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.

Page 44 of 90 · 20 per page

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  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. The real-life Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt, met his end about a hundred years before Jesus. Many died in the final battle, but six thousand of his followers were crucified all along the 130 or so miles of the Appian Way from Rome to Capua (inland from Naples), making it roughly one cross every forty yards (Appian, Civil Wars 1.120). Crucifying people beside busy roads or by the entrance to a city was of course designed to make a statement and issue a warning. People with business on those highways would walk past these terrible spectacles every day, and we may presume that many slaves who might have toyed with the idea of running away or joining the revolt would look, shudder, and decide that even their present miserable life was better than that. No doubt the authorities would often tell themselves that this was the only language such people understood. And, though there is evidence of friends or relatives taking away a corpse for burial, the more usual outcome was that the remains would stay there for several days and nights, becoming food for vultures and vermin, until (as with Jezebel in 2 Kings 9:21–37) there was nothing much left to bury. Nobody who had witnessed such a horror would be likely to regard such a death as “noble.” The point was emphasized by the harsh and degrading physical treatment that preceded crucifixion itself. The routine whipping and scourging were designed partly to weaken the victim and prevent a struggle, but also as part of the total public humiliation.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She got up and asked if I were in a hurry. No, I was not; I felt at ease. So she started washing herself from top to toe with the water in her little basin, which rapidly became a mouselike gray. But still she went on soaking her sponge in it and rubbing herself down with the dirty suds. She was so accustomed to the presence of men that she had lost all self-consciousness, and she washed every part of her body with the same thoroughness. When I bashfully asked if I could leave, she said that she would catch cold if she opened the door now, but that she would soon be finished. When she finally decided that she was clean, she picked up a razor blade between her thumb and her index finger and went through the routine of trying to shave her legs. After each stroke over her skin, she dipped the blade sticky with hairs in the blackish water. It made me sick at my stomach to watch it. When the blade ran over her protruding shin, she cut herself; and the little red stream of blood was certainly the least repulsive thing that I saw. ~ 2. THE OTHERS ~

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But his classes were carefully prepared and intelligent, so that they did me more harm than any stupid or aggressive jokes. I respected all that seemed scientifically accurate, and because I found no immediate reply to his arguments, they troubled me and made me feel guilty. To combat this, I threw myself into studies of Judaism and became intellectually aware of our own Hebrew spiritual tradition. For a few years I enthusiastically attended any lecture or meeting which could help me in these investigations; then firmly entrenched within my new knowledge, I tried to undermine as best I could the teachings of this doctrinaire racial theorist in the minds of my school-fellows. But they all laughed at my discoveries, much as they also derided what our teacher said. So I resorted to my usual vengeance. As he had at least the tact to allow us to express contrary views, whether he liked it or not, I was his best pupil, and I remember well writing angry sixteen-page compositions for him. But this was impossible with Murat, whom we nicknamed the sprinkler because he constantly spat as he spoke. He was an old crank who was a good example of the kind of anti-Semitism that is bred of stupidity. His mere physical appearance repelled me, with his rotting and uneven yellow teeth, the deposit of thick foaming saliva in the corners of his mouth, his colorless and lifeless hair, and the eternal moist cigarette stub which made him blink with its smoke. He allowed no discussion and, being mean and grumpy, took petty revenge on any obstinate contradictors, that is on the few pupils who thought at all. The others laughed at him and teased him with excessive humility, and this seemed to flatter him. When he was exasperated he would relieve himself by insulting them grossly. On the whole, however, they got on well together. On days when his temper was good he would leave his desk and, putting his left foot up on a bench, would rest his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee; it was time for a more intimate exchange of views. As he spat over the more unfortunate pupils who sat in the front row, he would ask seemingly innocent questions which were intended to make us reveal our most secret faults. Why was it that, in this country, the Jews always mentioned the profession of the deceased in death notices? He pretended not to know the reason, but he smiled knowingly: simply because Jews make the most — even of death — to advertise! But his stupidity went hand in hand with his greed, and my comrades learned to play the dirty trick of giving him presents. He was so grateful, it seemed, that he would even go so far as to hint at the subject of our next composition, without compromising himself, of course, but with much winking and subtle smiling:

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I lay down alongside her body. She fixed the hard horsehair pillow beneath her head, threw back her arms, and was motionless. So much passivity, such an absent manner, disconcerted me indeed. Vaguely, I had rather expected some sort of gentle communion, a game we would play together. I tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the ceiling. Fortunately, I had prepared myself for this meeting, I had thought about it and had heard accounts of similar ones. I knew what I had to do and, whatever my shyness, it had to be done. I began by stroking her shoulders. After a while her very coldness gave me courage, and my desire, needing no such subtleties, became manifest. Slowly, I was spontaneous again. As she remained with her face to the ceiling, my hand became a little more daring and slipped down to her bosom. Without a word, but firmly, she removed my hand. I understood that I had reached an area that was out of bounds. Submissively and afraid to hurt her feelings, I kept away from it, skipped the breasts and descended further, with no more embarrassment than if I had been alone. Soon I had almost forgotten her existence and was in a suave solitary dream when, far too soon for my liking, she guessed I was ready and, in a blank voice, ordered: “Come on, now.” Obediently I let go of her. Without looking or changing position, she stretched her hand toward the table and soaked her fingers in a glass of olive oil, which I recognized by its odor. She rubbed some between her thighs, while I furtively looked on, in spite of myself and my shame. The mystery which had, in my dreams, been so disturbing, was really a little disgusting in its biological reality and its vulgar animality. Then, as I hesitated, she must have realized that I was inexperienced. She drew me toward her, and like a child, I clumsily let myself be guided. To be joined in this manner to her flesh along the whole length of my own body now maddened me, and when her grasp became more specific, I could wait no longer. This angered her, and she grunted as she hurriedly guided me. I had already nearly finished, and left the matter at that. My pleasure had been too hasty and left me all tense; I found it much less satisfying than self-abuse. Because I had depended on someone else, my enjoyment had been meager. She pushed me over to one side, slapped her hand between her legs, and went and sat on the basin. I also got up and stood there with my loins all tense and sticky. I wondered what I was supposed to do. I could not put my clothes on over this mess. Meanwhile, she was quickly washing herself with careful movements that splashed the water from the basin all over the red distemper of the walls.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The rabbi, with his big hairy head doddering above a shapeless and dirty Oriental costume, raced for time against the gravediggers, swallowed half his words, and abridged the formula of the funeral prayers. At a distance, the undertakers talked among themselves. Employed by the community, these businessmen of death, rabbis, gravediggers, undertakers, all betrayed, by their naive indifference, the general hypocrisy. But the rabbi did well to hurry: the heat continued, despite the late hour, and I felt the perspiration drip from my forehead. Fortunately, we had to keep our hats on. At last, the grave was ready and the diggers emerged from the hole and went to fetch the body. They held it a while above the open grave and then slowly lowered it. I knew what was going to happen; I’d been told about it and I didn’t want to see. But my curiosity was stronger than my horror, and I couldn’t turn my head away. When the body, still strangely alive, was a few inches above the earth, they let it drop and, the moment it hit the bottom, everyone present was supposed, as is prescribed in the ritual, to join in a collective scream in order to stifle all noise. They screamed but imperceptibly too late, and I heard the horrible sound of the body as it fell. The gravediggers’ work was taken up again with their earlier mechanical cadence. Theirs was a practiced skill. To close the grave, they placed flat stones on it. In two minutes, Uncle Joseph had been shut away forever. Afterwards, we went to wash our hands at a consecrated fountain, for the sight of the body was supposed to have soiled us. Why the hands, I asked myself grouchily? Why not take a whole bath? But, like everyone else, I washed my hands. At the cemetery gate, a representative of the community fund waited for our donations. I passed him without giving anything and, as always, tried to make my uneasiness seem like disapproval. The trip back was even more carefree than the drive out had been. Discreetly encouraged by my companions, our driver slyly tried to pass the carriage in front of ours by going into a canter. The other driver avoided this and forced his nags to race. The passengers became interested in the race and, forgetting all propriety, began to urge their drivers on quite openly. We came back to town with our poor city-horses bulge-eyed from this unfamiliar effort, their manes flying tangled in the wind. The passengers laughed with excitement, as delighted as fans at a football game. Thanks to the crowd, I could avoid the obligatory return to the house of mourning and escape a new session of condolences and handshaking.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  All this was sheer anorexic madness. Rosa, like many anorexics, was so cunning at bundling herself in layers of clothes that it was easy to forget her emaciation. She weighed less than eighty pounds. And it was mad too for her to admire Carol, who was even thinner. A month ago, when I had been on call and paged because Carol had fainted, I had gotten to the ward just as the nurses were carrying her back to her bed. Her hospital gown had opened, exposing her buttocks, through which the heads of her femurs jutted, all but piercing the skin, reminding me of gruesome photographs of survivors liberated from concentration camps. But there was no point in debating Rosa’s assessment that she was fat. Body-image distortions of anorexic patients run too deep—I had challenged them on that issue too many times in too many groups and knew that was an argument I could not win. Rosa continued with her comparisons. Martin and Dorothy were dealing with far more significant problems than hers: “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish I had something visibly wrong with me, like paralysis. Then I’d feel more legitimate.” That stirred Dorothy into raising her head and making her first (and, as it happened, only) comment in the group: “You want paralyzed legs?” she whispered huskily. “Have mine.” To my great astonishment, Martin rushed in to defend Rosa: “No, no, Dorothy—I got the right name? It is Dorothy, isn’t it? Rosa didn’t mean it like that. I know she didn’t mean that she wanted your legs or mine. Look at my legs. Look at ’em. Just look at ’em. Who in their right mind would want ’em?” With his one good hand Martin ripped away the covering sheet and pointed to his legs. Hideously deformed, they ended in two or three gnarled nubbins. The rest of his toes had entirely rotted away. Neither Dorothy nor any of the other group members looked very long at Martin’s legs. They repelled me too, despite my medical training. “Rosa was just using a figure of speech,” Martin continued. “She only meant she wanted to have a more obvious disease, something you can see. She didn’t mean to minimize our condition. Did you, Rosa? It is Rosa, right?” Martin surprised me. I had allowed his deformity to conceal his acute intelligence. But he was not finished. “Do you mind if I ask you something, Rosa? I don’t mean to be nosy, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” “Shoot!” Rosa replied. “But I may not answer it.” “What is your condition? I mean, what’s wrong with you? You’re real skinny, but you don’t look sick. Why are you getting that IV?” he asked, gesturing toward it. “I don’t eat. They feed me with this stuff.” “Don’t eat? They don’t let you eat?” “No, they want me to eat. But I don’t want to.” Running her fingers through her hair, Rosa seemed to be trying to groom herself.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  She remembers the sex being incredible at the beginning of her relationship … or was it the same sex as now, filtered through the excitement of newness? Two years in, the idea of having sex with him elicits dread, exhaustion, and that tingling skin crawl of repulsion. Over the past four months, Anna and her boyfriend have had sex one time; her ideal would have been zero times. Though this area of her life is intrusively disappointing, she is opposed to seeking help for it. “I know this is likely not true, but I feel like talking about it makes it worse,” she said. “Like it will make it more stale and contrived, and that it adds more pressure to it. I feel like sex should be intuitive and that you should mesh with someone naturally.” To Anna, the payoff of treatment would be low: she can masturbate “in like two seconds,” and she does so every night to go to sleep. She doesn’t even desire sex anymore, though she considers herself a sexual person. She concedes that she could let her boyfriend go down on her, as a treat for him, but even that would feel like work. “Even still after being with him for so long I’m like, Ugh, it probably smells. Now I’m taking too long,” she said. “Even though I know he doesn’t care about that stuff.” Seeking help for your romantic life feels awkward at any age, but the unease is especially acute for young people, who believe that sex problems arrive much later in life, when they’re married and repulsed by their spouse, or when their penises settle into a perpetual softness. If Gossip Girl, The O.C., and other prestige youth soaps taught us anything, it’s that young people be fucking, freely and to completion. The only “dysfunction” is emotional entanglement, never the sex itself. (In the rare instances there is a problem with the sex, it’s either traumatic or comedic.) It took Katie, a twenty-eight-year-old cis straight woman who has been in sex therapy for over a year, nearly a decade to realize she needed help. She’s been with her boyfriend for ten years, and she sees herself marrying him in the not-too-distant future, but their sex life was fraught. As a teen, Katie had been in a traumatizing, abusive relationship that made many aspects of sex triggering. She became convinced that something was wrong with her. Having been raised in a somewhat conservative Catholic household, she didn’t feel she had the vocabulary or comfort level to talk about sex, which made the notion of sex therapy even scarier. (She recalls a high school science teacher telling her class, “If you have an abortion, you will miscarry every subsequent pregnancy.”) Eventually, she and her boyfriend realized there was no alternative; they weren’t going to be able to fix their sex life on their own, by sheer willpower.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  The easy abundance of “false images” makes sex ed even more important, and yet it fails us so profoundly. Maya Williams, a queer nonbinary poet and activist, remembers the sex ed in their hometown being “super clinical” and overwhelmingly white. “What was fascinating to me was whenever anatomical graphs were used, regardless of the majority population at the school, it was always a white body being displayed,” they told me. “It was like, ‘Oh, I don’t see myself in this equation. I don’t see Black people engaging in sex.’” I began researching this book with the assumption that sex education had improved over the past several decades. I now realize this was delusional. I tend to assume that, for the most part, the more time that passes, the better things get. While this has been true of my back acne, it has not been true of American sex education. In public school classrooms, children are still exposed to scientifically inaccurate, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and fear-based sex education, if they’re exposed to anything at all. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only seventeen states require sex education content to be medically accurate. What’s more, nineteen states require in-school instruction on the importance of saving yourself for marriage, and twenty-nine states require that abstinence be the focus of the curriculum.13 I now feel enormously grateful that the only thing I can recall from sex ed was getting tossed free deodorant and thick, off-brand pads. Curious about the scope of the American sex ed crisis, I asked my Twitter followers to share the most wrong, most offensive things they were taught about sex in school. The responses were chilling. I’m listing a few here so I don’t have to be alone with them, and to underscore how perfectly reasonable it is that people still have fraught relationships with sexual pleasure. “If you swallow cum a weird cauliflower-looking fungus would grow in your throat and suffocate you to death within days.” “Women don’t actually enjoy sex; they only enjoy the closeness and intimacy.” “At a certain point during sex, men ‘can’t stop and have to keep going’ even if the woman says to stop.” “You might be able to get HIV via enthusiastic French kissing.” “I was told that sex was like chewing gum. And you know what happens to gum? It gets spit on the ground, because no one wants someone else’s chewed-up piece of gum. Which was super cool to hear as a survivor of sexual trauma.” “Sex is binary, and everyone is always labeled correctly at birth.” “I was told that women are like stickers and if you put down a sticker and pull it off, it won’t be as nice when you try to put it down again.” “STIs are death sentences and gay sex is a footnote.” “I had an abusive conservative parent that wouldn’t sign the permission slip allowing me to receive sex education in the first place.” “Nothing. Nothing about my body, nothing about consent, nothing about pregnancy.”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  “An anthropologist visiting our planet might conclude that ours is a culture gluttonous for pleasure and sexually ravenous. And yet, what I observe daily in my clinical practice is that for all of this pleasure-seeking behavior, all of this wanting of pleasure, very few of us seem able to fully experience the sensations or satisfaction we seek.” —Nan Wise, PhD, Why Good Sex Matters When I was twenty-two, I was certain there was nothing left for me in Brooklyn. I quit my job, sold all my things, and fled to Naples, Italy, a dreamy, smelly place where post-lunch naps feel legally mandated. After a monthslong stretch of fighting for a visa and building a robust social circle of seniors and pizza men, I had to flee again, because of the law. I packed a large, military-grade backpack, gifted to me by a lovestruck middle-aged man named Biagio, and took an overnight ferry to Split, Croatia. (The tattered bag was from the war, he said; I never learned which one.) Once I settled in a small village outside of the city, and my body acclimated to a diet of cabbage, smooth sausages, and supermarket wine, I met a man with a long fluffy ponytail at an underground club, or a club that felt underground to me, darkened with smoke and off-brand grunge. After flirting in simple English about whether my life in New York had been like Friends (“Is Joey real??” he asked), I went home with him, we started hooking up, and, somewhat abruptly and without negotiation, he ejaculated on my face. It stung. He handed me tissues to dab the fluids and then slipped into a soft pajama onesie, ready for bed. I didn’t think much of the experience, only that I had an interesting story to relay to friends and, one day, readers.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  So she started washing herself from top to toe with the water in her little basin, which rapidly became a mouselike gray. But still she went on soaking her sponge in it and rubbing herself down with the dirty suds. She was so accustomed to the presence of men that she had lost all self-consciousness, and she washed every part of her body with the same thoroughness. When I bashfully asked if I could leave, she said that she would catch cold if she opened the door now, but that she would soon be finished. When she finally decided that she was clean, she picked up a razor blade between her thumb and her index finger and went through the routine of trying to shave her legs. After each stroke over her skin, she dipped the blade sticky with hairs in the blackish water. It made me sick at my stomach to watch it. When the blade ran over her protruding shin, she cut herself; and the little red stream of blood was certainly the least repulsive thing that I saw. ~ 4. THE CAMP ~ All through the long day’s journey the worn-out springs of the old truck passed on to us the smallest bumps in the road. We had left Tunis almost gaily at dawn, with rucksacks on our backs, which reminded us of our youth movement excursions. The sharp air and the warm sun were just as promising then, and when one of us burst into a marching song we all joined in. I was lighthearted as I left, for I had left nothing behind me. The evening before, Ginou had yielded to the last of my arguments and admitted that we were not made for each other. I must confess that I had indulged in some histrionics for a quarter of an hour as I tried to find in my heart a pain that was not there. But I had to leave her hurriedly in order to pack my bag and had no time to think more of it. Ten minutes after our departure, I was already singing with the others, standing in the wind, full of the healthy impression of having volunteered for a great adventure. At the first alarm, however, we stopped singing. Aircraft appeared suddenly from behind the hills and crossed the road in a streak firing their machine guns, sometimes quite insistently. Lying in a ditch we waited for them to be gone before we resumed our uncomfortable positions, tightly packed against each other. The men joked and bragged to hide the anxiety which grew in us as we moved further south.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She got up and asked if I were in a hurry. No, I was not; I felt at ease. So she started washing herself from top to toe with the water in her little basin, which rapidly became a mouselike gray. But still she went on soaking her sponge in it and rubbing herself down with the dirty suds. She was so accustomed to the presence of men that she had lost all self-consciousness, and she washed every part of her body with the same thoroughness. When I bashfully asked if I could leave, she said that she would catch cold if she opened the door now, but that she would soon be finished. When she finally decided that she was clean, she picked up a razor blade between her thumb and her index finger and went through the routine of trying to shave her legs. After each stroke over her skin, she dipped the blade sticky with hairs in the blackish water. It made me sick at my stomach to watch it. When the blade ran over her protruding shin, she cut herself; and the little red stream of blood was certainly the least repulsive thing that I saw. ~ 2. THE OTHERS ~

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  a.​All humans sinned, causing God to be angry and to want to kill them, to burn them forever in “hell.” b.​Jesus somehow got in the way and took the punishment instead (it helped, it seems, that he was innocent—oh, and that he was God’s own son too). c.​We are in the clear after all, heading for “heaven” instead (provided, of course, we believe it). Many preachers and teachers put it much more subtly than this, but this is still the story people hear. This is the story they expect to hear. In some churches, if you don’t tell this story more or less in this way, people will say that you aren’t “preaching the gospel.” The natural reaction to this from many who have grown up hearing this message and feeling they had to believe it (if they didn’t, they would go to hell) is that its picture of God is abhorrent. This God, such people instinctively feel, is a bloodthirsty tyrant. If there is a God, we must hope and pray that he (or she, or it) isn’t like that at all. So they react in one of a number of predictable ways. Some people reject the whole thing as a horrible nonsense. Others, puzzled, go back to their Bibles and to the great teachers of the early church, and there they find all sorts of other things being said about the cross, for instance, that it was the means by which God’s rescuing love won the ultimate victory over all the forces of darkness. Or they find early writers urging Christians to imitate the self-giving love of Jesus, and they seize upon that as the “answer”: the cross, they say, wasn’t about God punishing sin; it was about Jesus giving us the ultimate example of love. Thus many different interpretations have arisen, affecting the ways in which people have been taught the Bible and the Christian faith. This has been a recipe for confusion. This confusion, as I shall be suggesting, gets in the way of what is arguably the most important thing. The New Testament insists, in book after book, that when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, something happened as a result of which the world is a different place. And the early Christians insisted that when people are caught up in the meaning of the cross, they become part of this difference. You wouldn’t necessarily guess this from many of the debates and reactions that I’ve just sketched or, sadly, from the way many Christians and many churches have sometimes behaved. But it’s what the first Christians thought, said, and taught. Jesus’s crucifixion was the day the revolution began.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely in AD 33, is poised historically in between these two large-scale crucifixions. Nobody in that world would have been able to hear the word “cross” or be reminded of someone dying in that way without feeling instinctively the horror and shame of the whole thing. So too Saul of Tarsus, traveling the Roman world, must have seen plenty of crosses in his time: plenty of blood, plenty of rotting flesh, plenty of carrion and vermin picking over squirming carcasses. He must have known in his gut, more perhaps than we ever can, why the “word of the cross” was shocking, scandalous, and foolish beyond all measure. All of this needs to be in our minds and imaginations if we are even to glimpse, let alone understand, why that “word” was so utterly revolutionary. The second point of special interest for us is the way in which the Romans sometimes used crucifixion as a way of mocking a victim with social or political pretensions. “You want to be high and lifted up?” they said in effect. “All right, we’ll give you ‘high and lifted up.’” Crucifixion thus meant not only killing by slow torture, not only shaming, not only issuing a warning, but also parodying the ambitions of the uppity rebels. They wanted to move up the social scale? Let them be lifted up above the common herd, then—on a cross! When the emperor Galba was governor of his native Spain, a man condemned to crucifixion objected that he was a Roman citizen. Galba’s response was to make his cross higher than before and to have it painted white, signifying his high social status. When Pilate had “The King of the Jews” written on a placard above Jesus’s head, that’s the kind of message he intended to send—not only about Jesus, but about the Jews in general: “This is what we think of your kind.” I have said enough here, I trust, to bring to mind the violence and sheer nastiness of the world ruled by the Romans. And also the irony. Augustus, the first great Roman emperor, solemnly announced that he had brought peace and prosperity throughout Rome’s wide domains. He set up the Ara Pacis (“Altar of Peace”) in Rome, with stately, dignified carvings of himself and his pious family. At the same time, his lieutenants throughout his empire were making sure, in their bloody and brutal way, that the locals stayed “peaceful” and knew who was in charge. Augustus’s projected vision of tranquil peace was perched on top of a world of horror and violence. Wrath and arms continued to dominate classical culture.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She took an interest in my life and seemed to admire me, and I had, at last, a feeling of sexual communion and of sharing my secret. She got up and asked if I were in a hurry. No, I was not; I felt at ease. So she started washing herself from top to toe with the water in her little basin, which rapidly became a mouselike gray. But still she went on soaking her sponge in it and rubbing herself down with the dirty suds. She was so accustomed to the presence of men that she had lost all self-consciousness, and she washed every part of her body with the same thoroughness. When I bashfully asked if I could leave, she said that she would catch cold if she opened the door now, but that she would soon be finished. When she finally decided that she was clean, she picked up a razor blade between her thumb and her index finger and went through the routine of trying to shave her legs. After each stroke over her skin, she dipped the blade sticky with hairs in the blackish water. It made me sick at my stomach to watch it. When the blade ran over her protruding shin, she cut herself; and the little red stream of blood was certainly the least repulsive thing that I saw. ~ 2. THE OTHERS ~ At long last we removed the iron bars and came out of our barricaded houses. The streets were somnolent after our sleepless nights, the air tasted of ash, and a weird yellow light flashed through purple clouds and lit up our tired faces. A few useless and indifferent patrols of Negro soldiers ambled around. Occasionally, the police also showed up — when everything was over. Our main thirst was easily quenched as uncertain and contradictory bits of news poured in. Bissor was among the dead. About the corpses there could be no doubt. There was no possible mistake: Bissor was dead, and all his family had been murdered, except the prostitute sister who had been lucky enough to be away in Marseille. I am sure that Bissor had fought back wildly with his big hard fists. As for the rest, will we ever be able to understand? It was said that the Moslem infantry had been called to the front and that, before being shipped off to slaughter, they had felt, as warriors for whom all is right, that they could get away with anything. Tradition admitted that they could rob, rape, or kill as they pleased. Of course, they chose to descend on the Jewish quarter.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  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, should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things, or the endurance of them, but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. (In Verrem 16) The horrible personal and physical aspects of crucifixion were matched by the social, communal, and political meaning. This is important not just as the “context” for our understanding of the Jesus’s execution (as though the barbaric practice were just a dark backdrop to a theology produced from somewhere else), but as part of the very stuff of the theology itself. We might already have figured this out from the careful placing of Philippians 2.8b, thanatou de staurou , “even the death of the cross,” at the dead center of the poem that some think antedates Paul himself. As we shall see later, the first half of that poem is a downward journey, down to the lowest place to which a human being could sink with regard to pain or shame, personal fate or public perception.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Nobody in that world would have been able to hear the word “cross” or be reminded of someone dying in that way without feeling instinctively the horror and shame of the whole thing. So too Saul of Tarsus, traveling the Roman world, must have seen plenty of crosses in his time: plenty of blood, plenty of rotting flesh, plenty of carrion and vermin picking over squirming carcasses. He must have known in his gut, more perhaps than we ever can, why the “word of the cross” was shocking, scandalous, and foolish beyond all measure. All of this needs to be in our minds and imaginations if we are even to glimpse, let alone understand, why that “word” was so utterly revolutionary. The second point of special interest for us is the way in which the Romans sometimes used crucifixion as a way of mocking a victim with social or political pretensions. “You want to be high and lifted up?” they said in effect. “All right, we’ll give you ‘high and lifted up.’” Crucifixion thus meant not only killing by slow torture, not only shaming, not only issuing a warning, but also parodying the ambitions of the uppity rebels. They wanted to move up the social scale? Let them be lifted up above the common herd, then—on a cross! When the emperor Galba was governor of his native Spain, a man condemned to crucifixion objected that he was a Roman citizen. Galba’s response was to make his cross higher than before and to have it painted white, signifying his high social status. When Pilate had “The King of the Jews” written on a placard above Jesus’s head, that’s the kind of message he intended to send—not only about Jesus, but about the Jews in general: “This is what we think of your kind.” I have said enough here, I trust, to bring to mind the violence and sheer nastiness of the world ruled by the Romans. And also the irony. Augustus, the first great Roman emperor, solemnly announced that he had brought peace and prosperity throughout Rome’s wide domains. He set up the Ara Pacis (“Altar of Peace”) in Rome, with stately, dignified carvings of himself and his pious family. At the same time, his lieutenants throughout his empire were making sure, in their bloody and brutal way, that the locals stayed “peaceful” and knew who was in charge. Augustus’s projected vision of tranquil peace was perched on top of a world of horror and violence. Wrath and arms continued to dominate classical culture. All this helps us to understand the symbolic meanings of a crucifixion in that world. The early Christians very quickly gave Jesus’s cross meanings that were deep, rich, and revolutionary, but this was done in the teeth of the meanings that the cross already possessed. It already had a social meaning: “We are superior, and you are vastly inferior.”

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " I am not surprised that speech follows action," said Parlamente : " for it is easier to say than to do." " Why," said Geburon, " what sin had she committed } She was asleep in her bed, and he threatened her with death and infamy, Lucretia, who has been so much lauded, did quite as much." " It is true," said Parlamente, " there is no righteous person who may not fall ; but when one has felt at the instant great disgust at one's fall, one remembers it only with horror. To efface its memory Lucretia killed her- self ; but this wanton chose to make others laugh at it in her own case." " It seems to me, nevertheless," said Nomerfide, " that 492 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [AWel 62. she was a good woman, since she was urgently solicited several times, but would not consent. Accordingly, the gentleman was obliged to use fraud and violence in order to succeed." "What!" said Parlamente, "do you suppose that a woman's honour is spotless when she succumbs after two or three refusals .? At that rate there would be many a woman of honour among those who are regarded as having none. Plenty of women have been known foi- a long time to repulse him to whom their hearts were already given. Some do it because they fear infamy ; others to make themselves the more loved and esteemed by a feigned resistance. A woman, therefore, ought not to be held in any consideration unless she remains firm to the end." " If a young man were to refuse a handsome girl," said Dagoucin, "would you not regard that as a great act of virtue .-* " " Assuredly," said Oisille, " if a young man in good health made such a refusal, I should think the act very laudable, but not hard to believe." " I know some," said Dagoucin, " who have refused adventures which all their comrades sought for with avidity." " Pray take my place," said Longarine, " and tell us what you know in that way; but recollect that wc are pledged to speak the truth." " I promise to tell it you," said Dagoucin, " without cover or disguise." Siroenth day.\ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 493 NOVEL LXIII. Notable chastity of a French lord.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But just as we must (I believe) restore the biblical vision of God’s ultimate future and reconceive atonement in relation to that—the task of Part Three of the present book—so we must restore the biblical analysis of evil and see the cross as addressing it all, not just part of it. Scandalous—For the Wrong Reasons? If a quick tour of two thousand years of church history leaves us somewhat confused about the meaning of the cross, we will not be surprised that there is plenty of confusion in our own day as well. When, as I mentioned earlier, the National Gallery opened its 2000 exhibition “Seeing Salvation” and the skeptics sneered, the standard Christian response might have been, “Well, he died for our sins.” But that, for many today, just makes it worse. Skeptics come back with more scorn. “Sin” itself is out of date, they say. It’s just a projection of anxieties or childhood phobias. To land our “sins” onto a dead first- century Jew is not just ridiculous; it’s disgusting. To suggest that some god projected our “sins” onto that man is even worse: it’s a sort of cosmic child abuse, a nightmare fantasy that grows out of—or might actually lead to!—real human abuses in today’s world. We can do without that nonsense. The angry scorn of the skeptics gets extra traction from the fact that some have found the sign of the cross to be a symbol of fear. The horrible dark history of “Christian” persecution of people of other faiths, particularly Jewish people, has left a stain on what should be a symbol of hope and welcome. I remember being shocked, as a young man, to read about Jews who had escaped from persecution in supposedly “Christian” cultures in eastern Europe and who then, upon arriving in America, saw on street corners the sign of the cross, which they had come to fear and loathe. Those of us who grew up with crosses in our churches and all around us and with no anti-Jewish ideas in our heads have to face the fact that our central symbol has often been horribly abused. It has been used as a sign of a military might or of a dominant culture determined to stamp out all rivals. The emperor Constantine, facing a crucial battle, saw a vision of the cross in the sky and was told, “In this sign you will conquer.” The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses, claiming to bring the light of the Christian gospel into dark places. The fact that such nonsense is a scandalous denial of the early Christian meaning of the cross doesn’t make it any better. It isn’t just those outside the Christian faith who have found the cross a symbol of fear. Many inside the church too have shrunk back from one particular interpretation that, in some form or other, has dominated much Western Christianity over the last half millennium.

• 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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My mother was on her way, holding the lamp at arm’s length before her. She saw the visitor: “Oh, yes, I know what you want. Wait a moment.” She went into the room and the light vanished, drawing the shadows away in its wake. We followed her, wondering what she was up to. She pulled back the mattress of the bed-chest where my sister slept, and propped the top open while she rummaged inside. A sharp odor of mildew invaded the whole room. Her arms went deep into the chest and she drew forth the dirty linen, a handful at a time, and then began to sort it out methodically. She would bring the clothes close to the lamp to examine them before deciding. One of my sweaters, two pairs of pants, and a shirt were chosen, with a dress, a sweater and two pairs of drawers of my sister. Lastly, she removed all the buttons of imitation mother-of-pearl, leaving only the tailor’s buttons, which could all be replaced easily from my uncle’s stock. We were at last witnessing the mysterious operation that regularly deprived us of our old clothes. Fraji didn’t seem to notice our hostile glances, but continued to stare intently with his big protuberant eyes at the pile of clothes that was beginning to assume some importance. Then my mother sent me to borrow ten cents from Joulie Barouch. When I came back, I found on the table a bundle wrapped in newspaper and a thick slice of bread. Fraji hastened to bury the money deep in his pocket, grasped the parcel and the piece of bread in his arms and, without uttering a word, made a dash for the door. Then, at last, we exploded with anger: “Why do you give him our clothes?” Mother, in a dreamy mood, answered briefly, but in a decisive tone: “Because they are poor.” But this explanation didn’t satisfy us. Our life of confinement in our blind alley had scarcely prepared us to understand the world, and we resented Fraji, who was filthy and aroused our disgust, as well as all the poor who helped dispossess us. Gravely, we concluded that our dignity must truly be very considerable, our own and that of our father, the Saddler. An hour later my father sent me back to repay Joulie her ten cents and I did the errand without more ado. When we were sent to bed, my sister to the bed-chest and I to the far side of the big family bed, right up against the blue distempered wall, I began to project upon the uneven surface of the masonry the images that my imagination always discovered there. Two days later, while the women were all away at the public bath, I was left at home, under the none too careful supervision of Imiliou, the eldest of the Barouch children.