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 Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I find the erotic culture of Japan, torn between its own rich history, its highly stressed society, and westernization, to be a kind of case study for definitions of obscenity and innocence. “Japan has never been too preoccupied with realism,” writes Nicholas Bornoff in his study of the matter, Pink Samurai. But it’s that quality of unfettered fantasy that makes Japanese pornography so illuminating. The typical text of much Japanese pornography (and a lot has essentially no plot at all) is that a woman is always either a victim of male sexuality or of herself; in the words of the anthropologist Ian Buruma, she is “a compulsive man-eating ogress consumed by her sexual savagery.” Typical “victims” are the innocents—schoolgirls, nurses, young brides. They are raped, often with objects, and then fall in love with their rapists, victims of their own treacherous appetites. Often their husbands are inadequate, impotent, ignorant of their sexual needs; the rape awakens, enlivens them to themselves. The female body is essentially degraded, naturally so; sooner or later, nature will out. Perhaps the rapist will tearfully apologize, perhaps not; if he does, the woman becomes his comforter, a maternal figure, the lavishly adored mother-whore. Buruma sees modern Japanese culture as divided and contradictory, torn between sensuality and guilt, artificiality and naturalness, and further rended by the physical crowding and the veneration of both conformity and anonymity. Japan, after all, has created a unique theater of transvestism out of a culture of sharply divided gender roles. I could point at this running plot as a good example of how dangerous pornography really is, because these images will, undoubtedly, encourage male violence against women and increase oppression of women in all spheres. Won’t they? (Does the fact that Japanese women are freer to make choices for themselves than ever before count here?) Or I can consider how very much Japanese pornography has changed since the Ukiyo-e school of a few centuries ago, when gorgeous drawings of loving sex were common. I can place these images in a context, noting that erotic violence is a part of Japanese history, that Japan has always had a culture full of real sex and sham violence as well as real violence and fantasized sex. I can see these brutal films as evidence less of male terrorizing of women than as evidence of male terror. Violence by men against women is universal and very old. This acknowledgment, of how men fear women and especially women’s sexuality, is new. In Japan, as culture changes, art changes; the rape fantasy is less prevalent, the female dominatrix, once unheard of, is increasingly visible. And the rape fantasy is as much a fantasy of the cuckold as of rape, a very old source of irony and humor in Japan.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Throughout my twenties, I meditated weekly at the Russian & Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street on the impossibly ancient body of the woman whom I thought of as the ghost of the baths. (If you went to these baths on women-only days in the ’90s, you will know who I mean.) I meditated on her labia, which drooped far below her pale pubic hair, her butt cheeks dangling off the bone like two deflated balloons. And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look. I tried to learn everything there was to know about the aging female body by staring at hers. (Now I realize I should say “the elderly female body,” but in my youth, as in the culture at large, the space between “aging” and “elderly” women is often collapsed, treated as illegible or irrelevant.) In my day job as a graduate student, however, I expressed only offense at Allen Ginsberg’s descriptions of female genitalia in his poems, as in “the hang of pearplum / fat tissue / I had abhorred” and “the one hole that repelled me 1937 on.” I still don’t see the need to broadcast misogynistic repulsion, even in service of fagdom, but I do understand being repelled. Genitalia of all stripes are often slimy and pendulous and repulsive. That’s part of their charm. I realize now that such moments in Ginsberg have a different shine when held in the bowl alongside his go-for-broke encounter with the naked body of his mother, the mad Naomi, in his great “Kaddish”: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb— Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu. When I read this passage now, I feel only moved and inspired. “What, even, smell of asshole?”—this is the sound of Ginsberg cajoling himself as far out onto the ledge as he can go, even if it means pressing into the speculative, the fictive. Beyond the “Monster of the Beginning Womb” to the mother’s anus, which he leans into and sniffs. Not in service of abjection, but in pursuit of the limits of generosity. She needs a lover—am I that name? The result of all this pushing? “Later revolted a little, not much.” O glorious deflation without dismissal!

• From Another Country (1962)

  He was afraid to go near her, he was afraid to touch her, it was almost as though she had told him that she had been infected with the plague. His arms trembled with his revulsion, and every act of the body seemed unimaginably vile. And yet, at the same time, as he stood helpless and stupid in the kitchen which had abruptly become immortal, or which, in any case, would surely live as long as he lived, and follow him everywhere, his heart began to beat with a newer, stonier anguish, which destroyed the distance called pity and placed him, very nearly, in her body, beside that table, on the dirty floor. The single yellow light beat terribly down on them both. He went to her, resigned and tender and helpless, her sobs seeming to make his belly sore. And, nevertheless, for a moment, he could not touch her, he did not know how. He thought, unwillingly, of all the whores, black whores, with whom he had coupled, and what he had hoped for from them, and he was gripped in a kind of retrospective nausea. What would they see when they looked into each other’s faces again? “Come on, Ida,” he whispered, “come on, Ida. Get up,” and at last he touched her shoulders, trying to force her to rise. She tried to check her sobs, she put both hands on the table. “I’m all right,” she murmured, “give me a handkerchief.” He knelt beside her and thrust his handkerchief, warm and wadded, but fairly clean, into her hand. She blew her nose. He kept his arm around her shoulder. “Stand up,” he said. “Go wash your face. Would you like some coffee?” She nodded her head, Yes, and slowly rose. He rose with her. She kept her head down and moved swiftly, drunkenly, past him, into the bathroom. She locked the door. He had the spinning sensation of having been through all this before. He lit a flame under the coffee pot, making a mental note to break down the bathroom door if she were silent too long, if she were gone too long. But he heard the water running, and, beneath it, the sound of the rain. He ate a pork chop, greedily, with a piece of bread, and drank a glass of milk; for he was trembling, it had to be because of hunger. Otherwise, for the moment, he felt nothing. The coffee pot, now beginning to growl, was real, and the blue fire beneath it and the pork chops in the pan, and the milk which seemed to be turning sour in his belly.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  They would just film me for fifteen to twenty minutes. So into the tiny studio I went, and was told to talk directly into one of the cameras. During the journey, I had hastily concocted a little argument. I remembered that some years ago, while I was still living in Oxford, I had dropped into Blackfriars one evening. The Dominicans had been celebrating the Mass together and had just reached the consecration, pointing toward the Eucharistic bread and saying in unison, “This is my body.” The words had suddenly struck me as horribly ironic. At the time, I weighed about ninety pounds; I was in my anorexic phase, and was doing my best to make my body disappear. I thought of Rebecca; I thought of the way our bodies had rebelled against the religious regime we had endured. Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. Instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body—particularly the bodies of women. So that morning, in the hot little studio, I told that story. I also spoke of my anorexia and my epilepsy. I recalled my blackouts and the way I had been instructed by my superiors to subjugate my body to my will. I recalled the physical penances we had used to keep our bodies in line. And then I branched out and spoke of the failure of the churches to make creative use of their cult of the body of Christ. I remembered how Francis of Assisi had called his body Brother Ass, as though it were simply a stupid, sexually rampant beast of burden. I mentioned the women saints, such as Margaret Mary Alocoque, who had suffered from anorexia; Catherine of Siena had starved herself to death with the church’s approbation. I spoke of the barely concealed disgust felt by the Fathers of the church when they were forced to contemplate the female body; recalled that in the convent at Matins each Saturday, we had listened to readings from Saint Bernard or Saint Augustine, who had speculated about the virginity of the Mother of God in a way that even then had seemed prurient to me: How exactly had Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus? Did her hymen remain intact after the birth? I finally concluded my little talk by suggesting that a religion that found it impossible to accommodate the physical makeup of half the human race had a grave problem. I looked at the clock. My twenty minutes was up.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Hu Gu Po could remain a tenant in the woman’s body as long as she hunted. When she smelled the sweat-seasoned toes of children, her belly hardened into a beetle of need and scuttled out of her throat, a scout in search of salt. Craving their toes, she climbed into the children’s bedrooms at night. With her teeth, she unscrewed the toes of sleeping daughters and sucked the knuckles clean of meat, renaming them peanuts. Every morning, Hu Gu Po walked through the market and appraised the fish dragged in from the river, their bodies like oiled opals. A fisherman’s wife, smelling something that scarred the air with its smoke, turned to Hu Gu Po and asked what she was eating. Peanuts, Hu Gu Po said, shucking nut-bones with her teeth. The fisherman’s wife asked if Hu Gu Po might be willing to share. Hu Gu Po laughed. How much would you pay for one? The fisherman’s wife named a price. Slipping the skin off another nut, Hu Gu Po said, That’s not enough for me to make a living. She laughed, her black braid unraveling to ash, charring the air. The next morning, every child in the village woke with a toe subtracted from each foot. On each of their pillows was a five-cent coin, rusted dark as a blood spot. The fisherman’s wife had no children, but when she heard what had happened, she remembered the woman in the market cleaving peanut shells with her teeth. When she opened her door, there was a skin pouch lying in her doorway. She slit open the pouch and it spilled dozens of toes, deboned and dusted with salt. _ My mother lifted the bedsheet over us both when she told me this story, crouching down over my feet, grasping them in her fists, and ferrying them to her mouth. My toes squirmed like minnows in her maw, swimming against the current of her spit. In the dark, I watched the geography of her face rearranging: the mountain range of moles on her forehead, the hook of her lip lowering when she fished up a story. She let go of my feet when I begged her not to eat them, but one night she concluded the story by biting down on my big toe. Her teeth encircled it like a tiara, resting on the skin rather than breaking it, but I could feel her trembling, her jaw reined back by something I couldn’t see. In the morning, my toe wore a ringlet of white where the blood didn’t return again for months. Some nights, I woke to my mother’s finger foraging around in my ear, nicking out the earwax with her hooked pinky nail.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  In an oversaturated media marketplace, attention is the most prized currency. The best way for porn to capture and keep its share is to perpetually up the ante on aggressive and cruel acts—face fucking! Bukkake! Stealth “creampie”!—none of which are likely to result in orgasm for most women. Quite the opposite: some recent porn trends are so physically demanding that female performers later require surgery to repair prolapsed vaginal walls or anuses (there is little regard for women’s safety on set, and certainly no worker’s comp or disability pay). Porn is also pushed to extremes by conventional media, which has become ever more explicit in its own quest to lure viewers. Even so, most heterosexual porn still centers on “the big six”: digital stimulation of the vagina by a partner, self-stimulation (by either sex), fellatio, cunnilingus, and coitus. Those acts tend to appear together, according to Bryant Paul, an associate professor of media psychology at Indiana University who studies the impact of porn. So if you see one in a clip, you’re likely to see them all. But “the big six” also often cluster with certain, harsher acts: men spitting on women, “facial abuse” oral sex, anal sex. What’s more, specific behaviors don’t tell the whole story. Pornhub’s front page features the most popular videos in a viewer’s home country; in the United States (the world’s biggest consumer of adult content) that means an array of pseudo-incest porn (stepmothers, stepsiblings, teenage “besties” who have sex with each other’s “dads”). Even if the sex itself is fairly routine, the taboo that it flirts with to amp up arousal—the fantasy it promotes, reinforces, and possibly normalizes—is not.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But by this may more evidently be discerned, wherein pleasure and wherein curiosity is the object of the senses; for pleasure seeketh objects beautiful, melodious, fragrant, savoury, soft; but curiosity, for trial’s sake, the contrary as well, not for the sake of suffering annoyance, but out of the lust of making trial and knowing them. For what pleasure hath it, to see in a mangled carcase what will make you shudder? and yet if it be lying near, they flock thither, to be made sad, and to turn pale. Even in sleep they are afraid to see it. As if when awake, any one forced them to see it, or any report of its beauty drew them thither! Thus also in the other senses, which it were long to go through. From this disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know. Hence also, if with that same end of perverted knowledge magical arts be enquired by. Hence also in religion itself, is God tempted, when signs and wonders are demanded of Him, not desired for any good end, but merely to make trial of. In this so vast wilderness, full of snares and dangers, behold many of them I have cut off, and thrust out of my heart, as Thou hast given me, O God of my salvation. And yet when dare I say, since so many things of this kind buzz on all sides about our daily life—when dare I say that nothing of this sort engages my attention, or causes in me an idle interest? True, the theatres do not now carry me away, nor care I to know the courses of the stars, nor did my soul ever consult ghosts departed; all sacrilegious mysteries I detest. From Thee, O Lord my God, to whom I owe humble and single-hearted service, by what artifices and suggestions doth the enemy deal with me to desire some sign! But I beseech Thee by our King, and by our pure and holy country, Jerusalem, that as any consenting thereto is far from me, so may it ever be further and further. But when I pray Thee for the salvation of any, my end and intention is far different. Thou givest and wilt give me to follow Thee willingly, doing what Thou wilt.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I remembered pedaling confidently, convinced that my father was still holding the bike steadily, and then finding that I was balancing perfectly by myself. Interestingly, this tended to happen when I was writing about authors with whom I had initially felt no particular empathy: with the poet Philip Larkin or with the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. I was especially moved by the novels of Iris Murdoch, who had once been the philosophy tutor at St. Anne’s. I noticed that her characters often had what seemed to be a religious experience while they stood in front of a picture or contemplated a powerful landscape. These passages were so characteristic and so vivid that I felt certain that Murdoch herself must have been transfigured in this way, though, as Jenifer Hart told me, she had no conventional religious beliefs. Certainly Murdoch did not interpret the ecstasy of her characters in a traditionally theistic way, and yet it was clear that these were numinous encounters. It seemed that Murdoch had developed a form of secular mysticism, so that natural objects, works of art, or the experience of falling in love revealed a transcendent dimension that seemed natural to human beings. These experiences were clearly a revelation, similar to what religious people described as God or the sacred. Something similar had happened to me when I had listened to Dame Helen Gardner reading Ash-Wednesday. If traditional religious disciplines had failed to enlighten me, perhaps I would find in literature what had eluded me in the convent chapel. And this raised all kinds of questions about the nature of religion. If an unbeliever could experience the same kind of ecstasy as a Christian mystic, it seemed that transcendence was just something that human beings experienced and that there was nothing supernatural about it. Now that I no longer had to take Jacob to Mass on Sundays, I did not go myself. I had woken up on my first Sunday in London, registered what day it was, and decided to stay in bed for a while with a novel and a cup of coffee. My landlady had given me the address of the local Catholic church, but I knew that I was never going to set foot in it. Indeed, I now felt distaste for the whole churchy enterprise. It seemed not only a colossal waste of time and energy, but positively harmful too. If I saw somebody reading a theological or devotional book on the underground, I felt an involuntary twinge of disgust, and would even turn away as though I had seen something abhorrent. The word “God” or “Jesus” or “church” filled me with a lassitude akin to nausea. Conventional religion had worn me out and I wanted nothing more to do with it. If possible I would have liked to forget that it existed. It was quite easy to ignore religion in London. In Oxford there had been constant reminders: cloisters, church spires, bells that sonorously called worshipers to service, formal grace before dinner.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  These glimpses of other traditions were intriguing, but I was still convinced that God and I were through. And there were many aspects of Middle Eastern piety that fueled my aversion. The offices of the film company were near Meah Shearim, one of the ultra-Orthodox quarters of Jerusalem, and the placards on the walls there, which equated Zionism with Hitler and which commanded the “daughters of Israel” to dress modestly, repelled me— though my aversion was mild compared to the rage that the ultra-Orthodox inspired in Joel. Still worse was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest place in the Christian world, where the atmosphere was poisoned by the vitriolic hatred of the various sects. Joel explained to me that since the seventeenth century, a local Muslim family had been deputed by the Ottoman authorities to keep the keys to the church and unlock the doors at carefully prescribed intervals, because the Christians kept locking their rivals out. There was nothing comparable to the aura of prayer and spirituality that I had sensed in the al-Aqsa Mosque. On my first visit to the church, a wizened Coptic monk grabbed my arm as I had peered into the marble edifice surrounding Jesus’ tomb, and produced what looked suspiciously like a pack of tarot cards. A polite refusal did not suffice: he was determined to tell my fortune on this holy spot, even if he had to drag me into the tomb with his own hands. Eventually Danny had to swear at him and gesture threateningly before he backed off. No, I wanted nothing to do with any of this. As my stay drew to a close, Joel was beginning to think that we really might have an idea for a good series. We had started to work well together, sitting in small untidy offices, blue with cigarette smoke, drinking Coca-Cola and hammering out an outline. “In the first program of the series, we can alternate between Jesus and Paul,” Joel would suggest. “We zigzag between shots of Tarsus and Israel. Here we have Paul’s childhood in the Jewish Diaspora, and in the meantime”—he cut to a shot of the synagogue in Capernaum—“the other poor bastard is preaching in Galilee.” Again, I had to smile. Would I ever have imagined that I would one day be sitting at midnight in a grubby editing room in Jerusalem with a secularist, chain-smoking Jew, hearing Jesus referred to as a “poor bastard”?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Now that I no longer had to take Jacob to Mass on Sundays, I did not go myself. I had woken up on my first Sunday in London, registered what day it was, and decided to stay in bed for a while with a novel and a cup of coffee. My landlady had given me the address of the local Catholic church, but I knew that I was never going to set foot in it. Indeed, I now felt distaste for the whole churchy enterprise. It seemed not only a colossal waste of time and energy, but positively harmful too. If I saw somebody reading a theological or devotional book on the underground, I felt an involuntary twinge of disgust, and would even turn away as though I had seen something abhorrent. The word “God” or “Jesus” or “church” filled me with a lassitude akin to nausea. Conventional religion had worn me out and I wanted nothing more to do with it. If possible I would have liked to forget that it existed. It was quite easy to ignore religion in London. In Oxford there had been constant reminders: cloisters, church spires, bells that sonorously called worshipers to service, formal grace before dinner. All had recalled the age of faith when the university had been established. It was true that the religious customs often seemed quaint anachronisms and that many of those who actually attended a service simply wanted to hear one of Oxford’s fine choirs. “Oh, I don’t think that any of them are believers!” a choirmaster had said of his choristers during a radio interview; he had given the impression that the very notion of faith was outlandish. “No, no, none of them actually believe.” He had sounded anxious to reassure the host that the virus of religion had not contaminated his choir. Nevertheless, wherever I had looked in Oxford, there had been mementos of faith.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  He continued holding his hand over hers. “Wow, you really haven’t done this before, have you?” he commented. Then added, “Your mouth would feel even better.” He put a hand on top of her head and, Anwen recalled, “pushed down, pushed down, pushed down. This was not something I’d ever done before. And it didn’t feel good. I didn’t want to be doing it. It felt like I was going to choke. I was gagging.” Thinking that, as a newbie, she was growing frustrated with the “tips and tricks” he was offering, Sameer eventually let her up. “I know I’m hard to please,” he said, believing he was being magnanimous. He got up to go to the bathroom. “Let me just go finish up.” Anwen remembered thinking: I didn’t want to please you. I didn’t fucking want to please you. He came back and kissed her good night. For several hours, she lay in bed, scooched as close to the edge as possible, Sameer’s arm flung across her stomach, her eyes fixed longingly on the roommate’s stripped mattress. She cried quietly. And then she slept. As far as Sameer was concerned, the night had been a success. He lent Anwen a sweatshirt the next morning, secretly thinking that if she kept it, he’d have an excuse to see her again. “It’s so big on me!” she said. He laughed. “I’m so big on you!” He walked her to her dorm, kissed her once more. When someone opened the locked door to leave the building, Anwen grabbed it and dashed inside. “So, how was your night?” her roommate teased. Anwen was vague. A couple of days later, she told friends that she’d spent the night with Sameer, that the two of them had made out. “And,” she remembered, “I really didn’t know, so I was like, ‘Do I have to start dating him now?’” They got together once more, ostensibly to study. He leaned her back against a table and kissed her, pressing a knee between her legs. “You like that, don’t you?” he said. She did not, and wriggled away. After that, she went back to ignoring his texts. Sameer was disappointed but philosophical: “Fairly often at our school, people stopped talking after a hookup because they felt awkward and didn’t know how to communicate.” He didn’t grasp that he’d done anything amiss, and Anwen wasn’t about to tell him. In fact, she avoided him completely, leaving a room if she happened to spot him. Still, she couldn’t get that night out of her head: the images popped up unprompted, causing her to panic and gag, especially if she read or saw anything involving sex or assault. Always a straight-A student, she couldn’t focus on her studies and had to drop a class she was in danger of failing. When, sometime later, she began dating someone, physical intimacy, particularly oral sex, felt fraught.

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

  the first two parts did not come into general use as a standing formula of prayer until the thirteenth century.798 From that date the Ave Maria stands in the Roman church upon a level with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, and with them forms the basis of the rosary. § 83. The Festivals of Mary. This mythical and fantastic, and, we must add, almost pagan and idolatrous Mariology impressed itself on the public cultus in a series of festivals, celebrating the most important facts and fictions of the life of the Virgin, and in some degree running parallel with the festivals of the birth, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. 1. The Annunciation of Mary799 commemorates the announcement of the birth of Christ by the archangel Gabriel,800 and at the same time the conception of Christ; for in the view of the ancient church Mary conceived the Logos (Verbum) through the ear by the word of the angel. Hence the festival had its place on the 25th of March, exactly nine months before Christmas; though in some parts of the church, as Spain and Milan, it was celebrated in December, till the Roman practice conquered. The first trace of it occurs in Proclus, the opponent and successor of Nestorius in Constantinople after 430; then it appears more plainly in several councils and homilies of the seventh century. 2. The Purification of Mary801 or Candlemas, in memory of the ceremonial purification of the Virgin,802 forty days after the birth of Jesus, therefore on the 2d of February (reckoning from the 25th of December); and at the same time in memory of the presentation of Jesus in the temple and his meeting of Simeon and Anna.803 This, like the preceding, was thus originally as much a festival of Christ as of Mary, especially in the Greek church. It is supposed to have been introduced by Pope Gelasius in 494, though by some said not to have arisen till 542 under Justinian I., in consequence of a great earthquake and a destructive pestilence. Perhaps it was a Christian transformation of the old Roman lustrations or expiatory sacrifices (Februa, Februalia), which from the time of Numa took place in February, the month of purification or expiation.804 To heathen origin is due also the use of lighted tapers, with which the people on this festival marched, singing, out of the church through the city. Hence the name Candlemas.805 3. The Ascension, or Assumption rather, of Mary806 is celebrated on the 15th of August. The festival was introduced by the Greek emperor Mauritius (582–602); some say, under Pope Gelasius († 496). In Rome, after the ninth century, it is one of the principal feasts, and, like the others, is distinguished with vigil and octave. It rests, however, on a purely apocryphal foundation.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It seemed not only a colossal waste of time and energy, but positively harmful too. If I saw somebody reading a theological or devotional book on the underground, I felt an involuntary twinge of disgust, and would even turn away as though I had seen something abhorrent. The word “God” or “Jesus” or “church” filled me with a lassitude akin to nausea. Conventional religion had worn me out and I wanted nothing more to do with it. If possible I would have liked to forget that it existed. It was quite easy to ignore religion in London. In Oxford there had been constant reminders: cloisters, church spires, bells that sonorously called worshipers to service, formal grace before dinner. All had recalled the age of faith when the university had been established. It was true that the religious customs often seemed quaint anachronisms and that many of those who actually attended a service simply wanted to hear one of Oxford’s fine choirs. “Oh, I don’t think that any of them are believers!” a choirmaster had said of his choristers during a radio interview; he had given the impression that the very notion of faith was outlandish. “No, no, none of them actually believe.” He had sounded anxious to reassure the host that the virus of religion had not contaminated his choir. Nevertheless, wherever I had looked in Oxford, there had been mementos of faith. But life in London was very different. There I often passed churches that had been converted into warehouses, theaters, or art galleries. I even went to a dinner party in a flat that was cunningly constructed in the shell of a massive Victorian church: we sat under its rose window. None of the guests felt in the least uncomfortable about this sacred ambience; the ecclesiastical touches had simply been an amusing talking point. They had found it hilarious to ring the front-door bell and enter what had once been the church porch. Religion, it appeared, was quite risible. I noticed that I myself was reducing my convent past to a series of entertaining anecdotes. Hostesses often introduced me as an ex-nun, as though pulling a rabbit out of a hat: Look what I’ve got! Top that! My fellow guests might look faintly scandalized—“Do people truly do that anymore!”—or would ply me with endless questions about nuns’ underwear or convent hygiene. It did not usually occur to them that the religious life could be anything other than a joke. “You really should write all this up, Karen,” they would say. “It’s such a hoot!” I was uncomfortable about this but did not know what to do. Rebecca told me that she tried to hide the fact that she had been a nun, and would ask her hostesses not to mention it.

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

  To this gigantic evil the Christian church opposed an inexorable Puritanic rigor in the interest of virtue and humanity. No compromise was possible with such shocking public immorality. Nothing would do but to flee from it and to warn against it. The theatrical spectacles were included in "the pomp of the devil," which Christians renounced at their baptism. They were forbidden, on pain of excommunication, to attend them. It sometimes happened that converts, who were overpowered by their old habits and visited the theatre, either relapsed into heathenism, or fell for a long time into a state of deep dejection. Tatianus calls the spectacles terrible feasts, in which the soul feeds on human flesh and blood. Tertullian attacked them without mercy, even before he joined the rigorous Montanists. He reminds the catechumens, who were about to consecrate themselves to the service of God, that "the condition of faith and the laws of Christian discipline forbid, among other sins of the world, the pleasures of the public shows." They excite, he says, all sorts of wild and impure passions, anger, fury, and lust; while the spirit of Christianity is a spirit of meekness, peace, and purity." What a man should not say he should not hear. All licentious speech, nay, every idle word is condemned by God. The things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, defile him also when they go in at his eyes and ears. The true wrestlings of the Christian are to overcome unchastity by chastity, perfidy by faithfulness, cruelty by compassion and charity." Tertullian refutes the arguments with which loose Christians would plead for those fascinating amusements; their appeals to the silence of the Scriptures, or even to the dancing of David before the ark, and to Paul’s comparison of the Christian life with the Grecian games. He winds up with a picture of the fast approaching day of judgment, to which we should look forward. He inclined strongly to the extreme view, that all art is a species of fiction and falsehood, and inconsistent with Christian truthfulness. In two other treatises612 he warned the Christian women against all display of dress, in which the heathen women shone in temples, theatres, and public places. Visit not such places, says he to them, and appear in public only for earnest reasons. The handmaids of God must distinguish themselves even outwardly from the handmaids of Satan, and set the latter a good example of simplicity, decorum, and chastity.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Never put your hands where they aren’t getting paid. When the notes dried, I balled them together into a paper onion and put it back in her pocket. Imagined her taking the bus out to another house in the hills, hands in her pockets the whole ride west, the noteball hot and pulsing in her palm, pumping like an organ that keeps her alive until she’s home. _ At the mannequin factory, Jie is part of the arm team: She’s the one who counts the number of fingers on each arm before passing it on to the surgical team. The day after a heat wave, Jie and the other girls walk into the factory and see that all the mannequins have melted together into one body, some linked at the hips, others glued elbow-to-elbow. The girls have to spend three days with handsaws to divide the mannequins from one another, and even after that, most are unidentifiable by the standards of their manual. Jie drags them to the dumpster one by one. One of the mannequins has a belly like it’s pregnant: The head of another mannequin has fused to its stomach. When Jie saws the belly open, she finds a single bullet in its center. We have nothing to shoot it from, so we decide to bury it beneath Ma’s chili shrubs. I am supposed to be watering them and haven’t, so all the chilies are pale as finger-bones. After we bury the bullet, the chilies grow fat as udders. I pick them for Ma, but she says they’ve gone bad. I say they can’t be bad, I just picked them. I pluck the fattest of the chilies and de-stem it with my teeth: She’s right. They taste like rust, like menstrual blood, ripe with shed death. _ I do yard work for an Armenian woman two streets over. Her hose is patched with kiddie Band-Aids, and she only has one tree that requires constant pruning. The tree bears some kind of fruit I have no language for, and when I try to bite into one, the woman slaps it from my hand. She points at her mouth, then mimes gagging. I think she’s telling me they’re poisonous, which only makes me wonder why I’m pruning this tree in the first place. The tree’s branches grow in an upward curve, the shape of a bowl offered up to the sky. The dead branches are black and wax-soft. I climb into the lower branches and amputate the rotten ones, counting each as it drops. The tree one-ups me, rotting two shades blacker when I blink. Jie says to be careful: The Armenian woman’s husband is a soldier like Ba and shies easily, sometimes even eating the mirror when it shows him his face.

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

  Servetus was by no means satisfied with the answer, and wrote back that Calvin made two or three Sons of God; that the Wisdom of God spoken of by Solomon was allegorical and impersonal; that regeneration took place in the moment of baptism by water and the spirit, but never in infant baptism. He denied that circumcision corresponded to baptism. He put five new theological questions to Calvin, and asked him to read the fourth chapter on baptism in the manuscript of the Restitutio which he had sent him.1072 To these objections Calvin sent another and more lengthy response.1073 He again offered further explanation, though he had no time to write whole books for him, and had discussed all these topics in his Institutes.1074 So far there is nothing to indicate any disposition in Calvin to injure Servetus. On the contrary we must admire his patience and moderation in giving so much of his precious time to the questions of a troublesome stranger and pronounced opponent. Servetus continued to press Calvin with letters, and returned the copy of the Institutes with copious critical objections. "There is hardly a page," says Calvin, "that is not defiled by his vomit."1075 Calvin sent a final answer to the questions of Servetus, which is lost, together with a French letter to Frellon, which is preserved.1076 This letter is dated Feb. 13, 1546, under his well-known pseudonym of Charles Despeville, and is as follows:—

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

  and the six days of labor, to the prejudice of the former, and plays into the hands of idleness. And finally, it rests in great part upon uncertain legends and fantastic myths, which in some cases even eclipse the miracles of the gospel history, and nourish the grossest superstition. The Greek oriental church year differs from the Roman in this general characteristic: that it adheres more closely to the Jewish ceremonies and customs, while the Roman attaches itself to the natural year and common life. The former begins in the middle of September (Tisri), with the first Sunday after the feast of the Holy Cross; the latter, with the beginning of Advent, four weeks before Christmas. Originally Easter was the beginning of the church year, both in the East and in the West; and the Apostolic Constitutions and Eusebius call the month of Easter the "first month" (corresponding to the month Nisan, which opened the sacred year of the Jews, while the first of Tisri, about the middle of our September, opened their civil year). In the Greek church also the lectiones continuae of the Holy Scriptures, after the example of the Jewish Parashioth and Haphthoroth, became prominent and the church year came to be divided according to the four Evangelists; while in the Latin church, since the sixth century, only select sections from the Gospels, and Epistles, called pericopes, have been read. Another peculiarity of the Western church year, descending from the fourth century, is the division into four portions, of three months each, called Quatember,713 separated from each other by a three days’ fast. Pope Leo I. delivered several sermons on the quarterly Quatember fast,714 and urges especially on that occasion charity to the poor. Instead of this the Greek church has a division according to the four Gospels, which are read entire in course; Matthew next after Pentecost, Luke beginning on the fourteenth of September, Mark at the Easter fast, and John on the first Sunday after Easter. So early as the fourth century the observance of the festivals was enjoined under ecclesiastical penalties, and was regarded as an established divine ordinance. But the most eminent church teachers, a Chrysostom, a Jerome, and an Augustine, expressly insist, that the observance of the Christian festivals must never be a work of legal constraint, but always an act of evangelical freedom; and Socrates, the historian, says, that Christ and the apostles have given no laws and prescribed no penalties concerning it.715 The abuse of the festivals soon fastened itself on the just use of them and the sensual excesses of the pagan feasts, in spite of the earnest warnings of several fathers, swept in like a wild flood upon the church.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Now that I no longer had to take Jacob to Mass on Sundays, I did not go myself. I had woken up on my first Sunday in London, registered what day it was, and decided to stay in bed for a while with a novel and a cup of coffee. My landlady had given me the address of the local Catholic church, but I knew that I was never going to set foot in it. Indeed, I now felt distaste for the whole churchy enterprise. It seemed not only a colossal waste of time and energy, but positively harmful too. If I saw somebody reading a theological or devotional book on the underground, I felt an involuntary twinge of disgust, and would even turn away as though I had seen something abhorrent. The word “God” or “Jesus” or “church” filled me with a lassitude akin to nausea. Conventional religion had worn me out and I wanted nothing more to do with it. If possible I would have liked to forget that it existed. It was quite easy to ignore religion in London. In Oxford there had been constant reminders: cloisters, church spires, bells that sonorously called worshipers to service, formal grace before dinner. All had recalled the age of faith when the university had been established. It was true that the religious customs often seemed quaint anachronisms and that many of those who actually attended a service simply wanted to hear one of Oxford’s fine choirs. “Oh, I don’t think that any of them are believers!” a choirmaster had said of his choristers during a radio interview; he had given the impression that the very notion of faith was outlandish. “No, no, none of them actually believe.” He had sounded anxious to reassure the host that the virus of religion had not contaminated his choir. Nevertheless, wherever I had looked in Oxford, there had been mementos of faith.

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

  The Libertines taught the community of goods and of women, and elevated spiritual marriage above legal marriage, which is merely carnal and not binding. The wife of Ameaux justified her wild licentiousness by the doctrine of the communion of saints, and by the first commandment of God given to man: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth (Gen. 1:28). The Libertines rejected the Scriptures as a dead letter, or they resorted to wild allegorical interpretations to suit their fancies. They gave to each of the Apostles a ridiculous nickname.734 Some carried their system to downright atheism and blasphemous anti-Christianity. They used a peculiar jargon, like the Gypsies, and distorted common words into a mysterious meaning. They were experts in the art of simulation and justified pious fraud by the parables of Christ. They accommodated themselves to Catholics or Protestants according to circumstances, and concealed their real opinions from the uninitiated. The sect made progress among the higher classes of France, where they converted about four thousand persons. Quintin and Pocquet insinuated themselves into the favor of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who protected and supported them at her little court at Nérac, yet without adopting their opinions and practices.735 She took offence at Calvin’s severe attack upon them. He justified his course in a reply of April 28, 1545, which is a fine specimen of courtesy, frankness, and manly dignity. Calvin assured the queen, whose protection he had himself enjoyed while a fugitive from persecution, that he intended no reflection on her honor, or disrespect to her royal majesty, and that he wrote simply in obedience to his duty as a minister. "Even a dog barks if he sees any one assault his master. How could I be silent if God’s truth is assailed?736 ... As for your saying that you would not like to have such a servant as myself, I confess that I am not qualified to render you any great service, nor have you need of it … . Nevertheless, the disposition is not wanting, and your disdain shall not prevent my being at heart your humble servant. For the rest, those who know me are well aware that I have never studied to enter into the courts of princes, for I was never tempted to court worldly honors.737 For I have good reason to be contented with the service of that good Master, who has accepted me and retained me in the honorable office which I hold, however contemptible in the eyes of the world. I should, indeed, be ungrateful beyond measure if I did not prefer this condition to all the riches and honors of the world."738 Beza says: "It was owing to Calvin that this horrid sect, in which all the most monstrous heresies of ancient times were renewed, was kept within the confines of Holland and the adjacent provinces."

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  A girl in a striped crop top, leggings, and sneakers barreled over, already a little tipsy. “It’s so unfair to have a vagina,” she complained, once I’d explained my presence. “They’re so hard to deal with. For guys, it’s just simple. I mean, I’ve read Judith Butler. I love Judith Butler. I know gender doesn’t exist, but still. Girls have to deal with sexism and then on top of it we’re so hard to please sexually.” I asked how she thought the boy standing next to us might respond to that. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you think as a guy you see the world differently?” she demanded. He stared at her, confused. “Um, I think as an individual I see the world differently?” he said, then turned his back on her. “Well,” she said, disgusted, “that was a cop-out.” She wandered off; when I spotted her again, a few minutes later, she was leaning against a wall, making out with a guy whom, I’d later find out, she had just met. I watched a different boy, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “apathy,” weave through the crowd. He caressed several girls’ bare shoulders, dropped his head on another one’s chest (she immediately took a step back), hit up someone for her Snapchat. Iris had invited this boy specially; they’d hooked up a couple of times recently and she thought there was potential for something more. Judging by his behavior, though, that wasn’t looking likely. He paused next to me, Solo cup in hand, surveying the room. Iris had told him I was writing about hookup culture; he took that to mean I was focused on rape. “Guys are a lot worse at those Big Ten schools,” he said. “That’s where you see all the assault. It’s awful. Here, guys are respectful.” “What about Brock Turner?” I countered. “He went to Stanford. That’s not a Big Ten school.” “Yeah,” a second boy broke in, “but he was an athlete. He wasn’t there on merit.” A third boy agreed. “It really comes down to communication,” he said. “You have to communicate with your partner.” I turned to a girl who had been listening without comment. “Do boys usually ‘communicate’ with you during a hookup?” I asked. She grimaced and shook her head. “I mean, you’re usually drunk, right?” I asked the boy. “Well,” he said, “I don’t hook up with anyone drunk that I wouldn’t get with sober.” “Does ‘communicating’ also mean you don’t just stop talking to a girl after a hookup or ignore her when you see her again?” He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, um . . .” “Or that you make sure your partner has an orgasm whether or not you do?” He glanced longingly toward the group playing rage cage. “Um . . .” he repeated.