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 The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Billy’s father looked me straight in the eye. “And he does better when his mother and I don’t coddle him.” I was saddened but not surprised by what had happened to Billy when he attempted college. Like so many of the young people in our study, Billy’s parents were both college educated and both had been given a higher education by their families. I had no doubt at all that if these two had stayed together, they would have sent Billy to college no questions asked. Moreover, their lack of concern for Billy’s future was striking. I was certainly aware that a vulnerable young man like Billy needed a high level of specialized knowledge in order to enter the workplace because his poor health precluded so many jobs. But when I talked to Billy’s mother she seemed politely regretful that her son hadn’t continued in college. Billy’s father told me flatly that he didn’t care one way or another. Neither parent seemed to expect that Billy would achieve to at least their own educational and occupational levels. In fact, neither seemed to have many expectations for Billy at all. When they reach their eighteenth birthday, many young adults in divorced families suddenly feel like second-class citizens. That’s when the last child support check arrives and that’s when they realize how disadvantaged they are compared with their friends in intact families. In California and the great majority of the states, a parent has no obligation to help a child after the age of eighteen or the end of high school. The child’s continued education, including tuition, books, supplies, and living expenses, is all up to him. Many young people consider the cutoff at age eighteen the worst hit of their parents’ divorce. They tell me bitterly, “I paid for my folks’ divorce.” Among middle-class children, a college education is an expected rite of passage. Americans believe that the university is a necessary step for success in our technologically advanced, competitive society. Many parents in intact families make enormous sacrifices to send their children to college. As men and women of the world who benefited from their own professional training and contacts, they know that without a college education young people are handicapped all through their lives. Thus they save their money for many years ahead. In turn, they expect their kids to work hard as students and in part-time jobs. But they do not expect the children to do it all by themselves. Billy’s experience with higher education is typical of what happened to many of the young people in this study who had college-educated parents.

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

  Odum collaborated with Roy Stryker of the FSA’s photographic unit in overseeing a three-year sociological project of thirteen counties in North Carolina and Virginia. 46 The real strength of Odum’s work came from the amount of information he amassed. He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated. Here was one southerner who wanted to see some “sincere, courageous telling of the truth about the South.” He was “tired of the defense complex,” he said, and the unending ridicule, complacency, ignorance, and, above all, the poverty. The greatest virtue of Southern Regions was its quantitative weight and its objective outlook. As the southern historian Broadus Mitchell insisted at the same time, “The South does not need defense, but exposition.” 47 The primary target of Odum’s research was sectionalism’s destructive legacy. Mitchell interpreted Odum in such a way as to say that there was no longer a justification for using Yankee oppression for the South’s refusal to change. To Odum, there were “many Souths”; what was needed now was a regional vision. As a cattle breeder, he compared the sectional dictate to “cultural inbreeding,” and to the “stagnation” that came from resisting the “cross-fertilization of ideas” and by refusing to engage with those beyond one’s state. When he looked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, he saw unmistakably the most successful of New Deal projects in regional planning; the TVA had harnessed the power of seven monumental dams, coordinating among seven states and employing nearly ten thousand people in an area that previously had suffered under tremendous poverty. Odum said he hoped the TVA “would constitute the 49th State.” The straitjacket of states’ rights had suffocated southern progress long enough. 48 Odum was right about the TVA. It was a shining example of positive planning. Its dams alone were marvels of engineering, elegant and modern architectural wonders. Intelligent management resulted in soil conservation; flood, malaria, and pollution control; reforestation; and improved fertilization— all sensible land-use strategies. The TVA led to well-designed communities that supported libraries and health and recreation facilities—everything that Wilson had prescribed for the homestead villages. There were training centers in agriculture, marketing, automotive and electrical repair, mechanical work and metalwork; there were classes in engineering and mathematics at nearby colleges, plus unprecedented opportunities for adult education. A bookmobile carried libraries to workers and their families. 49 Odum knew it would be extremely difficult to dislodge cultural prejudices. In 1938, he sent questionnaires to distinguished academics across the country, asking each to define what “poor white” meant to him.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In Lorde’s body of work, we see her defying this idea of the dominant culture as the default, this idea that she should only write about her oppression, but while doing so she never abandons her subject position. She is empathetic, curious, critical, intuitive. She is as open about her weaknesses as she is about her strengths. She is an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last. We are rather attached to the notion of truth as singular, but the best writing reminds us that truth is complex and subjective. The best writing reminds us that we need not relegate the truth to the narrow perimeters of right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. I have thought about how narrow the perimeters of change really are when we insist on using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. This narrow brand of thinking has only intensified since the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump was elected. Whatever progress it seemed like we were making during the Obama era has retracted sharply, painfully. We live in a very fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized, demonized, and where discourse demands allegiance to extremes instead of nuanced points of view. We live in a time where the president of the United States flouts all conventions of the office, decorum, and decency. Police brutality persists, unabated. Women share their experiences with sexual harassment or violence but rarely receive any kind of justice. It seems like things have only gotten worse since the height of Lorde’s career when she was writing about the very things we continue to deal with—the place of women and, more specifically, black women in the world, what it means to raise black girls and boys in a world that will not welcome them, what it means to live in a world so harshly stratified by class, what it means to live in a vulnerable body, what it means to live. There are very few voices for women and even fewer voices for black women, speaking from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are, but Lorde was, throughout her storied career, one such voice. In her poem “Power,” Lorde wrote about a white police officer who murdered a ten-year-old black boy and was acquitted by a jury of eleven of his peers and one black woman who succumbed to the will of those peers. She captured the rage of such injustice and how futile it feels to try and fight such injustice, but she also demonstrated that even in the face of futility, silence is never an option.

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

  As television’s first attempt at a “reality” show, the Loud family saga was a study in dysfunction—a decade removed from Ozzie and Harriet, and emotional light-years from the tame, kid- friendly Brady Bunch. Three hundred hours of taping over the course of a year was edited down to twelve hours of riveting television. Outsiders may have cared about the new TV family, but a New York Times Magazine article on the Louds described their world as a cultural vacuum: they had few hobbies, cared little about suffering in the world at large, and seemed emotionally short-circuited when attempting to deal with one another. The parents, Bill and Pat, were getting separated, but to the husband, who avoided conflict and admitted to no failures, their pending divorce came devoid of introspection. In the words of commentator Anne Roiphe, the breakup of a marriage was experienced by him as “a minor toothache.” Amid filming, the Louds’ house burned down, and even that barely fazed them. They floated through life like “jellyfish,” transparent and unresponsive; they valued “prettiness” and gave no attention to any but their outwardly attractive and successful neighbors; they were nonplussed when it came to “those who do not make it.” As Roiphe sublimely put it, with reference to Mario Puzo’s Godfather clan, “Maybe it’s better to be a Corleone than a Loud.” At least the Sicilians’ tribal, violent character got the blood flowing. (She might just as well have used “redneck” in place of “Corleone.”) Blind to their blandness, the Louds were adrift, like so many others of the seventies middle class. Roiphe’s updated motto for the family sampler: “Be it ever so hollow, there’s no place like home.” 3 • • • Historical fictions provided a solution for cultural longing. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) created a media sensation. It spent twenty-two weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list before becoming a twelve-hour miniseries that won nine Emmys. Haley had done something few imagined possible: he had traced his African American family’s history back to a village in Gambia. The author’s success was based wholly on his claims to have discovered his paternal ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who acquired the name Toby in America. Haley insisted that he had spent long years doing careful research that had enabled him to prove that his family’s oral history (and that told by an African storyteller) could be corroborated with archival documentation. The dialogue in his book may have been made up, but the family saga was a true slice of history. Impressed by this gargantuan effort, the New York Times praised Haley for his “wealth of authentic detail,” and for having instilled his narrative with the “feel of history.” The most prominent review in the newspaper of record averred, “Its truths have been quarried by a mountain of facts.”

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  20 James Baldwin ing him asthoughshe wereafraid he would do something awful, watched him and watched the womenand, yes, she flirted with the men in astrange, nerve-wracking kind of way. Thereshe was,dressed, as they say, to kill, withher mouthredder thanany blood, dressed in something which waseither the wrongcolor, ortootight,or too young, the cocktail glass in her hand threatening, atany instant, to be re- duced toshards, to splinters,and thatvoice going onand on like a razor blade on glass. WhenI was a little boyand I watched her in company, shefrightenedme. Butnomatter what washappeningin that room,my mother waswatchingit. Shelooked outof thephotographframe, a pale,blonde woman,dehcately put together,dark-eyed,and straight-browed, with a nervous,gentle mouth. Butsomethingaboutthewaythe eyeswere set intheheadand stared straightout, some- thingveryfaintly sardonic andknowing in the set ofthemoudi suggested that,somewhere beneaththis tensefragility was a strength as various asitwas unyielding and, like my father's wrath, dangerous because it was so entirely unexpected. My father rarely spoke of her and when hedid hecovered, by some mys- terious means, hisface;he spokeof heronly as my motherand, in fact, as he spokeof her, he might havebeen speaking of hisown. Ellen spokeof mymother often, saying what a remarkablewomanshe hadbeen, but she made GIOVANNI'S ROOM 21 me uncomfortable. I feltthatI had no right to be the son of sucha mother. Years later, when Ihad becomea man,I tried to get my fatherto talk aboutmy mother.But Ellenwas dead, hewas aboutto marry again. He spoke of my mother,then,as Ellen had spokenof her and hemight, indeed,have been speaking of Ellen. Theyhada fightonenightwhenIwas about thirteen. They had a greatmany fights,of course; but perhaps I remember thisoneso clearlybecauseit seemed tobeabout me. Iwas in bed upstairs,asleep.Itwas quite late. Iwas suddenly awakened by the soundof my father'sfootfallsonthe walkbeneathmy window. I could tellbythesoundandthe rhythm thathe was a littledrunk andIremem- ber that atthat moment a certain disappoint- ment, an unprecedented sorrowenteredinto me. Ihad seen him drunk manytimes and had never felt this way— onthecontrary, my father sometimes had great charm whenhe was drunk— but that night Isuddenly felt that there was something in it,in him, to be despised. I heard him come in. Then, atonce, I heard Ellen's voice. 'Aren't you in bed yet?' my father asked. He wastrying to be pleasant and trying to avoid a scene, but there was no cordiality in his voice, only strain and exasperation. T thought,' said Ellen, coldly, 'that someone ought to tell you what you're doing to your son.'

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

  To my astonishment my triumph did me harm with the boys. Some sneered, while all agreed that I did it to show off. Jones and the Sixth began the boycott again. I didn’t mind much, for I had heavier disappointments and dearer hopes. The worst was I found it difficult to see Lucille in the bad weather; indeed I hardly caught a glimpse of her the whole winter. Edwards asked me frequently to the Vicarage; she might have made half a dozen meetings but she would not, and I was sick at heart with disappointment and the regret of unfulfilled desire. It was March or April before I was alone with her in her schoolroom at the Vicarage. I was too cross with her to be more than polite. Suddenly she said, “Vous me boudez.” I shrugged my shoulders. “You don’t like me”, I began, “so what’s the use of my caring.” “I like you a great deal”, she said, “but—” “No, no”, I said, shaking my head, “if you liked me, you wouldn’t avoid me and—” “Perhaps it’s because I like you too much—” “Then you’d make me happy”, I broke in. “Happy”, she repeated, “How can I?” “By letting me kiss you, and—” “Yes, and—” she repeated significantly. “What harm does it do you?” I asked. “What harm”, she repeated, “Don’t you know it’s wrong? One should only do that with one’s husband; you know that.” “I don’t know anything of the sort”, I cried, “That’s all silly. We don’t believe that today.” “I believe it”, she said gravely. “But if you didn’t, you’d let me”, I cried, “say that, Lucille, that would be almost as good, for it would show you liked me a little.” “You know I like you a great deal”, she replied. “Kiss me then”, I said, “there’s no harm in that”, and when she kissed me I put my hand over her breasts; they thrilled me they were so elastic-firm, and in a moment my hand slid down her body, but she drew away at once quietly but with resolve. “No, no”, she said, half smiling. “Please!” I begged. “I can’t”, she said, shaking her head, “I mustn’t. Let us talk of other things—How is the play getting on?” But I could not talk of the play as she stood there before me. For the first time I divined through her clothes nearly all the beauties of her form. The bold curves of hip and breast tantalized me and her face was expressive and defiant. How was it I had never noticed all the details before? Had I been blind? or did Lucille dress to show off her figure? Certainly her dresses were arranged to display the form more than English dresses, but I too had become more curious, more observant. Would life go on showing me new beauties I had not even imagined?

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

  We noted that Montefiore and Schoeps, among others, supposed that the Judaism criticized by Paul must have been Hellenistic Judaism, since Rabbinic Judaism was better than one would gather from Paul's attacks. Others (we gave Bultmann as an example) have supposed that Paul's criticisms were perfectly accurate, and the criticism of Judaism given by Paul was held to be supported by Rabbinic literature. To assess this question we must carefully note what Paul's attack has been held to be and what it actually was. It is generally taken to be the case that Paul's criticism was that Judaism was a religion of legalistic works-righteousness; that is, that he criticized the means (works of law) while agreeing with the goal (righteousness). His failure to mention the significance of the covenant 550 Conclusion as indicating God's grace and of repentance as providing contin'1ing access to forgiveness has been held either accurately to represent Judaism (the covenant conception receded in late Judaism) or to reveal ignorance of it Jewish arrogance may be seen as under attack by Paul in the discussion of boasting in Rom. 3.27-4.5, and it has been maintained that smug self- satisfaction (as well as uncertainty of salvation) is evidenced in Rabbinic literature. Our analysis of Rabbinic and other Palestinian Jewish literature did not reveal the kind of religion best characterized as legalistic works-righteousness. But more important for the present point is the observation that in any case that charge is not the heart of Paul's critique. As we argued in the discussion of Paul's attitude toward the law (Chapter V, section 4), the basis for Paul's polemic against the law, and consequently against doing the law, was his exclusivist soteriology. Since salvation is only by Christ, the following of any other path is wrong. Paul does say that faith excludes boasting, and he does warn the Jews against boasting (Rom. 2.17), but the warning is not against a self-righteousness which is based on the view that works earn merit before God. The warning is against boasting of the relationship to God which is evidenced by possession of the law and against being smug about the knowledge of God's will while in fact transgressing. Nul regarded zeal for the law itself as a good thing (Rom. 10.2; Phil. 3.6). What is wrong with it is not that it implies petty obedience and minimization of important matters, nor that it results in the tabulation of merit points before God, but that it is not worth anything in comparison with being in Christ (Phil. 3.4-11). The fundamental critique of the law is that following the law does not result in being found in Christ; for salvation and the gift of the Spirit come only by faith (Rom. 10. 10; Gal. 3. 1-5). Doing the law, in short, is wrong only because it is not faith.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  390 THE HEPTAMEROA'- OF THE {Ncrjel 45. did not prevent it, though they were duped, and on that of the girl, who liked it well, and never complained." "All this," said Parlamente, "was only the conse- quence of the good-nature and simplicity of the mercer's wife, who in good faith led her daughter to the butchery without knowing it." " Why not say to the wedding .? " said Simontault, "since this simplicity was not less advantageous to the girl than it was prejudicial to a wife who was too easily the dupe of her husband." "Since you know the story," said Nomerfide, "tell it us." " With all my heart," replied Simontault, " on condi- tion that you promise me not to weep. Those who say, ladies, that you have more craft than men, would find it hard to produce an example like that of which I am go- ing to speak. I purpose to exhibit to you not onl}' the great craft of a husband, but also the extreme simplicity and good-nature of his wife." NOVEL XLV. A husband, giving the innocents to his servant girl, plays upon his wife's simplicity. There was at Tours a shrewd, cunning fellow, who was upholsterer to the late Duke of Orleans, son of King Francis I. Though this upholsterer had become deaf in consequence of a severe illness, he nevertheless retained the full use of his wits, and was so well en- dowed in that respect that there was not a man in his /•yth Jay.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 391 trade more cunning than himself. As for other matters, you shall see from what I am about to relate to you how he contrived to acquit himself. He had married a good and honourable woman, with whom he lived very peace- ably. He was greatly afraid of displeasing her, and she also studied to obey him in all things. But for all the great affection the husband had for his wife, he was so charitable that he often gave his female neighbours what belonged to her ; but this he always did as secretly as possible. They had a good stout wench as a servant, with whom the upholsterer fell in love. Fearing, how- ever, lest his wife should perceive it, he affected often to scold her, saying she was the laziest creature he had ever seen ; but that he did not wonder at it, since her mistress never beat her. One day, when they were talking of giving the Inno- cents,* the upholsterer said to his wife, " It would be a

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  17. And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit; 18. And wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out; and they could not. 19. He answereth him, and saith, O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me. 20. And they brought him unto him: and when he saw him, straightway the spirit tare him; and he fell on the ground, and wallowed foaming. 21. And he asked his father, How long is it ago since this came unto him? And he said, Of a child. 22. And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us. 23. Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. 24. And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. 25. When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. 26. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. 27. But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose. 28. And when he was come into the house, his disciples asked him privately, Why could not we cast him out? 29. And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting. THEOPHYLACT. After He had shewn His glory in the mount to the three disciples, He returns to the other disciples, who had not come up with Him into the mount; wherefore it is said, And when he came to his disciples, he saw a great multitude about them, and the Scribes questioning with them. For the Pharisees, catching the opportunity of the hour when Christ was not present, came up to them, to try to draw them over to themselves. PSEUDO-JEROME. But there is no peace for man under the sun; envy is ever slaying the little ones, and lightnings strike the tops of the great mountains. Of all those who run to the Church, some as the multitudes come in faith to learn, others, as the Scribes, with envy and pride. It goes on, And straightway all the people, when they beheld Jesus, were greatly amazed, and feared.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In the later days, some will come who will depart from the faith and pay attention to teachings of demons (i Timothy 4:1). A good servant of Jesus Christ must be nourished in the words of faith and sound teaching (i Timothy 4:6). The heretics are people of corrupt minds and counterfeit faith (2 Timothy 3:8). The duty of Titus is to rebuke people that they may be sound in the faith (Titus 1: 13). This comes out particularly in an expression peculiar to the Pastorals. As the Revised Standard Version has it, Timothy is urged to keep hold of `the truth that has been entrusted to you' (2 Timothy 1: 14). The word for that has been entrusted is paratheke. Paratheke means a deposit which has been entrusted to a banker or someone else for safe-keeping. It is essentially something which must be handed back or handed on absolutely unchanged. That is to say, the stress is on orthodoxy. Instead of being a close, personal relationship to Jesus Christ, as it was in the thrilling, pulsating days of the early Church, faith has become the acceptance of a creed. It is even held that in the Pastorals we have echoes of the earliest creeds. [image file=img/page0218_0000.svg] That indeed sounds like the fragment of a creed which is to be recited. Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David - that is my gospel. (2 Timothy 2:8) That sounds like a reminder of a sentence from an accepted creed. Within the Pastorals, there undoubtedly are indications that the time of insistence on acceptance of a creed has begun, and that the days of the first thrilling personal discovery of Christ are beginning to fade. A Dangerous Heresy It is clear that in the forefront of the situation against which the Pastoral Epistles were written there was a dangerous heresy which was threatening the welfare of the Christian Church. If we can distinguish the various characteristic features of that heresy, we may be able to go on to identify it. It was characterized by speculative intellectualism. It produced questions (i Timothy 1:4); those involved in it had a craving for questions (i Timothy 6:4); it dealt in stupid and senseless questions (2 Timothy 2:23); its stupid questions are to be avoided (Titus 3:9). The word used in each case for questions is ekzetesis, which means speculative discussion. This heresy was obviously one which was a playground of the intellectuals, or rather the pseudo-intellectuals of the Church.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  When, after an absence of almost seventeen years I revisited England, I made the dreadful mistake of going to see Cambridge again not at the glorious end of the Easter term but on a raw February day that reminded me only of my own confused old nostalgia. I was hopelessly trying to find an academic job in England (the ease with which I obtained that type of employment in the U.S.A. is to me, in backthought, a constant source of grateful wonder). In every way the visit was not a success. I had lunch with Nesbit at a little place, which ought to have been full of memories but which, owing to various changes, was not. He had given up smoking. Time had softened his features and he no longer resembled Gorki or Gorki’s translator, but looked a little like Ibsen, minus the simian vegetation. An accidental worry (the cousin or maiden sister who kept house for him had just been removed to Binet’s clinic or something) seemed to prevent him from concentrating on the very personal and urgent matter I wanted to speak to him about. Bound volumes of Punch were heaped on a table in a kind of small vestibule where a bowl of goldfish had formerly stood—and it all looked so different. Different too were the garish uniforms worn by the waitresses, of whom none was as pretty as the particular one I remembered so clearly. Rather desperately, as if struggling against boredom, Ibsen launched into politics. I knew well what to expect—denunciation of Stalinism. In the early twenties Nesbit had mistaken his own ebullient idealism for a romantic and humane something in Lenin’s ghastly rule. Ibsen, in the days of the no less ghastly Stalin, was mistaking a quantitative increase in his own knowledge for a qualitative change in the Soviet regime. The thunderclap of purges that had affected “old Bolsheviks,” the heroes of his youth, had given him a salutary shock, something that in Lenin’s day all the groans coming from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon had not been able to do. With horror he pronounced the names of Ezhov and Yagoda—but quite forgot their predecessors, Uritski and Dzerzhinski. While time had improved his judgment regarding contemporaneous Soviet affairs, he did not bother to reconsider the preconceived notions of his youth, and still saw in Lenin’s short reign a kind of glamorous quinquennium Neronis.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  This makes it look very much as if Matthew and Luke were using Mark as the basis of their gospels. What makes the matter still more certain is this. Both Matthew and Luke very largely follow Mark's order of events. Sometimes Matthew alters Mark's order and sometimes Luke does. But when there is a change in the order Matthew and Luke never agree together against Mark. Always one of them retains Mark's order of events. A close examination of the three gospels makes it clear that Matthew and Luke had Mark before them as they wrote; and they used his gospel as the basis into which they fitted the extra material which they wished to include. It is thrilling to remember that when we read Mark's gospel we are reading the first life of Jesus, on which all succeeding lives have necessarily been based. Mark, the Writer of the Gospel Who then was this Mark who wrote the gospel? The New Testament tells us a good deal about him. He was the son of a well-to-do lady of Jerusalem whose name was Mary, and whose house was a rallying point and meeting place of the early Church (Acts 12:12). From the very beginning Mark was brought up in the very centre of the Christian fellowship. Mark was also the nephew of Barnabas, and when Paul and Barnabas set out on their first missionary journey they took Mark with them to be their secretary and attendant (Acts 12:25). This journey was a most unfortunate one for Mark. When they reached Perga, Paul proposed to strike inland up to the central plateau; and for some reason Mark left the expedition and went home (Acts 13:13). He may have gone home because he was scared to face the dangers of what was notoriously one of the most difficult and dangerous roads in the world, a road hard to travel and haunted by bandits. He may have gone home because it was increasingly clear that the leadership of the expedition was being assumed by Paul, and Mark may have felt with disapproval that his uncle was being pushed into the background. He may have gone home because he did not approve of the work which Paul was doing. Writing in the fourth century, John Chrysostom - perhaps with a flash of imaginative insight - says that Mark went home because he wanted his mother! Paul and Barnabas completed their first missionary journey and then proposed to set out upon their second. Barnabas was anxious to take Mark with them again. But Paul refused to have anything to do with the man `who had deserted them in Pamphylia' (Acts 15:37-40). So serious was the difference between them that Paul and Barnabas split company, and, as far as we know, never worked together again. For some years, Mark vanishes from history.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  (2) The contents make it difficult to believe that it is Peter's. There is no mention of the passion, the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus Christ; no mention of the Church as the true Israel; no mention of that faith which is a combination of undefeatable hope and trust; no mention of the Holy Spirit, of prayer, of baptism; and no passionate desire to call men and women to the supreme example of Jesus Christ. If one took away these great truths from i Peter, there would be little or nothing left - and yet none of them occurs in 2 Peter. (3) It is wholly different in character and style from i Peter. This was realized in the fourth century by the biblical scholar Jerome, who wrote: `Simon Peter wrote two Epistles which are called Catholic, of which the authenticity of the second is denied by many because of the difference of the style from the first.' The Greek style of this letter is very difficult. F. B. Clogg calls it ambitious, artificial and often obscure, and remarks that it is the only book in the New Testament which is improved by translation. F. H. Chase, Bishop of Ely in the early part of the twentieth century, writes: `The Epistle does produce the impression of being a somewhat artificial piece of rhetoric. It shows throughout signs of selfconscious effort. The author appears to be ambitious of writing in a style which is beyond his literary power.' He concludes that it is hard to reconcile the literary character of this letter with the supposition that Peter wrote it. James Moffatt says: `2 Peter is more periodic and ambitious than i Peter, but its linguistic and its stylistic efforts only reveal by their cumbrous obscurity a decided inferiority of conception, which marks it off from i Peter.'

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We are forced to apprehend every part of the series as linked with the other parts by something in common which is not the feelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is the feelings themselves; and as that which is the same in the first as in the second, in the second as in the third, in the third as in the fourth, and so on, must be the same in the first and in the fiftieth, this common element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feelings or consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it, and its possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be asserted of Self—the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we can ascribe to it." [283] Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father, and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it altogether. [284] In this place the concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the admission of something very like the Soul. This 'inexplicable tie' which connects the feelings, this 'something in common' by which they are linked and which is not the passing feelings themselves, but something 'permanent,' of which we can 'affirm nothing' save its attributes and its permanence, what is it but metaphysical Substance come again to life? Much as one must respect the fairness of Mill's temper, quite as much must one regret his failure of acumen at this point. At bottom he makes the same blunder as Hume: the sensations per se, he thinks, have no 'tie.' The tie of resemblance and continuity which the remembering Thought finds among them is not a 'real tie' but 'a mere product of the laws of thought;' and the fact that the present Thought 'appropriates' them is also no real tie. But whereas Hume was contended to say that there might after all be no 'real tie,' Mill, unwilling to admit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a non- phenomenal world. John Mill's concessions may be regarded as the definitive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the consciousness of self, starting, as it does, with the best intentions, and dimly conscious of the path, but 'perplexed in the extreme' at last with the inadequacy of those 'simple feelings,' non-cognitive, non- transcendent of themselves, which were the only baggage it was willing to take along. One must beg memory, knowledge on the part of the feelings of something outside themselves. That granted, every other true thing follows naturally, and it is hard to go astray.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Our country doctor, with whom I had left the pupae of a rare moth when I went on a journey abroad, wrote me that everything had hatched finely; but in reality a mouse had got at the precious pupae, and upon my return the deceitful old man produced some common Tortoiseshell butterflies, which, I presume, he had hurriedly caught in his garden and popped into the breeding cage as plausible substitutes (so he thought). Better than he, was an enthusiastic kitchen boy who would sometimes borrow my equipment and come back two hours later in triumph with a bagful of seething invertebrate life and several additional items. Loosening the mouth of the net which he had tied up with a string, he would pour out his cornucopian spoil—a mass of grasshoppers, some sand, the two parts of a mushroom he had thriftily plucked on the way home, more grasshoppers, more sand, and one battered Small White. In the works of major Russian poets I can discover only two lepidopteral images of genuinely sensuous quality: Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell: And there will fly into the room A colored butterfly in silk To flutter, rustle and pit-pat On the blue ceiling … [image file=image_rsrc137.jpg] The author’s father and mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, born Rukavishnikov (1876–1939), in 1900, on the garden terrace at Vyra, their estate in the Province of St. Petersburg. The birches and firs of the park behind my parents belong to the same backdrop of past summers as the foliage of photograph facing this page. [image file=image_rsrc138.jpg] My brother Sergey and I, aged one and two, respectively (and looking like the same infant, wigless and wigged), in December 1901, in Biarritz. We had, I suppose, come there from Pau where we were living that winter. A shining wet roof—that is all I remember from that first trip to the South of France. It was followed by other trips, two to Biarritz (autumn 1907 and 1909) and two to the Riviera (late autumn 1903 and early summer 1904). [image file=image_rsrc139.jpg] My father, aged thirty-five, with me aged seven, St. Petersburg, 1906. and Fet’s “Butterfly” soliloquizing: Whence have I come and whither am I hasting Do not inquire; Now on a graceful flower I have settled And now respire. In French poetry one is struck by Musset’s well-known lines (in Le Saule): Le phalène doré dans sa course légère Traverse les prés embaumés which is an absolutely exact description of the crepuscular flight of the male of the geometrid called in England the Orange moth; and there is Fargue’s fascinatingly apt phrase (in Les Quatres Journées) about a garden which, at nightfall, se glace de bleu comme l’aile du grand Sylvain (the Poplar Admirable). And among the very few genuine lepidopterological images in English poetry, my favorite is Browning’s

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

  Many years later his deafness became to me the symbol and explanation of his genius. He had always lived “the life removed” and kept himself unspotted from the world: that explains both his narrowness of sympathy and the height to which he grew! His narrow, pleasantly smiling face comes back to me whenever I hear his name mentioned. But at the time I was indignant with his deafness and out of temper with Smith because he didn’t notice it and seemed somehow to make himself cheap. When we went away, I cried: “The old fool is as deaf as a post!” “Ah, that was the explanation then of his stereotyped smile and peculiar answers”, cried Smith, “how did you divine it?” “He put his hand to his ear more than once”, I replied. “So he did”, Smith exclaimed, “how foolish of me not to have drawn the obvious inference!” It was in this fall, I believe, that the Gregorys went off to Colorado. I felt the loss of Kate a good deal at first; but she had made no deep impression on my mind and the new life in Philadelphia and my journalistic work left me but little time for regrets and as she never wrote to me, following doubtless her mother’s advice, she soon drifted out of my memory. Moreover, Lily was quite as interesting a lover and Lily too had begun to pall on me. The truth is, the fever of desire in youth is a passing malady that intimacy quickly cures. Besides, I was already in pursuit of a girl in Philadelphia who kept me a long time at arm’s length, and when she yielded I found her figure commonplace and her sex so large and loose that she deserves no place in this chronicle. She was modest, if you please, and no wonder. I have always since thought, that modesty is the proper fig-leaf of ugliness. In the spring of this year 1875, I had to return to Lawrence on business connected with my hoardings. In several cases the owners of the lots refused to allow me to keep up the hoardings unless they had a reasonable share in the profits. Finally I called them all together and came to an amicable agreement to divide twenty-five percent of my profit among them, year by year. I had also to go through my examination and get admitted to the Bar. I had already taken out my first naturalization papers and Judge Bassett of the District Court appointed the lawyers Barker and Hutchings to examine me. The examination was a mere form: they each asked me three simple questions: I answered them and we adjourned to the Eldridge House for supper and they drank my health in champagne. I was notified by Judge Bassett that I had passed the examination and told to present myself for admission on the 15th of June, I think, 1875.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  She contended afterward, in her rare moments of moodiness, that our love had not withstood the strain of that winter; a flaw had appeared, she said. Through all those months, I had kept writing verse to her, for her, about her, two or three poems per week; in the spring of 1916 I published a collection of them—and was horrified when she drew my attention to something I had not noticed at all when concocting the book. There it was, the same ominous flaw, the banal hollow note, and glib suggestion that our love was doomed since it could never recapture the miracle of its initial moments, the rustle and rush of those limes in the rain, the compassion of the wild countryside. Moreover—but this neither of us saw at the time—my poems were juvenile stuff, quite devoid of merit and ought never to have been put on sale. The book (a copy of which still exists, alas, in the “closed stacks” of the Lenin Library, Moscow) deserved what it got at the tearing claws of the few critics who noticed it in obscure periodicals. My Russian literature teacher at school, Vladimir Hippius, a first-rate though somewhat esoteric poet whom I greatly admired (he surpassed in talent, I think, his much better known cousin, Zinaïda Hippius, woman poet and critic) brought a copy with him to class and provoked the delirious hilarity of the majority of my classmates by applying his fiery sarcasm (he was a fierce man with red hair) to my most romantic lines. His famous cousin at a session of the Literary Fund asked my father, its president, to tell me, please, that I would never, never be a writer. A well-meaning, needy and talentless journalist, who had reasons to be grateful to my father, wrote an impossibly enthusiastic piece about me, some five hundred lines dripping with fulsome praise; it was intercepted in time by my father, and I remember him and me, while we read it in manuscript, grinding our teeth and groaning—the ritual adopted by our family when faced by something in awful taste or by somebody’s gaffe. The whole business cured me permanently of all interest in literary fame and was probably the cause of that almost pathological and not always justified indifference to reviews which in later years deprived me of the emotions most authors are said to experience.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Very fresh, very dark Arran Browns, which emerged only every second year (conveniently, retrospection has fallen here into line), flitted among the firs or revealed their red markings and checkered fringes as they sunned themselves on the roadside bracken. Hopping above the grass, a diminutive Ringlet called Hero dodged my net. Several moths, too, were flying—gaudy sun lovers that sail from flower to flower like painted flies, or male insomniacs in search of hidden females, such as that rust-colored Oak Eggar hurtling across the shrubbery. I noticed (one of the major mysteries of my childhood) a soft pale green wing caught in a spider’s web (by then I knew what it was: part of a Large Emerald). The tremendous larva of the Goat Moth, ostentatiously segmented, flat-headed, flesh-colored and glossily flushed, a strange creature “as naked as a worm” to use a French comparison, crossed my path in frantic search for a place to pupate (the awful pressure of metamorphosis, the aura of a disgraceful fit in a public place). On the bark of that birch tree, the stout one near the park wicket, I had found last spring a dark aberration of Sievers’ Carmelite (just another gray moth to the reader). In the ditch, under the bridgelet, a bright-yellow Silvius Skipper hobnobbed with a dragonfly (just a blue libellula to me). From a flower head two male Coppers rose to a tremendous height, fighting all the way up—and then, after a while, came the downward flash of one of them returning to his thistle. These were familiar insects, but at any moment something better might cause me to stop with a quick intake of breath. I remember one day when I warily brought my net closer and closer to an uncommon Hairstreak that had daintily settled on a sprig. I could clearly see the white W on its chocolate-brown underside. Its wings were closed and the inferior ones were rubbing against each other in a curious circular motion—possibly producing some small, blithe crepitation pitched too high for a human ear to catch. I had long wanted that particular species, and, when near enough, I struck. You have heard champion tennis players moan after muffing an easy shot. You may have seen the face of the world-famous grandmaster Wilhelm Edmundson when, during a simultaneous display in a Minsk café, he lost his rook, by an absurd oversight, to the local amateur and pediatrician, Dr. Schach, who eventually won. But that day nobody (except my older self) could see me shake out a piece of twig from an otherwise empty net and stare at a hole in the tarlatan.

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

  It was easy to see that the boom and inflation period had been based at first on the extraordinary growth of the country through the immigration and trade that had followed the Civil War. But the Franco-German war had wasted wealth prodigiously, deranged trade too, and diverted commerce into new channels. France and then England first felt the shock: London had to call in monies lent to American railways and other enterprises. Bit by bit even American optimism was overcome for immigration in 1871 and 1872 fell off greatly and the foreign calls for cash exhausted our banks. The crash came in 1873; nothing like it was seen again in these States till the slump of 1907 which led to the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. Willie’s fortune melted almost in a moment: this mortgage and that, had to be met and could only be met by forced sales with no buyers except at minimum values. When I talked to him, he was almost in despair; no money: no property: all lost; the product of three years’ hard work and successful speculation all swept away. Could I help him? If not, he was ruined. He told me then he had drawn all he could from my father: naturally I promised to help him; but first I had to pay the Gregorys and to my astonishment he begged me to let him have the money instead. “Mrs. Gregory and all of ’em like you”, he pleaded, “they can wait, I cannot; I know of a purchase that could be made that would make me rich again!” I realised then that he was selfish through and through, conscienceless in egotistic greed. I gave up my faint hope that he would ever repay me: henceforth he was a stranger to me and one that I did not even respect, though he had some fine, ingratiating qualities. I left him to walk across the river and in a few blocks met Rose. She looked prettier than ever and I turned and walked with her, praising her beauty to the skies and indeed she deserved it; short green sleeves, I remember, set off her exquisite, plump, white arms. I promised her some books and made her say she would read them; indeed I was astonished by the warmth of her gratitude: she told me it was sweet of me, gave me her eyes and we parted the best of friends, with just a hint of warmer relationship in the future. That evening I paid the Gregorys, Willie’s debt and my own and—did not send him the balance of what I possessed as I had promised; but instead, a letter telling him I had preferred to cancel his debt to the Gregorys.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother. “Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters.