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 Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Lorde's explication of the nexus of eroticism and the pornographic illuminates the textual/sexual dynamics governing John and Marie's sexual exchanges, as well as his language, in which resonates a rhetoric situated within a pornographic lexicon that denies feeling for the sake of sensation, titillation, and sexual fantasy. John's actions, contextualized as such, renders his exchange pornographic, as sensation (without feeling): the ripping of clothes degrades the body in the same fashion that his words-"act like a whore"-diminish and reduce Marie not to a particular humanity or essence but to an empty sexual (and even objectified and pathologized) state. Marie, in turn, is the recipient, quiet and willing to "take it how he gives it," enabling his sensation and sexual domination in his attempts to recover his threatened masculinity. John, through sexuality, virility, and sexual domination, attempts to display masculine strength, or a semblance of it, that is vexed and problematic at best.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Above all, they were filthy. A shoe would roll off the assembly line with a stain, a swath of grime, and nothing would be done. There was no overarching sense of cleanliness, no real quality control. When we pointed out a defective shoe, the officials running the factories would shrug and say: “Perfectly functional.” Never mind aesthetics. The Chinese didn’t see why the nylon or canvas in a pair of shoes needed to be the same shade in the left shoe and the right. It was common practice for a left shoe to be light blue and a right shoe to be dark blue. We met with scores of factory officials, and local politicians, and assorted dignitaries. We were toasted, feted, queried, monitored, talked at, and almost always welcomed warmly. We ate pounds of sea urchin and roasted duck, and at many stops we were treated to thousand-year-old eggs. I could taste every one of those thousand years. Of course we were served many Mao tais. After all my trips to Taiwan, I was prepared. My liver was seasoned. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much Hayes would like them. With each sip he smacked his lips and asked for more. Near the end of our visit we took a nineteen-hour train ride to Shanghai. We could’ve flown, but I insisted on the train. I wanted to see, to experience the countryside. Within the first hour the men were cursing me. The day was dripping hot and the train was not air-conditioned. There was one old fan in the corner of our train car, the blades barely moving the hot dust around. To get cool, Chinese passengers thought nothing of stripping down to their underwear, and Hayes and Strasser thought this gave them license to do the same. If I live to be two hundred years old, I won’t forget the sight of those leviathans walking up and down the train car in their T-shirts and BVDs. Nor will any Chinese man or woman who was on the train that day. Before leaving China we had a final errand or two in Shanghai. The first was to secure a deal with the Chinese track-and-field federation. This meant securing a deal with the government’s Ministry of Sports. Unlike the Western world, where every athlete made his own deal, China itself negotiated endorsement deals for all its athletes. So, in an old Shanghai schoolhouse, in a classroom with seventy-five-year-old furniture and a huge portrait of Chairman Mao, Strasser and I met with the ministry representative. The first several minutes the representative lectured us on the beauties of communism. He kept saying that the Chinese like to do business with “like-minded people.” Strasser and I looked at each other. Like-minded? What gives? Then the lecture abruptly stopped. The representative leaned forward and in a low voice that struck me as a Chinese version of uber agent Leigh Steinberg he asked: “How much you offering?”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Without a word—and before I could say anything to him—he drove off. But a distance of only a few feet away, he stopped the car sharply. And he waited there.... And with a knifing awareness I thought: Just as I paused outside of Dave’s door! Then the car, stopped only for those few decisive moments, roared away along the street. CITY OF NIGHT YEARS, YEARS, YEARS AGO, I HAD stared at my dead dog, buried under the littered ground of our barren backyard and dug out again, and I had seen in revulsion the decaying face. Now, as if I had dug beneath the surface of the world, I saw that world’s face. And it was just as hideous. For many, San Francisco is an escape, in that coffin-shaped state, from the restless neon-forest of Los Angeles. Its whitewashed, closely pressed houses cuddle each other as if from the chilly invigorating breeze that invades its streets every day around noon, washing them with rain-specked fog almost nightly. In the crystalline mornings, the sky blazes triumphantly clear. Whitewashed, rain-cleansed, breeze-swept, the city itself ascends vigorously in steep hills before diving toward the bay. All this gives San Francisco an aspect of purity—a magnificent impressionistic prettiness. Even its inevitably shabby streets—around Mission, say, or toward the Embarcadero, into Italiantown—exhale that fresh, fresh bay-air. For me, San Francisco was the inevitable step in that journey toward the loss of innocence. Although I didnt realize it then (telling myself that I was coming here to separate myself— again! —from what had become a guilt-obsessed life; that there was a resurrective atmosphere in San Francisco which would make this possible), I understand now that I came here instead to initiate myself in a further rite which that world would only too willingly expose me to: hinted at subtly the previous time I had been here: when I had explored, but shortly, the netherworld of that city. And I did get a job. Yet in fairness I must say that, even then, I knew that on the slightest pretext, if any—as before—I would quit. Looking out the window where I worked on Market Street, I saw an older man stop to talk to a boy who had been loitering at the corner obviously trying to score. Together, they moved away. Minutes later, I walked out on that job. Away from those streets, I was wasting my Youth. The end of youth is a kind of death. You die slowly by the process of gnawing discovery. You die too in the gigantic awareness that the miraculous passport given to the young can be ripped away savagely by the enemy Time.... Youth is a struggle against—and, paradoxically, therefore a struggle toward —death: a suicide of the soul.

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

  Heathen Rome lived a good while after this prediction, but, the causes of decay were already at work in the first century. The immense extension and outward prosperity brought with it a diminution of those domestic and civil virtues which at first so highly distinguished the Romans above the Greeks. The race of patriots and deliverers, who came from their ploughs to the public service, and humbly returned again to the plough or the kitchen, was extinct. Their worship of the gods, which was the root of their virtue, had sunk to mere form, running either into the most absurd superstitions, or giving place to unbelief, till the very priests laughed each other in the face when they met in the street. Not unfrequently we find unbelief and superstition united in the same persons, according to the maxim that all extremes touch each other. Man must believe something, and worship either God or the devil.81 Magicians and necromancers abounded, and were liberally patronized. The ancient simplicity and contentment were exchanged for boundless avarice and prodigality. Morality and chastity, so beautifully symbolized in the household ministry of the virgin Vesta, yielded to vice and debauchery. Amusement came to be sought in barbarous fights of beasts and gladiators, which not rarely consumed twenty thousand human lives in a single month. The lower classes had lost all nobler feeling, cared for nothing but "panem et circenses," and made the proud imperial city on the Tiber a slave of slaves. The huge empire of Tiberius and of Nero was but a giant body without a soul, going, with steps slow but sure, to final dissolution. Some of the emperors were fiendish tyrants and monsters of iniquity; and yet they were enthroned among the gods by a vote of the Senate, and altars and temples were erected for their worship. This characteristic custom began with Caesar, who even during his lifetime was honored as "Divus Julius" for his brilliant victories, although they cost more than a million of lives slain and another million made captives and slaves.82 The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of redemption. "The world," says Seneca, in a famous passage, "is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer bidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere."83 Thus far the negative. On the other hand, the universal empire of Rome was a positive groundwork for the universal empire of the gospel. It served as a crucible, in which all contradictory and irreconcilable peculiarities of the ancient nations and religions were dissolved into the chaos of a new creation. The Roman legions razed the partition-walls among the ancient nations, brought the extremes of the civilized world together in free intercourse, and united north and south and east and west in the bonds of a common language and culture, of common laws and customs. Thus they evidently, though unconsciously, opened the way for the rapid and general spread of that religion which unites all nations in one family of God by the spiritual bond of faith and love.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We thought there must be some little occupation, to which you turned your idle fingers, in your solitary cell.’ Zena hesitated. Then she said, ‘Please, m’m, do you mean, sewing bags?’ At that, the ladies gave a roar of laughter, which made Zena flinch, and blush worse than ever, and put a hand to her throat. Diana said, very slowly, ‘No, child, I did not mean sewing bags. I meant, that we thought you must have turned frigstress, in your little cell. That you must have frigged yourself until your cunt was sore. That you must have frigged yourself so long and so hard, you frigged yourself a cock. We think you must have a cock, Blake, in your drawers. We want you to lift your skirt, and let us see it!’ Now the ladies laughed again. Zena looked at them, and then at Diana. ‘Please, m’m,’ she said, beginning to shake, ’I don’t know what you mean!’ Diana stepped towards her. ‘I think you do,’ she said. She had picked up the book that Dickie had given her, and now she opened it, and held it oppressively close to Zena’s face, so that Zena flinched again. ‘We have been reading a book full of stories of girls like you,’ she said. ‘And now, what are you suggesting? That the doctor who wrote this book - this book that Miss Reynolds gave me, for my birthday - is a fool?’ ‘No, m’m!’ ‘Well then. The doctor says you have a cock. Come along, lift your skirts! Good gracious, girl, we only want to look at you — !’ She had put her hand upon Zena’s skirt, and I could see the other ladies, all gripped, in their turn, by her wildness, making ready to assist her. The sight made me sick. I stepped out of the shadows and said, ‘Leave her, Diana! For God’s sake, leave her alone!’ The room fell silent at once. Zena gazed at me in fright, and Diana turned, and blinked. She said: ‘You wish to raise the skirt yourself?’ ‘I want you to leave Blake be! Go on, Blake,’ I nodded to Zena. ‘Go on back to the kitchen.’ ‘You stay where you are!’ cried Diana to her. ‘And as for you,’ she said, fixing me with one narrow, black, glittering eye, ‘do you think you are mistress here, to give orders to my servants? Why, you are a servant! What is it to you, if I ask my girl to bare her backside for me? You have bared yours for me, often enough! Get back behind your velvet curtain! Perhaps, when we have finished with little Blake, we shall all take turns upon Antinous.’ Her words seemed to press upon my aching head - and then, as if my head were made of glass, it seemed to shatter.

• From City of Night (1963)

  So I executed him.” “You put on that Nazi costume and you—?” I started. “Yes! And I Exterminated him—as all weakness must be Exterminated!... I put that cat out of his absurd sniveling misery!” He went on deliberately: “I put him in a bag. I drowned him in the bathtub!” As soon as hes verbalized what hes done, he appears visibly shaken, as if an emotional rubberband had been stretched to the point of snapping. I felt violently sick.... The black uniform now being hung adoringly in the closet... the flushed face... the pitiful lumpy body covered with the absurd clothes... the terrifying words.... The dummies gazing blankly.... Noticing that I was staring at him with undisguised contempt; surprised to see it so coldly aimed at him; realizing all at once that he had misinterpreted my returning here—and looking tense as if my look of disgust had thrown him unexpectedly off-balance—he blurted: “There is no excuse for weakness!... Once you allow yourself to be touched by it, youre lost!... And you may think—like that insidious Carl!—that it’s weakness to do—to do the things I do. But remember the importance of Seduction! The Leader of every cause has to set an example, whatever form that takes! He has to show The Way!” I want to tell him what I see so clearly. I want to say: “Youve rationalized your masochism—masking your own very real weakness.” But I merely stare at the posed obdurate face, chin thrust out like the caricature of a repugnant dictator—but a very uncertain dictator somehow. “You killed that cat,” I said finally—still not really believing it; rather, not wanting to. He sighed wearily. The enormity of what hes done seems slowly to be dawning on him. But he fights back, shaking his head: “Once you let weakness touch you—...” he starts; and his whole body begins to tremble instantly, as if his jangled nerves were out of control, rebelling against him. He shook his head as if he were very, very, very tired. And then he erupted: “I’ll give you an example of what weakness can do!” he shouts as if to blot out his own guilty thoughts. “The Example! My own father!... He was weak!... But my—... mother!” He flung the word out with infinite revulsion. “—that—woman!—that loathsome despicable woman with her hatred of the body—... I couldnt go barefoot! I even had to take a bath in the dark!... That woman!— she knew. She was strong—and she used that strength, and she used my father’s weakness—” He twisted his hands as if wringing out a piece of cloth. “—and she twisted and drained and twisted.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  After the Second World War, philosophers and theologians all struggled with the idea of God, seeking to rescue it from the literalism that had made it incredible. In doing so, they often revived older, premodern ways of thinking and speaking about the divine. In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. 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

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Walking through those museum rooms… I couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t process it. Mannequins dressed in singed clothes. Clumps of scorched, irradiated—jewelry? Cookware? I couldn’t tell. Photos that took me to a place far beyond emotion. I stood in horror before a child’s liquefied tricycle. I stood, open-mouthed, before the blackened skeleton of a building, where people had loved and worked and laughed, until. I tried to feel and hear the moment of impact. I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible. The next morning, these ghastly images still fresh in my head, I was somber, heavily subdued as I drove with Sumeragi and Sole Jr. into the countryside, and I was almost startled by the good cheer of the factory officials. They were delighted to meet us, to show us their wares. Also, they said forthrightly, they were most eager to do a deal. They’d long been hoping to crack the U.S. market. I showed them the Cortez, asked how long it might take to produce a sizable order of this shoe. Six months, they said. Sole Jr. stepped forward. “You’ll do it in three,” he barked. I gasped. With the exception of Kitami, I’d always found the Japanese unfailingly polite, even in the heat of disagreement or intense negotiation, and I’d always strived to reciprocate. But in Hiroshima of all places I felt that politeness was that much more essential. Here, if nowhere else on earth, humans should be gentle and kind with one another. Sole Jr. was anything but. The ugliest of Americans. It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him—but we needed his father’s contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were. In Kurume, just outside Beppu, in the southern islands, we visited a factory that was part of a vast industrial complex run by the Bridgestone Tire Company. The factory was called Nippon Rubber. It was the biggest shoe factory I’d ever seen, a kind of Shoe Oz, capable of handling any order, no matter how big or complicated. We sat with factory officials in their conference room, just after breakfast, and this time, when Sole Jr. tried to speak, I didn’t let him. Each time he opened his mouth I spoke up, cut him off. I told officials the kind of shoe we wanted, showed them the Cortez. They nodded gravely. I wasn’t sure they understood. After lunch we returned to the conference room and there before me on the table was a brand-new Cortez, Nike side stripe and all, hot off the factory floor. Magic.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Walking through those museum rooms… I couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t process it. Mannequins dressed in singed clothes. Clumps of scorched, irradiated—jewelry? Cookware? I couldn’t tell. Photos that took me to a place far beyond emotion. I stood in horror before a child’s liquefied tricycle. I stood, open-mouthed, before the blackened skeleton of a building, where people had loved and worked and laughed, until. I tried to feel and hear the moment of impact. I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible. The next morning, these ghastly images still fresh in my head, I was somber, heavily subdued as I drove with Sumeragi and Sole Jr. into the countryside, and I was almost startled by the good cheer of the factory officials. They were delighted to meet us, to show us their wares. Also, they said forthrightly, they were most eager to do a deal. They’d long been hoping to crack the U.S. market. I showed them the Cortez, asked how long it might take to produce a sizable order of this shoe. Six months, they said. Sole Jr. stepped forward. “You’ll do it in three ,” he barked. I gasped. With the exception of Kitami, I’d always found the Japanese unfailingly polite, even in the heat of disagreement or intense negotiation, and I’d always strived to reciprocate. But in Hiroshima of all places I felt that politeness was that much more essential. Here, if nowhere else on earth, humans should be gentle and kind with one another. Sole Jr. was anything but. The ugliest of Americans. It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him—but we needed his father’s contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were. In Kurume, just outside Beppu, in the southern islands, we visited a factory that was part of a vast industrial complex run by the Bridgestone Tire Company. The factory was called Nippon Rubber. It was the biggest shoe factory I’d ever seen, a kind of Shoe Oz, capable of handling any order, no matter how big or complicated. We sat with factory officials in their conference room, just after breakfast, and this time, when Sole Jr. tried to speak, I didn’t let him. Each time he opened his mouth I spoke up, cut him off. I told officials the kind of shoe we wanted, showed them the Cortez. They nodded gravely. I wasn’t sure they understood. After lunch we returned to the conference room and there before me on the table was a brand-new Cortez, Nike side stripe and all, hot off the factory floor. Magic. I spent the rest of the afternoon describing the shoes I wanted.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He knows it too. But I am sure hes misinterpreting that excitement, which is merely for myself in these clothes, narcissistically, not for what the clothes themselves must represent to him. He approached me slowly. Fascinatedly, he moved around me, arranging the mirrors so that both of us can see the reflections from different angles; careful, always, to be in the framed image. He led me to the elaborately carved chair before the mirror. He knelt. Without warning, he flung himself stomach down on the floor, and now all his actions will become astonishingly feverish. His head burrowed between the boots; his tongue glides hungrily over the glossy surface; his hands caress the leather, reach now for the belt. He looped his fingers urgently behind it. Releasing the belt, his hands move treasuringly down the costume. His mouth gnaws into the opening at the top of one boot, then the other, his teeth cling to the straps inside. Frenziedly, he raised my foot with one hand, turned himself face up on the floor. And he held the boot poised over his face. From his throat emanate gasping groans; his eyes are deliriously wide, as if to magnify the scene beyond his ordinary vision. With one desperate hand, he pressed down on my leg from the knee, attempting to bring the boot against his craving mouth. Swiftly—angered—I moved away from him—leaving him a shattered heap of studs and leather straps sprawled grotesquely on the floor. “What’s the matter?” he whispered almost inaudibly. “Im not interested,” I said harshly. As I took off the clothes he had dressed me in, to leave, he eyed me curiously from where he still lay pitifully like a smashed doll on the floor. 3 There are of course other bars in the French Quarter where the hunted and the hunting of that world gather. There was Les Petits, where, nightly, Love Face, a fat Negro woman with bleached hair, made panting, sighing song-love to the mike. And, outside, past the courtyard, was Sandy-Vee’s bar—and Sandy-Vee is one of the most flagrant, most famous drag-queens in America. Vaunting her imposed exile, defiantly she dangles his/her orange earring for the curious tourists. (And my first time there, exhibiting herself before the amused tourists—hating them but using them cunningly—as I walked in—she shrieked: “Theres muh new husband!”—and then she said to an ancestrally bored woman sitting with her fat, tired middle-aged companion: “Ahm doin much bettuh than you are, honey!—and theres more where he came from!”—and she underscored the flagrant put-down by squirting seltzer water, fizzing, into a glass and shouting at the woman: “Douche time!”) And there was Cindy’s bar, run by a fat, jolly-looking, pursed-mouthed woman who pined after her clients. There was Les Deux Freres. (“Why The Two Brothers’?” “Because it’s owned by two brothers, and theyre sisters!”) And there were the other bars, scattered throughout the Quarter.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  While still a schoolmaster he bought two Siamese cats – a breed renowned for its independence – and tried to ‘train them to place no reliance or affection upon anybody but themselves’. It was what he had been trying to do himself for years. ‘In vain,’ he concluded, with disgust. ‘Far from wandering free and independent . . . they sleep all day in the sitting room, in the intervals of mewing at me for more food.’ The cats were a failure. The grass snakes he kept in his rooms were not. He kept them because ‘it was impossible to impose upon them, or steal their affections’. He loved them because they were misunderstood, maligned, and ‘inevitably themselves’: they were versions of the self he aspired to be, just like the characters he called to life in his books: Merlyn the perfect teacher; the Wart, the orphan who was born to be king, and Sir Lancelot the ill-made knight, whose character White made his own. Lancelot was a sadist who refrained from hurting people through his sense of honour – his Word. His Word was his promise to be gentle, and it was one of the things that made him the Best Knight in the World. ‘All through his life,’ White wrote of Lancelot, ‘even when he was a great man with the world at his feet – he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.’ White always took great pains to be gentle precisely because he wanted to be cruel. It was why he never beat his pupils at Stowe. And though abjuring cruelty was White’s Word, animals played a curious role in keeping it. Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers ‘screeched them on’. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries ‘tense, self-conscious, and hysterically animal’. But the hounds were not. ‘The savagery of the hounds,’ he wrote, ‘was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  That whole evening turned into progressively less veiled hostility between myself and the director, as—throughout his brutal imitation of a star then involved in a frontpage sex scandal—the face of Skipper—somewhere drunk in downtown Los Angeles—scorched my thoughts. 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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I was seized by the greatest revulsion of my whole life—a roiling, then a quick flooding invading my whole being like electricity; a maelstrom of revulsion—for myself, for him, loathing for him, for what he wanted done—loathing for what I was doing. And hearing the racked baleful sobs which continue (“Why... hurt?...” And again the unfinished word: “Wanted—want lo—...”)—seeing that writhing pitiful body, the boot pinioning him to the floor (like a worm! like a helpless worm! like a helpless worm tortured by children!)—seeing that face gleaming with tears and sweat—and feeling, myself, as if the world will now burst in a bright crashing light which will consume us both in judgment—I bent down over him, extending my hand to him—my foot removed from his scorched groin: extending my hand to him, to help him up—to help him!—as if he were the whole howling painracked ugly crushed mutilated, sad sad crying world, and I could now, at last, in that moment, by merely extending my hand to him in pity, help him—and It. Compassion flooded me as turbulently as, only seconds before, the seducing savagery had rocked me to my violated soul. And as the man sobbing on the floor in the disheveled wet costume saw my hand extended to him in pity, the howling stopped instantly as if a switch had been turned off within him, and his look changed to one of ferocious anger. And he shouted fiercely: “ No, no! Youre not supposed to care!” 4 “I knew youd come back,” he said victoriously. I had walked out on him that day, and I had stayed away for several days. “I understand,” he said. “In the first stages it can be difficult—for some. And those are the ones that turn out to be the best. This time you can use this whip.” He brandished a coiled leather snake. “And if youre ready, I’ll show you my ‘studio’ in the basement.” He had misunderstood my purpose in coming back—which was to show him (and to show myself?) that he could never seduce me in that way again. I knew it irrevocably when I saw a black costume lying across the leather-spread bed. He was bent over it folding it to replace it in the closet. It was the costume, complete with swastika, of a storm trooper. “Were you wearing that?” I asked him. “Yes,” he answered proudly. “I wear it only on Special occasions.” But a note of nervousness entered his voice as he said: “Today I went to an Execution.” I blinked incredulously. “Yes,” he repeated with bravado—but he appears even more nervous now. “You heard right: An Execution! If you had been here, you could have witnessed it. My cat—remember the furry one?—he was becoming too weak—constantly simpering, whining. I hate weakness. I despise it. I loathe it...

• From City of Night (1963)

  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. Back in San Francisco, to North Beach, usually to the Raven bar—which, at that time, was the best scoring bar in the city—especially on weekends, when a queen would go through a parody of an opera, playing all the female parts. Market Street by the magazine store, and you stand pretending youre watching the toylike trolley swinging around to begin its weary ascent up Powell.... Pickup places scattered from the Embarcadero to the fashionable sections of the city.... Walking through North Beach one silver afternoon—a few blocks beyond a flowered park where people on their lunch-hours sit in the sun (and where another afternoon a sad drunk woman, angered when I turned down her offer of a drink, started yelling hysterically: “He tried to snatch my purse! Catch him!”), I looked up at the huge statue of a monk before a church. And I went into that church. There were only a few noon people inside. Automatically, I knelt, crossed myself with the holy water: iron-binding echoes of childhood you cant shed no matter how you try. Mechanically I said some childhood prayers. It was serene and peaceful here—yes—but it was also Empty, infinitely Empty. The painted statues with blind eyes fixed into the air were remote and distant, like that heaven which doesnt exist. Whatever was to be found was not in here. It was in the World.... I made the sign of the cross—again embarrassedly—and I walked out. If I relented now in that journey through this submerged world, whatever meaning I might have found would evade me forever. Now those three haunting faces which had invaded my life were turning a searchlight into my soul.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Does the prohibition of the former endanger the latter? No one doubts that if it does, this constitutes a reason, though perhaps not an ultimately decisive one, to relax social controls. So autonomy has a central place in our understanding of respect. So much is generally agreed. Beyond this lie various richer pictu res of human na ture and our predicament, which offer reasons for this demand. These include, for instance, the notion of ourselves as disengaged subjects, breaking free from a comfortable but illusory sense of immersion in nature, and objectifying the world around us; or the Kantian picture o f ourselves as pure rational agents; or the Romantic picture just mentio,ned, where we understand ourselves in terms of organic metaphors and a concept of self-expression. As is well kn own, the partisans of these different views are in sharp conflict with each oth e r. Here again, a gene ralized moral consensus breaks into controvers y at t h e level of philosophical explication. I am not at all neutral on this cont r oversy, but I don't feel at this stage in a position to contribute in a helpful way to it. I would rather try now to round out this picture of our modern understanding of respect by mentioning two other, c on nected features. The first is the importance we put on avoiding suffering. This again seems to be unique among higher civilizations. Certainly we are much more sensitive on this score than our ancestors of a few centuries ago-a s we can readily see if we cons i der the (to us) b arba rou s pun i s hments they inflict ed . Inescapable Frameworks · 13 On c e agai n, the legal code and its practices provide a window into broader mov em ents of culture. Think of th e horrify ing description of the torture and e x e c uti on of a man who had atte mpted regicide in mid-eighteenth-century Fr a n ce, which opens Michel Foucault's Surveil/er et punir. 7 It's not that c o m p ar a ble horrors don't occur i n the twentieth-century West. But they are n o w se en as shocking aberrations, which have to be hidden. Even the "clean" le g al e xecutions, where the deat h p enalty is still in force, are no longer carried ou t in public, but deep within pris on walls. It's with a shudder tha t we lea r n tha t parents used to bring small children to witness such events when they were offered as public spectacles in earlier times. We are much mor e sensitive to suffering, which we may of cou rse just translat e into not wanting to hea r about it rather than into any concr ete remedial action.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She picked it up, fascinated. ‘What an amazing thing,’ she said, frowning under her straight-cut fringe. ‘It goes over the hawk’s head to keep it quiet, right?’ And she looked inside, where the moulded leather was stitched with lines of hair-fine thread, and then turned it over in her hands, examining the bevelled opening for the hawk’s beak and the plaited Turk’s-head knot you hold it by, and the two long braces at the back that pull the hood open and closed. She set it back on the table reverently. ‘It’s so beautifully made,’ she said. ‘It’s like a Prada shoe.’ Indeed. This hood is among the best of its kind. It was made by an American falconer called Doug Pineo and it weighs almost nothing. A few grams. That is all. Something about its perfect lightness set against the heaviness of my heart makes me giddy. I shut my eyes and my head is full of hoods. Modern American hoods like this one. Loose-braced Bahraini hoods of soft goatskin for passage sakers and peregrines. Syrian hoods. Turkmen hoods. Afghan hoods. Tiny Indian hoods in snakeskin for shikras and sparrowhawks. Huge eagle hoods from Central Asia. Sixteenth-century French hoods cut from white kidskin embroidered with golden thread and painted with coats of arms. They’re not a European invention. Frankish knights learned how to use hoods from Arab falconers during the Crusades, and a shared love of falconry made hawks political pawns in those wars. When a white gyrfalcon owned by King Philip I of Spain broke its leash during the Siege of Acre and flew up to the city walls, the king sent an envoy into the city to request its return. Saladin refused, and Philip sent another envoy, accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns for the falcon. Was it returned? I can’t recall. Did it matter? No, I think savagely. They’re all dead. Long dead. I think of Saladin taking the king’s falcon onto his own hand and covering its eyes with leather. I own this. It is mine. I think of fetish hoods. I think of distant wars. I think of Abu Ghraib. Sand in the mouth. Coercion. History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something’s sight away to calm it. It’s in your own best interest. Rising nausea. There’s a sensation of ground being lost, of wet sand washing from under my feet. I don’t want to think of the photographs of the tortured man with the hood on his head and the wires to his hands and the invisible enemy who holds the camera, but it is all I can see and the word hood like a hot stone in my mouth. Burqa, the word in Arabic. Hood.

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

  The individual treatment of slaves depended on the character of the master. As a rule it was harsh and cruel. The bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre stupefied the finer sensibilities even in women. Juvenal describes a Roman mistress who ordered her female slaves to be unmercifully lashed in her presence till the whippers were worn out; Ovid warns the ladies not to scratch the face or stick needles into the naked arms of the servants who adorned them; and before Hadrian a mistress could condemn a slave to the death of crucifixion without assigning a reason. See the references in Friedländer, I. 466. It is but just to remark that the philosophers of the first and second century, Seneca, Pliny, and Plutarch, entertained much milder views on this subject than the older writers, and commend a humane treatment of the slaves; also that the Antonines improved their condition to some extent, and took the oft abused jurisdiction of life and death over the slaves out of private hands and vested it in the magistrates. But at that time Christian principles and sentiments already freely circulated throughout the empire, and exerted a silent influence even over the educated heathen. This unconscious atmospheric influence, so to speak, is continually exerted by Christianity over the surrounding world, which without this would be far worse than it actually is. § 49. Christianity and Society. Christianity enters with its leaven-like virtue the whole civil and social life of a people, and leads it on the path of progress in all genuine civilization. It nowhere prescribes, indeed, a particular form of government, and carefully abstains from all improper interference with political and secular affairs. It accommodates itself to monarchical and republican institutions, and can flourish even under oppression and persecution from the State, as the history of the first three centuries sufficiently shows. But it teaches the true nature and aim of all government, and the duties of rulers and subjects; it promotes the abolition of bad laws and institutions, and the establishment of good; it is in principle opposed alike to despotism and anarchy; it tends, under every form of government, towards order, propriety, justice, humanity, and peace; it fills the ruler with a sense of responsibility to the supreme king and judge, and the ruled with the spirit of loyalty, virtue, and piety.

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

  that every hunter feared his horn."1154 The French king gave him his special aid and a royal bodyguard to attend him. He had hundreds of victims in Western Burgundy and the adjoining regions. In one term of two or three months, he burnt fifty of both sexes.1155 At Cambrai he burnt twenty, at Douai ten. His last deed was to burn at Mt. Aimé in 1239, twenty-seven, or according to another account more than one hundred and eighty—"a holocaust very great and pleasing to God" as the old chronicler put it.1156 In 1239 he was himself consigned to perpetual imprisonment for his misdeeds. In the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, the number of heretics does not seem to have been large. In 1232 the archbishop of Tarragona was ordered by Gregory IX. to proceed against heretics in conjunction with the Dominicans.1157 One of the most famous of all Inquisitors, the Spanish Dominican, Eymericus, was appointed Inquisitor-general 1357, was deposed 1360, and reappointed 1366. He died in exile. His Directorium inquisitorum, written 1376, is the most famous treatise on the mode of treating heresy. Heretics, in his judgment, were justly offered the alternative of submission or the stake. The small number of the victims under the earlier Inquisition in Spain was fully made up in the series of holocausts begun under Ferdinand in 1480. In Northern and Central Italy, the Inquisition was fully developed, the first papal commissioners being the bishops of Brescia and Modena, 1224. The cases of heresy in Southern Italy were few and isolated. In Rome, the first pyres were lighted in 1231, in front of St. Maria Maggiore. From that year on, and at the demand of Gregory IX., the Roman senator took an oath to execute heretics within eight days of their conviction by the ecclesiastical court. The houses sheltering them were to be pulled down. The sentence condemning heretics was read by the Inquisitor on the steps of the Capitol in the presence of the senator.1158 At a later period the special order of San Giovanni Decollato—John, the Beheaded—was formed in Rome, whose members accompanied the condemned to the place of death. In Germany, the Inquisition did not take full hold till the crusade against witchcraft was started. The Dominicans were formally appointed to take charge of the business in 1248. Of sixty-three papal Inquisitors, known by name, ten were Franciscans, two Augustinians, one of the order of Coelestin, and the rest Dominicans.1159 The laws of Frederick II. were renewed or elaborated by Rudolf, 1292, and other emperors,1160 and the laws of the Church by many provincial councils.1161 The bishops of Treves, Mainz, and Cologne interfered at times with the persecution of the Beghards and Beguines, and appealed, as against the papal Inquisitors, to their rights, as recognized in the papal bulls of 1259 and 1320. After the murder of Konrad of Marburg, Gregory IX. called upon them in vain to prosecute heretics with vigor.

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

  (3) The later unscriptural addition, which contains the prayer proper, and is offensive to the Protestant and all sound Christian feeling: Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis. Amen. Formerly this third part, which gave the formula the character of a prayer, was traced back to the anti-Nestorian council of Ephesus in 431, which sanctioned the expression mater Dei, or Dei genitrix (qeotovko"). But Roman archaeologists797 now concede that it is a much later addition, made in the beginning of the sixteenth century (1508), and that the closing words, nunc et in hora mortis, were added even after that time by the Franciscans. But even 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.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We talked about the history of falconry for a while, and the history of the Club, and then he said, ‘Come and look at this.’ And he pulled open a cupboard, and there, right at the back, half-obscured by the usual household bits and bobs, I saw it. ‘ Oh God , ’ I said. ‘Gordon, is that it?’ He looked at me and nodded. ‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to have it in the house. ’ I crouched down and pulled it out. It was a bronze falcon standing on a vertical plinth, heavy, stylised, and slightly worn around its wings. ‘Shit, Gordon. This freaks me out,’ I said. ‘Me too,’ he replied. The statuette was very valuable, and very beautifully made, but it was a thing that both of us wished had never been made at all. In 1937 Gilbert Blaine and Jack Mavrogordato were invited to the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. They travelled to Berlin with a display of British falconry: stuffed falcons on perches, falconry equipment, photographs, books and paintings. I suspect their last-minute attendance was partly diplomatic cover: travelling with them was Britain’s pro-appeasement Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who’d been invited to the event for secret talks with Hitler . There were no more than fifty falconers in the whole of Germany, but the symbolism of falconry was flourishing in the Reich. On the cover of the exhibition catalogue a stylised, naked Übermensch held a golden hawk upon his fist. The national falconer’s association, the Deutscher Falkenorden , had been given state patronage, and a vast half-timbered State Falconry Centre, the Reichsfalkenhof , had recently been built in the forest at Riddagshausen. In Berlin Blaine and Mavrogordato walked through halls whose walls were hung thickly with thousands of antlers and draped in red banners sewn with swastikas. They admired the German hawks, falcons and eagles sitting on perches in the halls, but they were less impressed by the open-air falconry demonstrations. They watched a saker falcon catch a tethered pigeon, and an eagle thrown at a rabbit so tame it sat nibbling grass until the eagle landed. Only two countries had falconry exhibits in the Berlin exhibition. Germany won first prize for theirs, and the British Falconers’ Club came second. That bronze falcon I’d pulled from Gordon’s cupboard was their award. It had been sent to the club after the exhibition by Hermann Göring. Göring: Hitler’s right-hand man, commander-in chief of the Luftwaffe , the Jägermeister of the Reich, the man who’d set the Reichstag on fire.