Exposure Dread

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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  But then Kathy is half singing, half wailing “Oh my god!” and getting up and embracing Katrina. Then so is the woman in the cream skirt, and others that Reese hasn’t yet been introduced to. Even Sexy-Smart, despite her interrupted sales pitch, is cooing and vying for a hug. “But who’s the father?” Kathy asks, when the cooing dies down. Katrina points at Reese. A room full of confused faces turns to Reese. Kathy tilts her head, as though trying to look under Reese, for whatever father Reese might be sitting on and hiding. There is a second in which Reese instinctively fears that she’s been outed and says suddenly, “We’re co-mothers.” Then she says, “But I’m not the actual father.” Then, aware of how odd that sounds, she concedes another piece of information: “But I am trans.” If an oracle had foretold that Reese would voluntarily come out at a doTERRA Essential Oils direct-sales party, she would have understood it figuratively, a puzzle like the one the witches gave to fool Macbeth—because the literal possibility of a forest traveling up a hill existed beyond the realms of even outlandish farce. A d(OTERRA- party-coming-out is Reese’s Birnam Wood. Yet now, it has happened. She has come out at a dOTERRA party, although she’s not sure what she has come out as, or how much more coming out she still has to go. There is a moment’s silence to take this in. But Kathy, being the hostess, knows exactly what social grace the situation requires and she executes it properly. Which is to say she coos loudly and happily and swoops in at Reese for the congratulatory embrace. The woman in the immaculate cream skirt (whose name Reese has forgotten and can’t bear to ask again, and so she has named her the Empress of Dry Cleaning), Kathy, Katrina, Reese, and two other women have left Kathy’s apartment for a café specializing in Italian desserts. It is an impromptu celebration for Katrina’s pregnancy announcement. They all smell like essential oils. Reese has a healthy droplet of peppermint under her nose that Steve wiped there with his bare finger, and which he said would open up her sinuses. Everything smells like freezing candy canes, but since her sinuses weren’t stuffy to begin with, she can’t opine as to the efficacy of his celebrity medical technique. The Empress of Dry Cleaning knows the proprietor of the dessert place, a darkly handsome man in his midlife. Fireworks of smile lines burst across his face at every small pleasantry uttered by the Empress. Reese sees the effect the Empress has on the poor man, and really, who can blame him? She must be in her thirties, but it is not just her clothes that are perfectly pressed: Everything about her is apple crisp and seems newly made. Her skin, Reese imagines, must smell like dryer sheets.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Never again shall I travel in a native bus. From now on I’ll have a limousine to take me to the high school and back from there to the boarding school. I shall dine in the most elegant places in town. And I’ll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good and bad, the bus, the bus driver I used to laugh with, the old women chewing betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence. He talked. Said he missed Paris, the marvelous girls there, the riotous living, the binges, ooh là là, the Coupole, the Rotonde, personally I prefer the Rotonde, the nightclubs, the “wonderful” life he’d led for two years. She listened, watching out for anything to do with his wealth, for indications as to how many millions he had. He went on. His own mother was dead, he was an only child. All he had left was his father, the one who owned the money. But you know how it is, for the last ten years he’s been sitting staring at the river, glued to his opium pipe, he manages his money from his little iron cot. She says she sees. He won’t let his son marry the little white whore from Sadec. The image starts long before he’s come up to the white child by the rails, it starts when he got out of the black car, when he began to approach her, and when she knew, knew he was afraid. From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy. And therefore that others besides him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises. She knows something else too, that the time has now probably come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this, nor her brothers. She knows this now too. As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever. From now on they will no longer know what becomes of her. Whether she’s taken away from them, carried off, wounded, spoiled, they will no longer know. Neither her mother nor her brothers. That is their fate henceforth. It’s already enough to make you weep, here in the black limousine. Now the child will have to reckon only with this man, the first, the one who introduced himself on the ferry. • • • It happened very quickly that day, a Thursday. He’d come every day to pick her up at the high school and drive her back to the boarding school. Then one Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he came to the boarding school and drove off with her in the black car.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It might enclose a whole world, it seemed, and its open gates yawned like a mouth before the drawbridge. Now from everywhere the subjects of the Prince, mere specks in the distance growing ever and ever larger, ran toward the road that wound down and then up again before them. Riders came over the drawbridge and rode toward them with a blast of trumpets, their banners streaming behind them. The air was warmer here, as if this place were protected from the sea breeze. It was nothing as dark as the narrow villages and forests through which they had passed. And Beauty could see everywhere the peasants dressed in lighter and brighter colors. But they were drawing ever nearer to the castle, and in the distance Beauty could see not the peasants whose admiration she had received all along the road, but a great crowd of magnificently dressed Lords and Ladies. She must have uttered a little cry and bowed her head, because the Prince came up alongside of her. She felt his arm gather her close to the horse, and he whispered: "Now, Beauty, you know what I expect of you." But they had already reached the steep approach to the bridge, and Beauty could see it was just as she feared, men and women of her own rank and all clad in white velvet trimmed in gold, or gay and festive colors. She dared not look, and felt the blush in her cheeks again and for the first time was tempted to throw herself on the mercy of the Prince and beg him to conceal her. It was one thing to be shown to the rustics who praised her and would make a legend of her, but she could already hear the babble of haughty speech and laughter. This was unendurable to her. But when the Prince dismounted, he ordered her down on her hands and knees and told her softly that this was how she must enter his castle. She was petrified, her face burning, but she fell quickly to obey, glimpsing the Prince's boots to her left as she struggled to keep up with him in crossing the drawbridge. Through a great dim corridor she was led, not daring to raise her eyes, though she could see rich gowns and shining boots all around her. Lords and Ladies were bowing to the Prince on either side of her. There were whispers of greeting, and kisses being thrown, and she was naked, moving on her hands and knees as if she were only some poor animal. But they had reached the mouth of the Great Hall, a room far more vast and shadowy than any in her own castle. An immense fire roared on the hearth, though the sun streamed warm through high narrow windows.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It was freezing cold outside that afternoon. As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating. I was glad not to see many people on the street. Those I did see looked like lumbering monsters, human shapes deformed by puffy coats and hoods, mittens and hats, snow boots. I assessed my reflection in the windows of a darkened storefront as I walked up West Fifteenth Street. It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still had good posture. One might have even confused me for a celebrity in slovenly incognito. Not that people cared. I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them. The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman— perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said. Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing. A pleather pillow inflated around my bicep. I watched numbers on the digital screen go up and down. Pulse 48. Pressure 80/50. That seemed appropriate. I went to the rack of DVDs to browse the latest selection of pre-owned movies. The Nutty Professor, Jumanji, Casper, Space Jam, The Cable Guy. It was all kids’ stuff. Then an orange discount sticker on the bottom shelf caught my eye— 9½ Weeks. I picked it up. Trevor had claimed that it was one of his favorite movies. I still hadn’t seen it. “Mickey Rourke’s performance in this is unparalleled. Who knows? You might relate to it.” I resembled Kim Basinger, he explained, and just like me, her character worked in an art gallery. “This movie inspires me to try new things,” he said. “Like what?” I asked, amused by the thought that he might have the courage to do more in bed than reposition himself to get “better leverage.” He took me into his kitchen, turned his back, and said, “Get on your knees.” I did as I was told and knelt down on the cold marble tile. “Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “And open your mouth.” I almost laughed, but I played along. Trevor took his blow jobs very seriously. “Have you seen Sex, Lies, and Videotape?” I asked him. “James Spader in that—” “Be quiet,” he said. “Open up.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born—the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile. I relied on alcohol only on the days of these excursions—a shot of vodka before I went out and walked past all the little bistros and cafes and shops I’d frequented when I was out there, pretending to live a life. Otherwise I tried to limit myself to a one-block radius around my apartment. The men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians. Besides my psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, my friend Reva, and the doormen at my building, the Egyptians were the only people I saw on a regular basis. They were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on. There must have been half a dozen of them— brothers or cousins, I assumed. Their style deterred me. They wore soccer jerseys and leather racing jackets and gold chains with crosses and played Z100 on the radio. They had absolutely no sense of humor. When I’d first moved to the neighborhood, they’d been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I’d begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection. “You have something,” the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later. After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me “boss” and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn’t have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee—coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didn’t want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I used to walk the streets of the old town alone in the rain. I spent hours wandering through department stores fingering merchandise I knew I’d never buy, dreaming in crowds, overhearing long conversations which at first I understood only snatches of, listening to the demonstration hucksters barking out the virtues of stretch wigs, false fingernails, carving sets, meat grinders, chopping blocks…. “Meine Damen und Heren …” they begin, and every long sentence is interlarded with that phrase. It rings in your ears after a while. All the potato-shaped ladies would stand around me, forming a gray wall of loden cloth. Germany is patrolled by armies of gray-coated ladies in Tyrolean hats and sensible shoes and jowls crimson with exploded capillaries. Up close, their cheeks seem laced with tiny fireworks caught, as in a photograph, at the moment of bursting. These sturdy widows are everywhere: carrying string bags with bananas sticking out, riding broad-assed on narrow bicycle seats, taking the rain-streaked trains from München to Hamburg, from Nürnberg to Freiburg. A world of widows. The final solution promised by the Nazi dream: a Jewless world without men. Sometimes, wandering around aimlessly, riding the Strassenbahn , stopping for beer and pretzels in a café, or Kaffee und Kuchen in a Konditorei , I would have the fantasy that I was the ghost of a Jew murdered in a concentration camp on the day I was born. Who was to tell me I was not? I devised complicated plots which I pretended to myself were merely surrealistic tales I planned to write. But they were more than tales and I was not writing. At times I thought I was going mad. For the first time in my life, I became intensely interested in the history of the Jews and the history of the Third Reich. I went to the USIS or Special Services Library and began poring over books which detailed the horrors of the deportations and death camps. I read about the Einsatzgruppen and imagined digging my own grave and standing on the brink of a great pit clutching my baby while the Nazi officers readied their machine guns. I imagined the shrieks of terror and the sounds of bodies falling. I imagined being wounded and rolling into the pit with the twitching bodies and having dirt shoveled over me. How could I protest that I wasn’t a Jew but a pantheist? How could I plead worship of the Winter Solstice and the Rites of Spring? For the purposes of the Nazis, I was as Jewish as anyone. Would I turn back into earth and become a flower or a fruit? Was that what had happened to the souls of all the Jews murdered on the day I was born?

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It is to the credit of the amazing power of Jesus Christ over the life of Paul that there is only one recorded instance in which he used his privilege. It is quite understandable that his sense of security would influence certain aspects of his philosophy of history. Naturally he would have a regard for the state, for the civil magistrate, unlike that of his fellows, who regarded them as the formal expression of legitimatized intolerance. The stability of Paul’s position in the state was guaranteed by the integrity of the state. One is not surprised, then, to hear him tell slaves to obey their masters like Christ, and say all government is ordained of God. (It is not to meet the argument to say that in a sense everything that is, is permitted of God, or that government and rulers are sustained by God as a concession to the frailty of man.) It would be grossly misleading and inaccurate to say that there are not to be found in the Pauline letters utterances of a deeply different quality—utterances which reveal how his conception transcended all barriers of race and class and condition. But this other side is there, always available to those who wish to use the weight of the Christian message to oppress and humiliate their fellows. The point is that this aspect of Paul’s teaching is understandable against the background of his Roman citizenship. It influenced his philosophy of history and resulted in a major frustration that has borne bitter fruit in the history of the movement which he, Paul, did so much to project on the conscience of the human race. Now Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He was not protected by the normal guarantees of citizenship—that quiet sense of security which comes from knowing that you belong and the general climate of confidence which it inspires. If a Roman soldier pushed Jesus into a ditch, he could not appeal to Caesar; he would be just another Jew in the ditch. Standing always beyond the reach of citizen security, he was perpetually exposed to all the “arrows of outrageous fortune,” and there was only a gratuitous refuge—if any—within the state. What stark insecurity! What a breeder of complete civil and moral nihilism and psychic anarchy! Unless one actually lives day by day without a sense of security, he cannot understand what worlds separated Jesus from Paul at this point. The striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of American Negroes is obvious to anyone who tarries long over the facts. We are dealing here with conditions that produce essentially the same psychology. There is meant no further comparison. It is the similarity of a social climate at the point of a denial of full citizenship which creates the problem for creative survival.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Colonel Brandon’s character,” said Elinor, “as an excellent man, is well established.” “I know it is,”—replied her mother seriously, “or after such a warning, _I_ should be the last to encourage such affection, or even to be pleased by it. But his coming for me as he did, with such active, such ready friendship, is enough to prove him one of the worthiest of men.” “His character, however,” answered Elinor, “does not rest on _one_ act of kindness, to which his affection for Marianne, were humanity out of the case, would have prompted him. To Mrs. Jennings, to the Middletons, he has been long and intimately known; they equally love and respect him; and even my own knowledge of him, though lately acquired, is very considerable; and so highly do _I_ value and esteem him, that if Marianne can be happy with him, I shall be as ready as yourself to think our connection the greatest blessing to us in the world. What answer did you give him?—Did you allow him to hope?” “Oh! my love, I could not then talk of hope to him or to myself. Marianne might at that moment be dying. But he did not ask for hope or encouragement. His was an involuntary confidence, an irrepressible effusion to a soothing friend, not an application to a parent. Yet after a time I _did_ say, for at first I was quite overcome, that if she lived, as I trusted she might, my greatest happiness would lie in promoting their marriage; and since our arrival, since our delightful security, I have repeated it to him more fully, have given him every encouragement in my power. Time, a very little time, I tell him, will do everything; Marianne’s heart is not to be wasted for ever on such a man as Willoughby. His own merits must soon secure it.” “To judge from the Colonel’s spirits, however, you have not yet made him equally sanguine.” “No. He thinks Marianne’s affection too deeply rooted for any change in it under a great length of time, and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age and disposition he could ever attach her. There, however, he is quite mistaken. His age is only so much beyond hers as to be an advantage, as to make his character and principles fixed; and his disposition, I am well convinced, is exactly the very one to make your sister happy. And his person, his manners too, are all in his favour. My partiality does not blind me; he certainly is not so handsome as Willoughby; but at the same time, there is something much more pleasing in his countenance. There was always a something, if you remember, in Willoughby’s eyes at times, which I did not like.” Elinor could _not_ remember it; but her mother, without waiting for her assent, continued,

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And so he stared at the price above the ticket-seller’s window and, showing her his coins, received the piece of paper that was charged with the power to open doors. Having once decided to enter, he did not look back at the street again for fear that one of the saints might be passing and, seeing him, might cry out his name and lay hands on him to drag him back. He walked very quickly across the carpeted lobby, looking at nothing, and pausing only to see his ticket torn, half of it thrown into a silver box and half returned to him. And then the usherette opened the doors of this dark palace and with a flashlight held behind her took him to his seat. Not even then, having pushed past a wilderness of knees and feet to reach his designated seat, did he dare to breathe; nor, out of a last, sick hope for forgiveness, did he look at the screen. He stared at the darkness around him, and at the profiles that gradually emerged from this gloom, which was so like the gloom of Hell. He waited for this darkness to be shattered by the light of the second coming, for the ceiling to crack upwards, revealing, for every eye to see, the chariots of fire on which descended a wrathful God and all the host of Heaven. He sank far down in his seat, as though his crouching might make him invisible and deny his presence there. But then he thought: ‘ Not yet. The day of judgment is not yet ,’ and voices reached him, the voices no doubt of the hapless man and the evil woman, and he raised his eyes helplessly and watched the screen. The woman was most evil. She was blonde and pasty white, and she had lived in London, which was in England, quite some time ago, judging from her clothes, and she coughed. She had a terrible disease, tuberculosis, which he had heard about. Someone in his mother’s family had died of it. She had a great many boy friends, and she smoked cigarettes and drank. When she met the young man, who was a student and who loved her very much, she was very cruel to him. She laughed at him because he was a cripple. She took his money and she went out with other men, and she lied to the student—who was certainly a fool. He limped about, looking soft and sad, and soon all John’s sympathy was given to this violent and unhappy woman. He understood her when she raged and shook her hips and threw back her head in laughter so furious that it seemed the veins of her neck would burst.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  I was a Holy Cross student—often happy to be a student at “the Cross”—but I knew every time I stepped out of my room in Beaven dormitory that no part of that place in Worcester, Massachusetts, had been made with me in mind. I felt that but did not yet have very many words for it. Baldwin gave them to me. This is Baldwin, with his “special attitude,” talking of Shakespeare and the cathedral at Chartres and Rembrandt and the Empire State Building and Bach: “These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.” And so he continued throughout the rest of Notes , a gloriously keen and sensitive mind, something I did not completely appreciate at the time, something I’m sure he would smile about now. I confess that I could not then grasp some of his more complex thoughts, perhaps because I was merely too young and the world had yet to take such a harsh hold on me. And other thoughts of his I just dismissed, no doubt because I was, again, too young and because I was developing a militant streak that scoffed at notions not in line with my own developing ones. That militancy came naturally with the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War and with the new awareness that I was black in a white world. The militant me asked, for example, why would Baldwin write at times as if he were not black but some observer, a guilty one, true, but still an observer. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then,” he says to me in “Many Thousands Gone,” “is indivisible from dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.” And later: “We (Americans in general, that) like to point to Negroes and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn….” But with my focus on the constant use of words like “we” and “our,” it was easy for eighteen-year-old me in those last days of December 1968 to lose sight of so much of the truth and pain of that and other statements in “Thousands.”

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  A slave-or servant-based society, moreover, can never be entirely private. Royalty always live under the eyes of their retainers. To the end of antiquity, the dependence of elites on a slave society and the upward attraction exercised on the bourgeois by the nobility played strongly against any tendency to separation and privacy. Even without slaves, Augustine was rarely alone at home in Hippo. His choice to invite a community to live in the bishop’s house with him created a household with some differences from that familiar to upper-class Romans, but it was still an open and public space nonetheless, not unlike the home of an extended kinship family. Much that a modern politician might reasonably hope to conceal from others would have been unavoidably public for Augustine. (We would love to know whether Augustine continued to frequent the public baths: unlikely but not impossible, not least because it was a good place to see and be seen and to meet others on neutral ground.) We see glimpses of Augustine’s inmost bodily and emotional life, but only glimpses drawn from Augustine’s self-presentation in his texts, gathered and rearranged here into a mosaic he did not design. We know that his body served him for seventy-five years, eight months, and fifteen days. Body and mind were in collaborative unison until the very end. By the standards of any generation, he must be regarded as a man of robust good health. Thus since the dawn of the twentieth century’s psychological age, it has been regularly observed that Augustine’s body had a tendency to subvert him at emotionally convenient moments. As a small boy, he was near enough death’s door to plead for baptism, but his mother thought he was not sick enough to need that form of life insurance.197 When he landed in Italy, escaping from his life, he fell deathly ill in the house of his Manichee host. Escaping his life, he almost left it.198 When he fled from Milan to the countryside to test his newly celibate resolve, he pleaded an illness of the “chest” that made it impossible for him to go on as “salesman of words.” And then while in the country, he was felled by an acute toothache, miraculously cured, but he seems unsurprised by the miracle.199 In both cases, the physical disorder attacked the very center of his social personality, his capacity as a speaker of well-formed words. In 397, his grand debut at Carthage is followed by an acute attack of hemorrhoids that pulled him back from the public stage and left him unable to stand or sit; he may have begun dictating the Confessions thus prone, in pain, and the object of smiling pity.200 In 410, on the eve of his great triumphs (and downfalls) of 411, he fell ill and left Hippo just as a wave of powerful and even competing individuals were arriving, and so was hors de combat at a moment when his carefully nurtured epistolary relationships of the last fifteen years could have begun turning into face-to-face friendship or rivalries.201

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For Luther, Christ’s merits did not constitute any kind of credit system. Rather his merits gave the church its “keys,” that is, the power to admit or reject individuals from the sacrament and the fellowship of Christians. Moreover, because every human action was tainted with sin, there could be no satisfactory payment for sin, no good deeds to be set in the balance, no way for the individual to make him- or herself acceptable to God by purchasing indulgences or any other means; the banking-system model of “merits” had to be rejected altogether. The flip side of the argument is that whereas the practice of indulgences permitted people to pray for one another, and fostered the creation of a whole series of cooperative prayers, sayings of Mass, chantries, and collective efforts toward salvation, for Luther the Christian stood alone before God, devoid of any assistance. On the face of it, this is a bleak and individualistic concept of salvation, where the emphasis is squarely placed on the believer’s encounter with the living God. It must also have accorded with Luther’s own experience—and perhaps his sense of isolation, as he stood alone to defend himself. The other topic of debate concerned the role of faith in the efficacy of the sacraments. Luther argued that the sacraments were ineffective without faith, while Cajetan insisted that they were valid in and of themselves; indeed, as the cardinal argued, since one could never be entirely sure of one’s faith, it was vitally important that the sacraments did not depend on it. Yet Cajetan eventually proved willing to compromise on this issue, insisting that Luther recant only on the other point, that the Pope had the power of the keys. The underlying intellectual issue at Augsburg concerned authority. When Luther presented his scriptural passages in support of his position on indulgences and repentance, it seems that Cajetan hardly bothered to read them. One person’s interpretation of the Bible, Cajetan believed, could not possibly be as weighty as papal decree. The proceedings thus exposed what Luther felt to be the authoritarianism of the Church and the Pope. At the end of the third and last meeting, on October 14, Cajetan finally lost patience. He sent Luther away, telling him not to return unless he was willing to recant. He then demanded that Staupitz intervene as Luther’s superior; Staupitz replied that he would do what he could but Luther’s knowledge of Scripture exceeded his own. In the meantime, Cajetan declared, he would report to Rome and await further instructions; but later that day, Staupitz heard rumors that Gabriele della Volta, the head of the Augustinian order, had requested that Cajetan seize Luther and send him to Rome. In response, Staupitz released him from his Augustinian vows—which included obedience toward those set over him in the order. Staupitz was effectively refusing to control or discipline his former protégé. 39 The meeting at Augsburg thus ended with Luther losing Staupitz as his superior.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  But Chauncy did not even mean “talk.” More precisely he meant “listen to a talk,” that is, to sit and listen in silence to an authorized voice. Hyde goes on to say that such talk in the church, dominated by “abstraction of symbols” in theology, is deeply linked to the abstract symbol of “cash,” thus linking abstract theology that silences to the reduction of life to commoditization and the management of money. It is, Hyde judges in an appeal to Walt Whitman, reference to the body in its concreteness, which counters such abstractions, that permits domination, monopoly, and exploitation. It has struck me through these several textual studies how silence breaking is evoked by attention to the body in pain. The body knows that silence kills. When the silence is broken, the body may be restored and the body politic may be open to new possibility. Chapter 1 THE OPPRESSED BREAK SILENCE After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. —Exod. 2:23 THE CRUCIAL DRAMA OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (AND OF the entire Bible) concerns the performance of Pharaoh, ancient Israel, and YHWH (see glossary) found in Exodus 1–15. The story begins with Pharaoh and ends with YHWH. The one constant in all parts of the story is Israel, a community that moves from slavery to emancipated possibility. The Exodus narrative is the account of how that movement happened . . . and continues to happen. THE STORY The lead character at the beginning of the story is Pharaoh, king of Egypt. He might have been an actual historical character, though his identity is completely elusive. More importantly, he is a metaphor or stand-in for many historical characters who successively reenact his role. On the one hand, in Egyptian lore he is taken to be a god invested with absolute authority. From that it follows that his regime is all-embracing. Nothing is possible or even imaginable beyond his reach. It also means that his absolute authority and control extend to perpetuity. There is no prospect for anything outside of Pharaoh’s absolutism and nothing after it, because there is nothing after perpetuity.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  After such healings, oral tradition from devotees, shrine propaganda from locals, and scribal enthusiasm from priests regularly escalate the details. All such miracles must get bigger, better, and more startling. That is inevitable from their role as witness to transcendental intervention. I have three conclusions so far. First, society and individual, disease and illness, healing and curing always intertwine together, be it delicately or brutally. Second, supportive companionship and/or religious faith can heal illness and, by so doing, even cure disease, but only in certain cases. We may not be sure of the present or future limits of such healing, but we all make certain decisions about where they are every day of our lives. Third, healing stories tend to increase and become more extraordinary rather than decrease and become more banal. And now on to one final issue: What role does healing have, what forms can healing take, in situations where social context creates the ailment rather than simply exacerbating its presence after an independent arrival? Healing and Resistance If the personal is defined by social categories, can we ever identify matter which does not reflect social ideology? This question is thrown into particularly sharp relief when we consider the most private religious documents that survive from antiquity, usually referred to as magical or curse inscriptions. Even these sources, however, are increasingly regarded as reflecting a way of dealing with the personal strain resulting from social and ideological pressures. Lynn R. LiDonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions , p. 3 Arthur Kleinman records the experience of a twenty-nine-year-old internist, Lenore Light, “who comes from an upper middle class black family and works in an inner-city ghetto clinic.” She tells, in her own words, how she was revolutionized by the first encounter with “our black under class; the poorest, the most miserable, the most chaotic, and oppressed and oppressive reminder of where we have all of us come from. It has radicalized me; it is a revolutionary encounter with the social sources of mortality and morbidity and expression. The more I see, the more appalled I am at how ignorant I have been, insensitive to the social, economic, and political causes of disease. We learned about these things in the abstract in med school. Here it is a living reality, a medical hell. What we need is prevention, not the Band-Aids I spend my day putting on deep inner wounds. Today I saw an obese hypertensive mother of six. No husband. No family support. No job. Nothing. A world of brutalizing violence and poverty and drugs and teenage pregnancies and—and just plain mind-numbing crises, one after another after another. What can I do? What good is it to recommend a low-salt diet, to admonish her about control of her pressure? She is under such real outer pressure, what does the inner pressure matter? What is killing her is her world, not her body. In fact, her body is the product of her world.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It is hard, for now, not only for those who have faith in Jesus, but also for those who have faith in humanity, to look closely at the terror of crucifixion in the ancient world. And when one does look closely, there is always the danger of prurient voyeurism, the vicarious thrill at another’s horror. But since that world did in thousands what our century has done in millions, it is necessary to look with cold, hard eyes at what exactly such a death entailed. Nevertheless, I tread here very carefully. In June of 1968 the only crucified skeleton ever discovered was found at Giv’at ha-Mivtar, in northeastern Jerusalem just west of the Nablus Road, in a tomb dating from the first century of the common era. There were four tombs in all, carved like small rooms into the soft limestone, each with an anteroom and then a burial chamber with niches deep enough to accommodate a human body lengthwise at burial. Such tombs were used over and over again for generations; the bones, after decomposition of their flesh within the niches, were buried together in pits dug in the floor or, as a much more costly alternative, were gathered together into ossuaries—limestone bone boxes. The niches were then reused for more recent burials. In the Giv’at ha-Mivtar complex there were fifteen such ossuaries, mostly packed to the top and containing the bones of thirty-five individuals—eleven males, twelve females, and twelve children. Of those thirty-five, one woman and her infant had died together in childbirth for lack of a midwife’s help; three children, one of six to eight months, one of three to four years, and another of seven to eight years, had died of starvation; and five individuals had met violent deaths: a female and a male by burning, a female by a macelike blow, a child of three to four years by an arrow wound, and a male of twenty-four to twenty-eight years who stood five-foot-five by crucifixion. His name, inscribed on the ossuary, was then Yehochanan but now is I/4A: Tomb I, Ossuary 4 (of eight in that tomb), Skeleton A (of three in that ossuary, the other two being an incomplete adult and Yehochanan’s son, another child of three to four years). After appraisal and reappraisal by scholars from Israel’s Department of Antiquities and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, the manner of crucifixion became clear. His arms had been not nailed but tied to the bar of the cross, probably with arms to elbows over and behind it. His legs had been placed on either side of the upright beam, with separate nails holding the heelbone to the wood on each side. A small olive-wood plaque had been set between the nail’s head and the heel bone lest the condemned man manage to tear his foot free from the nail.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  They call her Kelley, though it’s her last name, and I’ll later find out she was deputized to take Warren trick-or-treating when he was a kid, with a sheet over her head and a bag for her own candy. Odd, I thought, my parents hadn’t taken me around, either. (Though the Whitbreads’ offhand parenting style was light-years from my family’s, both Warren and I grew up yearning for a warmer home than where we’d started.) I don’t have the sense not to hug whoever greets us, so I try to throw my arms around Kelley, and she flinches away, straightening her apron. Facing the big house, I’d like to say I’m neither wowed nor panicky, but I feel like a field hand called out of the cotton . Would you like some tea? Kelley asks. Yes, please, Warren says, closing the door. The foyer, a crystal chandelier like a sparkly jungle gym hangs from the two-story ceiling. Two dogs waggle around us, which Warren pats and baby-talks to while I stare. Cloudily mirrored alcoves hold Chinese vases. The staircase curves grandly enough for his older sister to have descended for her debut into New York society on it. At some point, Warren gently uses his hand to close my jaw. For something to say, I ask the dogs’ names. The mutt is Sammy, Kelley says, and this grand old man—she ruffles the ears of the golden retriever—is Tiger. Tiger Three, Warren says. He explains that the death of Tiger One so traumatized the family twenty years back that his father kept buying new pups and stapling the old name on. Tea comes in the formal library, Kelley lurching in under the weight of a silver tray. A dozen cookies circle a linen napkin, and following Warren’s lead, I take a single measly cookie the size of a half dollar, eyeing the rest with the same appetite that keeps Tiger panting openmouthed nearby. In that house, you have to practice not wanting. The living room has about fourteen chintz couches and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig, plus polo trophies and embossed silver cigarette cases. Also a baby grand nobody’s used since Warren left for prep school. I ask where the TV goes in that vast space, and he drags aside the drapes to reveal the portable set his dad infrequently rolls out for viewing golf. Warren tells me if his father poked his head in the living room and found Warren and his sister before the TV, he’d never fail to say, Hello, idiots . Which shocks me. In my house, personal freedom is all, amusement so hard won in that town that the right to scrabble for it is inalienable. Also in my house, cruelty was rarely so deliberate, more often the haphazard side effect of being shitfaced . I plop down at the keyboard to play the only chord I know, but Warren mentions his mother naps after lunch.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  [Social banditry] is found in one or other of its three main forms…the noble robber or Robin Hood, the primitive resistance fighter or guerilla unit…and possibly the terror-bringing avenger.* The rebel bandits or outlaws that Josephus speaks of were probably not all as nice as the sainted Robin Hood (who was Prince not of Thieves but of Outlaws , by the way). It is necessary neither to romanticize nor canonize them but to understand that their increasing presence always indicates that the oppressed lower classes are being pushed below even subsistence level and are being forced into armed resistance, however sporadic, ineffective, or desperate. In Greek the technical term for such a rebel bandit is l [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] stes , and that is exactly what Barabbas is called. He was a bandit, a rebel, an insurgent, a freedom fighter—depending always, of course, on your point of view. But Mark was written soon after the terrible consummation of the First Roman-Jewish War in 70 C.E., when Jerusalem and its Temple were totally destroyed. We already saw how the Zealots, a loose coalition of bandit groups and peasant rebels forced into Jerusalem by the tightening Roman encirclement, fought within the city for overall control of the rebellion in 68 C.E. There, says Mark, was Jerusalem’s choice: it chose Barabbas over Jesus, an armed rebel over an unarmed savior. His narrative about Barabbas was, in other words, a symbolic dramatization of Jerusalem’s fate, as he saw it . Finally, whenever such stories are judged to be authorial creations, their author’s purpose is seldom just literary embellishment. It is usually either symbolic dramatization , as here (process become event in my earlier terms); or prophetic fulfillment , as with the Triumphal Entrance; or both, as with the infancy stories seen in Chapter 1. That conclusion about the Barabbas incident raises, however, a far wider question. How did Jesus’ first followers know so much about his death and burial? How did they know those almost hour-by-hour details given in fairly close and remarkable agreement by all four New Testament gospels and by the Gospel of Peter outside the New Testament? Searching the Scriptures Once Again Recall, first, how “searching the Scriptures” created Jesus’ infancy narratives in Matthew, Luke, and even before them. My heading’s “once again” directs you back to that opening section of this book. Recall, second, that I said at the start of this chapter that it was the most difficult one for two reasons. One was the difficulty in looking unswervingly at the horror of torturous crucifixion and possible nonburial. The other is the need to explain where those detailed passion accounts came from and how they were constructed. But first, one brief word of background. The Jewish sect of the Essenes, whose home at Qumran was destroyed during the First Roman-Jewish War and whose hidden library has given us the Dead Sea Scrolls, applied prophetic writings from the Hebrew Scriptures to their own past history and present situation.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It was kind of crazy, you said. You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras. I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell. Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood. This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs. You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you. Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over. I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through. It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy. She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isn’t that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo. Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mother’s Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine—a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing. Don’t you love that? she says. It’s silly, but I love it. I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you. How long had you been drinking? Oh I wasn’t drunk, Mother says. Maybe I’d had a few drinks. This completely counters her earlier version, in which she’d claimed to have been shitfaced. But I don’t press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh. I’d never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. You’re showing my life to me through a new window—not just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother. For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. She’s your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her childrearing judgment never improved.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  29 Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead) YOU ARE HERE. —A mall directory I don’t enter the Morgan Library for the second reception thinking, Wow, I’ve arrived, my life will change now. I edge in sweating like a sow, shaking like a dope fiend, and heavy with dread. I feel the paste pearls around my neck and the cardboard soles of my cheap shoes. The party spreads out inside a book-lined cathedral—forty-foot ceilings lined with volumes. Glass cases around its perimeter glint in the low light. One holds a Bible printed by Gutenberg, another a Shakespeare folio, another etchings by poet William Blake. Standing there, I study a knot of people at the room’s center with no idea how to elbow my way in. Then with some jostling, the crowd parts, and there stands Toby Wolff, looking immensely hearty dead center of that vaulted room. He wears a blue blazer and has a beer in his hand. Hardly anybody reads memoirs much, but I check them out by the armload, including that year Toby’s This Boy’s Life, his own hair-raising account of battles with a bullying redneck stepfather. The fact that Toby’s origins are almost as scabby and unfortunate as my own partly make him approachable. Plus he taught me in grad school before he was a big deal. I’d even written him for advice on how to rework the discombobulated novel I’d cobbled together into nonfiction. (The concocted protagonist had served as a correction to the real me—beautiful and noble; she’d volunteered at the local nursing home and did differential calculus in sixth grade.) The letter Toby sent back got taped over my desk. It said: Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit...Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed... Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth. For the unbeliever I am, Toby’s wave in my direction is incalculable shithouse luck. (I’d later call it grace.) He gives me an avuncular hug and claps my padded shoulder. He’s mustachioed and fit, with a military bearing earned in Vietnam. Good for us, huh, Mare? I’m trying not to drink, I tell him, a confession he barely registers. Stand next to me, then, he says, adding, I’ll drink for you. Toby doesn’t drink for me, of course. But he feels like a pillar propping me up. I woodenly shake hands with men in suits and ladies in cocktail clothes. Who they are, I have no clue, beyond knowing they outearn me. In the midst of this, Lux shows up, and between him and Toby, I manage not to accept a single glass of the nonstop champagne flutes foisted on me from various silver trays.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  The men of Sodom, however, surround the house and demand that Lot bring out the strangers “so that we may know them.” “To know” is often used as a euphemism for sex, and Lot’s reaction makes clear that this is so here: “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.” To deter them he offers to give them his two virgin daughters, to do to them as they pleased, but says, “Only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof” (Genesis 19:8). Readers have often assumed that the wicked deed from which Lot wants to deter the men of Sodom is indeed sodomy—intercourse with his male guests. The issue is complicated, however, by a couple of factors. As Lot’s response makes clear, he, as host, feels responsible for his guests.20 That the people of Sodom wanted to rape male guests evidently added to the outrage. But what is involved here is rape. Accordingly the story says nothing about the permissibility of consensual sex between males. The idea that it would be worse to rape a man than to rape a woman persists in Philo, in sophisticated circles in Alexandria around the turn of the Common Era: “If you are guilty of pederasty or adultery or rape of a young person, even of a female, for I need not mention the case of a male . . . the penalty is death” (Hypothetica 7.1).21 Interestingly, the most explicit statement about the sin of Sodom in the Hebrew Bible, in Ezekiel 16:49, does not mention sex at all: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” The Epistle of Jude, verse 7, associates Sodom and Gomorrah with sexual immorality and says that the residents went after “other flesh,” and 2 Peter 2:6–10 associates them with licentiousness, without further specification. The “other flesh” in Jude may refer to the flesh of angels. The earliest author to condemn the Sodomites for sex between males was Philo of Alexandria (Abraham 135).22 Lot’s guests were angels, and they could escape by striking the people of Sodom with blindness. Lot’s daughters suffer no ill effects. The woman in a related story in Judges 19 is not so fortunate. She is the concubine of a Levite, who is bringing her back from Bethlehem to the hill country of Ephraim. He stops in Gibeah to spend the night, and an old man offers him hospitality. Again, the men of the city, “a perverse lot,” demand that the stranger be brought out so that they might “know” him. The host pleads with them not to do such a vile thing and offers them his virgin daughter and the stranger’s concubine to ravish or do what they want with them. The Levite thrusts out his concubine. In the morning the concubine is dead on the doorstep.