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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest. Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. Next thing I knew, I was earping onto the frozen earth, then girls were steering me loop-legged to my door. Which was the end of that night and more than a few others. Come Christmas, I caught a ride to Dallas, then took the silver bullet-shaped bus into the Leechfield station, where Daddy stood in creased khakis with comb marks in his black hair. The neck I threw my arms around had gone loose and leathery. For the first time, he smelled old. He took my duffel bag, saying, You could use a few pounds. Passing through the greenish neon of the station, I felt time curve back, and us in it. The place seemed coated with chicken grease. Even the pinball glass was smoky. A man sat on his shoeshine box listening to a big transistor radio with a coat-hanger antenna. In his raised-up chair was a thin lady with conked hair slicked alongside her head. Outside, Daddy threw my duffel into the truck bed. The door he opened groaned with rust, the hollow timbre of it tolling my arrival better than church bells. For five months, I’d ached to reenter a familiar slot alongside my fading daddy, but being there my mind went skittery as water flicked on a skillet. Even with the window open, the truck was redolent with Camel smoke and the goop Daddy used to clean oil off his hands with. There was a hint of cumin from a paper bag of corn-husk tamales from a roadside stand. And running under it all like current—what got him up in the morning and laid him out at night was the oak smell of wood barrels where whiskey soaked up flavor. For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  And her family, who’d done two interventions, kept rifling laundry hampers and closets, looking to no avail for her stash. Then one night, she tells us in a demure voice, the frost had built up so deep she couldn’t midwife the bottle out, so she just upended the whole bird, guzzling out of it. She says, And that was my moment of clarity, thinking, Other people just don’t drink like this. Rather than scorn her like schoolmarms for the sin, the room roars—myself among them—while she gives a startled smile. And because I’ve never drained vodka from an icy bird, I think I’m nowhere near as bad as that crazy bitch. Another guy talks about burying bottles all over his mother’s yard before being dragged into rehab. Fresh out, he needed only to secret inside his Speedo bathing suit a plastic straw. Then he’d grab a towel and some tanning oil and step outside, saying he wanted to catch some rays. His mother would study him all day through the sliding door, totally flummoxed when he came crab-walking in—drunk and beet-red—at sundown. More laughter, and I hear myself join in since the company is more raucously alive than most dance clubs. Was it this same meeting where a man told the story of trying to hang himself? The rope was too green, and at dusk, his wife tilted open the garage door to find him twisting drunk, on tiptoes, half conscious. She cut him down, called him a bastard, and packed her bags. He then went into the kitchen and blew out the pilot light and stuffed towels around the edges of the room. He emptied a bottle of sleeping pills into his mouth and finished the last of the whiskey. Three days later, he woke with a crushing headache, and his first thought was, Boy do I need a cigarette. So he patted around on the front of his shirt and pulled out a stogie. Then he drew the Bic lighter from his pants pocket and rubbed up a single flame. He didn’t hear the explosion as the walls of the room were blown out. In his next conscious instant, he was smoldering in his neighbor’s yard with his brows singed off. When have I laughed so hard in company at the specter of human frailty? Not since the last great poetry reading I’d sat through, when some outcast put a fresh name on the unnamable. I don’t know what I expected here—a bunch of guys who crawled out from alleys or under bridges looking for hot coffee and a bowl of soup. But the folks around me look mostly present and clear-eyed. Among the academics and guys in suits sit working people—chamber maid, garage mechanic, diner waitress. I recognize the Latino guy who pours my coffee at the local donut shop.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In the restaurant, we give our names as Wally and Holly Stevens, a poet and his editor daughter. At a tiny candlelit table, I smell the red wine on Warren’s breath. As he passes over my menu, his hand touches mine, and the pulse in my chest grows so thunderous I fear he’ll make it out. This has to be a date, dammit. When he starts to quote Yeats’s famous love poem, When you are old and gray and full of sleep/And nodding by the fire take down this book… I leap in to finish: And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep… And if there’d been a chaise longue nearby to land on, I might have stood up and swooned. The night before I graduate, he shows up at a bar where I dance with him all night while my putative suitor buys our drinks. In the wee hours, Warren quotes the famous pastoral proposition poem, Come live with me and be my love…The sixteenth-century version of Hubba, hubba, sweetcakes. My heart’s banging bongos. And four months later—after he’s driven cross-country to see me several times—he asks me to move to Cambridge with him. Three years after that, we’ll get engaged. But before any of that, I have to meet the family, and boy am I eager, facing the task with a peasant girl’s bouncy determination to wow people not overimpressed by much. The final miles Warren’s tiny car putters, I hold a compact in one hand and a mascara wand in the other, globbing on lashes. (Little did I know my mother’s advice—You can never wear too much mascara—is, in this company, deeply wrong.) We pass through wrought-iron gates, and I look up, wand in hand, to ask, Is this a subdivision? This is my house, he says. It’s a testament to Warren’s reticence that he’s failed to mention the place is posh enough to sport a baronial-sounding name without seeming ridiculous: Fairweather Hall. There’s a separate wing for the live-in staff, severely reduced now that the six children are gone. If I remember right, the gardener even grew up on the estate since his father had been Mr. Whitbread’s valet in law school—sounding like a Chekhov serf to me. After Warren parks, I gawk my way from the car, jaw unhinged, about to burst out with a ghetto goddamn. Why didn’t you tell me about all this? I ask. Tell you about what? he wonders, completely sincere, for he’s never less than sincere, which partly informs my devotion. I already know how Warren shrinks from show. When people ask where he went to college, he’ll avoid dropping the H-bomb as long as possible, though I’d have tattooed it on my forehead.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Do tree surgeons gape at great examples of tree surgery? Do line cooks get misty eyed seeing a well run café pump out orders? For me seeing this guy gives an almost sexual thrill—like a horny teenager faced with a centerfold. Or more like a devout altar girl seeing a saint. Please don’t, Warren finally says in a voice barely audible. He places an empty purple shell in the bowl between us. What? I say. Don’t introduce yourself, he says. Admit you’re thinking about it. It’s true that my former grad school professor Bob translates the guy at Berkeley, so we connect at some small nexus. Warren and I both pick at our mussels till I say, Why not? It’s something I can tell our grandkids about. I touched the hand that wrote those words. I don’t want to be here for it, Warren says. He raises a finger for the check. Behind his napkin, he says, You don’t have to meet every famous poet. In his view, my appetite for social activity is voracious. I remember seeing an invitation to his college reunion on the kitchen table that year. The choices were: I can attend. I hope I can attend. I cannot attend. He circled the words to read I hope I cannot attend before sending it back. You’re at Harvard every day, I say. You record Seamus Heaney lectures (Harvard’s own Nobel-anointed poet). He was your teacher, even. You host poetry readings twice a month. The Greek waiter drops off the check, and I rifle my briefcase as Warren goes over the math. He says, Seamus is plagued by toadies. I don’t want to be one of them. I snatch the check from his hand, saying, I’m the boring stiff in a suit who comes in late to the reading and nobody talks to at the reception. I live in a business gulag. He says, Nobody thinks of you as a wallflower, Mare. I glance over at the Polish luminary, adding, I just want to shake his hand. Warren looks as if he’d like to sink through the floor, so I say, Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the car. As he slips on his coat, I say, Not speaking to Seamus is not treating him like a normal person, you know. He pulls on his stocking cap with a grimace. Seconds later, I shake the great laureate’s hand, and it shames me to say I’m so desperate to enter the world in which he’s lord that I get a shock of electricity doing so. We’re driving home when Warren says, You’d sit in his lap if he’d let you. He’s eighty, I say. I just wanted to touch him and see if he was real.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  The glans penis is about half as round as the faces of the four pubescent boys who lap wondrously at it. I’m reminded of one of Otto’s road-trip Boy Scout reminiscences: “Shit,” Otto said. “It’s just like sucking on your finger.” The guy says he’s leaving tomorrow, but that he’ll be back in a couple weeks. He’s sorry we can’t get together. He has a guest coming. He’ll leave the tray in the hall. I consider listening at the door when I make my pickup rounds. Downstairs, Sally informs me that she’s heard Lemon Pie is a queer. She’s checked the register and his name is . . . I tune her out. It’s none of my business. Tuning her back in, I hear he’s from Walla Walla. Somehow it’s good to know that homosexuals come from someplace besides San Francisco. I decide not to listen at the door. In fact, the morning crew can get his tray. I’m feeling pretty good, generally. I take all stairs two at a time. I loft the heaviest trays of dirty dishes to my shoulder, balancing them on my fingertips, flexing my fingers frequently, exercising those unsung muscles of a good grip, the interossei and lumbricales. I reflect upon the tracks a good grip will leave on wrists and upper arms. Dishes brush my ear. Turkey gravy, bits of dressing, peaks of burned meringue deck my hair. Each time I see Sally for a new order she picks the garbage off my head. Elmo and I arm wrestle. I beat him both arms. I bounce on my toes while Elmo runs the charcoal brick over his grill. His tools are cleaned and put away in their slots in the cutting board. It’s about time to head home. I’ve never been more in touch with my body than I am at this weight. I swear I can hear the valves of my heart open and slam shut. Oxygenated blood swooshes through my arteries. It sounds like the Seattle monorail. Leukocytes and erythrocytes politely line up at my capillaries: “Be my guest!” “No, no. After you!” they say. My highly energized state strikes Elmo as comical. Wiping the grill a final few times with his burlap rag, he looks up at me and smiles. “You get you some teeth, you be a totally tuned man,” he says, chuckling. “You about a yard off the floor. Best be sure you come down on that Shute.” I smile and dance and hold my palms up for him to punch. He throws a combination, blowing out his nose each time his fist smacks my palm. The veins bulge beneath the tattoos on Elmo’s forearms. He was a lightweight fighter in Chicago in the 1940s. He’s the only black adult I’ve ever known, besides teachers and coaches. I’m sure glad he got out of boxing with his brain intact. Sally looks up from balancing her till. She’s already pulled the velvet cord across the doorway.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When Luther’s party reached Oppenheim, they came to the banks of the river Rhine. A ferry took them and their wagon and horses over, and on April 16, around ten in the morning, their procession entered Worms at last, most likely through the Mainz gate. All who have written of it say that it was a spectacle for the ages. Trumpets from the cathedral announced Luther’s arrival, and two thousand people thronged to greet him. (The entire population of the city was seven thousand, but in the course of the diet this would double.) The imperial herald was now joined by a jester wearing a fool’s coxcomb and singing, The one we sought so long has arrived at last; we expected you even when days were at their darkest!5 Swawe wrote that it was all just like Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was breathtaking. Of course Luther could not help wondering whether that meant that he was days away from his Good Friday, but over and over he gave it all to God. Thy will be done. The tremendous reception Luther got upon his entry into Worms deeply peeved the papal nuncio Aleander, and he blamed the emperor for allowing it. He was sure that any kind of rapprochement with this insolent monk—whom he dubbed “the Saxon dragon”—was impossible. And of course Aleander’s own arrival at Worms was as far a cry from Luther’s as can be imagined. No one was there to greet him, and he was bitterly put out that the only room he could find was cramped and unheated. It all must have been exceedingly unpleasant and fatiguing. In fact, the whole time he was in Worms, people hissed at him and made threatening gestures when they saw him on the street. Aleander saw only too well that Luther was a German hero. He wrote to Rome, “Now the whole of Germany is in full revolt; nine-tenths raise the war cry ‘Luther,’ while the watchword of the other tenth who are indifferent to Luther is ‘Death to the Roman Curia!’” This monk and his revolution had better be destroyed mercilessly, and soon. Aleander was amazed that not only did all of the people root for Luther, but they seemed well acquainted with the details of his case. “All of them,” Aleander wrote, “have written on their banners a demand for a council to be held in Germany, even those who are favorable to us, or rather to themselves.”6 He was particularly nettled to see people everywhere peddling woodcut images depicting Luther with a dove, firmly answering the question whether he was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and others with him piously sporting a numinous nimbus, as though his sainthood had already been established beyond any doubt. Later Aleander wrote a cranky account of Luther’s arrival:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But it was with the three aforementioned manifestos that Luther would be most identified during this twelve-month caesura in Rome’s mad hunt; so let us look at each of them in turn. But one other reason Luther was freer than previously to write these three groundbreaking and theologically breathtaking treatises may also have to do with something fairly mundane. During this time, Luther’s monastic practice of saying the daily hours might at last have caught up with his theology. In other words, he stopped doing them altogether. Ten years later, he wrote, Our Lord God pulled me away by force from the canonical hours in 1520, when I was already writing a great deal, and I often saved up my hours for a whole week, and then on Saturday I would do them one after another so that I neither ate nor drank anything for the whole day, and I was so weakened that I couldn’t sleep, so that I had to be given Dr. Esch’s sleeping draught, the effects of which I still feel in my head.*28 He said that eventually he was behind by three full months and the idea of ever catching up so much overwhelmed him that he was finally forced to end this practice he had been doing for fifteen years. So it is entirely possible that the writing of these three treatises brought him to this breaking point or that he had ended this habit before writing them. In any event, it’s clear that abandoning the hours enabled him to be that much more productive. [image file=image_rsrc6KX.jpg] Cranach’s 1520 portrait of Luther. Part of what makes Luther sui generis is the mad unpredictability and speed at which he tossed these three bombs. He made up for lost time and said everything he thought must be said. While his opponents were still choking from the dust of one explosion and then blinking to fathom the damage around them, Luther threw another—of another kind and in an unexpected place—so that they were stymied and flummoxed into paralysis and confusion. Luther’s first major work during this time was his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. It was published in August 1520, and Melchior Lotter presciently printed no fewer than four thousand copies, a giddily optimistic number in the world of early sixteenth-century publishing. But Lotter’s gamble was well rewarded. Within two weeks, every copy had been sold. Luther emended a second edition slightly, which was printed within the month, and eventually ten editions were printed, making their way from the printing centers of Basel, Strasbourg, Augsburg, and Leipzig out to the wider world.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Just see what has been accomplished in a single year, during which we have been preaching and writing this truth. See how the papists’ camouflage clothing has shrunk in length and breadth. . . . What will be the result if the mouth of Christ continues to thresh* by his Spirit for another two years?5 This is the same piece of writing in which Luther decries the name “Lutheran,” which was being taken by many who sided with him. He asked that such people simply call themselves Christians. “What is Luther?” he asked. “After all, the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for you. . . . How then should I—poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am—come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name?”6 Of course his plea was in vain.* On December 22, Karlstadt, ever forcing things forward, announced that on New Year’s Day a simple evangelical Lord’s Supper would be held in the Castle Church, in which every one of the new reforms would be included. Both wine and bread would be served to all. Those communing must hold the chalice themselves, and the words of the Communion ceremony would be spoken in simple German. The host would certainly not be elevated, as is done in the Catholic Mass. Of course there would be a sermon. But as soon as Frederick’s counselors caught wind of this service, they made clear they would shut it down. It was one thing to take such steps in more private quarters, as they had been doing, but to do this in the Castle Church itself was too much and much too soon. But Karlstadt cleverly moved the date up one week, to Christmas Eve, before anyone had time to organize against it. And not only did he conduct things as promised; he even dispensed with the usual clerical vestments, simply wearing his academic gown. Many hundreds came. Some said a thousand were there. It was said that many of those who took Communion did not fast beforehand, as was typical, or go to confession, both of which were somewhat scandalous. Twice during this landmark service, the sacred Communion wafer was dropped on the floor, with the offending layperson too horrified by what he had done to bend down and pick it up, so Karlstadt took it upon himself to do so. But word of this contributed to the controversy with which this service was regarded.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s dream had now come true; he could spend infinite hours digging into the Bible in a way he had never been able to do before. He could find out what it really was saying on certain issues that had always eluded him, and he could perhaps even find the fabled golden ticket—the deeper meaning that was the key to the whole—that lay buried someplace deep beneath the Latin strata. Luther was hunting for the truth itself about who we are and who God is and what he really expects of us and how we can reconcile the infinite breach between heaven and earth, between God and man, between peace and agony. For this he would look and look very hard, because if he found it he would at last have a way out of the miserable doubt and agony that had plagued him since long before the thunderstorm in Stotternheim. WittenbergIn the tale of Luther’s life, there are many important players, but the town of Wittenberg played as vital a role as any. In fact, it’s quite impossible to divorce Wittenberg itself from several of those players, among them Staupitz and Frederick, the Duke of Saxony. Frederick was also known as Frederick the elector, and later as Frederick the Wise, and there would hardly be any Wittenberg per se if not for him. Later, the great painter Lucas Cranach becomes another Wittenberg figure whose role in Luther’s story cannot be exaggerated. Our present-day grand view of Wittenberg—as a respected name in the pantheon of those places where history has been lived and made—is dramatically different from the view people would have had of it when Luther went to live there. In fact, compared to the many truly great cities of Germany at that time, Wittenberg was then decidedly pathetic. A number of the German cities—the so-called imperial free cities—were so powerful that they were able to flout the authority of any nearby prince and be truly independent. Among these were Augsburg, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne, Strasbourg, and Basel. In 1512, when Luther arrived to stay, Wittenberg was a far cry from any of these. But what made Wittenberg into the city it would become and was already becoming—in part as the staging ground for the Reformation to come—had begun as the pure ambition that was born of a bitter sibling rivalry. It all began in 1485, when the former lands of the Wettin-Saxon dukes were divided between Frederick’s father, Ernest, and Ernest’s brother Albert. According to Saxon custom, Albert, as the youngest, was able to choose which of the territories he wished to take, and he naturally chose the best ones available, with Saxony’s prize city, Leipzig, among them. This division of Saxony into what became known as “Albertine Saxony” and “Ernestine Saxony” created a rivalry that would be played out in numerous ways with many important ramifications in the decades ahead.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When June 27 dawned, the debate proceedings began with great ceremony. At 6:00 a.m., there was a worship service at the Church of St. Thomas, where a twelve-part Mass was sung. The company then proceeded to the thirteenth-century Pleissenburg castle. Because there was no space in the university large enough for all who wished to attend, the castle courthouse would serve as the debate site. The room was duly festooned with tapestries, and seventy-six local citizens stood guard. Two lecterns faced each other. Eck’s bore the image of the dragon slayer Saint George, whereas the Wittenbergers’ bore the image of Saint Martin. Each morning’s disputation began at 7:00 and ended at 9:00. The afternoon’s session ran from 2:00 to 5:00. But on this first day, the events began with an oration of more than two hours, given by the Leipzig Humanist and Greek scholar Peter Mosselanus. In it he took great pains to warn the debaters not to wrangle indecently but long-windedly instructed them to debate God’s truth in a manner befitting the subject. Duke George was stunned such things needed to be said. Did not these fool theologians already know this? When the oration was over, it was already time to repair to midday dinner. It was said that Duke George “had an eye for the delicacies of the table.”10 So he graciously sent a deer to Eck and a tasty roebuck to Karlstadt. Luther received nothing. When the actual debate began, the first subject was the freedom of the will and whether one was able to do anything good apart from God’s grace. Luther felt that Karlstadt was debating well, always backing up what he said with quotations from his many books. But then Eck objected that he would not “debate against a library.”11 Eck insisted that Karlstadt refrain from inanely parroting what others had said. This caused a tremendous uproar, but in the end Karlstadt was obliged to set his well-traveled helps aside. For reasons lost to history, Luther was widely reported to have a nosegay during much of these early debates, which some of the public found irritating. For the first four days of the debate, Karlstadt and Eck went at it, but on July 4, at last, it was Luther’s turn to step to the rostrum. Mosselanus has given us this indelible portrait of the actors:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Ironically, then, it was the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Muslim aggressors that spawned what came to be the definitive response to Scholasticism. Innumerable Byzantine Greek scholars fled the region to settle in Europe, and as a result Greek and Latin studies enjoyed a great revival, leading to what we now call Renaissance Humanism, whose great cry was ad fontes! Back to the sources! This suddenly presented fascinating and tantalizing possibilities in the realization that one might for the first time in so many centuries uncover what lay at the root of what everyone believed. One might also uncover things that threw into question or entirely disproved conventional teachings. “Renaissance” means “rebirth,” and so it was not just a return to the original sources of antiquity but a new birth of all of these sources that would allow scholars to apply their newfound knowledge to these old texts. These things had been hidden and even believed lost forever, but now suddenly the doors were opened and everyone could go picking through what had been untouched for many centuries. Who knew what they might find? The Bible was of course central to all of these new developments. For one thing, the world of Scholasticism had put it at a significant remove from even monks themselves, and even when they were able to read portions of it, it was always in the sometimes obscuring Latin of the Vulgate.* But because the Old Testament was actually written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, there were numerous passages in which the Latin translation did a disservice to the original meanings, and these errors had been passed down through the centuries. Erasmus of Rotterdam would play the central role in restoring the New Testament to its original Greek, making the raw and original words of the first Christians available to a new generation. Most notable among those eager to delve into these long hidden depths was Luther himself, who would use Erasmus’s own restored Greek New Testament when he translated the New Testament into German many years later. But for now it was all still just an exciting possibility. It’s impossible to think that Luther didn’t wonder what treasures lay as yet undiscovered in the original texts and whether there in the original sources he might somehow find succor for his restless soul. • • •

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Every guy who comes to practice gets to be on the team. If he’s the best he gets to wrestle number one varsity. If he’s second best he gets to wrestle number two varsity or number one junior varsity. If he’s third best he gets to wrestle number one JV or number two JV. It depends on how tough the matches are and how bad the team needs to win. Coach remembers when he had to go through the halls grabbing guys, asking them if they wanted to turn out for the wrestling team. After we won the state championship last year, the PTA wanted to build us a new wrestling room. Otto and Schmooz and Kuch and I had to threaten to move to Moses Lake before they’d leave us alone. I slip through the door and find myself some moving room. Soon I’m lost in the thunder. * * * We’re about to begin our wrestle-offs. Coach walks to a corner of the wrestling room to watch. Coach never referees the wrestle-offs or participates in any way. Guys who aren’t wrestling at the time do all the refereeing. We all know Coach has his favorites among us, but it’s not Coach’s opinion that determines the first team. In wrestling, unlike football or basketball, there’s none of this crap about how good so-and-so looked in practice. If a wrestler beats everybody in his weight class, he’s number one. That’s all there is to it. In wrestle-offs Coach roots for nobody. Coach walks to a corner and takes a seat on a pile of green-and-gold blankets. I look across the room at Otto, whose big face contorts into giggles. We’re about to have a diversion. Coach sits down and his face immediately goes quizzical. He bends his head between his legs and lifts the blankets a bit to check the source of the tremors he feels. Coach finds he is sitting on the Sausage Man. Untied, Sausage leaps up and down and spits all over. He has this tendency to spit when he gets excited. He’s like a lawn sprinkler when he plays his flute. If you’re in the audience you’ve either got to stand way back or wear a raincoat. I doubt the problem is pathological. Sausage pulls his headgear on sideways and gets his nose stuck in an ear hole. He rips it off and flings it at Otto, who convulses in the center of the mat. “Fucking lardass Lafte!” the Sausage spits. I pull his mouthpiece out of my jock and toss it to him gently. “Fucking Swain!” he slavers. “You muscle-bound dog turd!” Sausage spits lint and chunks of sweat sock. He pops the wretched mouthpiece into his mouth. We all laugh. Coach, too. It’s ten minutes before we can get the wrestle-offs started. * * * Practice is over. I sit on the shower floor, turning pink under the hottest spray I can endure.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  the banker’s daughter ran naked on the deck with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck screaming Shine Shine save poor me and I’ll give you all the pussy a black boy needs— how Shine said now pussy is good and that’s no jive but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive— And Shine swam on Shine swam on — This language both rocked me back and echoed how Daddy talked. I mean, if he thought I was persisting in something I couldn’t get done, he’d say, You keep trying to thread a noodle up that wildcat’s ass; if he thought somebody was poor, He couldn’t buy a piss ant a wrestling jacket. Back in Minneapolis, I took the low-tipping day shift just so I could rathole my notebook by the beer spout and scribble. Crazed to see my name in print, which would prove poethood, I mailed to hapless editors work bad enough that—in retrospect—I’m surprised the rejections didn’t come with a cyanide pill. One snotty bastard commented solely on my failure to hit the space bar after periods and commas. If you could bring yourself to use standard spacing after punctuation, we would find it most helpful . Two nights a week, Etheridge held a private poetry workshop at his house, charging young writers like me a pitiful hundred bucks to sit for four months in his living room while he conducted our discussions from the sagging trough of a chenille armchair. The green and imploding house he shared with his poet-wife, Mary, and their two kids (adopted from Africa back when it was odd) stood out amid the tidy tract houses. Everything about Etheridge’s place was off-kilter. The roof sagged. One gutter was untethered. The front screen door hung from a single hinge. Inside, the wood floors buckled as if frozen mid-earthquake. Add a few cypress trees, a front-porch glider, and a hound dog, and the entire tableau could have been picked up by tweezers and used as a set for Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Mary, a smart, curvy blonde from Oklahoma, drew paychecks as a social worker plus writing and fighting against apartheid, but even if she’d cleaned from dawn till dusk, I believe that from whatever spot Etheridge occupied, chaos would’ve spread out like kudzu vines, for he was an addict of the first caliber. Allegedly sober, Etheridge ran his own beer-and marijuana-maintenance program. While he spouted lines from Dickinson, he kept a forty-ounce of Colt malt liquor between his knobby knees . Back then, in magazines like The New Yorker , stories were mostly about ex-Yalies wearing deck shoes. (Ray Carver was about to change all that.) By contrast, Etheridge lectured wearing a string T-shirt and dark pants of a stiff material that I swear to God looked prison issue. He turned his plaid house shoes into slip-ons by stepping on their backs. The Free People’s Poetry Workshop, he called us.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems to have faded, however, after Luther’s departure to Wittenberg, and Luther wrote to reassure his friend that although he thought “a cold and proud north wind had extinguished all warmth of love,” in fact his silence was simply because he had no “time or leisure” to write, an explanation that may not have set the old man’s mind at rest. 32 His days at Eisenach certainly made a lasting impression, and it was through the Schalbes that Luther heard about another figure who would later become significant to him: a renegade Franciscan monk named Johann Hilten. 33 In the 1470s Hilten had started making apocalyptic prophecies, warning of Turkish power and criticizing monasticism openly. He ended up imprisoned in a cell in Eisenach, where, according to later Lutheran propagandists, he died of starvation around the turn of the century—a victim of the cruelty of the monks. Decades later, in 1529, the story came up again when Luther was visiting his friend Friedrich Myconius. By now the parallels between Luther and Hilten were striking: Both were graduates of Erfurt who had become monks and rebelled against the Church. Moreover, the Turks had just laid siege to Vienna, making Hilten’s warnings suddenly prescient. When he got home, Luther wrote excitedly to Myconius, wanting to find out everything he could about the monk, and begging his friend to leave nothing out. 34 Why was Luther so excited? Hilten had apparently prophesied that soon someone would arise and attack the papacy. In the story Luther first heard from Myconius, the event had been predicted for 1514, but there were other versions that more helpfully foretold the prophet’s arrival in 1516. Later biographers saw this as proof of Luther’s divine mission, even if it was off by a year. Luther himself cited the prophecy approvingly with the date of 1516, believing that it referred to himself. When Melanchthon, Luther’s most important collaborator, wrote the Apology for the Augsburg confession of 1530, the founding articles of the Lutheran faith, he began the section on monastic vows with the life story of Hilten and his maltreatment by the “pharisaic bitterness and envy” of the monks. Melanchthon added that, in an echo of John the Baptist, Hilten had predicted before he died that “[a]nother man will come…who will destroy you monks…him you will not be able to resist.” 35 The figure of Hilten then made its way into Luther hagiography, and his prophecies were republished in the late sixteenth century and again in the seventeenth.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Another reason for Luther’s rise may have been the effect of his forceful personality in what was still a minor institution. Even in 1536, there were only twenty-two faculty posts at Wittenberg: four each in theology and law, three in medicine and eleven in the arts.41 Karlstadt, for one, was profoundly influenced by his erstwhile junior colleague and new friend, and rapidly absorbed his ideas. In 1516 Luther’s student Bartholomäus Bernhardi gave a disputation, part of the customary academic training, and advanced some of Luther’s ideas on grace developed in the lectures on Romans; in its course, Luther publicly stated that he did not believe St. Augustine was the author of the treatise attributed to him, De vera et falsa poenitentia. Karlstadt vigorously disagreed and immediately procured his own copy from Leipzig. But on rereading the text he decided that Luther was correct, and he began to be influenced by Luther’s understanding of Augustine.42 Both radical and passionate, Karlstadt easily got lost in the thread of his own thought and needed direction: Luther’s intensity seems to have unleashed his creativity, sparking him to rethink all his intellectual and spiritual positions. Schurff, more cautious by nature, was also captivated, perhaps because Luther was able to articulate the desperation and sense of sinfulness he too had felt. Luther clearly had an intellectual drive that drew others to him, in part because they recognized their own ideas in what he argued. He was intellectually independent and decisive, and could communicate complex opinions with passion. His energy and conviction rather than intellectual superiority may explain why he became the leading figure at Wittenberg so quickly. —THESE were exciting times as a generation of intellectuals felt that they witnessed the dawn of a new era. It seemed that scholasticism, with its tortured deference to Aristotle, was finished. The university syllabus at Wittenberg had been a careful compromise between via moderna and via antiqua, but by 1516 Johannes Lang was enthusing that students were “eagerly hearing lectures on the Bible and the Church Fathers, while the so-called scholastic doctors have hardly two or three listeners.”43 In 1517–18 Luther lectured on Hebrews, Karlstadt on Augustine, the humanist Aesticampianus on Jerome—this was a whole program of study invigorated by a humanist-style return to the sources.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Nietzsche realized that there had been a radical shift in the consciousness of the West which would make it increasingly difficult to believe in the phenomenon most people described as “God.” Not only had our science made such notions as the literal understanding of creation an impossibility, but our greater control and power made the idea of a divine overseer unacceptable. People felt that they were witnessing a new dawn. Nietzsche’s madman insisted that the death of God would bring about a newer, higher phase of human history. To become worthy of their deicide, human beings would have to become gods themselves. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche proclaimed the birth of the Superman who would replace God; the new enlightened man would declare war upon the old Christian values, trample upon the base mores of the rabble and herald a new, powerful humanity which would have none of the feeble Christian virtues of love and pity. He also turned to the ancient myth of perpetual recurrence and rebirth, found in such religions as Buddhism. Now that God was dead, this world could take his place as the supreme value. Whatever goes comes back; whatever dies blooms again; whatever breaks is joined anew. Our world could be revered as eternal and divine, attributes that had once applied only to the distant, transcendent God. The Christian God, Nietzsche taught, was pitiable, absurd and “a crime against life.”18 He had encouraged people to fear their bodies, their passions and their sexuality and had promoted a puling morality of compassion which had made us weak. There was no ultimate meaning or value and human beings had no business offering an indulgent alternative in “God.” Again, it must be said that the Western God was vulnerable to this critique. He had been used to alienate people from their humanity and from sexual passion by means of a life-denying asceticism. He had also been made into a facile panacea and an alternative to life here below.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then, in 1534, Pope Clement died, but his successor, Paul III, put forth plans for a church council in Mantua in 1537, although it would never actually happen. But already in 1535, plans for it were moving ahead, and the papal nuncio Paolo Vergerio traveled to Wittenberg to meet with Luther to discuss it. Luther was so tickled that a papal legate had dragged his Roman corpus all the way to Wittenberg to meet him that he knew he must be properly outfitted for the occasion. Thus he had himself barbered to a dandy fare-thee-well, as he sometimes did before important sermons. He was trimmed, shaved, and bathed and then bedecked himself in a doublet decorated with fur and a robe sumptuously lined with fur, and he wore the fine hose of a nobleman. He loaded his fingers with borrowed rings and punctuated the gaudy costume with a gold pendant so eye-poppingly large that even the barber made bold to tut-tut his disapproval. And rather than walking the short distance to the city gate to meet Vergerio, as he might typically have done, Luther rode there grandly in a carriage with Bugenhagen. Vergerio himself arrived with twenty horsemen. In a January 1536 letter to Caspar Müller, Luther referenced a document (drafted by Melanchthon) that was the Schmalkaldic League’s response to a question from Vergerio about whether the proposed church council might be held outside Germany. The answer was a flat negative, because they knew that were the council held on their ground, it would be far less likely that the pope would have undue influence in what transpired. Luther wrote that he could not put his hand to a copy of the document—which he would like to send along to Müller—because at that very moment he was suffering from a coughing fit. He then joked that if Müller would only pray for him, he was sure the coughing would stop and he could find the document. Three months later, Luther wrote to Thomas Cromwell, at that time the most powerful man in England—save the king—and one of the chief architects of the English Reformation. Cromwell hoped to bring England into the Schmalkaldic League so that England could stand with it against the pope and the emperor, but this was not to be. But Robert Barnes, who had just left Wittenberg, had raised Luther’s hopes along these lines and had sent greetings from Cromwell, which Luther now returned: Doctor Barnes has . . . made me extraordinarily happy in telling me of Your Lordship’s earnest and determined will regarding the cause of Christ, especially since because of your prestige, by which you are capable of accomplishing very many things through the whole kingdom and with the Most Serene Lord King, you can do much good. I do pray and I shall pray to the Lord to strengthen abundantly his work, begun in Your Lordship, to his glory and the salvation of many. Amen.2

• From A History of God (1993)

  4 Trinity: The Christian GodIN ABOUT 320 a fierce theological passion had seized the churches of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Sailors and travelers were singing versions of popular ditties that proclaimed that the Father alone was true God, inaccessible and unique, but that the Son was neither coeternal nor uncreated, since he received life and being from the Father. We hear of a bath attendant who harangued the bathers, insisting that the Son came from nothingness, of a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, prefaced his reply with a long disquisition on the distinction between the created order and the uncreated God, and of a baker who informed his customer that the Father was greater than the Son. People were discussing these abstruse questions with the same enthusiasm as they discuss football today.1 The controversy had been kindled by Arius, a charismatic and handsome presbyter of Alexandria, who had a soft, impressive voice and a strikingly melancholy face. He had issued a challenge which his bishop, Alexander, found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; indeed, he called Jesus “strong God” and “full God,”2 but he argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature: Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he. Alexander and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that this was no mere theological nicety. Arius was asking vital questions about the nature of God. In the meantime, Arius, a skillful propagandist, had set his ideas to music, and soon the laity were debating the issue as passionately as their bishops.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He was capable of presenting himself as a Sunni to Sunnis, a Shii martyr to Shiis, a revolutionary, a religious philosopher and a parliamentarian. The mystical disciplines of Ishraqi mysticism help Muslims to feel at one with the world around them and to experience a liberating loss of the boundaries that hedge in the self. It has been suggested that al-Afghani’s recklessness and adoption of different roles had been influenced by the mystical discipline, with its enlarged concept of self. 25 Religion was essential, though reform was necessary. Al-Afghani was a convinced, even a passionate theist, but there is little talk of God in The Refutation of the Materialists , his only book. Because he knew that the West valued reason and regarded Islam and Orientals as irrational, al-Afghani tried to describe Islam as a faith distinguished by its ruthless cult of reason. In fact, even such rationalists as the Mutazilis would have found this description of their religion strange. Al-Afghani was an activist rather than a philosopher. It is, therefore, important not to judge his career and convictions by this one literary attempt. Nevertheless, the depiction of Islam in a way calculated to fit what is perceived as a Western ideal shows a new lack of confidence in the Muslim world that would shortly become extremely destructive. Muhammad Abduh (1849–1005), al-Afghani’s Egyptian disciple, had a different approach. He decided to concentrate his activities in Egypt alone and to focus on the intellectual education of its Muslims. He had had a traditional Islamic upbringing, which had brought him under the influence of the Sufi Sheikh Darwish, who had taught him that science and philosophy were the two most secure paths to the knowledge of God. Consequently when Abduh began to study at the prestigious al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was soon disillusioned by its antiquated syllabus. Instead he was attracted to al-Afghani, who coached him in logic, theology, astronomy, physics and mysticism. Some Christians in the West felt that science was the enemy of faith, but Muslim mystics had often used mathematics and science as an aid to contemplation. Today Muslims in some of the more radical mystical sects of the Shiah, such as the Druzes or the Alawis, are particularly interested in modern science. In the Islamic world there are grave reservations about Western politics but few find it a problem to reconcile their faith in God with Western science. Abduh was excited by his contact with Western culture and was especially influenced by Comte, Tolstoy and Herbert Spencer, who was a personal friend. He never adopted a wholly Western lifestyle, but liked to visit Europe regularly to refresh himself intellectually. This did not mean that he abandoned Islam. Far from it; like any reformer, Abduh wanted to return to the roots of his faith. He therefore advocated a return to the spirit of the Prophet and the first four Rightly Guided Caliphs ( rashidun ). This did not entail a fundamentalist rejection of modernity, however.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Elector relented but insisted that the first paragraph of Luther’s “Reflections,” which insinuated that the papal breve condemning his work was a forgery, was blacked out. This was not the first time that Luther had acted quickly, before the authorities could intervene. Just a few months earlier, when the bishop of Brandenburg had stepped in to stop the publication of Luther’s Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, his first work in German for a wide popular audience, Luther ensured that it was already on sale; by 1520 there would be twenty-five printings in all major cities in Germany. 47 Now he disingenuously explained to Spalatin that he had arranged for the Appellation to Leo to be printed, but had then agreed with the printer to buy up all the stock so as to stop publication, but that when he turned up with the money the copies had all been sold. 48 With his every action, therefore, Luther was driving the conflict with Rome forward. His use of print was tactically brilliant: He knew exactly how to forestall censorship and protect his ideas by spreading them as widely as possible, each new work marking yet another radical advance delivered to an audience that was hungry for more. The logic of the market and its craving for novelty was part of what propelled Luther’s cause. Published largely in Latin, his writings were still mainly directed at a clerical, intellectual elite, but they were now also being translated. No one had previously used print to such devastating effect. But there were deeper reasons for Luther’s refusal to compromise. His letters at this time, especially those to Spalatin, convey a sense of exaltation and exhilaration as he came to accept that he was likely to die a martyr. The letters written before Augsburg are marked by a sense of urgency: “This affair has to be handled in a great hurry. They have given me only a short time,” or “Fast action is necessary here. The days fly by and the appointed day draws near.” 49 All this increased the singular importance of the meeting. In May 1518, when he dedicated his explanations of the Ninety-five Theses to Staupitz, he had written that “only one thing is left, my poor, weak little bit of body, worn out by constant abuse…if they want to take that away by force or intrigue, they will only make me poorer of my life by one or two hours.”