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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I put my hand to my pocket for a handkerchief: what I drew out was the programme that Miss Skinner had given me, for Flo to sign; I found myself gazing at it, quite bewildered by the sudden turns the afternoon had taken. And all the time, the woman on the platform talked hoarsely on, arguing with the hecklers in the audience - the air seemed clotted with shouts and smoke and bad feeling.I looked up. Florence was standing near the wall of canvas, beside Annie and Miss Raymond: she was shaking her head, as they leaned to put their hands upon her arm. When Annie drew back I caught her eye, and she walked over and gave me a wary smile.‘You should have learned better than to argue with Florrie,’ she said, taking the seat beside me. ‘She is about as sharp-tongued as anyone I know.’‘She tells the truth,’ I said miserably. ‘Which is sharper than anything.’ I sighed; then, to change the subject, I asked: ‘Have you had a good day, Annie?’‘I have,’ she said. ‘It has all been rather wonderful.’‘And who is that girl with your Emma?’ I nodded to the fair-haired woman at Miss Raymond’s side.‘That’s Mrs Costello,’ she said, ‘Emma’s widowed sister.’‘Oh!’ I had heard of her before, but never expected her to be so young and pretty. ‘How handsome she is. What a shame she ain’t - like us. Is there no hope of it?’‘None at all, I’m afraid. But she is a lovely girl. Her husband was the kindest man, and Emma says she is just about despairing that she will ever find another to match him. The only men who want to court her turn out to be boxers ...’I smiled dully; I was not much bothered about Mrs Costello, really. While Annie talked I kept glancing over to Florence. She now stood at the far side of the tent, a handkerchief gripped between her fingers but her cheeks dry and white. However long and hard I looked at her, she would not meet my gaze.I had almost decided to make my way over to her, when there came a sudden clamour: the lady on the platform had finished her speech, and the crowd was reluctantly clapping. This meant, of course, that it was time for Ralph’s address; Annie and I turned to see him hover uncertainly at the side of the little stage, then stumble up the steps as his name was announced, and take up his place at the front of the platform.I looked at Annie and grimaced, and she bit her lip.

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

  Evangelicals were still staunchly anti-Catholic, and their withdrawal made it easier for Catholic immigrants to be accepted into the American nation, but it also deprived that nation of salutary criticism. Before the war, preachers had concentrated on the legitimacy of slavery as an institution but had neglected the issue of race. Tragically, they would remain unable to bring the gospel to bear on this major American problem. For a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, African Americans in the South would continue to suffer segregation, discrimination, and routine terrorism at the hands of white supremacist mobs, which the local authorities did little to suppress. 143 Shaken by the catastrophe of the Civil War, Americans dismantled their military. Europeans meanwhile came to believe that they had discovered a more civilized and sustainable mode of warfare. 144 Their model for this supposedly efficient warfare was the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), who had invested heavily in railways and telegraph systems and issued his army with new needle guns and steel cannons. In three relatively short, bloodless, but spectacularly successful wars against states that did not have this advanced technology—the Danish War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870)—Bismarck created a united Germany. Fired by their national myths, the nation-states of Europe now embarked on an arms race, each convinced that it too could fight its way to a unique and glorious destiny. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, not a single year passed in which a novel or short story about a future catastrophic conflict did not appear in a European country. 145 The “Next Great War” was invariably imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal, after which the nation would rise to enhanced life. This would not be as easy as they imagined, however. What each power failed to reckon was that when all nations had the same new weapons, none would have an advantage and that Bismarck’s victories were, therefore, not replicable. As Lord Acton had predicted, this aggressive nationalism made life even more problematic for minorities. In the nation-state, Jews increasingly appeared chronically rootless and cosmopolitan. There were pogroms in Russia, condoned and even orchestrated by the government; 146 in Germany anti-Semitic parties began to emerge in the 1880s; and in 1893 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was convicted on false evidence of transmitting secrets to Germany. Many were convinced that Dreyfus was part of an international Jewish conspiracy that was plotting to weaken France. The new anti-Semitism drew on centuries of Christian prejudice but gave it a scientific rationale.

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

  As a boy, Joseph—Jacob’s favorite son—had dreams of agrarian tyranny that he foolishly described to his brothers: “We were binding sheaves in the countryside, and my sheaf, it seemed, stood upright; then I saw your sheaves gather round and bow to my sheaf.”26 The brothers were so incensed that they stuttered in fury: “Would you be king, yes, king over us?”27 Such fantasies of monarchy violated everything the family stood for, and Jacob took the boy to task: “Are all of us, then, myself, your mother and your brothers to come and bow to the ground before you?”28 But he continued to indulge Joseph, until, driven beyond endurance, his brothers had him sold into slavery in Egypt, telling their father he had been killed by a wild beast. Yet after a traumatic beginning, Joseph, a natural agrarian, cheerfully abandoned the pastoral ethos and assimilated to aristocratic life with spectacular success. He got a job in Pharaoh’s court, took an Egyptian wife, and even called his first son Manasseh—“He-Who-Makes-Me-Forget,” meaning “God has made-me-forget … my entire father’s house.”29 As vizier of Egypt, Joseph saved the country from starvation: warned by a dream of impending agricultural blight, he commandeered the harvest for seven years, sending fixed rations to the cities and storing the surplus, so that when the famine struck, Egypt had grain to spare.30 But Joseph had also turned Egypt into a house of bondage, because all the hard-pressed Egyptians who had been forced to sell their estates to Pharaoh in return for grain were reduced to serfdom.31 Joseph saved the lives of his family when hunger forced them to seek refuge in Egypt, but they too would lose their freedom since Pharaoh would forbid them to leave.32

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

  4 There was now one God, one empire, and one emperor. 5 By his military victories, Constantine had finally established Jesus’s kingdom, which would soon spread to the entire world. Eusebius understood Constantine’s Iranian ambitions perfectly and argued that the emperor was not only the Caesar of Roman Christians but also the rightful sovereign of the Christians of Persia. 6 By crafting and articulating an imperial Christianity and baptizing the latrocinium of Rome, Eusebius entirely subverted the original message of Jesus. Constantine’s conversion was clearly a coup. Christianity was not yet the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it had at last been recognized in Roman law. The Church could now own property, build basilicas and churches, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Yet those Christians who had accepted imperial patronage so joyfully failed to notice some glaring incongruities. Jesus had told his followers to give all they had to the poor, but the Christian emperor enjoyed immense wealth. In the Kingdom of God, rich and poor were supposed to sit at the same table, but Constantine lived in an exalted state of exception, and Christianity would inevitably be tainted by its connection with the oppressive agrarian state. Eusebius believed that Constantine’s conquests were the culmination of sacred history: 7 Jesus had given his disciples all power in heaven and earth, and the Christian emperor had made this a political reality. 8 Eusebius chose to ignore that he had achieved this with the Roman legions that Jesus had condemned as demonic. The close union of church and empire that began in 312 meant that warfare inevitably acquired a sacral character—though Byzantines would always be reluctant to call war “holy.” 9 Neither Jesus nor the first Christians could have imagined so great an oxymoron as the notion of a Christian emperor. Yet again, we see that a tradition that had once challenged state aggression was unable to sustain this ethical stance when it became identified with aristocratic rule. The Christian Empire would inevitably be tainted by the “robbery and violence” (latrocinium) that, Lactantius believed, characterized all imperialism. As in Darius’s imperial Zoroastrianism, eschatological fulfillment had been projected onto a political system that was inevitably flawed. Eusebius maintained that Constantine had established the kingdom that Christ was supposed to inaugurate at his Second Coming. He taught the Christians of Byzantium to believe that the ruthless militarism and systemic injustice of the Roman Empire would be transformed by the Christian ideal. But Constantine was a soldier, with very little knowledge of his new faith.

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

  Those who would object did so by invoking not Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian abolitionists condemned slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow. The political issue—the preservation or dissolution of the Union—was not in doubt, but to their dismay, both Northerners and Southerners found that the clergy on whom they relied for ideological guidance could find no common ground. Supporters of slavery had a host of biblical texts at their command, 124 but in the absence of any explicit biblical condemnation of slave ownership, abolitionists could only appeal to the spirit of scripture. The Southern preacher James Henry Thornhill argued that slavery was a “good and merciful” way of organizing labor, 125 while in New York Henry Ward Beecher maintained that it was “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin.” 126 But the theological split did not coincide neatly with the North-South divide. In Brooklyn, Henry Van Dyke argued that abolition was evil because it amounted to an “utter rejection of the Scriptures,” 127 but Taylor Lewis, a professor of Greek and Oriental studies at New York University, retorted that Van Dyke was not taking “the vastly changed condition of the world” sufficiently into account: it was a “malignant falsehood” to suggest that ancient institutions could be transplanted wholesale to the modern world. 128 Lewis’s nuanced approach to scripture was based on a scholarly understanding of ancient slavery that was anathema to evangelicals in the North, who had led the Abolitionist movement since its founding in the 1830s. 129 They still approached scripture with the Enlightenment conviction that human beings could discover the truth for themselves without authoritative or expert guidance, but now, to their dismay, they found that the Bible that had united the nation after the War of Independence was tearing it apart. 130 The evangelicals had failed to guide the nation at this moment of grave crisis. When, however, the political unity of the states foundered with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the secession of the Confederacy, the problem of slavery was settled by the battles of the Civil War (1861–65), not by the Bible. This is not to say that wartime saw an eclipse of religious sentiment. On the contrary: though the American state would regard its effort as a principled defense of the Constitution, for the American nation it was a conflict charged with religious conviction. The Civil War armies have been described as the most religiously motivated in American history. 131 Northerners and Southerners both believed that God was on their side and that they knew exactly what he was doing.

• From My People (2022)

  He’s going to strike it easy with poorer people.” Zuma’s jigging, the traditional leopard-skin outfits he wears on ceremonial occasions, and his casual manner initially won the public over. He earned credit for appointing a diverse cabinet, comprising communists, trade unionists, and capitalists. It included competent men like Aaron Motsoaledi, the health minister, and Trevor Manuel, the head of a new National Planning Commission. Even de Klerk, who had long since given up hope of returning to power, praised Zuma. The enthusiasm, however, quickly waned as the unemployment rate climbed to 25.2 percent and manufacturing continued to decline. The nation produces about one-third less gold than it did in 1994. South Africa currently has the worst income inequality in the world. The president didn’t help matters with a lumbering State of the Nation speech in February, during which he seemed to lose his place at one point. Although Zuma hasn’t substantially changed Mbeki’s economic policies, the sex scandals have created the sense that he can no more control the economy than he can his libido. South Africa also continues to have one of the highest crime rates in the world and a police service woefully in need of professionalization. There are close to fifty murders a day—about seven times the per-capita rate in the United States—along with some two hundred sexual offenses and three hundred armed robberies. Two out of five women say that rape was their first sexual experience. The number of protests has surged since Zuma took office, many in response to the government’s failure to deliver such basic services as water and electricity. In the first three months of 2010, there were more protests than at any point since 1994. Zuma’s great political strength was supposed to be his ability to win the trust of the poor. Yet the unrest has been worst in the poorest areas, including Orange Farm, a sprawling informal settlement about forty-five miles from Johannesburg. In February, protesters there blocked a thoroughfare, burned tires, and threw stones to call attention to what they insisted were years of neglect and corruption on the part of local officials. Eventually, the protest turned chaotic, with hordes of young people looting foreign-owned stores. I traveled to Orange Farm a day after the tumult—the smell of burning tires lingered in the air, causing my eyes to burn. A group of women gathered around me. Many spoke at once. “We don’t have sewers and no lights in the streets or on the road,” a woman named Dorothy Diphoko said. “We want Zuma to come here!” Amanda Sikhahleli shouted. After a little while, the women started gently shoving me away and telling me that I should move—that it was no longer safe. Across the street, growing numbers of young men and some women were dancing the toyi toyi —the historic dance of protest, in which demonstrators move forward military-style.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Leah. I had all my casual sex before Tinder and the like (I hooked up with someone from a Craigslist ad once). While I know Tinder and other sites work for some people, for me, they also really upped the traditional desirability politics in a bad way. The thing I liked about casual sex in the nineties and 2000s was that it often really felt like a place where you could get some as a non-traditionally attractive weirdo. Now, it feels like a contest where traditionally pretty people get more ass and others don’t. As I’ve gotten more out about being disabled, I’ve gotten less interested in casual sex because I only want to have sex with other people with non-normative bodyminds, and much of mainstream casual sex space (including able-bodied QTPOC) just ignores and “forgets” about disability and ableism. In most places I’ve encountered, there’s not enough room or awareness to talk about and engage with bodyminds the way I want to. However, I believe this could change. amb. Thank you for raising that, I think that’s also some of what holds me back. How can an app capture the needs I have related to size and ability, and even to post-gender desire? So, what do readers need to know to get the best casual sex experiences? Leah. Well, not everything is going to be the best sex of your life—there are going to be plenty of weird, mediocre experiences. You need to know yourself, or engage with knowing yourself as an ongoing project. Ask yourself, what are your desires? What’s your motivation for doing this? What are the rituals you want to incorporate into it? What do you need to feel safe/r? It’s really hard to be honest about all the things you want and in what context, but it’s crucial to enjoyment. Also, there are some kinds of sex you just might not want to have casually, and that’s okay. The biggest thing is figuring out what yes, no, and maybe are for you, and how they feel in your body, and knowing you can stop, leave, or change direction at any time. amb. Repeat: any time. What else? Samhita. Communication! Be honest about how you really feel and what you want. Don’t try to be the “cool girl”—fuck chill. It’s your body, demand what you want for it (or ask, I mean, whatever floats your boat). You deserve to be treated exactly how you want, so be honest about what you are bringing to the table and what you hope to get out of the experience. Also, use protection ;) Gary. Trust your instincts. If it doesn’t feel right, act on that feeling. If you’re worried or feel uncomfortable, then you’re not enjoying the moment. Be self-aware. Know your intentions and motivations. Know what you want from the encounter. Communicate. Set boundaries if you need to. Ask the questions that you need to. Say “no” if you need to.

• From The Art of Memoir

  it’s only manifest after a first draft. Once I’ve found it, I’ll revise with it as the spine—how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end. Another way a crap memoir fails is if the narrator fails to change over time. Characters who don’t transform or who lack depth become predictable. If the bad characters were consistently bad in real life, it would make all our heartbreaks almost palatable. We could just steer clear of the always-hateful human. But the hateful are kind sometimes, or sorry—or they sound so sincerely sorry it’s hard not to get lured in again and again. Those of us who grew up with seductive narcissists in the family know that they capture you not with their bullying but by somehow making you pity them in private. So you imagine you’re the sole confidante of this individual’s inner misery. She needs your fealty, and you give it repeatedly despite brutal evidence that doing so puts you in danger. Shallow reportage usually stems from a lack of psychological self- knowledge. The narrator is always tough or stoical or self-sacrificing, or always ready with the quick quip or smartass posture. Worst of all, such characters are hackneyed as hell, predictable when life often fails to be and art must never be. Most stale of all is the butt-whipping memoir, which abounds these days: “I took a butt-whipping, I got up and took another. Poor me, here came yet another.” The great Holocaust memoirs portray not just great suffering but great hope and wisdom and forms of psychological endurance and curiosity. They seem written to help us understand something complex, not to prove a single point in dreary repetition. A book that concerns itself only with one thing—I Was a Teenage Sex Slave, say—might have some prurient interest, but unless that thing is super dramatic (a war or a concentration camp) or varied in its portrayal, you won’t find yourself rereading it. Unless there’s a political motive (as for Robert Graves or Richard Wright), a bitter book grows tired, a vengeful one unreadable. You know the writer’s morphing every event to make a point. Or a memoir fails from a pacing problem—it goes fast over dramatic events and slows to a snail’s pace to dispense banal

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

  In three months he had become enthusiastically American, “America is the greatest country in the world”, he assured me from an abysmal ignorance; “any young man who works can make money here; if I had a little capital I’d be a rich man in a very few years; it’s some capital I need, nothing more.” Having drawn my story out of me especially the last phase when I divided up with the boys, he declared I must be mad. “With five thousand dollars”, he cried, “I could be rich in three years, a millionaire in ten. You must be mad; don’t you know that everyone is for himself in this world: good gracious! I never heard of such insanity: if I had only known!” For some days I watched him closely and came to believe that he was perfectly suited to his surroundings, eminently fitted to succeed in them. He was an earnest Christian, I found, who had been converted and baptised in the Baptist Church; he had a fair tenor voice and led the choir; he swallowed all the idiocies of the incredible creed; but drew some valuable moral sanctions from it; he was a teetotaler and didn’t smoke; a Nazarene, too, determined to keep chaste as he called a state of abstinence from women, and weekly indulgence in self-abuse which he tried to justify as inevitable. The teaching of Jesus himself had little or no practical effect on him; he classed it all together as counsels of an impossible perfection, and like the vast majority of Americans, accepted a childish Pauline-German morality while despising the duty of forgiveness and scorning the Gospel of Love. A few days after our first meeting, Willie proposed to me that I should lend him a thousand dollars and he would give me twenty-five per cent for the use of the money. When I exclaimed against the usurious rate, twelve per cent being the State limit, he told me he could lend a million dollars if he had it, at from three to five per cent a month on perfect security. “So you see,” he wound up, “that I can easily afford to give you two hundred and fifty dollars a year for the use of your thousand: one can buy real estate here to pay fifty per cent a year; the country is only just beginning to be developed”, and so forth and so on in wildest optimism: the end of it being that he got my thousand dollars, leaving me with barely five hundred, but as I could live in a good boardinghouse for four dollars a week, I reckoned that at the worst I had one carefree year before me and if Willie kept his promise, I would be free to do whatever I wanted to do for years to come.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I felt my eyes, that had been so wide and dazzled, grow small again in the gloom of the coach, and I began to feel, not thrilled, but rather nervous. I wondered what kind of lodgings he had found for us, and what kind of lady Mrs Dendy would be. I hoped that neither would be very grand.I need not have worried. Once we had left the West End and crossed the river, the streets grew greyer and quite dull. The houses and the people here were smart, but rather uniform, as if all crafted by the same unimaginative hand: there was none of that strange glamour, that lovely, queer variety of Leicester Square. Soon, too, the streets ceased even to be smart, and became a little shabby; each corner that we passed, each public house, each row of shops and houses, seemed dingier than the one before. Beside me, Kitty and Mr Bliss had fallen into conversation; their talk was all of theatres and contracts, costumes and songs. I kept my face pressed to the window, wondering when we should ever leave behind these dreary districts and reach Greasepaint Avenue, our home.At last, when we had turned into a street of tall, flat-roofed houses, each with a line of blistered railings before it and a set of sooty blinds and curtains at its windows, Mr Bliss broke off his talk to peer outside and say that we were almost there. I had to look away from his kind and smiling face, then, to hide my disappointment. I knew that my first, excited vision of Brixton - that row of golden make-up sticks, our house with the carmine-coloured roof - was a foolish one; but this street looked so very grey and mean. It was no different really, I suppose, from the ordinary roads that I had left behind in Whitstable; it was only strange - but therefore slightly sinister.As we stepped from the carriage I glanced at Kitty to see if she, too, felt any stirrings of dismay. But her colour was as high, and her eyes as damp and shining, as before; she only gazed at the house to which our chaperon now led us, and gave a little, tight-lipped smile of satisfaction.

• From My People (2022)

  “In a dual school system, black kids don’t usually even come out with a foreign language. These tests are geared for kids who go to white, middle-class high schools. If a black kid does succeed in making 900 on the SAT, you know he could have made 1,500 with the proper background.” Most white students are, in addition, more test-conscious than blacks, having prepared for at least a couple of years for the SAT by taking old tests and using books with prepared tests in them. My high school was one of the few black schools that did that when I was preparing for college. We had sessions for several weeks, on Saturday mornings, but my scores were still horrible. Fortunately, I never made below a B in any of my courses, and graduated third in my class. This, according to Colebert, would make a difference today, even with a low score. At present, the mean score for the entire university for boys is 1,050, and for girls, about 1,060. “Less than half of one percent” of the black students, according to Colebert, have even a 900 score. Their presence is the result of an admissions committee’s recommendations. “The university does make some concessions,” Colebert said. I asked him about the football players—whites, many of whom could barely speak English. Surely they didn’t have 900 SAT scores. Colebert laughed. “We don’t get into that,” he said. Because of inferior preparation, many black students have difficulties with their courses, particularly English—a bane to most Southern freshmen, regardless of color. Many of them flunked out. The BSU demanded that they be readmitted, and that some special counseling program be set up. President Fred C. Davison responded in this way: “The admission and readmission policies of the university are conducted without regard to race. The proposal to readmit all black students who have flunked out of the university is not only educationally unsound but it, too, could be challenged on the grounds of racial discrimination. Moreover, such a policy would result in a serious impairment of academic standards of the university.” Ben does not think that the liberal grants to black students will continue for long—“particularly if they get a lot of black students.” However, he plans to continue recruiting. “It is ironic,” he said as I was leaving, “that now that the University of Georgia is concerned with admitting black students, comes the insurgence of pride in black institutions and black environments.” “How do you deal with that?” I asked. “The only thing I tell them is that you get more awareness of being black here than in a black institution where it’s taken for granted.” It was a theme that I later heard expressed again and again by black students here. Gradually, I made my way to the history department, which houses the black studies program. I knew that there I would get not only some idea about the program, but also would probably run into some of the black students.

• From The Art of Memoir

  12 | Dealing with Beloveds (On and Off the Page) Families exist to witness each other’s disappointments. Laura Sillerman Methods for dealing with family and friends differ as radically as writers do. On one end sit memoirists—mostly women—who interview and almost collaborate. Carolyn See rewrote her Dreaming in response to family comment. On the other sit those with enough moxie not to give a rat’s ass—all men, in my experience. Frank Conroy claimed he did Stop-Time without much interest in his own clan’s response at all. “If they’d have disapproved, I wouldn’t have changed a word.” My friend Jerry Stahl, whose Permanent Midnight challenged family history by renaming his father’s death a suicide, once said, “If you had to live it, you get to write it.” The gender divide makes sense. Men can become men by rebelling against their folks—the angry young rock-and-roller stealing the car or standing up to the patriarch is an archetype—Oedipus slaying his father to marry his mother. But for a woman to kick her mother’s ass is unseemly. When I half chastised Lucy Grealy for—in her Autobiography of a Face—not explaining why her family seemingly abandoned her in the UK during the agonizing cancer treatments she underwent as a teen, she said, “Women are repositories of clan lore, and our femininity is gauged by the security of family relationships. To drag out the dirty laundry almost masculinizes a woman.” Of course we gossip and worry stories with

• From The Art of Memoir

  20 | Major Reversals in Cherry and Lit The idea that the looker affects the sight is taken for granted in every field of scientific enquiry today, but one needs to be clear about what it does (and does not) mean. It does not mean “everything is subjective anyway,” so that no clear and truthful statements can be made. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New Warning label: For decades, lecture audiences have questioned me at length about the roller-coaster reversals of my second and third books, Cherry and Lit. I know nobody else’s reversals intimately enough to set them down. Some of this I’ve glanced past in other writing, and while repeating myself is anathema, the lessons belong here. Whether you’re a practitioner or not, if you can’t suffer another word about my own work, feel free to bound over this to the next chapter. With my second and third books, I overturned my comfy takes on the past as I’d never done in Liars’ Club once I began it as nonfiction. In both later books, I kept bumbling into holes in my theories about my teen and early adult years, long-held ideas that had zero evidence in fact. It started with Cherry’s first chapter as I tried to render saying a weepy good-bye to my old man before heading out to California in a truck full of surfers and heads. All my life, I’d relied on the premise that Daddy had abandoned me a decade before I took off. So I was shopping for a scene to show the reader his abandonment and perhaps dab a tear from my living eye as I did so. But I could find no scene to exemplify his abandonment. I’d be at work, and he’d bring me a supper plate wrapped in foil. He’d offer to make me breakfast in the morning or to take me squirrel hunting or fishing; I’d say no. I was the one who shrugged his hand off my

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  DotAlthough we have been sleeping together regularly for two years, and I have had three short affairs during that time, my husband and I have been married only eight weeks. I thought I was well prepared for all the postmarital disillusionments that young brides are prone to, but one took me by surprise. Prior to our wedding, our sex life had been varied, quite spontaneous and imaginative. Although I had masturbated since puberty; it was only a year ago that I discovered my clitoris and experienced my first orgasm. Since that time, my mate had been only too anxious and willing to make use of that knowledge, and in his consideration, never failed to masturbate me to orgasm either immediately before or during intercourse. Since we have been married, however, our mutual sex life has come to a standstill in relation to the life we had beforehand. Granted, we are now on stricter schedules and he is often too tired, but even on Sunday afternoons (what used to be our spend-one-day-in-bed-fucking day) the most I can expect is an uneventful nap. Now this hasn’t been going on long enough for me to become angry or even frustrated, so I will deal with this myself. All this rambling has been my disorganized way of building up to the subject of fantasies. When my husband does decide to get down to business, it generally becomes a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair. Here’s where my imagination comes in. I found that no matter how long I concentrated on achieving an orgasm, he was simply not giving me the time. So gradually I discovered that it was quicker to snap together a mental vision, a situation that would give me a quick dose of eroticism that would carry me through. Second, I discovered after trying several fantasies, that the process was much quicker and more effective if I relied on one fantasy each time. And the more use the fantasy gets, either during intercourse or masturbation, the more vivid and realistic it becomes.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At the end of the meal, Duck Uncle said he’d been waiting to surprise us. I made an investment, he said. He signaled for the waiter, who nodded and walked back into the kitchen. Four waiters wheeled out a fish tank. The tank was at least as tall as me, the water a dyed-blue that was almost opaque. There was nothing inside the tank except for a floating red ribbon, flickering. A dragonfish, my mother said, and when I leaned closer to the glass I saw that it was a fish, that the ribbon spooled and unspooled on its own, an eye sewn on like a bead. It costs 10,000 dollars, Duck Uncle said, but I got it for half that. I’d heard of dragonfish in big hotels on the mainland, where my father had gone. They were smuggled out of rivers. The shinier their scales, the more luck it would deliver its owner. The dragonfish was the length of my arm, whipping from one end of the tank to the other. After Duck Uncle went bankrupt in the recession, he returned the fish tank. He bagged the dragonfish and took it home, releasing it into his toilet. Said he’d flush it back out to the sea, but we knew the salt would kill it. My brother and I scooped it out of his toilet with a bucket and slid it into our filled kitchen sink, watching it try to lasso itself. Let’s sell it for 10,000 dollars, my brother said. My mother said the fish was a fake. She’d known it wasn’t real the moment the light hit it: The scales were painted on, probably with nail polish. She butchered it the night he left, scraping the shell of pigment from its skin, and then we could see its real scales underneath, a color like smog. The night before Duck Uncle left, we saw my mother straddling the stump of the eucalyptus tree she’d felled in his yard. She said the stars were fish. But they’re not moving, we said. Because they want to be caught, my mother said. She raised her hook-finger to the sky and we waited all night for it to lure something. Near morning, a plane came to unzip the dark. It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire, I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  The other incident has to do with what I am sure must be a prevalent female fantasy: the male Negro and his reputed size and talent. This happened during the last presidential contest. My husband was called to Washington to cover some Senate hearings. During his absence, I attended a dinner party which brought together two presidential hopefuls and a group of pseudointellects (forgive me). One young Negro, well groomed and with a Ph.D. in political science, spent most of the evening with me discussing subjects from sales to sex. He offered to drive me home. By now, the fantasy had begun to play through my mind, and wondering what he was like sexually, I had already begun thinking about whether I wanted to find out. During the drive he pulled into a parking lot and proceeded to make advances. Of course you know what happened: he took out of his trousers his very hard and pulsing penis which he placed in my hand. I was actually holding it, this thing I’d imagined so often. He pleaded with me to let him “go down on you,” and before I knew it, I was lowering my briefs and pantyhose. He ate as though it was his last meal. Fortunately, the children were away at school, and so I thought it best that we drive to my home and continue the action there. I’m not one who can relax in a sedan. I don’t know if Charlie was any representative of his race, but he was a lousy fuck. It was my first and last experience with the other race. But I shall never forget the experience. I thought it would also be the end of the male Negro as a fantasy for me, but I find it hasn’t finished the fantasy, it’s changed it. I may not do it again but I’ll always remember it… in a way. One more thing: he begged me to suck him off—which I had done in fantasy—but which I naturally refused to do. I admit his instrument was mighty handsome to see and to hold, but beyond that, his sexual talents were zero. Incidentally, a close friend of mine also had intercourse with a black, and she, too, agreed that their sexual prowess is just so much baloney. It is a status symbol, I fear. Women would be smart to stick to their fantasies. So, there’s my story. I hope that it has been enlightening. Of course we mortals dream… for that is what life is all about. [Letter]

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] Byzantium: The Tragedy of EmpireIn 323 Constantine defeated Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His ultimate ambition, however, was to command the civilized world from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Iranian Plateau, as Cyrus had done.1 As a first step, he moved his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium at the Bosporus, the juncture of Europe and Asia, which he renamed Constantinople. Here he was greeted by Eusebius (c. 264–340), the bishop of Caesarea: “Let the friend of the All-Ruling God be proclaimed our sole sovereign … who has modeled himself after the archetypal form of the Supreme Sovereign, whose thoughts mirror the virtuous rays by which he has been made perfectly wise, good, just, pious, courageous and God-loving.”2 This was a far cry from Jesus’s criticism of such worldly authority, but in antiquity, the rhetoric of kingship had always been virtually interchangeable with the language of divinity.3 Eusebius regarded monarchy, the rule of “one” (monos), as a natural consequence of monotheism.4 There was now one God, one empire, and one emperor.5 By his military victories, Constantine had finally established Jesus’s kingdom, which would soon spread to the entire world. Eusebius understood Constantine’s Iranian ambitions perfectly and argued that the emperor was not only the Caesar of Roman Christians but also the rightful sovereign of the Christians of Persia.6 By crafting and articulating an imperial Christianity and baptizing the latrocinium of Rome, Eusebius entirely subverted the original message of Jesus. Constantine’s conversion was clearly a coup. Christianity was not yet the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it had at last been recognized in Roman law. The Church could now own property, build basilicas and churches, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Yet those Christians who had accepted imperial patronage so joyfully failed to notice some glaring incongruities. Jesus had told his followers to give all they had to the poor, but the Christian emperor enjoyed immense wealth. In the Kingdom of God, rich and poor were supposed to sit at the same table, but Constantine lived in an exalted state of exception, and Christianity would inevitably be tainted by its connection with the oppressive agrarian state. Eusebius believed that Constantine’s conquests were the culmination of sacred history:7 Jesus had given his disciples all power in heaven and earth, and the Christian emperor had made this a political reality.8 Eusebius chose to ignore that he had achieved this with the Roman legions that Jesus had condemned as demonic. The close union of church and empire that began in 312 meant that warfare inevitably acquired a sacral character—though Byzantines would always be reluctant to call war “holy.”9 Neither Jesus nor the first Christians could have imagined so great an oxymoron as the notion of a Christian emperor.

• From The Art of Memoir

  But right after, she mulls over at considerable length the dickering details of her husband’s settlement. Is that not too private? She first offers to sell everything, and then to split it fifty-fifty. “What if he took all the assets and I took all the blame?” [He] was also asking for things I never even considered (a stake in the royalties of books I’d written during the marriage, a cut of possible future movie rights to my work, a share of my retirement accounts). . . . It would cost me dearly, but a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive and time-consuming, not to mention soul-corroding. Now divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war, nor could I render my own any better. But while she takes the time to detail all her ex’s unfair requests, she never lets us in on the source of what seems like buckets of money for a New York freelance writer. She sports an apartment, a house in the ’burbs, a retirement account. She flies a friend along on her book tour for company. Even a simple “I’d come into some money” or “Movie rights made me flush” would help. This is a minor bump in the book’s long journey, but it proves that even the most successful of us misstep from time to time, showing what we should hide and hiding what the reader needs. We more often fail by omitting key scenes. Cheryl Strayed was almost done with Wild when she discovered two incidents that—once you’ve read her story—seem so psychologically crucial you can’t believe they’d ever been passed over. The first involves how she and her teenage brother have to shoot their dead mother’s horse. Before Strayed’s hiking trip, her beloved mother dies a swift and agonizing death of cancer, leaving behind an ancient, broken-down nag named Lady. Strayed’s stepfather—once an amazing dad—has, after her mother has passed, gotten over it pretty fast, even moving a new girlfriend into Strayed’s childhood house. He promises to have the animal put down by a vet. He’s away on Christmas Eve when Cheryl and her brother—she twenty, he eighteen—come back to the homestead for the last time to find the bony animal shivering in a snowfield. She spoke to me about it recently on the phone:

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

  Constantine’s successors pursued the Sunday legislation which he had initiated, and gave a legal sanction and civil significance also to other holy days of the church, which have no Scriptural authority, so that the special reverence due to the Lord’s Day was obscured in proportion as the number of rival claims increased. Thus Theodosius I. increased the number of judicial holidays to one hundred and twenty-four. The Valentinians, I. and II., prohibited the exaction of taxes and the collection of moneys on Sunday, and enforced the previously enacted prohibition of lawsuits. Theodosius the Great, in 386, and still more stringently the younger Theodosius, in 425, forbade theatrical performances, and Leo and Anthemius, in 460, prohibited other secular amusements, on the Lord’s Day.695 Such laws, however, were probably never rigidly executed. A council of Carthage, in 401, laments the people’s passion for theatrical and other entertainments on Sunday. The same abuse, it is well known, very generally prevails to this day upon the continent of Europe in both Protestant and Roman Catholic countries, and Christian princes and magistrates only too frequently give it the sanction of their example.

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

  Socinus ceased to trouble the Reformers with questions. He devoted himself to the congregation of refugees from Locarno, and secured for them Ochino as pastor, but exerted a bad influence upon him. Fortified with letters of recommendation he made another journey to Italy,—via Germany and Poland, to recover his property from the Inquisition. Calvin gave him a letter to Prince Radziwill of Poland, dated June, 1558, to further his object.927 But Socinus was bitterly disappointed in his wishes, and returned to Zürich in August, 1559. The last few years of his short life he spent in quiet retirement. His nephew visited him several times, and revered him as a divinely illuminated man to whom he owed his most fruitful ideas. The personal relation of Calvin and the elder Socinus is one of curious mutual attraction and repulsion, like the two systems which they represent.928 The younger Socinus, the real founder of the system called after him, did not come into personal contact with Calvin, and labored among the scattered Unitarians and Anabaptists in Poland. Calvin took a deep interest in the progress of the Reformation in Poland, and wrote several letters to the king, to Prince Radziwill, and some of the Polish nobility. But when the writings of Servetus and antitrinitarian opinions spread in that kingdom, he warned the Polish brethren, in one of his last writings, against the danger of this heresy. § 129. Bernardino Ochino. 1487–1565. Comp. § 40, p. 162. Ochino’s Sermons, Tragedy, Catechism, Labyrinths, and Dialogues. His works are very rare; one of the best collections is in the library of Wolfenbüttel; copious extracts in Schelhorn, Trechsel, Schweizer, and Benrath. A full list in Benrath’s monograph, Appendix II. 374–382. His letters (Italian and Latin), ibid. AppendixI1. 337–373. Ochino is often mentioned in Calvin’s and Bullinger’s correspondence. Zaccaria Boverio (Rom. Cath.) in the Chronicle of the Order of the Capuchins, 1630 (inaccurate and hostile). Bayle’s "Dict."—Schelhorn: Ergötzlich-keiten aus der Kirchenhistorie, Ulm and Leipzig, 1764, vol. III. (with several documents in Latin and Italian).—Trechsel: Antitrinitarier, II. 202–270.—Schweizer: Centraldogmen, I. 297–309.—Cesare Cantu (Rom. Cath.): Gli Eretici d’Italia, Turin, 1565–1567, 3vols. —Büchsenschütz: Vie et écrits de B. O., Strasbourg, 1872.—*Karl Benrath: Bernardino Ochino von Siena. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Reformation, Leipzig, 1875 (384 pp.; 2d ed. 1892; transl. by Helen Zimmern, with preface by William Arthur, London, 1876, 304 pp.; the letters of Ochino are omitted).—Comp. C. Schmidt in his Peter Martyr Vermigli (1858), pp. 21 sqq., and art. in Herzog2 X. 680–683. (This article is unsatisfactory and shows no knowledge of Benrath, although he is mentioned in the lit.) –––––––––– Mi sara facile tutto in Christo per el qual vivo et spero di morire. (From Ochino’s letter to the Council of Siena, Sept. 5, 1540; reproduced from Benrath’s monograph.) –––––––––– The Capuchin Monk.