Excitement

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 Fermata (1994)

  Still enFolded, I walked briskly all the way to the Gap clothing store in the Copley Place Mall and took off the shirt of every woman in it (there were eleven women), singing the country-western Gap jingle from the seventies: “Fall—in—to—the—Gap.” I draped their bras over their shoulders. With no pants on, I walked around the racks of braided belts and along the walls of folded shorts and overdyed jeans. I knew from previous experience that there would be sand in some of the pants pockets—not because that particular pair had been worn to the beach and then returned, as I had once thought, but because the pants were sand-washed before they were sold. They came pre-supplied with their own memories of the Cape. I twirled slowly like a compass needle in the middle of the store, both hands on my tiller. I let my eye be surprised by each topless woman in turn, saying, “And you! And you! I’d forgotten about you! Wow, those are nice! Hi, how are you?” Having filled my brain with a multiplicity of naked Jamaicas (without coming, however), I redressed my wrongs, putting everything back where it had been, and made my way back to the MassBank building. At my desk, I snapped and emerged from my personal Gap full of self-assurance, fortified by secret acts of vulgarity, looking at Joyce, who, needless to say, hadn’t moved during my absence. “Would you like to have a snack with me sometime?” I asked her. “What kind of a snack do you mean?” she asked. “A dinner sort of snack.” “Oh.” She smiled sideways. “I need to talk to you. I’ve done you a wrong, and I need to unburden myself.” “I see,” she said. “Tonight?” “Hm.” She almost went for it. But then she said: “No, tonight is bad. I wish I could, but I’m probably going to have to stay late. I’m going to have to go over the stuff in that tape when you get it back to me. Thomas needs to look at it tomorrow morning.” “If I have it back to you in ten short minutes,” I said, “will you go out with me tonight?” “There’s an hour of stuff on that tape!” “I know that. I’m just saying, if I get it back to you in ten minutes, will you go out with me tonight? I know it’s a little strange, but it has to do with what I want to talk to you about.” “Okay, yes, sure,” she said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For days at a time Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves’s airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle.There are more similarities between a fishmonger’s trade and a music-hall manager’s than you might think. When Father changed his stock to suit his patrons’ dulled and over-heated palates, so did Tricky. He paid half of his performers off, and brought in a host of new artistes from the music halls of Chatham, Margate and Dover; most cleverly of all, he secured a one-week contract with a real celebrity, from London: Gully Sutherland - one of the best comic singers in the business, and a guaranteed hall-filler even in the hottest of hot Kentish summers.Alice and I visited the Palace on the very first night of Gully Sutherland’s week. By this time we had an arrangement with the lady in the ticket-booth: we gave her a nod and a smile as we arrived, then sauntered past her window and chose any seat in the hall beyond that we fancied. Usually, this was somewhere in the gallery. I could never understand the attraction of the stalls ticket; it seemed unnatural to me to seat oneself below the stage, and have to peer up at the artistes from a level somewhere near their ankles, through the faint, shimmering haze of heat that rose above the footlights. The circle gave a better view, but the gallery, though further away, to my mind gave the best of all; and there were two seats in the front row, at the very centre of the gallery, that Alice and I particular favoured.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  At first that summer I watched the wash with the lid up just because I enjoyed it—I liked imagining myself as an agitator, shouldering the water powerfully back and forth with my fins; but eventually I began to suspect that untapped temporal powers resided in the spin cycle. Nothing that could safely displace articles of clothing in a circle that fast could fail to be of help to me in my effort to discover a second way, after the race-track transformer, to remove the clothes of girls and women without their knowledge. There were words molded on the tops of the agitators’ spindles—ours said SURGILATOR—and one day I let my fingers rest lightly on this rotifer of meaning as its final acceleration began. The word, made slightly slippery from residual soap, circulated progressively faster under my touch until, vibrating into unreadability, its letters merged into a whirling probabilistic annulus, and I felt that the secret of spin had been communicated from the machine to me. And I was right—the secret of spin was indeed at my fingertips —but it took a while for me to discover how exactly to put it to work. At first I thought that I had to spin. I went outside at twilight and practiced whirling with arms outstretched, not too terribly troubled by the possibility that I might remind an onlooker of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, trying to get my red blood cells to crowd down my forearms with such force that the tips of my fingers would blow off and I would hemorrhage triumphantly over the pachysandra. But of course my fingertips held and time ticked on. (Fingertips are so durable. They don’t even explode when you use them as temp shoehorns; they just tingle for a second as your impassive heel forces itself past.) Even so, I knew I was on the right track experimentally when, just around that time, I came across a paperback about UFOs in a carousel at a Mass Pike gift shop. It was a collection of letters from the general public to the air force describing flying-saucer sightings, interior layouts, and so on. One of the letters was from a man who thought that UFOs were generating the antigravity forces on which they supposedly hovered by spinning quantities of loose dirt and boulders in a doughnut-shaped inner ring built into the perimeter of the spacecraft. The author of the letter supplied a rough illustration which showed the rotating fill and the resultant lift. I knew that his idea was flawed and foolish, but I also knew that he had rightly sensed, as I had, centrifugation’s evocative peculiarity, its possibly mystical potential. It wasn’t the pull of gravity that spin would neutralize, I felt; it was the pull of time.

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

  In any case, in view of the miserable fee, nobody with a name would have touched this project with a barge pole. “I’ve nothing against you personally,” Joel explained, while John was out of the room, “but you have no experience. Nobody knows you—you are not even—” He broke off, gesturing hopelessly at me but saying nothing. “Pretty” was clearly the word that, with a restraint that I would later realize to be quite uncharacteristic, he had managed to bite back. The only thing that gave him any hope at all was that I had once been a nun. “Perhaps we can make some scandal out of that,” he sighed, blowing the blue cigarette smoke out from his nostrils like a disconsolate dragon. In fact, the only person who had any faith in the project was John. “It’s going to be wonderful, darling!” he told me repeatedly. “You’re going to be a big hit. I’m going to make you a star!” I took all that with a pinch of salt. But for some reason, I wanted to make this film. I sensed instinctively that this was what I had been waiting for. It was odd that I should feel this. For years I had wanted nothing to do with religion; the thought of reading anything remotely theological had filled me with visceral disgust. But this was different. The reading I was doing now in preparation for the series was not devotional. It would have no bearing on my life, after all, but would be a purely academic exercise. The slight quickening of spiritual interest that I had experienced while writing Through the Narrow Gate had been submerged. In the robustly secularist atmosphere of Channel 4, any form of faith seemed absurd, and my early life an aberration. Where Nick found religion faintly upsetting, John hated it with the passion of a zealot. This, I was told, was one of the reasons why Jeremy Isaacs, the controller of Channel 4, had put him in charge of religion. This new channel had a remit to be different from the other three. There was to be no “God slot,” no Songs of Praise, no edifying discussions for the devout. “I want to open up religion and discuss it as critically as any other subject,” John was fond of saying. And he did, conducting his mandate as an antireligious crusade. “They’re all bonkers, darling!” he would exclaim incredulously when yet another pious broadcaster came to talk to him about the possibility of a commission.

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

  My family was not particularly devout, and my parents were horrified when I told them that I had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of university life and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really wanted. So on September 14, 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other girls at the novitiate. Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was tough, and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured, because, as Saint Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful, inspired, and inspiring—perhaps even a saint. This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent high school to become a nun. Birmingham, my hometown, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed—even slightly irritated—and I, of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She looked skeptical at first, and then more interested. “Well, you know, I have to admit that in the past I’ve had some fleeting suspicions in that direction. I mean, why shouldn’t frequent or prolonged masturbational episodes aggravate, or even cause, CTS? But until now, no patient has spontaneously suggested it as a cause, and I’ve been reluctant to mention it. It’s definitely worth looking into. Perhaps we could scan you as you …” “Really?” I said. “You’d have me pleasure myself in one of those gigantic magnets? The ones like iron lungs, that take pictures of brain tumors?” “Well, why not?” she said. “And you’d use our dummy keyboard, too. We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions. We unfortunately can’t use real keyboards, because we can’t have any ferrous metal within the magnet.… Now, you don’t habitually masturbate wearing a studded cock ring or ball separator, do you?” “God no.” “Fine, because that might create real problems in a magnetic field of thirty thousand times earth gravity. So—I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you sincerely interested? I’m thinking out loud now, which I don’t normally do, but my sense is that this could be an important new line of research. Who knows—you might make The New England Journal of Medicine. Anonymously, of course.” “Well,” I said, pleased, “I suppose if I can be of some small help to others …” A week later, I showed up at the MR wing of Common-health’s hospital at a quarter to six in the evening, after an untaxing day at an accounting firm. My arm hurt, which pleased me, because I felt that I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. In a conference room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman explained in her friendly, faintly ironic way what was going to happen to me: some reference dots were going to be painted on my arm and penis, so that the imaging system could keep a fix on these two elements as I moved. She said she wanted me to type and masturbate just as I would in real life. She got up, and then remembered something. “One thing I do have to ask,” she said. She looked through some drawers in the back of the room. “I’m looking for something with a particular shape,” she explained. She held up a tongue depressor, but rejected it: “A little unromantic. I should have thought to bring in a prosthetic penis-form of some kind.” “I could just show you mine,” I suggested. “No—no—then we have to get observers in here and worry about all sorts of things. Thanks for offering, though. Ah! This will do.” She brought out a stick of lipstick from her purse and handed it to me. “Can you hold that and show me roughly how you masturbate? I realize that it’s a little smaller than you’re used to.” I held it and stroked it several ways.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I snipped all the thread from my hands and amassed a load’s worth of dirty clothes from the floor of my room (supplemented by several towels) and I started a large warm wash with the lid open and the interlock jammed. While the wash churned through its preliminaries, I chose a new needle, threaded it, and pushed it through the thus-far-unsewn callus at the base of my left hand’s middle finger. I put the spool in place on the nail and wrapped the loose end of the thread around the post of the washing machine. Now, as the spin cycle began, it pulled the thread through my callus, through a part of me, in winding it onto itself. The thread tugged through the hole in my skin surprisingly easily, faster and faster. My hand lay on the sill of the washer, face up. The heat of the friction began to hurt; when it became almost unbearable, and I was on the verge of closing my fist on the thread to snap it, the event, or non-event, happened. Everything stopped. I looked into the tub of the washing machine and was thrilled to be able to see and even touch that fiction of the physical sciences, centrifugal force. Without suffering harm, I could now reach in and hold clothes that were in the midst of spinning at six hundred r.p.m. I put my hand in the machine. The remaining blue water, immobilized in its turbulence and yet still wet to the touch, was especially beautiful. The world was again available for undressing. But I knew that if the thread that ran through my callus broke, time would resume. So I was unfortunately tethered to the washing machine.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “No, just drive,” she ordered, lifting her skirt and kneeling over the Van Dilden. “Find a dirt road and drive on it. I want this truck to bounce.” “My pleasure,” he said. She turned the vibrator on to full and slid halfway down on it. While she squeezed Astroglide on the two ends of the Fusilier, he turned onto a dirt road in low gear. The truck rocked and lurched. “Oh, that’s it,” she said, feeling herself filled with unexpected lateral UPS-truck fuck-motions. Already aching from her earlier mowing, she was impatient. “Now stop for a second. I want you to stick one end of this in my ass.” She pulled her skirt up over her ass with one hand and leaned forward and passed him the double-headed vibrator. The head of the Van Dilden was still inside her. “Should I turn it on?” he asked, examining the little remote controller. “Yeah, I guess, but, mmm, the main thing is to stuff it in my ass right now.” He turned it on, using the little control box. The two buzzings were at slightly different pitches, wowing in and out of phase. Marian felt something hard push against the muscle of her ass. “That’s it,” she said. She relaxed against it and let its head go in. “Push it a little further. Wow. Now drive—oh fuck, just drive this fucking truck.” The UPS guy hopped back in his seat and put the truck in gear. Marian unbent her knees and sat flatly down on the Van Dilden with her legs extended in front of her. This had the effect of pushing the Royal Welsh Fusilier deeper into her ass. It was like a fleshy tail. “I’ve got toys up my cunt and up my ass,” she moaned. The truck started bumping and jostling. She pulled the length of the Fusilier up against her tailbone and bent it around her hip and found that, as she had hoped, the other end easily reached her clit. She pulled back its “foreskin” and held the slick second head against herself. “Oh, fuck” she said, feeling all of her circuits starting to get busy. “Is that about right?” called the UPS man. He was driving manfully from one gulley to the next, steering with one hand. His other, Marian saw, was in a fist, pounding up and down on his surprisingly meaty coral-gabled cock. His brown UPS pants were around his knees, the zipper splayed open and ready to rip. The dirt road sloped down.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When he had left, Marian did the dirtiest thing she could think of, which was to drive fast to the supermarket, buy a copy of Cosmopolitan, drive home, pull the shades, and squat naked on her living-room floor directly over the magazine, opened to a full-page head shot of Patrick Swayze. “Look at what I’m showing you, Patrick,” she said, stroking the underside of her open thighs and pulling on a few pubic hairs to add a piquant sensation. Patrick’s eyes gazed unblinkingly up at her from between her legs, half obscured by her bush. “That’s right, look at what you’re making me do to my big clit,” she said. “Do you want to see my big fat cunt come? Do you?” Soon her eyes locked with Patrick’s and she sat suddenly down on his nose and half-smiling mouth, making the doubly slick magazine buckle. It was all so out of character for her that she felt glowing and refreshed afterward. The next week had a day and a half of rain, and the lawn needed a mow badly by Saturday. Kev couldn’t come by until three-thirty because of soccer practice. Marian spent the day pruning several overgrown lilacs and reading some more of the new biography of Jean Stafford. She felt, by the time Kevin showed up, that her sexual energy was very much under control and that she wouldn’t make some sort of regrettable pass at him. He explained how to drive the mower, with many apologies for the fact that he knew how to drive his own family’s mower better, saying that basically you did this and that and you had to watch out for this and that. She paid him fifteen for the lesson, which he at first wouldn’t take and then did take with fairly good grace, and she waved and began mowing. It was exhilarating to churn through the grass, especially when she drove up the slight grade toward the house and heard the engine strain a little. At first she mowed in a kind of boustrophedon pattern, back and forth, and then she changed to an Aztec square spiral pattern, homing in on the white tractor tire. As she got more confident about turning sharply and using the accelerator, she began to understand why David had wanted to own this machine—the feeling of being in control of it, cutting this wide swathe, was really terrific.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I spent some personal time with Ami Pro and a copier and saddle-bound a number of copies of these several stories, along with the one about Marian and the ridem lawn-mower, in pamphlet form, using as a cover the pale blue cover of something called Tales of French Love and Passion—a heavily ironic reissue of a cheesy 1936 edition of several mildly risqué stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had ordered through the Archie McPhee catalog. I left my homemade booklet in lots of places—in copies of Self and The American Scholar just before they were shoved through mail-slots, in women’s bathrooms at dance clubs, under the Gideon’s Bible in several rooms of the Meridien Hotel, on coffee tables during cocktail parties, inserted in the library’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article on “Life, Meaning and Value of”—but nothing resulted from all this effort that was anywhere near as exciting to me as the simple sight of Michelle, the Cape Cod woman, dunking her dildo in her bathwater and shaking it off. The peak of my life-imitates-rot phase came on the Massachusetts Turnpike one Saturday. I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea—the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand—the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope—I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely distracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I forgot. I’ll try. I’ll try. And so then he puts her tits back in her bra and tucks her shirt in and scampers back into the magnet and he lies there on the pad just where he was and snaps his fingers, and time starts up again, and he lies there thinking of the tits he has just sucked on, how great they felt in his hands, and it’s such a tremendous thought that he has to come, he doesn’t care how much it hurts—oh, that’s right. I want to come inside your magnet, doctor. It hurts, but I don’t care. I like you to take all kinds of graphic pictures of my nerve while I pump this hot nasty piece of meat off for you. I like being hard and hot in your core. Oh, doctor. Doctor? I’ve got to call you Susan when I come. Sorry. Is that okay?” “That’s okay,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Just try to stroke a little slower, if it’s at all possible.” “Oh, thank you. Oh Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan, uff, uffuck. Tell me you want to see me come. I want to hear you say it.” I heard only silence over the intercom, and then: “As I said before, I do think it’s important for you to climax.” “I will climax, you bet, you got it. I’m going to think of your tits and climax. Oh, you gave me your lipstick to hold. That was so good of you. I wish I could’ve circled your lips and nipples with it. Oh that feels nice. Squeeze my meat, Susan. Squeeze it in your big magnetic hole. Open that hole up for me. Suck me in, baby. Oh God yeah. Tighten that force down on my cock, uffuck. Uffuck. Here it is: oh yeah, oh fuck yeah. Oh yeah! Urrrrr!” I let the comeshots jump up and land on my stomach muscles. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, breathing peacefully. “Am I done?” I beatifically asked at last. “Almost,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Normally, at this point might you resume writing?” “If I’d been alternating writing and jacking, yes.” “Then could you type the baseline sentence again?” she said. “It might be useful to have. Remember it? ‘The cure …’?” “Don’t tell me!” I put the fake keyboard on my chest, avoiding the sperm, and typed the sentence from memory. The technicians dragged me out on the gantry and handed me a brown paper towel. I sat up, feeling a little sleepy and dazed, and put on my gown. In the control room, Dr. Orowitz-Rudman met me and led me to the room where my clothes were. “I think that went well, don’t you?” she said. “I’m sorry I fixated so totally on you.” “Don’t apologize,” she said. “We were fixated on you, you were fixated on us.” “It’s just that a woman doctor asking me to masturbate is like a dream come true …”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “That’s okay—come for me baby. She’s starting to come, Kevin! Shoot that hot juice up her ass for her! Fill her ass with that burning come!” Marian finger-fucked the okra-dick faster in and out of Kevin’s asshole, and he leaned forward to take it and then straightened up, lifting Sylvie by the hips right off the ground and pulling her back against his cock. “Now, Sylvie?” he said. “Oh, fuck me good, Kev! Fill my fucking fanny!” Sylvie shouted, looking in Marian’s eyes and then down at her toy-filled fuckholes. “Harder! Oh, yes! Fuck me real good, darling! SHOOT THAT HOT DICK UP MY FANNY-HOLE! OH! OH!” With an astonished expression, Kevin made one last long lurching shuddering push and started to come. “OH YES!” said Sylvie, feeling Kevin’s cock empty ounce after ounce of boiling scream-cream into her ass. “AH! I’M COMIIINNNG!!!!!” As pagan pleasures wracked her body, she did indeed make a huge grimacing smiley face. It was Marian’s turn now. She allowed the idea of Kevin’s squirting dick in Sylvie’s ass to merge with the sensation of Armande Klockhammer, Jr.’s in her own. She conjured up the sight of the dollar bills stuffed in his asscheeks as he danced with his back to the audience. She thought of the shouting women; the whomping music; the sight of him turning on the stage and tossing his heavy live meat around inside its black silk pouch as he looked out at all his women. All these memories were up her ass. She opened her eyes and said evenly, “Please watch me come, now, you two. Watch my asshole and cunt come around these huge horny cocks!” Then she threw herself back on the wet grass and lifted her legs and rested her feet on Sylvie’s back; she let them watch whatever they wanted while the brutish, hunky orgasm ennobled her body. “Oh nice … so nice … so nice …” she sighed as the clit-twitching ebbed. When the three of them had recovered a little, Marian rinsed off Kevin’s softening cock and lifted herself off the Klockhammer and sprayed it fresh. “Can we pick some more of your tulips sometime?” said Sylvie sweetly before she and Kevin, dressed once again in their matching outfits, left for the fish hatchery. “Anytime you want,” said Marian. “I love young love.” Naked, replete, she put her toys and her abandoned book on the tray and went indoors. Over the next year, with Kevin and Sylvie’s weekend help weeding and planting and mowing, her back yard became the envy of her neighbors.

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

  “How can anyone believe all this stuff?” John or Nick would ask incredulously, and we would look at one another, wide-eyed in genuine astonishment. It did indeed seem incredible that in the late twentieth century people could still accept the idea that a personalized deity had brought the world into being and supervised human history, or that a young Jewish teacher who had died in an obscure province of the Roman Empire had been divine. And if you could give no credence to these doctrines—and I could not— you had lost your faith. That was the end of the matter, and truth demanded that you should say so honestly. I was convinced that I had not been alone in my doubts: there must be hundreds—thousands—of Christians who suppressed similar misgivings, stamped on their rebellious thoughts, and felt all the while a sinking loss of intellectual and personal integrity. These people must be crippling their minds as I had done by confining them within an untenable doctrinal system. Channel 4 had commissioned me to liberate them. I would show the absurdity of these dogmatic constraints. People could walk free and rediscover the joy of an unfettered mind, as I was doing right now. This was arrogant, of course, but I still felt slightly intoxicated by my newly recovered mental agility and I wanted others to feel this way too. I could not get over my luck in getting this commission; it was a privilege, and I wanted to spread the “gospel” that had, I thought, saved me. So I was not simply carried away by the flattery, the attention, and the expense-account lunches. I was a woman with a mission.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So when Jesus went around saying that God was now in charge, he wasn’t walking (as it were) into virgin territory. He wasn’t making his announcement in a vacuum. Imagine what it would be like, in Britain or the United States today, if, without an election or any other official mechanism for changing the government, someone were to go on national radio and television and announce that there was now a new prime minister or president. “From today onward,” says the announcer, “we have a new ruler! We’re under new government! It’s all going to be different!” That’s not only exciting talk. It’s fighting talk. It’s treason! It’s sedition! By what right is this man saying this? How does he think he’ll get away with it? What exactly does he mean, anyway? An announcement like this isn’t simply a proclamation. It’s the start of a campaign. When a regime is already in power and is simply transferring that power to the next person in line, you just announce that it’s happening. But if you make that announcement while someone else appears to be in charge, you are saying, in effect, “The campaign starts here.” So what did Jesus mean? What sort of a campaign could this have been? Those were the questions, we can be sure, in his hearers’ minds. Frustratingly, for us and for them, Jesus’s answer to, “What exactly does he mean?” seems to have been partly, “Wait and see.” But in the meantime he was still demonstrating what it meant, up close and personal. His healings and celebrations were part of the meaning of God becoming king. This is what it looked like. But what had the curing of dozens, perhaps thousands, of people to do with the hopes and aspirations we studied earlier, the dream of a new Exodus, a victorious battle against the old tyrant, the rebuilding of the Temple, the creation of justice and peace? Maybe that last one is the place to start. Justice and peace are about putting things right in the world. But, from whatever angle you look at Jesus, he was concerned not just with outward structures, but with realities that would involve the entire person, the entire community. No point putting the world right if the people are still broken. So broken people will be healed: paralytics, epileptics, demoniacs, people with horrible skin diseases, a servant on the point of death, an old woman with a high fever, blind men, deaf and mute men, a little girl who’s technically already dead, an old woman with a persistent hemorrhage. And so on, and so on. Matthew lets the list build up until we almost take it for granted: yes, here’s a person who’s sick; Jesus will cure her.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Now that I have recorded it here, it seems to me that Arlette’s flowershop story and my behavior in her apartment afterward may mark the end of one phase of my Fold-life and the beginning of another. I was always, or almost always, quite careful, even painstaking, in my sexual adventures in the Fold up until then, but Arlette’s recklessness liberated me, at least to a degree. I still revere the word “painstaking,” as I always have—I pronounce it and think of it as if it were divisible into “pain” and “staking,” because the “staking” contributes a tweezery sort of push-pinned delicacy to the connotation and is in its pointedness the secret reason for the word’s success, even though technically it merely means taking pains, or exerting oneself. But sometimes when I’m recording detailed notes as I remove a woman’s clothes (“left bra strap fallen” or “panties inside out and worked partway into asscrack”) so that I will be sure to replace everything perfectly, just as it was, I feel a gurgle of Arlette’s joyful who-gives-a-fuckness working in me, and I want to strip the entire city of Boston and mound all the clothes together in the middle of Washington Street and dance on top of them screaming, “We’re totally fucking naked, we’re totally fucking naked!”—or failing that (since sudden widespread big-city nudity could lead to rapes and other unforeseen turbulence), I might want to strip everyone in an idyllic small town like Northampton and see how they would adjust to it. That actor on Unsolved Mysteries could do a nice twenty-minute segment about the event—the Quiet Little College Town That Stripped. Nobody would connect it to me and my Solonoid. Since Arlette, I have taken many more risks; I have increasingly wanted to give the world something to digest—something big and anarchic and sloppy but not (I hope) harmful or even particularly embarrassing in any permanent way to the individuals concerned. Probably my decision to assemble something on paper about my life flows in part from this urge.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of semis—by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight—like (she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in The Harder They Come. I got animated, because I love talking about sex, and I impulsively decided that this was the right moment to begin to confess my Fold history to her, couching it first as a hypothetical case. All right then, I said to her, what did she think of the idea of some sort of chord on the piano that whenever you played it, stopped time? Say back when she was at Tufts, her piano teacher (someone on whom she’d told me she’d had a crush) had been working on a conclusive edition of a piece called Map, by a once forgotten but now increasingly respected twentieth-century composer named Mascon Albedo. Say that, in comparing the microfilmed manuscripts with the 1903 Yates and Boling edition of the work, Rhody’s piano teacher, Alan Sparkling, discovered a surprising number of significant errors and righted them. As his corrections accumulated, he began to feel not only that Map was a much greater work than anyone could have known, but also that he, Alan Sparkling, was developing a sure instinct for Albedo’s style. And his instinct told him that there was one chord which, even though it checked out as correct against several of the relevant manuscripts, still sounded quite wrong, or at least incomplete. It didn’t sound at all like the chord Albedo would have written at that moment in the piece. And it was a chord of crucial importance to the meaning of the work—a very soft chiming that arrived after a long stretch of murkier pianism that should have come off as strange and triumphant, but as it stood did not. The chord was surmounted by a fermata.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Simply Jesus A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters N. T. Wright Dedication To the beloved memory of Nicholas Irwin Wright 26 February 1920–16 March 2011 Contents Title Page Dedication Preface Part One Chapter 1 - A Very Odd Sort of King Chapter 2 - The Three Puzzles Chapter 3 - The Perfect Storm Chapter 4 - The Making of a First-Century Storm Chapter 5 - The Hurricane Part Two Chapter 6 - God’s in Charge Now Chapter 7 - The Campaign Starts Here Chapter 8 - Stories That Explain and a Message That Transforms Chapter 9 - The Kingdom Present and Future Chapter 10 - Battle and Temple Chapter 11 - Space, Time, and Matter Chapter 12 - At the Heart of the Storm Chapter 13 - Why Did the Messiah Have to Die? Chapter 14 - Under New Management: Easter and Beyond Part Three Chapter 15 - Jesus: The Ruler of the World Further Reading Scripture Index About the Author Credits Books by N. T. Wright Copyright About the Publisher Part One Preface J ESUS OF NAZARETH poses a question and a challenge two thousand years after his lifetime. The question is fairly simple: who exactly was he? This includes the questions, What did he think he was up to? What did he do and say, why was he killed, and did he rise from the dead? The challenge is likewise fairly simple: since he called people to follow him, and since people have been trying to do that ever since, what might “following him” entail? How can we know if we are on the right track? I have spent much of my life puzzling over these questions and trying, from various angles, to address and answer them. This has been exhilarating as well as challenging. Having grown up in a Christian household, and having experienced the growth and development of my own personal faith from my early years through to adulthood, I have been aware of a vocation which our present culture usually splits into two but which I persist in seeing as a single whole. I have been called to be a historian and theologian, a teacher and writer specializing in the history and thought of early Christianity, and also a pastor within the church. Sometimes I have been able to combine these two elements, the academic and the pastoral; sometimes the jobs to which I have been led have forced me to specialize in one rather than the other, leaving an imbalance which I have then tried to correct.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Indeed, it was he who had been rebuilding Sepphoris as his capital. In the south, there were the chief priests, with the (annually appointed) high priest at their head—a pseudo-aristocracy, kept in place, as was Herod Antipas himself, by Roman backing. The Romans liked to run their huge empire through local power brokers on whom they could rely to collect the taxes and keep the population under control. If either Herod or the high priest heard that someone was going around announcing that God was becoming king, they would smell trouble at once. So when Jesus went around saying that God was now in charge, he wasn’t walking (as it were) into virgin territory. He wasn’t making his announcement in a vacuum. Imagine what it would be like, in Britain or the United States today, if, without an election or any other official mechanism for changing the government, someone were to go on national radio and television and announce that there was now a new prime minister or president. “From today onward,” says the announcer, “we have a new ruler! We’re under new government! It’s all going to be different!” That’s not only exciting talk. It’s fighting talk. It’s treason! It’s sedition! By what right is this man saying this? How does he think he’ll get away with it? What exactly does he mean, anyway? An announcement like this isn’t simply a proclamation. It’s the start of a campaign. When a regime is already in power and is simply transferring that power to the next person in line, you just announce that it’s happening. But if you make that announcement while someone else appears to be in charge, you are saying, in effect, “The campaign starts here.” So what did Jesus mean? What sort of a campaign could this have been? Those were the questions, we can be sure, in his hearers’ minds. Frustratingly, for us and for them, Jesus’s answer to, “What exactly does he mean?” seems to have been partly, “Wait and see.” But in the meantime he was still demonstrating what it meant, up close and personal. His healings and celebrations were part of the meaning of God becoming king. This is what it looked like . But what had the curing of dozens, perhaps thousands, of people to do with the hopes and aspirations we studied earlier, the dream of a new Exodus, a victorious battle against the old tyrant, the rebuilding of the Temple, the creation of justice and peace? Maybe that last one is the place to start. Justice and peace are about putting things right in the world. But, from whatever angle you look at Jesus, he was concerned not just with outward structures, but with realities that would involve the entire person, the entire community. No point putting the world right if the people are still broken.

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

  Neither did I. What had religion ever done for me but make me ill, make me unhappy and dissatisfied with myself, and, now, apparently, make me cross into the bargain? I would be better without it. Some weeks later, after we had returned to Oxford, I looked apprehensively at the envelope that Jenifer had pushed under my door, but forced myself to open the letter and read it. Then I read it again. I had got a job. I had been appointed tutorial research fellow at Bedford College in the University of London. It was Jane who had seen the advertisement. She had marched into the kitchen, where I was heating up some soup for lunch, and waved the newspaper under my nose. “You should apply for this!” she said. It was a three-year appointment. It would enable me to finish my thesis and—even more important—would give me some teaching experience. I wanted that job. I wanted it very much. I looked at Jane and knew that she wanted it too. We didn’t have to say anything, because we both knew that if she had been able to apply, she would certainly have been the one to get it. But Jane was going to Keswick, and I had applied and been summoned to an interview. Dorothy Bednarowska had written me a reference. This was the kind of junior post that she thought I could handle, and it was “only London,” a university which, from her Oxbridge perspective, was almost beneath serious consideration. “I’ve written her up terrifically,” she had told Jane. And she must have done so, because at my interview the two young lecturers seemed to assume that I would be coming. They wanted me to teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, and because they themselves wished to concentrate on the drama of the period, I would also be teaching the twentieth-century novel. “Malcolm Lowry, John Fowles, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing? Is that all right?” one of them had asked me. “Yes, of course,” I lied, realizing that if I got the job I would have a great deal of reading to get through during the summer. But they seemed to think that it was not if but when. I had returned home to Oxford, scarcely daring to believe it. But it was true. I had been offered the job. All I had to do was sign the contract. It was a step up the ladder, a foot in the door—all those things. It seemed that, after all, it really might be possible to become an academic. It was a new start. Three years now stretched invitingly ahead of me. In three whole years in London, anything could happen. 5. Desiring This Man’s Gift and That Man’s Scope

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Marian was not a committed zoophile, though—at least she didn’t think of herself as one. True, she and her best friend in sixth grade had made her friend’s black Labrador shoot two quick clear squirts of come once by gently squeezing his dense buried bulb as he lay on his back with his legs open and his eyes half closed, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Marian was a fan of human cock, for better or worse. (Dogdick did still have a certain appeal to her, in part because when it emerged it had a clitoral, almost hermaphroditic quality: something bisexual in her was triggered by the sight of it.) Mentally she again reviewed her dildos—how could she have (one or two late nights excepted) snubbed them all winter? The idea of running herself a bath, and then straddling the cold edge of the tub so that all her weight was on the soft place between her vadge and her ass, began to seem attractive. She could take one of the middle-sized dildi and swish it around in the bathwater and shake it off, so that it waggled obscenely, and stick it down on the edge of the tub and squirt Astroglide all over it. She could arrange herself over it, supporting herself with her hands on the edge of the tub, looking down past her hanging breasts at the slick dildo as it slowly disappeared into her sex-hair and found its thick way up inside her. She went inside to do just this, but by the time she had actually drawn the bath and gotten into it, she was much too aroused to do tame things in her bathroom. She got out and dried off and slipped on a dress. She had a new plan. She wanted to have a full-fledged Betty Dodsonian PC-muscled clasm outside in honor of her tulip garden.