our sympathy for human frailties which are common; his theology and character do not awaken our admiration. § 101. Younger Contemporaries of Abaelard. Literature: For Gilbert (Gislebertus) of Poictiers. His Commentaries on Boethius, De trinitate are in Migne, 64. 1266 sqq. T he De sex principiis, Migne, 188. 1250–1270. For his life: Gaufrid of Auxerre, Migne, 185. 595 sqq.—Otto of Freising, De gestis Frid., 50–57.—J. of Salisbury, Hist. pontif., VIII.—Poole, in Illustr. of the Hist. of Med. Thought, pp. 167–200. Hefele, V. 503–508, 520–524.—Neander-Deutsch, St. Bernard, II. 130–144.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  3The autumn passed, giving place to the winter, with its short, dreary days of mist and rain. There was now little beauty left in Paris. A grey sky hung above the old streets of the Quarter, a sky which no longer looked bright by contrast, as though seen at the end of a tunnel. Stephen was working like some one possessed, entirely re-writing her pre-war novel. Good it had been, but not good enough, for she now saw life from a much wider angle; and moreover, she was writing this book for Mary. Remembering Mary, remembering Morton, her pen covered sheet after sheet of paper; she wrote with the speed of true inspiration, and at times her work brushed the hem of greatness. She did not entirely neglect the girl for whose sake she was making this mighty effort—that she could not have done even had she wished to, since love was the actual source of her effort. But quite soon there were days when she would not go out, or if she did go, when she seemed abstracted, so that Mary must ask her the same question twice—then as likely as not get a nebulous answer. And soon there were days when all that she did apart from her writing was done with an effort, with an obvious effort to be considerate. ‘Would you like to go to a play one night, Mary?’ If Mary said yes, and procured the tickets, they were usually late, because of Stephen who had worked right up to the very last minute. Sometimes there were poignant if small disappointments when Stephen had failed to keep a promise. ‘Listen, Mary darling—will you ever forgive me if I don’t come with you about those furs? I’ve a bit of work here I simply must finish. You do understand?’ ‘Yes, of course I do.’ But Mary, left to choose her new furs alone, had quite suddenly felt that she did not want them. And this sort of thing happened fairly often. If only Stephen had confided in her, had said: ‘I’m trying to build you a refuge; remember what I told you in Orotava!’ But no, she shrank from reminding the girl of the gloom that surrounded their small patch of sunshine. If only she had shown a little more patience with Mary’s careful if rather slow typing, and so given her a real occupation—but no, she must send the work off to Passy, because the sooner this book was finished the better it would be for Mary’s future. And thus, blinded by love and her desire to protect the woman she loved, she erred towards Mary.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  9 A year later our father came to Stamps without warning. It was awful for Bailey and me to encounter the reality one abrupt morning. We, or at any rate I, had built such elaborate fantasies about him and the illusory mother that seeing him in the flesh shredded my inventions like a hard yank on a paper chain. He arrived in front of the Store in a clean gray car (he must have stopped just outside of town to wipe it in preparation for the “grand entrance”). Bailey who knew such things, said it was a De Soto. His bigness shocked me. His shoulders were so wide I thought he'd have trouble getting in the door. He was taller than anyone I had seen, and if he wasn't fat, which I knew he wasn't, then he was fat-like. His clothes were too small too. They were tighter and woolier than was customary in Stamps. And he was blindingly handsome. Momma cried, “Bailey, my baby. Great God, Bailey.” And Uncle Willie stuttered, “Bu-Buh-Bailey.” My brother said, “Hot dog and damn. It's him. It's our daddy.” And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again . His voice rang like a metal dipper hitting a bucket and he spoke English. Proper English, like the school principal, and even better. Our father sprinkled ers and even errers in his sentences as liberally as he gave out his twisted-mouth smiles. His lips pulled not down, like Uncle Willie's, but to the side, and his head lay on one side or the other, but never straight on the end of his neck. He had the air of a man who did not believe what he heard or what he himself was saying. He was the first cynic I had met. “So er this is Daddy's er little man? Boy, anybody tell you errer that you er look like me?” He had Bailey in one arm and me in the other. “And Daddy's baby girl. You've errer been good children, er haven't you? Or er I guess I would have er heard about it er from Santa Claus.” I was so proud of him it was hard to wait for the gossip to get around that he was in town. Wouldn't the kids be surprised at how handsome our daddy was? And that he loved us enough to come down to Stamps to visit? Everyone could tell from the way he talked and from the car and clothes that he was rich and maybe had a castle out in California. (I later learned that he had been a doorman at Santa Monica's plush Breakers Hotel.) Then the possibility of being compared with him occurred to me, and I didn't want anyone to see him. Maybe he wasn't my real father. Bailey was his son, true enough, but I was an orphan that they picked up to provide Bailey with company.

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

  But if you will not obey the Lord your God . . . the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out against them one way and flee before them seven ways. (Deut. 28:1, 7, 15, 25) This example leads to an obvious question: Were such blessings and curses always empirically verifiable and consistently credible both inside and outside the Deuteronomic tradition? That theology was applied, for example, to judge as good or bad the kings of Judah and Israel in the historical books that come after the book of Deuteronomy. Did theory work out in practice? Were good kings always awarded with blessings and bad kings always punished with curses? Here are two striking examples that contradict Deuteronomy’s serene assurance. Watch how history is then corrected to conform with theology. The cases concern a bad king who lived too long and a good king who died too young. This double discrepancy between monarchic history and Deuteronomic theology was recognized by the author known as the Chronicler who wrote a theologically “correct” version of 2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings during the Persian restoration around 400 BCE . His solution was not to rethink theology, but to change history—like this. The Case of King Manasseh: Manasseh was a very bad king by Deuteronomic standards (2 Kings 21:2), yet he reigned from 697 to 642 BCE —longer even than David. How could that be? He must have done something good and was being blessed and rewarded, and the Chronicler rewrites the story accordingly: History Written: “Manasseh misled them to do more evil than the nations had done that the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel. . . . Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all that he did, and the sin that he committed, are they not written in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah?” (2 Kings 21:9, 17) History Rewritten: “Manasseh misled Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that they did more evil than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed before the people of Israel. . . . The Lord brought against them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria, who took Manasseh captive in manacles, bound him with fetters, and brought him to Babylon. While he was in distress he entreated the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. He prayed to him, and God received his entreaty, heard his plea, and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his Kingdom . . . . Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, his prayer to his God, and the words of the seers who spoke to him in the name of the Lord God of Israel, these are in the Annals of the Kings of Israel.” (2 Chron.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Having said all that, I will be the first to admit that many MTF spectrum folks seem to be rather oblivious to the impact that traditional sexism has on their lives—both with respect to the male privileges they gain because of it as well as the special social stigma they receive for their feminine transgender expression and/or for choosing to transition to female. Personally, it was only after I began living full-time as a woman, experiencing firsthand all of the inferior and negative assumptions that others projected onto me because of my femaleness, that I began to make a connection between traditional sexism and the discrimination that I faced because of the specific direction of my transition and transgender expression. Only then did I realize how inadequate the transgender movement’s mantra—that we are discriminated against for “transgressing binary gender norms”—is for those of us on the MTF spectrum who primarily grapple with effemimania and trans-misogyny. MTF spectrum folks need feminism in order to make sense out of our lives and to work toward ending our continuing marginalization. Unfortunately, many cissexual feminists seem to fear that MTF spectrum inclusion within feminism might dilute, distract, or undercut a movement that has historically centered itself on the struggles and issues of cissexual women. Typically, such fears arise from the assumption that we cannot work together because we supposedly have different goals, or that we are unable to relate to one another’s experiences. I believe that is a red herring. After all, many lesbian women, who typically do not have to deal with the issue of unwanted pregnancy, work hard for and are committed to protecting the availability of birth control and a woman’s right to choose. Similarly, a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be a survivor of sexual or physical assault herself to do crucial work in a domestic violence shelter or a rape crisis center. What truly unites feminists is not a shared history (as we each bring a unique set of life experiences to the table), but our shared commitment to fighting against the devaluation of femaleness and femininity in our society and the double standards that are placed onto both sexes. In this respect, cissexual female and MTF spectrum feminists do have a lot in common.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  He finished, and since there was no need to give any more than the most perfunctory thank-you's, he nodded to the men on the stage, and the tall white man who was never introduced joined him at the door. They left with the attitude that now they were off to something really important. (The graduation ceremonies at Lafayette County Training School had been a mere preliminary.) The ugliness they left was palpable. An uninvited guest who wouldn't leave. The choir was summoned and sang a modern arrangement of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” with new words pertaining to graduates seeking their place in the world. But it didn't work. Elouise, the daughter of the Baptist minister, recited “Invictus,” and I could have cried at the impertinence of “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” My name had lost its ring of familiarity and I had to be nudged to go and receive my diploma. All my preparations had fled. I neither marched up to the stage like a conquering Amazon, nor did I look in the audience for Bailey's nod of approval. Marguerite Johnson, I heard the name again, my honors were read, there were noises in the audience of appreciation, and I took my place on the stage as rehearsed. I thought about colors I hated: ecru, puce, lavender, beige and black. There was shuffling and rustling around me, then Henry Reed was giving his valedictory address, “To Be or Not to Be.” Hadn't he heard the whitefolks? We couldn't be, so the question was a waste of time. Henry's voice came out clear and strong. I feared to look at him. Hadn't he got the message? There was no “nobler in the mind” for Negroes because the world didn't think we had minds, and they let us know it. “Outrageous fortune”? Now, that was a joke. When the ceremony was over I had to tell Henry Reed some things. That is, if I still cared. Not “rub,” Henry, “erase.” “Ah, there's the erase.” Us. Henry had been a good student in elocution. His voice rose on tides of promise and fell on waves of warnings. The English teacher had helped him to create a sermon winging through Hamlet's soliloquy. To be a man, a doer, a builder, a leader, or to be a tool, an unfunny joke, a crusher of funky toadstools. I marveled that Henry could go through with the speech as if we had a choice. I had been listening and silently rebutting each sentence with my eyes closed; then there was a hush, which in an audience warns that something unplanned is happening.

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

  (If, for example, we Americans took our vision of liberty and justice for all under God seriously, imagine the qualifications and reservations that would surround our Pledge of Allegiance.) If the Bible were all good-cop enthusiasm from God, we would have to treat it like textual unreality or utopian fantasy. If it were all about bad-cop vengeance from God, we would not need to justify, say, our last century. But it contains both the assertion of God’s radical dream for our world and our world’s very successful attempt to replace the divine dream with a human nightmare. The biblical problem is not, I emphasize, that the recipients of those divine challenges were evil, but that they were normal. The struggle is not between divine good and human evil but between, on one hand, God’s radical dream for an Earth distributed fairly and nonviolently among all its peoples and, on the other hand, civilization’s normal dream for me keeping mine, getting yours, and having more and more, forever. The tension is not between the Good Book and the bad world that is outside the book. It is between the Good Book and the bad world that are both within the book. “An Unearthly Shade of Red”YOU CAN EASILY UNDERSTAND my phrase “the radicality of God” when you think of those biblical manifestos against land greed in Leviticus, violence in the Gospels, and slavery in Paul that I just discussed. But why cite “the normalcy of civilization” in opposition to it? Do we not use the word “civilization” for all that is good, positive, and promising in the world around us? Is it not an insult to call individuals, groups, or countries “uncivilized”? How, then, can this chapter’s epigraph speak so negatively of civilization, and, especially, why does it suggest that human culture in general preceded human civilization in particular? One hint about this specific meaning of civilization is to remember that Mesopotamia—Greek for the land “between the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris—is called the “cradle of civilization. ” So there, in what is modern Iraq, civilization was conceived and born, created and developed at a certain point in time. Why then, why there, and how did it happen? Welcome to the Fertile Crescent, both for this and the next chapters. Snow-capped mountains surround deserts in an arch from Israel to Iran. Between mountains and deserts, from Levantine coast to Persian Gulf, there is an intermediate layer of foothills and plains called evocatively and accurately the Fertile Crescent. There, originally but not uniquely, humans first invented that specific form of culture known as civilization in a process now called the Neolithic or New Stone Age Revolution or, better, Evolution. In what is usually called the “dawn of civilization,” that R/Evolution developed from about 12,000 BCE to a first consummation between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers along the eastern reaches of that Fertile Crescent by 4000 BCE .

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  28 Although my grades were very good (I had been put up two semesters on my arrival from Stamps), I found myself unable to settle down in the high school. It was an institution for girls near my house, and the young ladies were faster, brasher, meaner and more prejudiced than any I had met at Lafayette County Training School. Many of the Negro girls were, like me, straight from the South, but they had known or claimed to have known the bright lights of Big D (Dallas) or T Town (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and their language bore up their claims. They strutted with an aura of invincibility, and along with some of the Mexican students who put knives in their tall pompadours they absolutely intimidated the white girls and those Black and Mexican students who had no shield of fearlessness. Fortunately I was transferred to George Washington High School. The beautiful buildings sat on a moderate hill in the white residential district, some sixty blocks from the Negro neighborhood. For the first semester, I was one of three Black students in the school, and in that rarefied atmosphere I came to love my people more. Mornings as the streetcar traversed my ghetto I experienced a mixture of dread and trauma. I knew that all too soon we would be out of my familiar setting, and Blacks who were on the streetcar when I got on would all be gone and I alone would face the forty blocks of neat streets, smooth lawns, white houses and rich children. In the evenings on the way home the sensations were joy, anticipation and relief at the first sign which said BARBECUE or DO DROP INN or HOME COOKING or at the first brown faces on the streets. I recognized that I was again in my country. In the school itself I was disappointed to find that I was not the most brilliant or even nearly the most brilliant student. The white kids had better vocabularies than I and, what was more appalling, less fear in the classrooms. They never hesitated to hold up their hands in response to a teacher's question; even when they were wrong they were wrong aggressively, while I had to be certain about all my facts before I dared to call attention to myself. George Washington High School was the first real school I attended. My entire stay there might have been time lost if it hadn't been for the unique personality of a brilliant teacher. Miss Kirwin was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again. She and her maiden sister worked in the San Francisco city school system for over twenty years.