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 Cleanness (2020)

  There was nothing solemn about the priest now. Once he had opened the bottle he made a direct line for D., the youngest American, who from the first had been the object of greatest interest for the Bulgarian men. This was especially true of the priest, whose attentions had gone quickly from charming to comic and then, as they persisted, become disquieting. For most beautiful first, he said, pouring wine into her cup, his English almost nonexistent, and she smiled and looked away, cringing a little. He came around to each of us then, gallant as he filled our cups, though he refused to meet my gaze, as he had all day, my attempts to speak with him defeated by the odd way he spoke Bulgarian, very fast and with a tripping enunciation that made him impossible for me to understand. It was the accent of his region, one of the other Bulgarians said to me, selski aksent, a village accent. But it wasn’t his accent that made him distant with me, I thought, though maybe it was uncharitable of me to assume he shared the views of his colleagues, or some of his colleagues, like the priest who had called, the previous summer, for all decent people to line the route of the Pride parade and throw stones at the queers.

• From Story of O (1954)

  Sir Stephen’s gaze was persistent. She could not bear it, and repeating “I can’t,” she closed her eyes. What she was seeing in her mind’s eye, what she had never been able to forget, what still filled her with the same sensation of nausea and disgust that she had felt when she had first witnessed it when she was fifteen, was the image of Marion slumped in the leather armchair in a hotel room, Marion with one leg sprawled over one arm of the chair and her head half hanging over the other, caressing herself in her, O’s, presence, and moaning. Marion had related to her how she had one day caressed herself this way in her office when she had thought she was alone, and her boss had happened to walk in and caught her in the act. O remembered Marion’s office, a bare room with pale green walls, with the north light filtering in through dusty windows. There was only one easy chair, intended for visitors, facing the table. “Did you run away?” O had asked. “No,” Marion had answered, “he asked me to begin all over again, but he locked the door, made me take off my panties, and pushed the chair over in front of the window.” O had been overwhelmed with admiration—and with horror—for what she took to be Marion’s courage, and had steadfastly refused to fondle herself in Marion’s presence and sworn that she never would, in anyone’s presence. Marion had laughed and said: “You’ll see. Wait till your lover asks you to.” René never had asked her to. Would she have obeyed? Yes, of course she would, but she would also have been terrified at the thought that she might see René’s eyes filling with the same disgust that she had felt for Marion. Which was absurd. And since it was Sir Stephen, it was all the more absurd; what did she care whether Sir Stephen was disgusted? But no, she couldn’t. For the third time she murmured: “I can’t.” Though she uttered the words in almost a whisper, he heard them, let her go, rose to his feet, closed his dressing gown, and ordered O to get up. “Is this your obedience?” he said. Then he caught both her wrists with his left hand, and with his right he slapped her on both sides of the face. She staggered, and would have fallen had he not held her up. “Kneel down and listen to me,” he said. “I’m afraid René’s training leaves a great deal to be desired.” “I always obey René,” she mumbled. “You’re confusing love and obedience. You’ll obey me without loving me, and without my loving you.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Perhaps this is why our culture’s underlying “city on a hill” morality remains unsoiled by all the graphic images that flicker on our screens: the central idea that sex is dirty remains unchallenged. Nowhere is our profound discomfort with sex more apparent than in the way we approach teenage sexuality. A sizable group of Americans believe that limiting access to birth control and sex education will steer our teenagers away from the temptations of the flesh. Campaigns like “Not Me, Not Now” encourage abstinence as a means of avoiding teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and our public health policies reflect the idea that adolescent sexuality is deviant behavior that should be prevented. No matter how liberated the media may appear, to many Americans sexuality is considered deeply dangerous—a risk factor. Europeans, in contrast, view adolescent sexuality as a normal developmental stage on the way to healthy adult sexuality. Sex is not a problem; being irresponsible about sex is. Hence the European counter-slogan to “Not Me, Not Now” is “Safe Sex or No Sex.” It’s also worth noting that in Europe, teenagers engage in sexual activity an average of two years later than their American counterparts, and the rate at which teenagers give birth is a staggering eight times less. How is it that American society, with such a clear bias against teen sex, produces such a statistical embarrassment? Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex. A society that sees sex as soiled does not make sex go away. Instead, this kind of anxious atmosphere breeds guilt and shame in its more extreme version, or a generalized discomfort in its more ubiquitous expression. Sex is divorced from emotional and social continuity. What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person. Want to Hook Up Tonight? Ratu is a twenty-two-year-old college student at an Ivy League university. She is the daughter of a doctor and a computer programmer, both Indian immigrants, whose years of hard work have paid off in an upmarket lifestyle. Ratu spent twelve years in the highly competitive public schools of New York City, and now hopes to follow her mother into medicine. I met Ratu’s mother at a friend’s going-away party. When I told her the subject of my book, she urged me to interview her daughter. “What I hear from my daughter? It is just unbelievable. So bleak, the way these children treat each other. You really want to know what is going on? You should talk to her. I cannot get my head around it.”

• From Story of O (1954)

  O was happy that René had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash, and the outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled her to pleasure when they took her, and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins. There had been embraces she had found foul, hands that had been an intolerable insult on her breasts, mouths which had sucked in her lips and tongue like so many soft, vile leeches, and tongues and sexes, viscous beasts which, caressing themselves at her closed mouth, at the double furrow, before and behind, which she had squeezed tight with all her might, had stiffened her with disgust and kept her stiffened so long that it was all the whip could do to unbend her, but she had finally yielded to the blows and opened, with disgust and abominable servility. And what if, in spite of that, Sir Stephen was right? What if she actually enjoyed her debasement? In that case, the baser she was, the more merciful was René to consent to make O the instrument of his pleasure. As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the Protestants often inscribe in their houses: IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD

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

  The figurative reason for these uncleannesses was that they were figures of various sins. For the uncleanness of any corpse signifies the uncleanness of sin, which is the death of the soul. The uncleanness of leprosy betokened the uncleanness of heretical doctrine: both because heretical doctrine is contagious just as leprosy is, and because no doctrine is so false as not to have some truth mingled with error, just as on the surface of a leprous body one may distinguish the healthy parts from those that are infected. The uncleanness of a woman suffering from a flow of blood denotes the uncleanness of idolatry, on account of the blood which is offered up. The uncleanness of the man who has suffered seminal loss signifies the uncleanness of empty words, for “the seed is the word of God.” The uncleanness of sexual intercourse and of the woman in child-birth signifies the uncleanness of original sin. The uncleanness of the woman in her periods signifies the uncleanness of a mind that is sensualized by pleasure. Speaking generally, the uncleanness contracted by touching an unclean thing denotes the uncleanness arising from consent in another’s sin, according to 2 Cor. 6:17: “Go out from among them, and be ye separate . . . and touch not the unclean thing.” Moreover, this uncleanness arising from the touch was contracted even by inanimate objects; for whatever was touched in any way by an unclean man, became itself unclean. Wherein the Law attenuated the superstition of the Gentiles, who held that uncleanness was contracted not only by touch, but also by speech or looks, as Rabbi Moses states (Doct. Perplex. iii) of a woman in her periods. The mystical sense of this was that “to God the wicked and his wickedness are hateful alike” (Wis. 14:9).

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  We spent Thanksgiving in Chinook with Dwight and his kids. Snow had fallen a few nights earlier. It had melted in the valley but still covered the trees on the upper slopes, which were purple with shadow when we arrived. Though it was still late afternoon the sun had already set behind the mountains. Dwight’s kids came out to meet us when we drove up. The two oldest, a boy and a girl, waited at the bottom of the steps as a girl about my age ran up to my mother and threw her arms around her waist. I was completely disgusted. The girl was pinch-faced and scrawny, and on the back of her head she had a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. She made a kind of crooning noise as she clutched my mother, who, instead of pushing this person away, laughed and hugged her back. “This is Pearl,” Dwight said, and somehow freed my mother from her grasp. Pearl looked over at me. She did not smile, and neither did I. We walked up to the house and met the other two. Both of them were taller than Dwight. Skipper had a wedge-shaped head, flat in the back and sharp in front, with close-set eyes and a long blade of a nose. He wore a crew cut. Skipper regarded me with polite lack of interest and turned his attention to my mother, greeting her with grave but perfect courtesy. Norma just said “Hi!” and ruffled my hair. I looked up at her, and until we left Chinook two days later I stopped looking at her only when I was asleep or when someone walked between us. Norma was seventeen, ripe and lovely. Her lips were full and red, always a little swollen-looking as if she’d just woken up, and she moved sleepily too, languidly, stretching often. When she stretched, her blouse went taut and parted slightly between the buttons, showing milky slices of belly. She had the whitest skin. Thick red hair that she pushed sleepily back from her forehead. Green eyes flecked with brown. She used lavender water, and the faint sweetness of the smell got mixed up with the warmth she gave off. Sometimes, just fooling around, thinking nothing of it, she would put her arm around my shoulder and bump me with her hip, or pull me up against her.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (Among the bad reasons for wanting to get rid of it is the lazy idea that God, if such a being exists at all, is like an indulgent elderly relative who doesn’t want to spoil people’s fun and so never gets angry about anything. As has often been pointed out, this is mere sentimentalism. If there is a God, and if he does not hate injustice, child prostitution, genocide, and a lot of other things as well, then he is not a good God.) Page after page of the New Testament insists, as we have already glimpsed, that what happens in the death of Jesus happens because of the love of God. But the problem with the “angry despot” picture of God is not solved by simply producing a few texts that say the opposite. Most preachers who in fact offer this picture will always say, if challenged, that God did what he did because of “love.” It’s just that it doesn’t look like that or sound like that to anyone trying to make sense of what’s just been said. It is easy for a preacher to deny the “angry despot” picture in theory, but to reinforce it in practice. Talk to people who attend those churches. They know. But the problems don’t stop there. Many people have pointed out that the idea of an angry, bullying deity who has to be appeased, to be bought off, to have his wrathful way with someone even if it isn’t the right person fits uncomfortably well with the way many human authority figures actually behave: tyrants, rulers, bosses, sometimes tragically also fathers, within families older men in general. Sometimes, of course, clergy. People who have grown up in a family with a violent, perhaps drunken, father or who have been abused one way or another by people in authority hear someone in a pulpit telling the story of the angry God, and they think, “I know that character, and I hate him.” It doesn’t do any good to tell people in that state of mind that this angry God is really a loving God in disguise. “If that’s love,” they think,” then I don’t want it.” They have quite possibly been told by an abuser how much he “loves” them. You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word “love” as you do so. Now, as I say, there are many ways of speaking of the death of Jesus in relation to the punishment of sin. At least one of those ways is biblical. We shall come to that, and when we do we will find that the entire setting undermines any suggestion of the angry, bullying God. There is a different story, one that we need to think through in fresh ways.

• From Story of O (1954)

  That evening, and for the first time in the company of Jacqueline and Natalie, of René and Sir Stephen, O dined naked, her chain pulled up between her legs and across her buttocks and wrapped around her waist. Norah was alone serving, and O avoided her gaze. Two hours before, Sir Stephen had summoned her. What shocked and upset the girl at the beauty parlor the following day, more than the irons and the black and blue marks on her lower back, were the brand-new lacerations. O had gone there to have the offending hair removed, and it did no good to explain to her that this wax-type depilatory, a method in which the wax is applied and allowed to harden, then suddenly removed, taking the hair with it—was no more painful than being struck with the riding crop. No matter how many times she repeated it, or made an attempt to explain, if not what her fate was, at least that she was happy, there was no way of reassuring her or allaying her feeling of disgust and terror. The only visible result of O’s efforts to soothe her was that, instead of being looked upon with pity, as she had been at first, she was beheld with horror. It made no difference how kind and profuse were her thanks when she left the little alcove where she had been spread-eagled as though for love, nor did it matter how generous a tip she gave as she left, when it was all over, she had the feeling that she was being evicted rather than leaving of her own free will. What did she care? It was obvious to her that there was something shocking about the contrast between the fur on her belly and the feathers on her mask, as it was obvious that this air of an Egyptian statue which this mask lent her, and which her broad shoulders, narrow waist, and long legs only served to emphasize, to demand that her flesh be perfectly smooth. Only the effigies of primitive goddesses portrayed so proudly and openly the cleft of the belly between whose outer lips appeared the more delicate line of the lower lips. And had any ever been seen sporting rings in their nether lips? O recalled the plump, red-haired girl at Anne-Marie’s who had said that all her master ever used the belly ring for was to attach her to the foot of the bed, and she had also said that the reason he wanted her shaved was because only in that way was she completely naked. O was worried about displeasing Sir Stephen, who so enjoyed pulling her over to him by the fleece, but she was mistaken: Sir Stephen found her more moving that way, and after she had donned her mask, having removed all trace of lipstick above and below, the upper and nether lips then being so uncommonly pale, he caressed her almost timidly, the way one does with an animal one wants to tame.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In particular, they seem to have interpreted Jesus’s crucifixion within a much bigger—and perhaps more dangerous—story than simply the question of whether people go to “heaven” or “hell.” That question, in fact—to the astonishment of many people—is not what the New Testament is about. The New Testament, with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion at its center, is about God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. This is, after all, what Jesus taught his followers to pray. That is a rather obvious piece of evidence, though people regularly ignore it in practice. However, it points us in the direction I shall be following as we try to figure out what exactly happened on the cross and why it launched a revolution that continues to this day. Confusions about the cross have come in many shapes and forms, but the one most Western Christians are familiar with today has to do with violence. Today’s global population is more aware of violence, its scale, and its nature than any previous generation. But now, among the unintended consequences of the technological revolution, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have offered two remarkable things. First, humans have devised ways of killing one another on an industrial scale. Second, the nastiest details about such horrors are now transmitted instantaneously around the world through social media. Apart from those directly involved either in war or torture, most people in earlier generations never really faced the disgusting actualities of raw violence. We all now know not only that it has happened and is happening, but what it looks like and sounds like. And even if we don’t watch the relevant news bulletins, the movie industry has made an entire art form, new and dark, out of the graphic depiction of every kind of violence. This seems to have been a kind of signature tune for the twentieth century, in which truly appalling acts of violence became defining moments for global culture. The mere names “Auschwitz” and “Hiroshima” say it all. It remains to be seen whether September 11, 2001, will become a defining moment of the same kind for the twenty-first century or whether it will be overtaken by other yet more terrible crimes. But the point is this. The present generation has gazed with justified revulsion upon the whole late modern culture of violence and death; and it has noticed worrying signs of the same culture in some expressions of Christianity. Many have pointed out that traditional expressions of belief about Jesus’s crucifixion sometimes mirror all too closely language that has been used to justify violence.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The world of wrath and arms helps to explain why anyone would want to execute a fellow human being in so brutal a fashion. A brief reminder of what crucifixion entailed—necessary sooner or later in this book—will make the point, lest we take for granted or gloss over what was actually involved in the event whose meaning we are discussing. Few readers of this book are likely to have seen, except on screen, the kind of violence that was common in the first century. Even those who watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ might either screen out the gratuitous horror of it all or be so overwhelmed by the physical brutality as to miss the point that such a death was designed to degrade as well as kill. Crucifixion was one of the central ways in which authorities in the ancient world set out quite deliberately to show subject peoples who was in charge and to break the spirit of any resistance. Crucifixion was, after all, one of the most horrible fates that humans could devise. That isn’t a modern overstatement. It was the considered opinion of the Roman orator Cicero and the Jewish historian Josephus, two men who had seen plenty of crucifixions, and also another who knew what he was talking about, the church father Origen. Cicero refers to crucifixion as crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, the “most cruel and terrifying penalty” (In Verrem 2.5.165). Josephus speaks of a Jewish protest against the “most pitiable of deaths,” thanatōn ton oiktiston (Jewish War 7.202f.). Origen refers to it as mors turpissima crucis, the “most shameful form of death, namely, the cross” (Commentary on Matthew 27.22). The point is often made but bears repetition: we in the modern West, who wear jeweled crosses around our necks, stamp them on Bibles and prayer books, and carry them in cheerful processions, need regularly to be reminded that the very word “cross” was a word you would most likely not utter in polite society. The thought of it would not only put you off your dinner; it could give you sleepless nights. And if you had actually seen a crucifixion or two, as many in the Roman world would have, your sleep itself would have been invaded by nightmares as the memories came flooding back unbidden, memories of humans half alive and half dead, lingering on perhaps for days on end, covered in blood and flies, nibbled by rats, pecked at by crows, with weeping but helpless relatives still keeping watch, and with hostile or mocking crowds adding their insults to the terrible injuries. All this explains Cicero’s statement that everything to do with crucifixion, including the word crux itself,

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Yes, indeed. But it is within the world of the Greeks and the Romans that Jesus was crucified; and it was within that same world that the originally Jewish message about Jesus received its wider airing and, arguably, its early shaping. The world of wrath and arms helps to explain why anyone would want to execute a fellow human being in so brutal a fashion. A brief reminder of what crucifixion entailed—necessary sooner or later in this book—will make the point, lest we take for granted or gloss over what was actually involved in the event whose meaning we are discussing. Few readers of this book are likely to have seen, except on screen, the kind of violence that was common in the first century. Even those who watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ might either screen out the gratuitous horror of it all or be so overwhelmed by the physical brutality as to miss the point that such a death was designed to degrade as well as kill. Crucifixion was one of the central ways in which authorities in the ancient world set out quite deliberately to show subject peoples who was in charge and to break the spirit of any resistance. Crucifixion was, after all, one of the most horrible fates that humans could devise. That isn’t a modern overstatement. It was the considered opinion of the Roman orator Cicero and the Jewish historian Josephus, two men who had seen plenty of crucifixions, and also another who knew what he was talking about, the church father Origen. Cicero refers to crucifixion as crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, the “most cruel and terrifying penalty” (In Verrem 2.5.165). Josephus speaks of a Jewish protest against the “most pitiable of deaths,” thanatōn ton oiktiston (Jewish War 7.202f.). Origen refers to it as mors turpissima crucis, the “most shameful form of death, namely, the cross” (Commentary on Matthew 27.22). The point is often made but bears repetition: we in the modern West, who wear jeweled crosses around our necks, stamp them on Bibles and prayer books, and carry them in cheerful processions, need regularly to be reminded that the very word “cross” was a word you would most likely not utter in polite society. The thought of it would not only put you off your dinner; it could give you sleepless nights. And if you had actually seen a crucifixion or two, as many in the Roman world would have, your sleep itself would have been invaded by nightmares as the memories came flooding back unbidden, memories of humans half alive and half dead, lingering on perhaps for days on end, covered in blood and flies, nibbled by rats, pecked at by crows, with weeping but helpless relatives still keeping watch, and with hostile or mocking crowds adding their insults to the terrible injuries.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Can I ever forget the Orient? It is deeply rooted in my flesh and blood, and I need but touch my own body to feel how I have been marked for all time by it. As though it were all a mere matter of cultures and of elective affinities! When the boy in the streetcar screamed with fear, I felt my own sexual organs quiver as if in response to a scream that reached me suddenly from the depths of my own childhood. Throughout this little byplay, I had looked up at the roof, like a man who pretends to have better manners and doesn’t want to seem to mind the business of his fellow-passengers. But my whole body followed the game with great attention and shared in the disgust of the child and the complicity of the crowd. Yes, I know well that unpleasant but voluptuous tremor. Before going to grade school, I used to go to the kouttab, the Hebrew cheder school in our neighborhood, where every morning the rabbi used to make us repeat aloud and in chorus the prayers of the Jewish faith. We used to make a fine noise, which any surprised wanderer in our part of town may yet hear if he goes into the heart of the ghetto. Out of the windows of the chedarim the voices escape toward freedom, a cacophony of the tones of fifty children of all ages as they repeat constantly, in every kind of nasal singsong, a mysterious text that is meaningless to the listener outside and, it would seem, to the children themselves. One morning, as he had to go away, the rabbi entrusted the supervision of the class to the oldest among the boys, who submissively promised to watch us carefully: “Yes, Rabbi, yes...,” repeating this after each one of the rabbi’s remarks, so that our collective recitation continued: “Yes, Rabbi...,” without being interrupted once until he returned, “Yes, Rabbi...”; only the smaller boys were to be allowed to leave the room to go to the toilet, the older boys only in extremely urgent cases; nothing in the old synagogue that served us as a kouttab was to be touched; our new supervisor would be allowed to report to the rabbi all those among us who were guilty of breaking any rule, and they would be punished with ten strokes of the cane on the soles of the feet — ”Yes, Rabbi. Yes, Rabbi. Yes, Rabbi...“

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The balancing element in the portrait of Jesus in all the gospels is the constant buildup of hostility toward him, his message, and his accomplishments. I have argued elsewhere (against some worrying trends in contemporary thinking that want to make the story of Jesus stand all by itself without historical context) that all four canonical gospels are careful to link the story of Jesus to the larger story of Israel, going back to prophetic traditions (Mark 1; Luke 1–2), Abraham (Matthew 1), Adam (Luke 3), and the creation itself (John 1). But this does not at all mean, as some have absurdly imagined, that the evangelists are simply envisaging the story of Israel as a kind of “progressive revelation,” a smooth crescendo, a steady development, at the end of which Jesus simply emerges as the final fulfilment. The story of Israel was never seen like that, not even in the thoroughly positive retellings such as, for instance, Psalm 105 (and in any case that is accompanied at once by Psalm 106, which brings out the dark side all too obviously). Matching the story of the chosen people stride for stride and sometimes indeed overwhelming that story in darkness and misery is the long story of evil. Evil comes in many forms in Israel’s scriptures. It is seen graphically in the total wickedness of the generations before and after the flood and then in the crazy arrogance at Babel. But, after the call of Abraham, we are never given the impression that “evil” only exists outside Abraham’s family. Abraham himself appears deeply flawed, as do all his successors, not least Jacob, whose new name, “Israel,” becomes the designation for his family ever after. Moses begins his public life with a premeditated murder. The books of Joshua and Judges do not spare the reputation of the new nation. Even the greatest kings, such as David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah, all have serious and damaging flaws. The priesthood is no better. As for the prophets—well, for every prophet who seems genuinely to want to listen for and then announce the true word of YHWH, there seem to be hundreds who will say what people, especially rulers, want to hear. The exile itself, as we have seen, indicates the ultimate failure of Israel and its results. “Evil” is not an occasional blip on the radar or a problem that can be pushed to one side or blamed on other nations. It is universal. According to Israel’s own scriptures, evil is just as much in evidence in Israel as anywhere else.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  As soon as I came I would be wide awake, and I would go back to studying. I carried on like this for nearly two hours before I realized what I was responding to so strongly. I was preparing for an exam in Human Anatomy 101. I had been studying colored plastic plates that flay the human body layer by layer, taking off skin, then muscle, till you get down to blood vessels, organs, and finally bare bone. I wanted to vomit. My completed paper for my History of the State class was lying next to the anatomy textbook. It had some grandiose title like “The Technology of Oppression.” I had compared the way the Inquisition treated women suspected of witchcraft to the treatments meted out to female leftists in the tiny military dictatorships that defoliated South America in the twentieth century. I flipped it open and started counting pages. Half of it was nothing but the descriptions of torture. How could anybody read this and not know about me? At that point, I think I did vomit. Another passerby is cruising me up and down. My feelings are still a little hurt about the woman who crossed the street to get away from me. Sometimes I feel like such a menace to society when I walk down the street, my legs get rubbery and I can’t keep track of whether or not my feet are hitting the sidewalk. And I think if one more person even looks at me, I’m going to have hysterics. So I straighten my shoulders and give this one a level look, acknowledging that what she is thinking about me is not nearly outrageous enough. She looks a bit put-off, but a little wistful, too. She sticks her hands in her sleeves and walks on. Her robe is a dark, conservative color, but the cut and fabric is expensive. She does not look back, but I know it will take more than a walk home to make her forget me. It wouldn’t surprise me if she turns up as a client some day. Maybe she already has. This collision with the law has forced me to evaluate my life in a way that is thoroughly unpleasant. I keep going back, trying to find an explanation in my past that might appease the faceless authorities who seem determined to stomp me flat. Or maybe it really is my fault, maybe somewhere in this story I should have made a different choice, and maybe it’s not too late to fix it. Aw, what can you do? I knew way back then I was abnormal. Knew it as clearly as I knew I had two hands and only nine fingers. And what could I do about it? Nothing. (Well, I had a chilly premonition of city streets and crumpled money and dark, smoky bars.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  But a child, a baby! that was still one of the sensations. She would venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to consider, and it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose children you wanted. Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a child to a rabbit! Tommy Dukes?... he was very nice, but somehow you couldn't associate him with a baby, another generation. He ended in himself. And out of all the rest of Clifford's pretty wide acquaintance, there was not a man who did not rouse her contempt, when she thought of having a child by him. There were several who would have been quite possible as lovers, even Mick. But to let them breed a child on you! Ugh! Humiliation and abomination. So that was that! Nevertheless, Connie had the child at the back of her mind. Wait! wait! She would sift the generations of men through her sieve, and see if she couldn't find one who would do.--"Go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem, and see if ye can find _a man_." It had been impossible to find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet, though there were thousands of male humans. But _a man! C'est une autre chose!_ She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner: not an Englishman, still less an Irishman. A real foreigner. But wait! wait! Next winter she would get Clifford to London; the following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France, Italy. Wait! She was in no hurry about the child. That was her own private affair, and the one point on which, in her own queer, female way, she was serious to the bottom of her soul. She was not going to risk any chance comer, not she! One might take a lover almost at any moment, but a man who should beget a child on one ... wait! wait! it's a very different matter.--"Go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem...." It was not a question of love; it was a question of _a man_. Why, one might even rather hate him, personally. Yet if he was the man, what would one's personal hate matter? This business concerned another part of oneself. It had rained as usual, and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's chair, but Connie would go out. She went out alone every day now, mostly in the wood, where she was really alone. She saw nobody there. This day, however, Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper, and as the boy was laid up with influenza,--somebody always seemed to have influenza at Wragby,--Connie said she would call at the cottage. The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying. Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Part of the point of crucifixion, then, was precisely the lingering, extended process, which added to the horror as well as the pain. Seneca describes it as a long- drawn-out affair, in which the victim would be “wasting away in pain, dying limb by limb, letting out his life drop by drop . . . fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly tumors on chest and shoulders, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony” (Epistle 101.12–14). People could be affixed to crosses with ropes, but nails seem to have been more common. Indeed, the nails that might be retrieved after a crucifixion were sometimes used in magical or medicinal potions, suggesting that some may have regarded the whole event as possessing, at some prearticulate level, a kind of dark potency. This is perhaps related to the indescribable lusts of those who gave the order to crucify and particularly of those who carried it out, who on occasion—as Josephus tells us—became so hardened to the practice that they experimented for fun with different positions and modes. Here too we touch on something that may be more germane than sometimes imagined to the quest for a fuller meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. Imagine the Roman soldiers, battle-hardened yet battle-weary, trying to police a small overheated nation with ridiculous beliefs and ambitions, in which sporadic terrorism hinted at an insatiable desire for revolt and independence. We who know about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib should not find it impossible to imagine something of the mind-set of an execution squad outside Jerusalem. Nor should we find it difficult to suppose that, in a world where raw emotion and raw religion got horribly mixed up, all sorts of meanings might be given to an event of this kind. The Romans, then, didn’t invent crucifixion. (Some have suggested that it was practiced in ancient Carthage; certainly it predates the rise and the imperial brutality of Rome.) But they quickly made it their own, and it became the “death of choice” for two categories of undesirables in particular: slaves and rebels—and of course especially slaves who were also rebels or rebel leaders whom the Romans wanted to display as no better than slaves. Having mentioned Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, we might note another spectacular historical movie, Spartacus.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This was precisely the point. Those who crucified people did so because it was the sharpest and nastiest way of asserting their own absolute power and guaranteeing their victim’s absolute degradation. The early Christians did not suppose that Jesus might in principle have died in one of a number of ways (being stoned, killed in battle, assassinated with a dagger in a crowd, or whatever). Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king. So how had crucifixion come to be used in this way? The early history of the practice is lost in the mists of the pre-Roman world. The first historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, mention the execution of people on poles and trees, though it isn’t always clear whether this was simply hanging or impaling, both of which would have resulted in a much quicker death. Recent scholarly work has surveyed the evidence from the entire ancient world and has stressed that part of the point of crucifixion itself, as opposed to impaling or hanging, was that the victim was often able to see, to speak, to cry out in pain or protest for hours or even days. In some cases it was even possible for a victim to be rescued, to be brought down from the cross in time to recover. Part of the point of crucifixion, then, was precisely the lingering, extended process, which added to the horror as well as the pain. Seneca describes it as a long-drawn-out affair, in which the victim would be “wasting away in pain, dying limb by limb, letting out his life drop by drop . . . fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly tumors on chest and shoulders, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony” (Epistle 101.12–14). People could be affixed to crosses with ropes, but nails seem to have been more common. Indeed, the nails that might be retrieved after a crucifixion were sometimes used in magical or medicinal potions, suggesting that some may have regarded the whole event as possessing, at some prearticulate level, a kind of dark potency. This is perhaps related to the indescribable lusts of those who gave the order to crucify and particularly of those who carried it out, who on occasion—as Josephus tells us—became so hardened to the practice that they experimented for fun with different positions and modes. Here too we touch on something that may be more germane than sometimes imagined to the quest for a fuller meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But even as she went through her usual toilet, a thousand times repeated, with her legs spread apart over the old basin, its blots of rust where the enamel had worn away and the soapy water dripping off her thighs, she became less terrifying to me, also a little despicable, as were all prostitutes in the eyes of my schoolmates. But I also felt that my disgust and scorn were to some extent also for myself. She emptied the basin out into a little gutter that led to a hole under the door where I could see daylight. She then filled the basin again and handed it to me. As I did not immediately grasp what she intended, she looked at me as though I were quite stupid and said: “Here, catch!”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The day after I wrote that last sentence I received an e-mail that included a link to a short video claiming to sum up the gospel in a way that, I was told, I would find refreshing. It would build up my faith. Intrigued, I watched it. It was well put together, with clever sequences and plenty of hi-tech touches. But at the center of the message was a line that made my blood run cold. The video had described how we all mess up our lives, how we all do things that spoil God’s world, and so on. Then said the narrator, “Someone has to die,” and it turned out, of course, to be Jesus. That sums up the problem. What kind of “good news” is that? What kind of God are we talking about once we say that sort of thing? If God wants to forgive us, why can’t he just forgive us? (Heinrich Heine famously suggested God would indeed forgive us, since after all that was his job.) Why does “someone have to die”? Why death? Why would that help? And could it just be “someone,” anyone? Did it have to be God’s own son? How does it all work? The danger with this kind of popular teaching—and examples of it are not hard to come by—is that ultimately we end up rewriting one of the most famous verses in the Bible. I already quoted the King James Version of John 3:16: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Look at the two verbs: God so loved the world that he gave his son. The trouble with the popular version I have described is that it can easily be heard as saying, instead, that God so hated the world, that he killed his only son. And that doesn’t sound like good news at all. If we arrive at that conclusion, we know that we have not just made a trivial mistake that could easily be corrected, but a major blunder. We have portrayed God not as the generous Creator, the loving Father, but as an angry despot. That idea belongs not in the biblical picture of God, but with pagan beliefs.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When I reached the entrance to our street, I noted at once the wild music of tambourines and flutes, which meant that this dreadful ceremony was still in full swing. That was, I felt, too bad; so I climbed the stairs four at a time, rushing past the first floor, where I was met by a violent cacophony of cymbals that sounded strangely explosive in the sudden silence of all the other instruments. I knocked in vain at our own door; the show seemed to have attracted everyone, and the children, I was sure, were now staring wide-eyed at the unwholesome display. To get the key to our door, I would now have to go there myself. So I went downstairs again. The whole band was in a frenzy, in response to the clashing cymbals that never ceased sounding. The door was literally vibrating as I knocked on it, at first with my fists, then with my feet too. They must all have become quite deaf, if not insane, from this awful music. At last, someone opened the door for me and the din was at once unbelievably louder, swelling to fill the whole staircase, right up to the glass roof at the top. I dived into this weird mixture of hysterical flutes, wild cymbals, tom-tom drums, and darbouka bagpipes, all seasoned with the babble of excited women. The air seemed tropical, damp and warm, heavy with human breath and incense. With great difficulty, I forced my way through the throng of women, all of them familiar faces, aunts, cousins, neighbors, but each one of them now a stranger under the spell that had overcome her. They stood there motionless, their hair disheveled, their eyes aglow, rigid as statues, or perhaps like stupid cows that I had to push aside, as if they couldn’t understand me. They even seemed not to recognize me. But I had still not penetrated into the room where the dance was being held, beyond a broad doorway that was cloudy with smoke. To get there, I had to make my way through a tangled throng of women who were watching, some of them standing on chairs, stools, even tables, leaning against the walls, clinging together in clusters, all peering deep into the cloud of smoke. How could they see anything at all? Close to me, I recognized my Aunt Noucha, dressed for the occasion in Bedouin costume. I shouted into her ear: “Where is Mother?” When I got no answer, I grasped hold of her arm and shook it roughly. It was oily and sticky with sweat, and seemed to slither out of my grasp. “Where is Mother,” I shouted again. “I want our keys!”