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 The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  That is your punishment for the death of my wife.’ Phoebus reached into the cage and pulled out all of the bird’s white feathers one by one. Then he struck it dumb, depriving it of speech and song, before he drove it out of the house. May the fiend take the bird. And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, all crows are black. So take heed of this story and remember to think before you speak. Guard your tongue. Never tell a man that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Whether you are right or wrong, he will hate you for it. According to eminent scholars, Solomon had learned discretion at an early age. But, as I said, I am not a learned man. My mother is my real teacher. Once she said to me, ‘Son, for God’s sake think of the crow. Curb your tongue and keep your friends. A loose tongue is more destructive than the devil. You can cross yourself to ward off the foul fiend.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  In a few minutes he’d start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we’d go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat. I looked at Dad. He wasn’t smiling, and he kept pulling at the skin of his neck as if he were itchy. • • • We followed Erma and Stanley and Grandpa inside. It was cold in the house, and the air smelled of mold and cigarettes and unwashed laundry. We huddled around a potbellied cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the living room and held out our hands to warm them. Erma pulled a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looked happy for the first time since we’d left Phoenix. Erma ushered us into the kitchen, where she was fixing dinner. A bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting harsh light on the yellowed walls, which were coated with a thin film of grease. Erma stuck a curved steel handle into an iron disk on top of an old coal cooking stove, lifted it, and with her other hand grabbed a poker from the wall and jabbed at the hot orange coals inside. She stirred a potful of green beans stewing in fatback and poured in a big handful of salt. Then she set a tray of Pillsbury biscuits on the kitchen table and ladled out a plate of the beans for each of us kids. The beans were so overcooked that they fell apart when I stuck my fork in them and so salty that I could barely force myself to swallow. I pinched my nose closed, which was the way Mom had taught us to get down things that had gone a little bit rotten. Erma saw me and slapped my hand away. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. There were three bedrooms upstairs, Erma said, but no one had been to the second floor in nigh on ten years, because the floorboards were rotted through. Uncle Stanley volunteered to give us his room in the basement and sleep on a cot in the foyer while we were there. “We’ll only be staying a few days,” Dad said, “until we find a place of our own.” After dinner, Mom and us kids went down into the basement. It was a big dank room, with cinder-block walls and a green linoleum floor. There was another coal stove, a bed, a pullout couch where Mom and Dad could sleep, and a chest of drawers painted fire-engine red. It held hundreds of dog-eared comic books—Little Lulu, Richie Rich, Beetle Bailey, Archie and Jughead—that Uncle Stanley had collected over the years. Under the chest of drawers were jugs of genuine moonshine. We kids climbed into Stanley’s bed. To make it less crowded, Lori and I lay down with our heads at one end, and Brian and Maureen lay down with theirs at the other.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I have Astroturf and a whole lot of high-quality plastic flowers stuck in the dirt of our front yard. These are quite a lovely sight and bring to mind many e. e. cummings poems. People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here. They’d end up looking like I watered them with Agent Orange. I’d tell people that I didn’t do well with potted plants, and they’d decide that I’d just never met the right one and that they were going to be the person to free me and cause God to restore my glorious gift of sight and all that, and they’d bring me some little training plant, and I’d try really hard to water it and keep it in or out of sunlight, whatever its little card of introduction said it preferred, and to take it for little walks around the house, and within about a month you could almost hear chlorophyllous breakdown, a Panic in Needle Park sort of thing. Then you’d see it clutching its little throat, staring at you with its little Keane eyes, gasping and accusing—and I mean, who needs it? Believe me, I have enough problems as it is. I actually kept this one horrible plant alive for months, this huge potted thing. I don’t even know what it was, but it was about three feet tall, before its decline, and green in a sort of fake jolly way. I watered it, I cut off its dead leaves, and how did it repay me? By becoming Howard Hughes in his last days. It lost all this weight, it stopped going out. I came to believe that it would be requesting latex gloves soon, boxes of them, and boxes of Kleenex with which to cover its food between bites. I gave it water, sunlight, expensive plant food—what was I supposed to do, get it a psychiatrist? So I finally came to my senses, took it outside, and put it against the side of the house where I wouldn’t have to look at it. You are probably thinking that it immediately began to flourish, but it didn’t. It died. So, needless to say, when it came time to design a garden for my main character, I wasn’t going to be able to plumb the depths of my own gardening experience. But I just knew somehow, without being able to explain the process to you, that this main character gardened. I love to see people in gardens, I love the meditation of sitting alone in gardens, I love all the metaphors that gardens are. The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer.

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

  But the very fact of the frequent repetition of these enactments, and the necessity of mitigating the penalties of transgression, show the great difficulty of carrying this unnatural restriction into general effect. In the British and Irish church, isolated as it was from the Roman, the marriage of priests continued to prevail down to the Anglo-Saxon period. But with the disappearance of legitimate marriage in the priesthood, the already prevalent vice of the cohabitation of unmarried ecclesiastics with pious widows and virgins "secretly brought in,"439 became more and more common. This spiritual marriage, which had begun as a bold ascetic venture, ended only too often in the flesh, and prostituted the honor of the church. The Nicene council of 325 met the abuse in its third canon with this decree: "The great council utterly forbids, and it shall not be allowed either to a bishop, or a priest, or a deacon, or any other clergyman, to have with him a sunqeivsakto", unless she be his mother, or sister, or aunt, or some such person, who is beyond all suspicion."440 This canon forms the basis of the whole subsequent legislation of the church de cohabitatione clericorum et mulierum. It had to be repeatedly renewed and strengthened; showing plainly that it was often disobeyed. The council of Toledo in Spain, A.D. 527 or 531, ordered in its third canon: "No clergyman, from the subdeacon upward, shall live with a female, be she free woman, freed woman, or slave. Only a mother, or a sister, or other near relative shall keep his house. If he have no near relative, his housekeeper must live in a separate house, and shall under no pretext enter his dwelling. Whosoever acts contrary to this, shall not only be deprived of his spiritual office and have the doors of his church closed, but shall also be excluded from all fellowship of Catholics." The Concilium Agathense in South Gaul, A.D. 506, at which thirty-five bishops met, decreed in the tenth and eleventh canons: "A clergyman shall neither visit nor receive into his house females not of his kin; only with his mother, or sister, or daughter, or niece may he live. Female slaves, also, and freed women, must be kept away from the house of a clergyman." Similar laws, with penalties more or less severe, were passed by the council of Hippo, 393, of Angers, 453, of Tours, 461, of Lerida in Spain, 524, of Clermont, 535, of Braga, 563, of Orleans, 538, of Tours, 567.441 The emperor Justinian, in the twenty-third Novelle, prohibited the bishop having any woman at all in his house, but the Trullan council of 692 returned simply to the Nicene law.442 The Western councils also made attempts to abolish the exceptions allowed in the Nicene canon, and forbade clergymen all intercourse with women, except in presence of a companion.

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

  The domestic or home mission work embraces the revival of Christian life in corrupt or neglected portions of the church in old countries, the supply of emigrants in new countries with the means of grace, and the labors, among the semi-heathenism populations of large cities. Here we may mention the planting of a purer Christianity among the petrified sects in Bible Lands, the labors of the Gustavus Adolphus Society, and the Inner mission of Germany, the American Home Missionary Societies for the western states and territories, the City Mission Societies in London, New York, and other fast-growing cities. II. The history of Persecution by hostile powers; as by Judaism and Heathenism in the first three centuries, and by Mohammedanism in the middle age. This apparent repression of the church proves a purifying process, brings out the moral heroism of martyrdom, and thus works in the end for the spread and establishment of Christianity. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church."2 There are cases, however, where systematic and persistent persecution has crushed out the church or reduced it to a mere shadow, as in Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, under the despotism of the Moslems. Persecution, like missions, is both foreign and domestic. Besides being assailed from without by the followers of false religions, the church suffers also from intestine wars and violence. Witness the religious wars in France, Holland, and England, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, all of which grew out of the Protestant Reformation and the Papal Reaction; the crusade against the Albigenses and Waldenses, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the massacre of the Huguenots, the dragonnades of Louis XIV., the crushing out of the Reformation in Bohemia, Belgium, and Southern Europe; but also, on the Protestant side, the persecution of Anabaptists, the burning of Servetus in Geneva the penal laws of the reign of Elizabeth against Catholic and Puritan Dissenters, the hanging of witches and Quakers in New England. More Christian blood has been shed by Christians than by heathens and Mohammedans. The persecutions of Christians by Christians form the satanic chapters, the fiendish midnight scenes, in the history of the church. But they show also the gradual progress of the truly Christian spirit of religious toleration and freedom. Persecution exhausted ends in toleration, and toleration is a step to freedom. The blood of patriots is the price of civil, the blood of martyrs the price of religious liberty. The conquest is dear, the progress slow and often interrupted, but steady and irresistible. The principle of intolerance is now almost universally disowned in the Christian world, except by ultramontane Romanism (which indirectly reasserts it in the Papal Syllabus of 1864); but a ruling church, allied to the state, under the influence of selfish human nature, and, relying on the arm of flesh rather than the power of truth, is always tempted to impose or retain unjust restrictions on dissenting sects, however innocent and useful they may have proved to be.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  C. In the story that follows in the rest of the narrative portion of the Confessions, Augustine will learn how to deal with mystery and will conquer his desire to understand everything with the same assurance that he understands that 7 + 3 = 10. III. Augustine begins his narrative by considering what he was like as a baby, even a baby one day old. A. He explains that he speculates about his infancy based on watching infants later in life. B. He considers babies who are one day old to be sinners, because all babies show a radical selfishness, not regarding anything except their immediate desires, such as milk from their mothers’ breasts. C. Augustine recognizes that such behavior as crying for food is discarded when children grow older. D. However, Augustine believes that the value of understanding a baby’s selfishness is that he or she and not the specific manifested behavior must be corrected as soon as the child can learn from correction. E. He claims that it is a good thing that babies are so physically limited; otherwise, their selfishness could cause real damage. F. This recognition of the need for the reorientation of each person from being self-centered to being God-centered is the basis for Augustine’s theory of education. 1. Education is used in the Platonic sense of turning people toward the highest things. 2. Augustine is, thus, introducing a Christianized version of Plato’s understanding of education. 3. Augustine will later clarify this by alluding to having been in the “cave” for quite a long time. IV. Augustine looks back on his earliest schooling with loathing for its goals and for his behavior. A. He understands that his schoolmasters saw their job as teaching Augustine how to be successful—defined as achieving fame and fortune—in the world. B. He especially hated corporal punishment when he was lazy in his schoolwork. 16 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Diré la verdad. En algún momento. Ella se dará cuenta que soy demasiado viejo, demasiado estable, y querrá más. No durará. Sin embargo, saber eso no me impide desearla, extrañarla y necesitarla. La cama se hunde detrás de mí, y parpadeo, dándome cuenta que hay alguien más en la habitación. Me toma un momento registrarlo, pero luego el alivio me inunda, y llevo mi mano hacia atrás, atrayéndola hacia mí. Jordan. Pero luego frunzo el ceño, mi corazón martilleando mientras el Heavenly de Victoria's Secret recorre mis fosas nasales, y siento una pierna que no tiene las mismas curvas y el mismo tono que he llegado a ansiar todos los días. Saltando, vuelvo la cabeza y veo un contorno familiar a mi lado pero no el que quiero. —¿Qué demonios? Arranco las sábanas y enciendo la lámpara, sentándome y mirando a Lindsay. Está usando un camisón de seda rojo. ¿Qué diablos cree que está haciendo? —¿En serio? —Me mira sorprendida, como si esa no fuera la reacción que esperaba—. No pretendas que no recuerdas la rutina, Pike. Cuando algo seguro aparece medio desnudo y caliente en tu cama, no lo rechazas. Se inclina, presionando su cuerpo contra el mío y yendo por mi cuello con su boca. —Detente. —Me levanto de la cama y tomo mis jeans de la silla, poniéndomelos—. No estoy tan jodidamente desesperado. —No tiene por qué ser así, Pike. —Suspira, se desliza más cerca de rodillas y se coloca el cabello oscuro detrás de la oreja—. Era joven, estúpida y egoísta — suplica—. No vi lo buen hombre que eres. Lo afortunada que fui al tener a alguien ambicioso, responsable y estable. Te quiero. —Ladea la cabeza, jugando con sus ojos—. No fue del todo malo. Lo recuerdas, ¿verdad? Recuerdas lo ardiente que éramos. Busco en el cajón de mi mesita de noche, viendo la nueva caja de condones que tuve que comprar, porque Jordan y yo pasamos por la última más rápido de lo que esperaba. Rápidamente saco un cigarro de la caja y el encendedor y cierro el cajón, para que Lindsay no lo vea y empiece a ser entrometida. —No tenía mucho de un marco de referencia en ese momento —escupo—. Ahora sí. —Estás solo —afirma—. Quiero intentarlo de nuevo. Por el amor de Cole. ¿Sabes cuánto le gustaría vernos juntos? Era demasiado joven para recordar. Dejo escapar una risa amarga. Y gracias a Dios por eso. Llegar a casa después de un turno doble y desembolsar sesenta dólares a una niñera antes de pasar el resto de la noche durmiendo una hora cuando podía, entre las horas de alimentación de Cole mientras ella estaba de fiesta. —¿No estás cansado de salir solo? —Se levanta de la cama y se acerca a mí—. ¿Ver a todos nuestros amigos con sus familias, hogares y vacaciones? Podemos ser eso. Crecí. Podría estar aquí para ti, cuidándote y cuidando esta casa. Esta casa. Se refiere a nuestra casa. Quiere vivir aquí.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  But I let her do my lips, which felt like she was searing off my vulva. I couldn’t believe that other women did this. Who were these people? Then she did my asshole, which she said she had to do, because it was “carrying around stink.” I’d been carrying around stink for thirty-eight years. When I got home I lay down with Dominic and held a package of frozen edamame to my vagina. I hated everything. Now the dress, the lipstick, even my hair color seemed stupid. I realized I didn’t care about any of this stuff, even the dress, which I had loved. It wasn’t about the dress. It was in the acquisition of the dress that there had been beauty. I thought about different kinds of happiness. There was the happiness I felt in all of the adrenaline of running around, a crazed happiness. This was a different happiness from the quiet peace of just being with Dominic. I kissed his ear. “Sorry I get so distracted,” I said. He sniffed at me. Suddenly I didn’t want to go out with Adam anymore. I fell asleep with the edamame defrosting on my vagina. But the next morning, my excitement—that sense of purpose—was oddly restored. I woke up to a text from Adam that said, see you tonight gorgeous. There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me. It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness. Now I felt passion and love for everything. 14. I found myself out on the rocks again later that night. I was throwing shells into the water when Theo the swimmer came paddling up, shoulders white in the moonlight. I hoped he would be there. He seemed happy to see me too. “You came back,” he said. “I did.” “Hi,” he said. “Hi. You’re really not freezing?” “No, it feels natural.” “Crazy. So I have a question. Do you like Bukowski?” I asked. “Who?” he said. “Charles Bukowski; he’s a poet.” “I don’t know who that is,” he said, treading water. “Why?” “It’s not important,” I said. “No, tell me why. Do you like him?” “Definitely not,” I said. “But I just went on a date with someone who is a big fan.” “You did?” said Theo. “How was that for you?” I couldn’t tell if he seemed genuinely interested or if he was just being polite. “Heinous,” I said. “That can happen, I suppose,” he said. Suddenly I felt too…something. I wanted him to know I had gone on a date, because I wanted to see what his response would be. But I didn’t want him to think that I was a complainer or needy, or that things didn’t work out for me. I didn’t want to seem bitter.

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

  If we desire priestly rule, there was enough of it to satisfy any one. But with the rule of the priesthood came the loss of individual freedom and the right of the soul to determine its own destiny in the sight of the Creator. De Voragine2154 speaks of Thomas à Becket, by great abstinence making his body lean and his soul fat. He had a right to do as he pleased. But it was the same prelate who expressed the hierarchical pride of the age when he exclaimed to an English king that priests are the fathers and masters of kings. The laity, according to Caesar of Heisterbach, as already quoted, were compared to the night, the clergy to the day, The preacher Werner of St. Blasius called the peasants the feet whose toil was appointed to maintain the more worthy parts of the body,—bishops, priests, and monks.2155 The thinkers of this period had no vision of the Reformation. The Middle Ages have been praised as a period of religious contentment and freedom from sectarian strife. The very contrary was the case. The strife between the friars and the secular clergy and, in cases, within the monastic orders themselves equals in bitterness any strife that has been maintained between branches of the Protestant Church. It was a question not whether there was religious unrest but, from the days of Arnold of Brescia on, how the established Church might crush out heretical revolt. There was also religious doubt among the monks, and there were women who denied that Eve had been tempted by an apple, as Caesar of Heisterbach assures us. The superstitions which prevailed were largely inherited from preceding ages. The worship of Mary clouded the merits of Christ. What can be said when Thomas of Chantimpré, d. about 1263, relates in all seriousness that a robber, whose head had been cut off, kept calling upon the Virgin, as the body rolled down a hill, until the parts were put together by a priest. The criminal then told how, as a boy, he had devoted Saturdays and Wednesdays to Mary and she had promised he should not die till opportunity was given him to make confession. So he made confession and died again, and, as the reader is left to believe, went into the other world rejoicing. The gruesome tales of demoniacal presence and influence indicate a condition of mind from which we do well to be thankful we are delivered. John of St. Giles, the admirable English Dominican, used to say, as he retired to his cell in the evening, "Now I await my martyrdom," meaning the buffetings of the devil. The awful story of how Ludwig the Iron, 1100–1172, was welcomed to hell and shown all its compartments and then pitched mercilessly into quenchless flames is no worse than the visions of Dante, but too revolting in the apparent callousness of it to the suffering of others not to call forth a shudder to-day.2156

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Gluttony is a cursed vice. It is the cause of our confusion on earth. It was the reason for our damnation, until it was paid for by the blood of Christ upon the cross. Yet at what a high price! Gluttony has corrupted the whole world. Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden as a result of their greed, condemned to a life of labour and of woe. As long as Adam fasted, he was happy in paradise. There is no doubt about it. But as soon as he tasted the forbidden fruit he was cast into the lower world of shame and suffering. We all ought to cry out against gluttony. If you knew how many diseases and complaints afflict the greedy man, you would be more temperate. You would maintain a proper diet, and enjoy good health. Alas the open mouth and the eager appetite! Men must labour, north and west, east and south, on land and sea, and in the air, to satisfy the stomachs of greedy men who crave more meat, more wine, more everything. Saint Paul has summarized the matter very well. ‘Meat is for the belly, and the belly is for meat. But in good time God will destroy them both.’ No words can tell, no tongue can name, the horrors of gluttony. A man then turns his mouth into a public toilet, a sink into which is poured the filth of alcohol; then he spews it out again. The apostle has recorded his lament. ‘Many are walking on this earth,’ he said, ‘who are enemies of Christ crucified. I tell you this in sorrow. Their fate is death everlasting. If their belly is their god, they will be condemned.’ Belly! Stomach! Words for a stinking bag of flesh, filled with shit and corrupted filth. From either end comes a foul wind. Sustenance is found for you at great cost and hard labour. The cooks have to grind and pound and mince, turning one dish into the likeness of another, just to satisfy you. They have to extract the marrow from the bones, just so that you can swallow the sweetest juices. They have to concoct spices out of herbs and leaves, so that they can make a sauce to stir your appetite. Yet you who live for such delights are as good as dead. Your vices have killed you.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Later, in his own house, when Hughie tried to come on with me for the first time—nibbling, appropriately rabbit-like, at my chest—I pushed him away, despising him strangely. “Youre too old for me anyway,” he said. “I prefer them very young and very, very dumb, dear,” he went on cuttingly. “In their 20s, theyve already been had too often—and in too many ways. I like the little boys who can still get aroused by dirty pictures. I like to watch the naughtiness awaken.... Theres a family near me—three boys, the oldest seventeen, the youngest twelve,” he bragged, “and Ive had the first two, now Im working on The Young One. They read comicbooks—not D. H. Lawrence!” He smacked his lips lecherously; and noticing my reaction of disgust, he said laughingly but still seriously: “Blame the aunts, dear.” “The aunts?” “Yes—I was raised by two maiden aunts—they taught me to play with paperdolls. Each time I seduce a very young boy (oh, anywhere around fifteen years—anyone over that is, well, just extra),” he aimed at me, “each time, you know, well, I Offer him Up to The Aunts!”... And so all those reminders of the premium placed on Youth mesmerized me, made me focus on that particular summer, as, later, I would try to focus on whatever particular season it was. I canceled out the future—or tried to—as if only the Present existed and would go on forever. I was crazily convinced that somehow if I concentrated only on Today, the specter of that shattering tomorrow would disappear.... But in a life that can date you when you begin to look over 25, I felt myself clawing to hold on to the present.... At the Ranch Market on Vine Street, a cockeyed clock winds its hands swiftly backwards. Longingly I stand before it. It was that summer that I met Dave. On the beach one morning I had met a malenurse who was going on a splurging scene with several credit cards (which may or may not have been stolen), and I got in on it: Wellington boots, khaki levis, shirts. Because he was staying at the home of the man he was nursing, we went that night to the apartment of a friend of his—a giddy short Italian. Lying on a couch was a darkly handsome, masculine youngman who looked immediately to me like a hustler. We acknowledged each other with a nod. When I came out of the room with the malenurse and the giddy Italian, the dark youngman I had seen on the couch was gone. A few days later, in an all-night coffeehouse on Sunset, he sat next to me. His name was Dave, and I had been wrong about his scene: He was not a hustler. He worked in an airplane factory, he told me, and he went to school at night. He quickly explained that he merely shared that apartment with the giddy Italian; that there was nothing between them.

• From City of Night (1963)

  In one fierce movement, he planted one of the heavy boots harshly on his crotch, grinding it in savagely. His previous look—impeccable, composed—disappeared, became rapt. His face contorted ecstatically as he utters a pained “Ugh!” And he coaxes me: “Put them on please.” His voice has become a complete whine. “Please—? Please command me to do whatever you want!” I stare fascinated at him. “Is that a glimmer of interest I detect in your eyes?” he asks me, laughing. The boot is still pinioned between his legs. “You dont detect anything!” I said angrily. “I feel cheated, then,” he said. “Not because of the money—but because I somehow expected so much of you.... Wont you... let me... Idolize you?” he said slowly. “Won’t you be brutal?” I have always been repelled by pain, either inflicting or receiving it. Why then did I feel a dart of excitement at the man’s words? To squelch that feeling, I walked out quickly. There is a theater on Market Street that changes features daily: One of those enormous swallowing buildings with a dark, dark balcony. Its back rows fill quickly with men, and there is constant movement. The most intimate sexscenes are sometimes played out here, at times in groups gathered like dark vultures.... As I sat down, halfway up the balcony, a man moved hurriedly from another aisle to sit directly beneath me, where my legs were propped on his seat almost straddling his shouders. In a quick movement, he turned his face sideways, brushing the Wellington boots with his tongue. When I didnt move, he got up, startlingly gasped at me: “I like mean sex, I’ll pay.” My stomach contracted violently. With excitement? With revulsion?... I didnt wait to find out Three people haunted me now much like that man whom I had first attempted to steal from: the man with the bleeding nose, the man with the boot hammered into his crotch, and the man in the theater.... I told myself I had seen enough. I stayed away from the Stirrup Club. In the afternoons, at the Y, I would go to the highest part of the sundeck where you could make it. Late at night, into the mornings, the showers ran unstopping. Eventually it became too hectic, and I moved out of the Y and into an apartment on Bush Street. Now in the afternoons I would go to Aquatic Park: a short beach curled along the bay, a section like a truncated stadium—concrete stairs—where you sit and wait.... Other times I would go to a cliff outside the city—where, walking along a path that seems completely deserted, you suddenly may discover men intimately locked with each other. With someone met in that journey through other lives, I went to Carmel. To Monterey.... To Big Sur: craggy awesome cliffs outlined by twisted trees.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arriving at truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. Each one was meaningful—but only in its own context. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence,” 46 because theological language worked “on an entirely different plane.” 47 Positivists and atheists who applied the norms of scientific rationality and common sense to religion and those theologians who tried to prove God’s existence had all done “infinite harm,” 48 because they implied that God was an external fact—an idea that was intolerable to Wittgenstein. “If I thought of God as another being outside myself, only infinitely more powerful,” he insisted, “then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.” 49 Religious language was essentially symbolic; it was “disgusting” 50 if interpreted literally, but symbolically it had the power to manifest a transcendent reality in the same way as the short stories of Tolstoy. Such works of art did not argue their case or produce evidence but somehow called into being the ineffable reality they evoked. But because the transcendent reality was ineffable—”wonderful beyond words” 51 —we would never come to know God merely by talking about him. We had to change our behavior, “try to be helpful to other people,” and leave egotism behind. 52 If, Wittgenstein believed, he would one day be capable of making his entire nature bow down “in humble resignation to the dust,” then, he thought, God would, as it were, come to him. 53 The German philosopher Martin Heidegger had no time for the modern, personalized God but saw Sein (“Being”) as the supreme reality. It was not a being, so bore no relation to any reality that we knew; it was wholly other and should more accurately be called Nothing. And yet, paradoxically, Being was seiender (“being-er”), more complete than any particular being. Despite its utter transcendence, we can gain some understanding of it—but not through the aggressive thrust of scientific investigation. Instead, we had to cultivate what Heidegger called “primordial thinking,” a listening, receptive attitude characterized by silence. This was not a logical process, and it was not something that we did. Instead, it was something that happened within us, a lighting up—almost a revelation. Being was not a fact that we could grasp once and for all, but an apprehension that we built up over time, repetitively and incrementally. We had to immerse ourselves in this cast of mind again and again, in rather the same way as a historian projects himself repeatedly into a historical figure or era. Theologians, Heidegger believed, had reduced God to a mere being. God had become Someone Else and theology a positive science.

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

  Anchoretism almost always carries a certain cynic roughness and coarseness, which, indeed, in the light of that age, may be leniently judged, but certainly have no affinity with the morality of the Bible, and offend not only good taste, but all sound moral feeling. The ascetic holiness, at least according to the Egyptian idea, is incompatible with cleanliness and decency, and delights in filth. It reverses the maxim of sound evangelical morality and modern Christian civilization, that cleanliness is next to godliness. Saints Anthony and Hilarion, as their admirers, Athanasius the Great and Jerome the Learned, tell us, scorned to comb or cut their hair (save once a year, at Easter), or to wash their hands or feet. Other hermits went almost naked in the wilderness, like the Indian gymnosophists.290 The younger Macarius, according to the account of his disciple Palladius, once lay six months naked in the morass of the Scetic desert, and thus exposed himself to the incessant attacks of the gnats of Africa, "whose sting can pierce even the hide of a wild boar." He wished to punish himself for his arbitrary revenge on a gnat, and was there so badly stung by gnats and wasps, that he was thought to be smitten with leprosy, and was recognized only by his voice.291 St. Symeon the Stylite, according to Theodoret, suffered himself to be incessantly tormented for a long time by twenty enormous bugs, and concealed an abscess full of worms, to exercise himself in patience and meekness. In Mesopotamia there was a peculiar class of anchorets, who lived on grass, spending the greater part of the day in prayer and singing, and then turning out like beasts upon the mountain.292 Theodoret relates of the much lauded Akepsismas, in Cyprus, that he spent sixty years in the same cell, without seeing or speaking to any one, and looked so wild and shaggy, that he was once actually taken for a wolf by a shepherd, who assailed him with stones, till he discovered his error, and then worshipped the hermit as a saint.293 It was but a step from this kind of moral sublimity to beastly degradation. Many of these saints were no more than low sluggards or gloomy misanthropes, who would rather company with wild beasts, with lions, wolves, and hyenas, than with immortal men, and above all shunned the face of a woman more carefully than they did the devil. Sulpitius Severus saw an anchoret in the Thebaid, who daily shared his evening meal with a female wolf; and upon her discontinuing her visits for some days by way of penance for a theft she had committed, he besought her to come again, and comforted her with a double portion of bread.294 The same writer tells of a hermit who lived fifty years secluded from all human society, in the clefts of Mount Sinai, entirely destitute of clothing, and all overgrown with thick hair, avoiding every visitor, because, as he said, intercourse with men interrupted the visits of the angels; whence arose the report that he held intercourse with angels.295

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

  The earthly remains of the martyrs were discovered commonly by visions and revelations, often not till centuries after their death, then borne in solemn processions to the churches and chapels erected to their memory, and deposited under the altar;883 and this event was annually celebrated by a festival.884 The legend of the discovery of the holy cross gave rise to two church festivals: The Feast of the Invention of the Cross885 on the third of May, which has been observed in the Latin church since the fifth or sixth century; and The Feast of the Elevation of the Cross,886 on the fourteenth of September, which has been observed in the East and the West, according to some since the consecration of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, according to others only since the reconquest of the holy cross by the emperor Heraclius in 628. The relics were from time to time displayed to the veneration of the believing multitude, carried about in processions, preserved in golden and silver boxes, worn on the neck as amulets against disease and danger of every kind, and considered as possessing miraculous virtue, or more strictly, as instruments through which the saints in heaven, in virtue of their connection with Christ, wrought miracles of healing and even of raising the dead. Their number soon reached the incredible, even from one and the same original; there were, for example, countless splinters of the pretended cross of Christ from Jerusalem, while the cross itself is said to have remained, by a continued miracle, whole and undiminished! Veneration of the cross and crucifix knew no bounds, but can, by no means, be taken as a true measure of the worship of the Crucified; on the contrary, with the great mass the outward form came into the place of the spiritual intent, and the wooden and silver Christ was very often a poor substitute for the living Christ in the heart.887 Relics became a regular article of trade, but gave occasion, also, for very many frauds, which even such credulous and superstitious relic-worshippers as St. Martin of Tours888 and Gregory the Great889 lamented. Theodosius I., as early as 386, prohibited this trade; and so did many councils; but without success. On this account the bishops found themselves compelled to prove the genuineness of the relics by historical tradition, or visions, or miracles. At first, an opposition arose to this worship of dead men’s bones. St. Anthony, the father of monasticism († 356), put in his dying protest against it, directing that his body should be buried in an unknown place. Athanasius relates this with approbation,890 and he caused several relics which had been given to him to be fastened up, that they might be out of the reach of idolatry.891 But the opposition soon ceased, or became confined to inferior or heretical authors, like Vigilantius and Eunomius, or to heathen opponents like Porphyry and Julian.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  " Rosalie added, casting herself into my arms, "O dear girl, and I too, yes I, he seduced me in my earliest years; I was barely eleven when I became his victim... when, alas! I was unable to defend myself against him." "But Mademoiselle," I interrupted, horrified, "at least Religion remained to you... were you unable to consult a confessor and avow everything?" "Oh, you do not know that as he proceeds to pervert us he stifles in each of us the very seeds of belief, he forbids us all religious devotions, and, furthermore, could I have done so ? he had instructed me scarcely at all. The little he had said pertaining to these matters had been motivated by the fear that my ignorance might betray his impiety. But I had never been to confession, I had not made my First Communion; so deftly did he cover all these things with ridicule and insinuate his poisonous self into even our smallest ideas, that he banished forever all their duties out of them whom he suborned; or if they are compelled by their families to fulfill their religious duties, they do so with such tepidness, with such complete indifference, that he has nothing to fear from their indiscretion; but convince yourself, Therese, let your own eyes persuade you," she continued, very quickly drawing me back into the closet whence we had emerged; "come hither: that room where he chastises his students is the same wherein he enjoys us; the lessons are over now, it is the hour when, warmed by the preliminaries, he is going to compensate himself for the restraint his prudence sometimes imposes upon him; go back to where you were, dear girl, and with your own eyes behold it all." However slight my curiosity concerning these new abominations, it was by far the better course to leap back into the closet rather than have myself surprised with Rosalie during the classes; Rodin would without question have become suspicious. And so I took my place; scarcely was I at it when Rodin enters his daughter's room, he leads her into the other, the two women of the house arrive; and thereupon the impudicious Rodin, all restraints upon his behavior removed, free to indulge his fancies to the full, gives himself over in a leisurely fashion and undisguisedly to committing all the irregularities of debauchery.

• From City of Night (1963)

  An ovaled man has been following me for about a block. I cross quickly, avoiding him. I feel genuinely indifferent to that scene right now. Im churning inside with the implied mysteries of this physically moribund city; and therefore feeling as vitally alive as a child pretending for a moment to be dead, my emotions seesawing from anticipation to revulsion.... Seeing that I was about to dodge him, the ovaled man walked faster until he caught up with me. “If yew come to muh house,” he says in a thick Southern drawl which I have a feeling he emphasizes purposely, “Ahll make it wuhth yuh while, suguh.” I shrugged, but I went with him to a house on Esplanade. The ovaled man is a parody of The Degenerate Southern Woman. In the apartment, he came on quickly. Just as Im leaving, another youngman comes up the stairs. He appears very distraught when he sees me. He looked masculine, but he acts effeminate. Behind me, I hear him and the ovaled man shouting angrily at each other. The younger one ran back into the street, crying—almost bumped into me. The ovaled one came to where I was standing. “Thay-at was muh lovuh!” he howls at me. “Ah didn think hed come bayack this aftuhnoon.” His hands flutter like an electric fan on “high.” “Oh, What Am Ah Going To Dew?—hes gawn—you heah?—he is gaw-on!—an for sure this time! Hes warned me—if Ah bring any tramps up, he’ll—... Ah don mean tramps, suguh—” mellowing “—Ah only may-ent—well, yew know—... Oh, please do come bay-ack into thuh house till Ah can com-pose muhself from this Or- dee -yall!” I went back with him largely because he was yelling so loudly and insistently that I was afraid he’d begin to attract attention. Already, a fat woman sweeping the dirty walk before her house was leering at us with a browntoothed, hateful grin.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Distrusting his Grand Show, I have asked for the money first—which he gives me unquestioningly. “You really didnt know why I drew that sketch for you?” he asked me. “Or why I suggested thats what you should wear?” “No,” I said, but of course, vaguely, I did. He went into another room. When he returned, hes holding a black jacket, high boots, black belt—the same items he had drawn so adoringly in the sketch. “Try them on,” he said. I remember the man on Times Square. But I know that this time I will not be expected to walk around the streets in this man’s clothes. “Please,” he coaxed, extending the clothes toward me. A disturbing note—almost a whine—is creeping into his voice. “I’d rather not,” I said. He shrugs. “Suit yourself. You will eventually. If not with me, with someone else. Remember that.” And then burying his finger into the collar of his shirt to exhibit a tiny chain on which dangles an “M,” he announced proudly: “Do you know what this means? It means Im a masochist. It means I adore pain.” He spoke with alarming aloofness. “It excites me because I really do believe youre new to this—to this aspect of it,” he adds. “And the best experiences Ive had are with such people.” In one fierce movement, he planted one of the heavy boots harshly on his crotch, grinding it in savagely. His previous look—impeccable, composed—disappeared, became rapt. His face contorted ecstatically as he utters a pained “Ugh!” And he coaxes me: “Put them on please.” His voice has become a complete whine. “Please—? Please command me to do whatever you want!” I stare fascinated at him. “Is that a glimmer of interest I detect in your eyes?” he asks me, laughing. The boot is still pinioned between his legs. “You dont detect anything!” I said angrily. “I feel cheated, then,” he said. “Not because of the money—but because I somehow expected so much of you.... Wont you... let me... Idolize you?” he said slowly. “Won’t you be brutal?” I have always been repelled by pain, either inflicting or receiving it. Why then did I feel a dart of excitement at the man’s words? To squelch that feeling, I walked out quickly. There is a theater on Market Street that changes features daily: One of those enormous swallowing buildings with a dark, dark balcony. Its back rows fill quickly with men, and there is constant movement. The most intimate sexscenes are sometimes played out here, at times in groups gathered like dark vultures.... As I sat down, halfway up the balcony, a man moved hurriedly from another aisle to sit directly beneath me, where my legs were propped on his seat almost straddling his shouders. In a quick movement, he turned his face sideways, brushing the Wellington boots with his tongue. When I didnt move, he got up, startlingly gasped at me: “I like mean sex, I’ll pay.” My stomach contracted violently. With excitement?

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Christians, in fact, were widely suspected of engaging in these kinds of wild activities. One of the best references to this comes from a Christian apology written by a Christian named Octavius, who also lived in North Africa. Octavius gives an account of the charges leveled against Christians, a very interesting set of charges, which show that many pagans thought that Christians were engaged in wild, profligate activities. This is the charge that he’s recording: “The notoriety of the stories told of the initiations of new Christian recruits is matched by their ghastly horror.” This is what they’re told to do with their new recruits: “A young baby is covered with flour, the object being to deceive the unwary. It is then served before the person to be admitted into their rites. The recruit is urged to inflict blows upon it. They appear to be harmless, because of the covering of flour. Thus, the baby is killed with wounds that remain unseen and concealed. It is the blood of this infant, it is this blood, that they lick with thirsty lips. These are the limbs they distribute eagerly. This is the victim by which they seal their covenant. It is by complicity in this crime that they are pledged to mutual silence. These are their rites, more foul that all sacrileges combined.” He goes on to describe orgies that Christians engage in at night, people who are related to each other engaged in sexual activities together at night. What is this all about? Christians were widely charged with having incestuous orgies, with killing babies, and eating them. Where did these charges come from? Well, these charges may seem odd to people today, but 192 they make sense given what we know about early Christians otherwise. Remember that Christians were meeting in secret. They often had to meet at dark, because they were of the lower classes. These were people who had to work during the day. They called each other “brother” and “sister,” and they were known to great one another with a kiss. Brothers and sisters kissing? In the dark? What’s that all about? Rumors of incest flew. Moreover, they were known to eat the body and drink the blood of the Son of God. They are eating the body and drinking the blood of the Son? They are killing babies and eating them. The charges, then, were of incestuous orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism. These charges are found not just in the writings of Octavius, but in a number of ancient sources. These were the sorts of rumors that flew concerning the Christians. These were the sorts of things that the masses may well have been persuaded by. We have seen that the governors were not all that eager to persecute the Christians. These governors would have been more highly educated. It may be that the masses were driving the governors to do this, forcing their hands, based on this kind of libelous accusation against the Christians.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I asked. Then I texted Claire: I’m going here with a strange boy from the internet it’s your fault if i don’t text you after then this is where to find the body His house was one tiny room that reeked of cigarettes. The mini refrigerator, stove, and oven were right at the foot of his bed, and the bathroom just off the head of it. There was beige wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the “kitchen” part, with stains that looked like spaghetti sauce, tar, and generally a lot of lint. He had very few books for someone who claimed to be a writer and loved to read. I counted seven: three of them Bukowski. “I love Bukowski maybe the best, actually,” he said when he caught me looking at the books. “Find what you love and let it kill you. So raw.” I didn’t say anything. He put his arms around my waist and began kissing me, then pulled me onto the dirty plaid bedspread and took off my dress. “You have such a hot body for forty,” he said. “Thirty-eight,” I said. “Mmmm,” he said, sliding his fingers into my underpants and tracing my war-torn labia. “I love your pussy. So hot that you have hair down there.” I took off his pants. His cock was hard as a stone, yet simultaneously pink and slimy. I didn’t want to touch it. So I didn’t. He began fingering me, very dryly, adding further battering to my poor wax-mangled vagina. He kept whispering, “Can I fuck you? I want to fuck you. Will you suck my dick?” I kept saying, “No, not yet. I’m not ready.” I guess in an effort to turn me on he inserted two more fingers into my wilting vagina, banging them in and out. My labia burned but I was surprised to find that up inside me I was wet, as though I didn’t know I was turned on. Now the wetness began to come down onto my labia and clit. But he ignored my clit and just kept banging away. “Such a hot, tight, pink pussy,” he said. I didn’t know how he knew it was pink. He hadn’t even looked at it or licked it. “Let me fuck it. Please?” he said. “No,” I said. “Okay, then will you suck me? Just suck me a little,” he asked. “I want to see those hot old lips on my cock.” That was it. “You know what I think would be hot?” I asked. “What would do it for me? I want to watch you jerk off for a little.” He stopped finger fucking me and looked me in the eye. “Really?” “Oh, yeah. It’s the biggest turn-on. I wanna watch as you lie there and give yourself pleasure. Jerk that hot dick.” I don’t know where I was getting this from.