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 Story of O (1954)

  crowd of strangers, of passers-by in the street, or when she got into a bus, or when she was at the studio with the models and technicians, and she told herself that any and all of these people she was with, if they should have an accident and have to be laid down on the ground or if a doctor had to be called, would keep their secrets, even if they were unconscious and naked; but not she: her secret did not depend upon her silence alone, did not depend on her alone. Even if she wanted to, she could not indulge in the slightest caprice - and that was indeed the meaning of one of Sir Stephen's questions - without immediately revealing herself, she could not allow herself to partake of the most innocent acts, such as playing tennis or swimming. That these things were forbidden her was a comfort to her, a material comfort, as the bars of the convent materially prevent the cloistered girls from belonging to one another, and from escaping. For this reason too, how could she run the risk that Jacqueline would not spurn her, without at the same time running the risk of having to explain the truth to Jacqueline, or at least part of the truth? The sun had moved and left her face. Her shoulders were sticking to the glossy surface of the photographs on which she was lying, and against her knee she could feel the rough edge of Sir Stephen's suitcoat, for he had come back beside her. He and René each took her by one hand and helped her to her feet. René picked up one of her mules. It was time for her to get dressed. It was during the lunch that followed, at Saint-Cloud on the banks of the Seine, that Sir Stephen, who had remained alone with her, began to question her once again. The restaurant tables, covered with white tablecloths, were arranged on a shaded terrace which was bordered by privet hedges, at the foot of which was a bed of dark red, scarcely opened peonies.

• From Story of O (1954)

  would sleep with her. When he came back, O reached over to turn out the lamp: it was her left hand, and the last thing she saw before the room was plunged into darkness was the somber glitter of her iron ring. She was lying half on her side: her lover called her softly by name and, simultaneously, seizing her with his whole hand, covered the nether part of her belly and drew her to him. The next day, O, in her dressing gown, had just finished lunch alone in the green dining room - René had left early in the morning and was not due home until evening, to take her out to dinner - when the phone rang. The phone was in the bedroom, beneath the lamp at the head of the bed. O sat down on the floor to answer it. It was René who wanted to know whether the cleaning woman had left. Yes, she had just left, after having served lunch, and would not be back till the following morning. "Have you started to sort out your clothes yet?" René said. "I was just going to start," she answered, "but I got up late, took a batch, and it was noon before I was ready." "Are you dressed?" "No, I have on my nightgown and my dressing gown." "Put the phone down, take off your robe and your nightgown." O obeyed, so startled that the phone slipped from the bed where she had placed it down onto the white rug, and she thought she had been cut off. No, she had not been cut off. "Are you naked?" René went on. "Yes," she said. "But where are you calling from?" He ignored her question, merely adding: "Did you keep your ring on?" She had her ring on. Then he told her to remain as she was until he came home and to prepare, thus undressed, the suitcase of clothing she was to get rid of. Then he hung up. It was past one o'clock, and the weather was lovely. A small pool of sunlight fell on the rug, lighting the white nightgown and the corduroy dressing gown, pale green like the shells of fresh almonds, which O had let slip to the floor when she had taken them off. She picked them up and went to take them into the bathroom, to hang them up in a closet. On her way, she suddenly saw her reflection in one of the mirrors fastened to a door and which, together with another mirror covering part of the wall and a third on another door, formed a large three-faced mirror: all she was wearing was a pair of leather mules the same green as her dressing gown - and only slightly darker than the mules she wore at Roissy - and her ring. She was no longer wearing either a collar or leather bracelets, and she was alone, her own sole spectator. And yet never had she felt

• From Story of O (1954)

  Sir Stephen resumed his questioning, with a judge-like resolution and the skill of a father confessor. O did not see him speaking, and saw herself replying. Whether she had, since she had returned from Roissy, belonged to other men besides René and himself? No. Whether she had wanted to belong to any other she might have met? No. Whether she caressed herself at night, when she was alone? No. Whether she had any girl friends she caressed or who she allowed to caress her? No (the "no" was more hesitant). Any girlfriends she did desire? Well, there was Jacqueline, but "friend" was stretching the term. Acquaintance would be closer, or even chum, the way well-bred schoolgirls refer to each other in high-class boarding schools. Whereupon Sir Stephen asked her whether she had any photographs of Jacqueline, and he helped her to her feet so she could go and get them. It was in the living room that René, entering out of breath, for he had dashed up the four flights of stairs, came upon them: O was standing in front of the big table on which there shone, black and white, like puddles of water in the night, all of the pictures of Jacqueline. Sir Stephen, half-seated on the table, was taking them one by one as O handed them to him, and putting them back on the table; his other hand was holding O's womb. From that moment on, Sir Stephen, who had greeted René without letting go of her - in fact she felt his hand probe deeper into her - had ceased addressing her, and addressed himself to René. She thought she knew why: with René there, the accord between Sir Stephen and René concerning her was established, but apart from her, she was only the occasion for it or the object of it, they no longer had to question her, nor she to reply; what she had to do, and even what she had to be, was decided without her. It was almost noon. The sun, falling directly on the table, curled the edges of the photographs. O wanted to move them and flatten them out to keep them from being ruined, but her fingers fumbled, she was on the verge of yielding to the burning probe of Sir Stephen's hand and allowing a moan to escape from her lips. She failed to hold it back, did in fact moan, and found herself sprawled flat on her back among the photographs, where Sir Stephen had rudely shoved her as he left her, with her legs spread and dangling. Her feet were not touching the floor; one of her mules slipped from her foot and dropped noiselessly onto the white rung. Her face was flooded with sunshine: she closed her eyes.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This consisted of the establishment of state capitalism, the institution of increased profit-sharing for the workforces and reforms to undermine the semifeudal forms of land ownership, and the creation of a literacy corps. 32 Some of the shah’s projects were successful. The industrial, agricultural, and social projects looked impressive, and the 1960s saw a large increase in the Gross National Product. Even though the shah personally thought women an inferior sex, he introduced reforms that improved their status and education, though this only benefited women of the upper classes. In the West, the shah’s achievements were hailed with enthusiasm: Iran seemed a beacon of progress and sanity in the Middle East. After the Musaddiq crisis, the shah courted America, supported the State of Israel, and was rewarded with foreign investment that kept the economy afloat. But even at the time, astute observers noted that these reforms did not go far enough. They favored the rich, concentrated on city dwellers, and ignored the peasantry. The profits derived from oil and natural gas were not used efficiently but were spent on showy projects and the latest in military technology. 33 As a result, the basic structures of society remained untouched and an even greater gulf yawned between the Westernized rich and the traditional poor, who had been left behind in the old agrarian ethos. Because of the decline in agriculture, there was a massive exodus from the country to the cities: between 1968 and 1978, the urban population rose from 38 percent to 47 percent. The population of Tehran almost doubled during these years, increasing from 2.719 million to 4.496 million. 34 The rural migrants did not integrate successfully, but lived in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities, eking out a precarious living as porters, taxi drivers, and street vendors. Tehran split into modernized and traditional sectors: the Westernized upper and middle classes moved away from the old city to the new residential neighborhoods and the business area in the north of the city, where there were bars and casinos, and where women dressed like Europeans and mixed freely with men in public. It seemed like a foreign country to the bazaaris and the poor, who remained in the old city and the adjacent southern areas. The vast majority of Iranians were thus experiencing one of the most unsettling of human emotions. The familiar world had grown unfamiliar; it was itself and yet not itself, like a close friend whose appearance and personality have been disfigured by illness. When the world we know changes as rapidly as Iran did during the 1960s, men and women begin to feel like strangers in their own country. Increasingly, a worrying number of Iranians found that they did not feel at home anywhere. The debacle of 1953 had left many with a corrosive sense of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the international community.

• 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 Shunned (2018)

  My steps echoed against the linoleum as I crossed the room and turned off the lights, keeping open the window blinds that lined one side of the room. Taking my seat next to the projector, I clicked it on. The sprockets combed through the film as it transferred from reel to reel, a cone of light delivering images to the screen. After a few episodes, I lost myself, isolation trumped by laughter as Bugs Bunny taunted the Tasmanian Devil and massaged Elmer Fudd’s scalp to the rhythms of The Barber of Seville . A few hours later, when my classmates returned from the auditorium, I was amusing myself by telling the gerbils make-believe stories as I changed the water in their cages. “Where were you?” asked Julia, a new girl I had befriended. She rushed over to stand next to me and seemed relieved that I was okay. “I thought we would sit together.” “She’s one of those Jehovahs!” answered Billy Gustafson, the class smart aleck with a butch haircut. “She doesn’t get any presents at Christmas.” Everyone in the class heard him and turned to look at me. In a split second, my biggest fear was realized: I had become the center of attention. I wanted to disappear, but I swallowed hard and stood taller. I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. Ms. Levy entered the room and sensed something was up. “Is that true?” asked Julia. Her eyes were peering and curious. “Yes,” I said. “It’s true. I’ve never celebrated Christmas. It’s against my religion.” “Never, ever?” asked Julia. When she had chosen me as her new friend, she had never imagined such a dire reality as this. This was one of those moments we discussed at the Kingdom Hall, and for which my mother had prepared me. There was no use avoiding the inevitable. Jesus was also ridiculed. When you are a true Christian, people make fun of you. It comes with the territory. My actions had created an opportunity for everyone in the room to hear Jehovah’s name, and that was a privilege. But the only thing I wanted to do was crawl behind the coat rack. “Isn’t that weird?” Billy shouted this question to the whole class. The knot that churned in my stomach started to unravel. I wanted to smack Billy Gustafson right upside the head. “Everyone find your seats,” Ms. Levy said, as she walked to the front of the room. Billy stuck his tongue out at me, then obeyed. Julia moved slowly, apparently trying to take in this news, to understand. Ms. Levy went up to the board and started erasing the doodles I had made earlier. I was grateful the attention had shifted away from me. “There is something I want all of you kids to remember,” she said. “There are all kinds of different religions in this world. Linda happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness.” My stomach tightened back up.

• 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 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 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)

  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 Martin Luther (2016)

  It is hardly surprising that when Johannes Tetzel, the preacher who would eventually spark Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, began to sell indulgences in 1508, he headed straight for the new mining region of St Annaberg, named after the miner’s saint, the mother of the Virgin Mary: miners needed all the protection they could muster. As Myco- nius, the town’s Lutheran preacher, would put it later, they hoped that ‘if they just put in the money and bought grace and indulgences, all the mountains around St Annaberg would become the purest silver; and as soon as the coins clinked in the bowl, the soul for whom they had put it in would fly straight to heaven with their dying breath’.* It may have been that omnipresence of uncertainty, danger and risk in the mining world which settled in Luther’s soul and gave him a deep conviction of the complete omnipotence of God: a sense that human beings are utterly exposed in their dealings with Him, and that there are no mediators or strategies that could protect them. Magic would not work, insurance did not exist, law offered only flimsy MANSFELD AND MINING 31 protection. The miner could call on the saints, especially St Anna. But in the end, he faced God alone. Around 1527 Lucas Cranach the Elder painted portraits of Luther’s parents, when they visited their son in Wittenberg. The painting of Hans shows a man with a powerful physical presence, and chunky features. A man of action, he looks almost uncomfortable sitting still, his hands awkwardly folded. He is dressed in black, the colour favoured by men of substance, and wears the obligatory fur collar. The resem- blance to Martin is unmistakable. He has the same deep-set eyes and the heavy jowls that Luther inherited. His mother Margarethe’s white coiffe and shirt complement the dark colours of her husband’s portrait. With her simple, conventional attire, and wearing no jewellery, she is presented as a model wife, although her chin juts forward, suggesting a less conventional character. There is also a surviving sketch of Hans Luder in pencil and watercolour by Cranach, probably a study for the portrait. Focused only on the face, it is more revealing: Hans’s eyes are wrinkled against the light and his face is weathered, as befits a man used to working out of doors. The mouth is firm, the nose emphatic. This is a man used to speaking his mind, but the clouded gaze also suggests someone whose power is now spent, a patriarch grown old. When the portraits were produced, the glory days of mining were already over. It is difficult to know what kind of a father Hans Luder made. Conventionally pious, he practised the devotion common to his gener- ation.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Just as he was in isolation from the outside world, so his body also seemed sealed off, unable to ‘flow’ - the process IN THE WARTBURG 199 humoral medicine considered fundamental to physical health. The condition lasted until the autumn and must have added to Luther’s sense of physical discomfort, with a different diet, a sedentary lifestyle and clothing that constantly constricted the body. But perhaps, after the fevered rush of the period leading up to the Diet of Worms, the constipation may have reflected his own turning inwards, entering a period of inactivity as essential as it was difficult, before he could become creative again." He also experienced attacks of the Devil. The story which was to become famous, of Luther throwing an inkpot at the Devil — the stain still visible today on the wall of his castle room — almost certainly rests on a misreading of Luther’s remark that he would fight the Devil with ink: that is, the printed word. But there was a new urgency about the Devil’s attacks, partly because without his friends and colleagues to talk to, his inner world loomed larger. ‘In this leisurely solitude’ he was ‘exposed to a thousand devils’, he wrote. In one sense he was a monk because he was alone, he told Spalatin, and yet ‘I am not actu- ally a monk [i.e. a hermit, alone], because I have many evil and astute demons with me; they “amuse” me, as one says, but in a disturbing way.’? What were these attacks of the Devil about? During his time in the Wartburg, Luther had to come to terms with his body in new ways. ‘I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God, yet burn in a big fire of my untamed body. In short I should be ardent in spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure and sleepiness.” It was not just constipation that made him painfully aware of the flesh; nor was Luther describing sexual lust alone. As the monastery in Wittenberg gradually emptied, he knew that he had to change and give up the life of a monk. Gone was all the discipline, the importance of keeping time, the collective eating, the disruption of sleep patterns for services in the night, the structure of daily life. The transformation of Luther was as much physical and emotional as it was theological. Meanwhile, matters were moving fast in Wittenberg. While Melanchthon became Luther’s main collaborator and instrument in the town, the relationship between the two men was not without its difficulties.

• 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 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 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)

  [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.