Disgust

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 Naked Lunch (1959)

  A rout of Mullahs and Muftis and Husseins and Caids and Glaouis and Sheiks and Sultans and Holy Men and representatives of every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and file and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain. Though the delegates are carefully searched at the door, these gatherings invariably culminate in riots. Speakers are often doused with gasoline and burned to death, or some uncouth desert Sheik opens up on his opponents with a machine gun he had concealed in the belly of a pet sheep. Nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass mingle with the assembled conferents and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties.... And there was the occasion when President Ra threw the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomized him, the spectacle being televised to the entire Arab World. Wild yipes of joy were heard in Stockholm. Interzone has an ordinance forbidding a meeting of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits. A. J.-- he is actually of obscure Near East extraction -- had at one time come on like an English gentleman. His English accent waned with the British Empire, and after World War II he became an American by Act of Congress. A. J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has ever been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy.... I believe he is on the Factualist side (which I also represent); of course he could be a Liquefactign Agent (the Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption). You can never be sure of anyone in the industry. A. J.'s cover story? An international playboy and harmless practical joker. It was A. J. who put the piranha fish in Lady Sutton-Smith's swimming pool, and dosed the punch with a mixture of Yage, Hashish and Yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating an orgy. Ten prominent citizens -- American, of course -- subsequently died of shame. Dying of shame is an accomplishment peculiar to Kwakiutl Indians and Americans -- others simply say " Zut alors " or " Son cosas de la vida " or "Allah fucked me, the All Powerful...." And when the Cincinnati Anti-Fluoride Society met to toast their victory in pure spring water, all their teeth dropped out on the spot. "And I say unto you, brothers and sisters of the Anti-Fluoride movement, we have this day struck such a blow for purity as will never call a retreat.... Out, I say, with the filthy foreign fluorides! We will sweep this fair land sweet and clean as a young boy's tensed flank. ...I will now lead you in our theme song The Old Oaken Bucket ." A well head is lighted by fluorescent lights that play over it in hideous juke-box colors.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "Well, you talk right sensible for a city feller.... Find out what he wants and take care of him.... He's a good ol' boy." INTERZONE The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif's chauffeur, which is not affectation or perversity on Keif's part, but a useful pretext to break off relations with anyone he doesn't want to see: "You made a pass at Aracknid list night. I can't have you to the house again." People are always blacking out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one can say for sure he didn't make a pass at Aracknid's unappetizing person. Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code. Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter. The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive: "Two thirds of one percent. I won't budge from that figure; not even for my bumpkins." "But where are the bills of lading, lover?" "Not where you're looking, pet. That's too obvious." "A bale of levies with built-in falsie baskets. Made in Hollywood." "Hollywood, Siam." "Well American style . " "What’s the commission.... The commission... The commission. " "Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quarantined by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego, The commission, my dear! If we can pull this off we'll be in clover." (Whale dreck is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony. The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out. The air is once again still and clear as glycerine. The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence. "Any eggs for Fats?" he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile's fan hairs. It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz. Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.) A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the cafe. HOSPITAL Disintoxication Notes . Paranoia of early withdrawal... Everything looks blue.... Flesh dead, doughy, toneless. Withdrawal Nightmares . A mirror-lined cafe. Empty. ...Waiting for something.... A man appears in a side door.... A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face... There is a pitcher of boiling acid in my hand.... Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his face.... Everyone looks like a drug addict.... Take a little walk in the hospital patio.... In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.... No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag. Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, intercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end -- probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.... In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me....The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gadgets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones. ...Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids... The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry....

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous -- (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) -- except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk. "That's the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there's always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that un-D.T. to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image. Some would be entirely made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of 3 and 4 eyes together, criss-cross of mouth and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out any way they fell. "The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus. "(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache. They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest.... In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome... An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune trafficking The Worm. The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.... So close I could reach out and touch them.... They wear shorts.... I can see the goosepimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.... I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, "Do you think they will do it?" And he says, "I think so. They are hungry." And I say, "That's the way I like to see them." Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, "Son cosas de la vida," as Soberba de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar O Motel and fucking it.... "She play hard to get already," he say... "I don't hafta take that sound." (Soberba de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders. ) The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. ...I think they are using it for an operating room.... NURSE: "I can't find her pulse, doctor." DR. BENWAY: "Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall." NURSE: "Adrenalin, doctor?" DR.. BENWAY: "The night porter shot it all up for kicks." He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.... He advances on the patient.... "Make an incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his appalled assistant.... "I'm going to massage the heart." Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.... NURSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?" DR.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  " Here to show off his new body ," Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing -- ah yes Miguel thank you -- three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error -- ("what is this a fucking farm?") which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase. "You look marvelous," Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up.... " Besides by the time I could correct the error... Lazarus go home.... Pay The Man and go home.... What I want to see your old borrowed meat for? " "Well it's great to see you off....Do yourself a favor." Miguel was swimming around the room spearing fish with his hand.... "When you're down there you never think about horse." "You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, following the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.... Miguel scratched the back of his hand.... He looked out the window.... His body moved in little, galvanized jerks as junk channels lit up.... Lee sat there waiting. "One snort never put anybody back on, kid." "I know what I'm doing." "They always know." Miguel took the nail file. Lee closed his eyes: "It's too tiresome." "Uh thanks that was great." Miguel's pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor. Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a little, cold, grey flick.... "Clean it up," he said. "Enough dirt in here now." "Oh uh sure," Miguel fumbled with a dustpan. Lee put the packet of heroin away. Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown gelatinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  49 o Its understanding of “holiness” demanded an opposition against paganism (with its idolatry) and Judaism (with its Law). o Insofar as it succeeded in expressing egalitarian ideals, it was inherently threatening to the stratified world of ancient patronage. • The earliest evidence of opposition comes not from the side of the Roman Empire but from the side of the Jews. o The question of the involvement of Jewish leaders in the death of Jesus is difficult and contentious. Certainly, he was executed under Roman order, but it is likely that some degree of cooperation if not instigation can legitimately be ascribed to some Jewish leaders. With the exception of the Gospel of Luke, however, the Gospels certainly tend to exaggerate the complicity of the Jewish population in the death of Jesus. o Nevertheless, the evidence of the New Testament (especially Acts and Paul’s letters) supports the fact that in the first decades, Jews harassed and sought to subvert the Christian movement. In fact, Paul attests that he was a persecutor of the church before his conversion and that after becoming an apostle was persecuted by his fellow Jews. o For the Jews, the problematic claim was not that “Jesus is Messiah,” for such a confession (right or wrong) was compatible with Jewish identity. The troubling claim was that “Jesus is Lord,” that is, as the son of God, he shared fully in the life and power of the divine. This claim offended Torah observers who interpreted the manner of Jesus’s death as an indication that he was cursed by God and who believed that declaring Jesus as Lord was the equivalent to polytheism. o The sources speak of two forms of harassment: stoning (attested by Paul and Acts) and excommunication from the synagogue (attested by Acts and the Fourth Gospel).

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “Don’t mind her,” he says, throwing her a look of supreme contempt, “she’s just a big sow. Give her a pinch in the ass, if you like. She won’t say anything.” And then addressing her, in English, he says. “Come here, you bitch, put your hand on this!” At this I can’t restrain myself any longer. I burst out laughing, a fit of hysterical laughter which infects the maid also, though she doesn’t know what it’s all about. The maid commences to take down the pictures and the photographs, mostly of himself, which line the walls. “You” he says, jerking his thumb, “come here! Here’s something to remember me by”—ripping a photograph off the wall—”when I go you can wipe your ass with it. See,” he says, turning to me, “she’s a dumb bitch. She wouldn’t look any more intelligent if I said it in French.” The maid stands there with her mouth open; she is evidently convinced that he is cracked. “Hey!” he yells at her as if she were hard of hearing. “Hey, you! Yes, you! Like this…!” and he takes the photograph, his own photograph, and wipes his ass with it. “Comme ça! Savvy? You’ve got to draw pictures for her,” he says, thrusting his lower lip forward in absolute disgust. He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into the big valises. “Here, put these in too,” he says, handing her a toothbrush and the douche bag. Half of his belongings are lying on the floor. The valises are crammed full and there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the bottles that are half empty. “Sit down a minute,” he says. “We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got to think this thing out. If you hadn’t come around I’d never have gotten out of here. You see how helpless I am. Don’t let me forget to take the bulbs out… they belong to me. That wastebasket belongs to me too. They expect you to live like pigs, these bastards.” The maid has gone downstairs to get some twine. … “Wait till you see… she’ll charge me for the twine even if it’s only three sous. They wouldn’t sew a button on your pants here without charging for it. The lousy, dirty scroungers!” He takes a bottle of Calvados from the mantelpiece and nods to me to grab the other. “No use carrying these to the new place. Let’s finish them off now. But don’t give her a drink! That bastard, I wouldn’t leave her a piece of toilet paper. I’d like to ruin the joint before I go. Listen… piss on the floor, if you like. I wish I could take a crap in the bureau drawer.” He feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else that he doesn’t know what to do by way of venting his feelings.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “Hey!” he yells at her as if she were hard of hearing. “Hey, you! Yes, you! Like this…!” and he takes the photograph, his own photograph, and wipes his ass with it. “Comme ça! Savvy? You’ve got to draw pictures for her,” he says, thrusting his lower lip forward in absolute disgust. He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into the big valises. “Here, put these in too,” he says, handing her a toothbrush and the douche bag. Half of his belongings are lying on the floor. The valises are crammed full and there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the bottles that are half empty. “Sit down a minute,” he says. “We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got to think

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I sit down by the window and give him what encouragement I can. It is tedious work. One has to actually coax him out of bed. Mornings—he means by mornings anywhere between one and five p.m.—mornings, as I say, he gives himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past he dreams. About his “cunts.” He endeavors to recall how they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments, where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies there, grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the impression that his disgust is too great for words. Over the bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for emergencies—for the virgins whom he tracks down like a sleuth. Even after he has slept with one of these mythical creatures he will still refer to her as a virgin, and almost never by name. “My virgin,” he will say, just as he says “my Georgia cunt.” When he goes to the toilet he says: “If my Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait. Say I said so. And listen, you can have her if you like. I’m tired of her.”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It doesn’t look like a twat any more: it’s like a dead clam or something.” He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. “I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me. … it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You’d imagine I’d never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue—that was by Rodin. You ought to see it some time… she has her legs spread wide apart. … I don’t think there was any head on it. Just a cunt you might say. Jesus, it looked ghastly. The thing is this—they all look alike. When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven’t got, of course. There’s just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it—you don’t even look at it half the time. You know it’s there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it’s as though your penis did the thinking for you. It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing… about a crack with hair on it, or without hair. It’s so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it. I must have studied it for ten minutes or more. When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head. All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank. Wouldn’t it be funny if you found a harmonica inside… or a calendar? But there’s nothing there… nothing at all. It’s disgusting. It almost drove me mad…. Listen, do you know what I did afterwards? I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her. Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book… but a cunt, it’s just sheer loss of time. …” It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech a whore gave us the eye. Without the slightest transition he says to me abruptly: “Would you like to give her a tumble? It won’t cost much… she’ll take the two of us on.” And without waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to her. In a few minutes he comes back. “It’s all fixed,” he says. “Finish your beer. She’s hungry.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  lasting months, for which purpose they requisitioned the entire pantechnicon fleet of the Paris Union of Furniture Removers, and an army of no fewer than fifteen hundred removal men was brought into action. All who had taken part in any way in this highly organized program of expropriation and reutilization, said Lemoine, the people in charge of it, the sometimes rival staffs of the occupying power and the financial and fiscal authorities, the residents’ and property registries, the banks and insurance agencies, the police, the transport firms, the landlords and caretakers of the apartment buildings, must undoubtedly have known that scarcely any of those interned in Drancy would ever come back. For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time, said Lemoine, remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day. In the years from 1942 onwards everything our civilization has produced, whether for the embellishment of life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests of drawers, Meissen porcelain, Persian rugs and whole libraries, down to the last saltcellar and pepper mill, was stacked there in the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot. A man who had worked in it told me not long ago, said Lemoine, that there were even special cardboard cartons set aside to hold the rosin removed, for the sake of greater cleanliness, from confiscated violin cases. Over five hundred art historians, antique dealers, restorers, joiners, clockmakers, furriers, and couturiers brought in from Drancy and guarded by a contingent of Indochinese soldiers were employed day after day, in fourteen-hour shifts, to put the goods coming into the depot in proper order and sort them by value and kind—silver cutlery with silver cutlery, cooking pans with cooking pans, toys with toys, and so forth. More than seven hundred train loads left from here for the ruined cities of the Reich. Not infrequently, said Lemoine, Party grandees on visits from Germany and high- ranking SS and Wehrmacht officers stationed in Paris would walk around the halls of the depot, known to the prisoners as Les Galéries d’ Austerlitz, with their wives or other ladies, choosing drawing room furniture for a Grunewald villa, or a Sevres dinner service, a fur coat or a Pleyel piano. The most valuable items, of course, were not sent off wholesale to the bombed cities, and no one will now admit to knowing where they went, for the fact is that the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliotheque, said Lemoine. The last of the light faded away down on the empty promenades. The treetops of the pine grove, which from this high vantage point had resembled moss-covered ground, now formed a regular black rectangle. For a while, said Austerlitz, we stood together in silence on the library belvedere, looking out over the city where it lay now sparkling in the light of its lamps.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Augustine was willing to use every tool, from polite diplomacy to slangy verse, in order to bring peace to the divided churches of Africa. But he was not willing, yet, to use force. This was not because of the first concepts that spring, somewhat anachronistically, to our mind—separation of church and state, tolerance, freedom of inquiry. That was not the language of the fourth century. What troubled Augustine was a concern very personal with him. State coercion might force a person to lie, claiming a belief he did not have. Augustine was an absolutist on the need for truth. Lying was always a sin, but lying about religious belief was blasphemous sin, and people should not be impelled toward that. Augustine’s attitude toward feigned religious positions is demonstrated in a correspondence, taken up at this time, that became a comedy of errors. Saint Jerome had written, in his commentary on Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (2.11–14) that Saints Paul and Peter could not really disagree, so they had only feigned disagreement. The idea that deception can serve religion shocked Augustine so deeply that he wrote a letter of protest to Jerome, then residing in Bethlehem. The couriers never reached Jerome, but copies of the letter circulated in Rome, a place Jerome felt (rightly) was filled with his enemies. Not getting any answer from Jerome, Augustine sat down in 395 to thrash out the problem of lying for a good cause. The result was a treatise (Deception) in which, as Sissela Bok puts it, Augustine “left no room for justifiable falsehood.” He considers the worst lie to be that which religion deploys for its own advance. This passage (Deception 17) goes straight to Jerome’s use of Paul: From religious instruction and from all who in any way speak where that instruction is given or accepted, every vestige of deception must be absolutely excluded. Nor should it be held that any possible excuse can be found for deception in such matters. Two decades later, when Augustine wrote another treatise, Forswearing Deception, it was because a correspondent asked if one could lie to a heretic in order to trick him into confessing his heresy. Again Augustine voiced his profound revulsion at any claim that God’s cause can be advanced with lies. He held that Christians could not lie under persecution, and Donatists should not be compelled to lie by forced conversion. Augustine had no way of knowing, when he addressed Jerome, that that brilliant writer and scholar was an enthusiastic liar about himself and a grim traducer of others. Jerome had been driven out of almost every place he lived in, including his birthplace. It was as rare for him to keep a friend as for Augustine to lose one. Thus, when Augustine kept writing to Jerome for an answer on the Galatians problem, the testy grump of Bethlehem snarled back:

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

  The measures for the repression and extermination of heresy culminated in the organized system, known as the Inquisition. Its history presents what is probably the most revolting spectacle in the annals of civilized Europe.1115 The representatives of the Church appear, sitting as arbiters over human destiny in this world, and in the name of religion applying torture to countless helpless victims, heretics, and reputed witches, and pronouncing upon them a sentence which, they knew, involved perpetual imprisonment or death in the flames. The cold heartlessness, with which the fate of the heretic was regarded, finds some excuse in the pitiless penalties which the civil tribunals of the Middle Ages meted out for civil crimes, such as the breaking of the victim on the wheel, burning in caldrons of oil, quartering with horses, and flaying alive, or the merciless treatment of princes upon refractory subjects, as when William the Conqueror at Alençon punished the rebels by chopping off the hands and feet of thirty-two of the citizens and throwing them over the walls. It is nevertheless an astounding fact that for the mercy of Christ the Church authorities, who should have represented him, substituted relentless cruelties. In this respect the dissenting sectaries were infinitely more Christian than they. It has been argued in extenuation of the Church that she stopped with the decree of excommunication and the sentence to lifelong imprisonment and did not pronounce the sentence of death. And the old maxim is quoted as true of her in all times, that the Church abhors blood—ecclesia non sitit sanguinem. The argument is based upon a pure technicality. The Church, after sitting in judgment, turned the heretics over to the civil authorities, knowing full well that, as night follows day, the sentence of death would follow her sentence of excommunication.1116 Yea, the Church, through popes and synodal decrees, again and again threatened, with her disfavor and fell spiritual punishments, princes and municipalities not punishing heresy. The Fourth Lateran forbade priests pronouncing judgments of blood and being present at executions, but at the very same moment, and at the pope’s persistent instigation, crusading armies were drenching the soil of Southern France with the blood of the Albigenses. A writer of the thirteenth century says in part truly, in part speciously, "our pope does not kill nor condemn any one to death, but the law puts to death those whom the pope allows to be put to death, and they kill themselves who do those things which make them guilty of death."1117

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

  The Dominican Chantimpré tells of the daughter of a count of Schwanenburg, who was carried every night through the air, even eluding the strong hold of a Franciscan who one night tried to hold her back. In 1275 a woman of Toulouse, under torture, confessed she had indulged in sexual intercourse with a demon for many years and given birth to a monster, part wolf and part serpent, which for two years she fed on murdered children. She was burnt by the civil tribunal. But it is not till the 15th century that the era of witchcraft properly begins. From about 1430 it was treated as a distinct cult, carefully defined and made the subject of many treatises. The punishments to be meted out for it were carefully laid down, as also the methods by which witches should be detected and tried. The cases were no longer sporadic and exceptional; they were regarded as being a gild or sect marshalled by Satan to destroy faith from the earth. It is probable that the responsibility for the spread of the wild witch mania rests chiefly with the popes. Pope after pope countenanced and encouraged the belief. Not a single utterance emanated from a pope to discourage it.920 Pope after pope called upon the Inquisition to punish witches. The list of papal deliverances opened in 1233, when Gregory IX., addressing the bishops of Mainz and Hildesheim, accepted the popular demonology in its crudest forms.921 The devil, so Gregory asserted, was appearing in the shapes of a toad, a pallid ghost and a black cat. In language too obscene to be repeated, he described at length the orgies which took place at the meetings of men and women with demons. Where medicines did not cure, iron and fire were to be used. The rotting flesh was to be cut out. Did not Elijah slay the four hundred priests of Baal and Moses put idolaters to death? Before the close of the 13th century, popes themselves were accused of having familiar spirits and practising sorcery, as John XXI., 1276, and Boniface VIII. Boniface went so far, 1303, as to order the trial of an English bishop, Walter of Coventry and Lichfield, on the charge of having made a pact with the devil and habitually kissing the devil’s posterior parts. Under his successor, Clement, the gross charges of wantonness with the devil were circulated against the Knights of the Temple. In his work, De maleficiis, Boniface VIII.’s physician, Arnold of Villanova, stated with scientific precision the satanic devices for disturbing and thwarting the marital relation. Among the popes of the 14th century, John XXII. is distinguished for the credit he gave to all sorts of malefic arts and his instructions to the inquisitors to proceed against persons in league with the devil.922 Side by side with the papal utterances went the authoritative statements of the Schoolmen. Leaning upon Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, d.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  However she doesn’t look as if she had gone through much suffering. She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior. She has two big warts on her chin from which there sprouts a clump of little hairs; she is growing a mustache. The day after Olga was released from the hospital she commenced making shoes again. At six in the morning she is at her bench; she knocks out two pairs of shoes a day. Eugene complains that Olga is a burden, but the truth is that Olga is supporting Eugene and his wife with her two pairs of shoes a day. If Olga doesn’t work there is no food. So everyone endeavors to pull Olga to bed on time, to give her enough food to keep going, etc. Every meal starts off with soup. Whether it be onion soup, tomato soup, vegetable soup, or what not, the soup always tastes the same. Mostly it tastes as if a dish rag had been stewed in it—slightly sour, mildewed, scummy. I see Eugene hiding it away in the commode after the meal. It stays there, rotting away, until the next meal. The butter, too, is hidden away in the commode; after three days it tastes like the big toe of a cadaver. The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bed-sheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am a slave!” Every day he says it, not once, but a dozen times. And then he takes his guitar from the wall and sings. But about the smell of rancid butter. … There are good associations too. When I think of this rancid butter I see myself standing in a little, old-world courtyard, a very smelly, very dreary courtyard. Through the cracks in the shutters strange figures peer out at me… old women with shawls, dwarfs, rat-faced pimps, bent Jews, midinettes , bearded idiots. They totter out into the courtyard to draw water or to rinse the slop pails. One day Eugene asked me if I would empty the pail for him. I took it to the corner of the yard. There was a hole in the ground and some dirty paper lying around the hole. The little well was slimy with excrement, which in English is shit . I tipped the pail and there was a foul, gurgling splash followed by another and unexpected splash.

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

  Having a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in no way prepared my brother for the sprawling financial mess he saw on the floor in front of him. There were piles of credit card receipts, stacks of pink overdraft notices from my bank, and duplicate and triplicate billings from all of the stores through which I had so recently swirled and charged. In a separate, more ominous pile were threatening letters from collection agencies. The chaotic visual impact upon entering the room reflected the higgledy-piggledy, pixilated collection of electric lobes that only a few weeks earlier had constituted my manic brain. Now, medicated and dreary, I was obsessively sifting through the remnants of my fiscal irresponsibility. It was like going on an archaeological dig through earlier ages of one’s mind. There was a bill from a taxidermist in The Plains, Virginia, for example, for a stuffed fox that I for some reason had felt I desperately needed. I had loved animals all of my life, had at one point wanted to be a veterinarian: How on earth could I have bought a dead animal? I had adored foxes and admired them for as long as I could remember; I thought them fast and smart and beautiful: How could I have so directly contributed to killing one? I was appalled by the grisly nature of my purchase, disgusted with myself, and incapable of imagining what I would do with the fox once it actually arrived. In an attempt to divert myself, I began pawing my way through the credit card slips. Near the top of the pile was a bill from the pharmacy where I had gotten my snakebite kits. The pharmacist, having just filled my first prescription for lithium, had smiled knowingly as he rang up the sale for my snakebite kits and the other absurd, useless, and bizarre purchases. I knew what he was thinking and, in the benevolence of my expansive mood, could appreciate the humor. He, unlike me, however, appeared to be completely unaware of the life-threatening problem created by rattlesnakes in the San Fernando Valley. God had chosen me, and apparently only me, to alert the world to the wild proliferation of killer snakes in the Promised Land. Or so I thought in my scattered delusional meanderings. In my own small way, by buying up the drugstore’s entire supply of snakebite kits, I was doing all I could do to protect myself and those I cared about. In the midst of my crazed scurryings up and down the aisles of the drugstore, I had also come up with a plan to alert the Los Angeles Times to the danger. I was, however, far too manic to tie my thoughts together into a coherent plan.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself. At one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement. He had warned me that if he didn’t answer it would mean that he was sleeping with someone, probably his Georgia cunt. Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with an air of weariness as usual. He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life. He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight. I sit down by the window and give him what encouragement I can. It is tedious work. One has to actually coax him out of bed. Mornings—he means by mornings anywhere between one and five p.m.—mornings, as I say, he gives himself up to reveries. Mostly it is about the past he dreams. About his “cunts.” He endeavors to recall how they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments, where he laid them, and so on. And as he lies there, grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the impression that his disgust is too great for words. Over the bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for emergencies—for the virgins whom he tracks down like a sleuth. Even after he has slept with one of these mythical creatures he will still refer to her as a virgin, and almost never by name. “My virgin,” he will say, just as he says “my Georgia cunt.” When he goes to the toilet he says: “If my Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait. Say I said so. And listen, you can have her if you like. I’m tired of her.” He takes a squint at the weather and heaves a deep sigh. If it’s rainy he says: “God damn this fucking climate, it makes one morbid.” And if the sun is shining brightly he says: “God damn that fucking sun, it makes you blind!” As he starts to shave he suddenly remembers that there is no clean towel. “God damn this fucking hotel, they’re too stingy to give you a clean towel every day!” No matter what he does or where he goes things are out of joint. Either it’s the fucking country or the fucking job, or else it’s some fucking cunt who’s put him on the blink. “My teeth are all rotten,” he says, gargling his throat. “It’s the fucking bread they give you to eat here.” He opens his mouth wide and pulls his lower lip down. “See that?

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I’ve got to get it in!” And there he is, bent over her, their heads knocking against the wall, he has such a tremendous erection that it’s simply impossible to get it in her. Suddenly, with that disgusted air which he knows so well how to summon, he picks himself up and adjusts his clothes. He is about to walk away when suddenly he notices that his penis is lying on the sidewalk. It is about the size of a sawed-off broomstick. He picks it up nonchalantly and slings it under his arm. As he walks off I notice two huge bulbs, like tulip bulbs, dangling from the end of the broomstick, and I can hear him muttering to himself “flowerpots... flowerpots.” The garçon arrives panting and sweating. Van Norden looks at him uncomprehendingly. The madam now marches in and, walking straight up to Van Norden, she takes the book out of his hand, thrusts it in the baby carriage, and, without saying a word, wheels the baby carriage into the hallway. “This is a bughouse,” says Van Norden, smiling distressedly. It is such a faint, indescribable smile that for a moment the dream feeling comes back and it seems to me that we are standing at the end of a long corridor at the end of which is a corrugated mirror. And down this corridor, swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door opens and a hand yanks him, or a hoof pushes him out. And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery. In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his valise there is only a toothbrush inside. In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he’s so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels. Meanwhile the luggage is being hauled in. And things begin to look crazier even than before—particularly when he attaches his exerciser to the bedstead and begins his Sandow exercises. “I like this place,” he says, smiling at the garçon. He takes his coat and vest off. The garçon is watching him with a puzzled air; he has a valise in one hand and the douche bag in the other. I’m standing apart in the antechamber holding the mirror with the green gauze.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Better still is to sleep outside the Metro doors; there you will have company. Look at them on a rainy night, lying there stiff as mattresses—men, women, lice, all huddled together and protected by the newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks without legs. Look at them under the bridges or under the market sheds. How vile they look in comparison with the clean, bright vegetables stacked up like jewels. Even the dead horses and the cows and sheep hanging from the greasy hooks look more inviting. At least we will eat these tomorrow and even the intestines will serve a purpose. But these filthy beggars lying in the rain, what purpose do they serve? What good can they do us? They make us bleed for five minutes, that’s all. Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity. At least now the birds are well provided for, and the cats and dogs. Every time I pass the concierge’s window and catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love—just enough to feed the birds. Still I can’t get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: liver ideas, kidney ideas, interstitial ideas, etc. If it were only for the sake of an idea Copernicus would have smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus would have foundered in the Sargasso Sea. The aesthetics of the idea breeds flowerpots and flowerpots you put on the window sill. But if there be no rain or sun of what use putting flowerpots outside the window? Fillmore is full of ideas about gold. The “mythos” of gold, he calls it. I like “mythos” and I like the idea of gold, but I am not obsessed by the subject and I don’t see why we should make flowerpots, even of gold. He tells me that the French are hoarding their gold away in water-tight compartments deep below the surface of the earth; he tells me that there is a little locomotive which runs around in these subterranean vaults and corridors. I like the idea enormously. A profound, uninterrupted silence in which the gold softly snoozes at a temperature of 17 ¼ degrees Centigrade.