Grief

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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  111 Unlike the tyrant-bishops who vied for the emperor’s backing, Maximus became a victim, not a perpetrator, of imperial violence. Having fled to North Africa during the Persian wars, in 661 he was forcibly brought to Constantinople, where he was imprisoned, condemned as a heretic, and mutilated; he died shortly afterward in exile. But he was vindicated at the third Council of Constantinople in 680 and would become known as the father of Byzantine theology. The doctrine of deification celebrates the transfiguration of the entire human being in the here and now, not merely in a future state, and this has indeed been the living experience of individual Christians. But this spiritual triumph hardly resembles the “realized eschatology” promoted by emperors and tyrant bishops. After Constantine’s conversion, they had convinced themselves that the empire was the Kingdom of God and a second manifestation of Christ. Not even the catastrophe of the Second Council of Ephesus or the military vulnerability of their empire could shake their belief that Rome would become intrinsically Christian and win the world for Christ. In other traditions people had tried to create a challenging alternative to the systemic violence of the state, but right up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Byzantines continued to believe that the Pax Romana was compatible with the Pax Christiana. The enthusiasm with which they had greeted imperial patronage was never accompanied by a sustained critique of the role and nature of the state, or its ineluctable violence and oppression. 112 By the early seventh century, both Persia and Byzantium had been ruined by their wars for imperial dominance. Syria, already weakened by a devastating plague, had become an impoverished region, and Persia had succumbed to anarchy, its frontier fatally compromised. Yet while Persians and Byzantines eyed each other nervously, real danger emerged elsewhere. Both empires had forgotten their Arab clients and failed to notice that the Arabian Peninsula had experienced a commercial revolution. Arabs had been watching the wars between the great powers very closely and knew that both empires were fatally weakened; they were about to undergo an astonishing spiritual and political awakening. 3 China: Warriors and Gentlemen T he Chinese believed that at the beginning of time, human beings had been indistinguishable from animals. Creatures that would eventually become human had “snake bodies with human faces or the heads of oxen with tiger noses,” while future animals could speak and had human skills.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Still shaking her head she had said to Stephen: ‘Needs must when the Bodies get busy, Miss Gordon! Have an eye to her, will you? She may stick it all right, but between you and me I very much doubt it. You might try her out as your second driver.’ And so far Mary Llewellyn had stuck it. Stephen looked away again, closing her eyes, and after a while forgot about Mary. The events that had preceded her own coming to France, began to pass through her brain in procession. Her chief in The London Ambulance Column, through whom she had first met Mrs. Claude Breakspeare—a good sort, the chief, she had been a staunch friend. The great news that she, Stephen, had been accepted and would go to the front as an ambulance driver. Then Puddle’s grave face: ‘I must write to your mother, this means that you will be in real danger.’ Her mother’s brief letter: ‘Before you leave I should very much like you to come and see me,’ the rest of the letter mere polite empty phrases. The impulse to resist, the longing to go, culminating in that hurried visit to Morton. Morton so changed and yet so changeless. Changed because of those blue-clad figures, the lame, the halt and the partially blinded who had sought its peace and its kindly protection. Changeless because that protection and peace belonged to the very spirit of Morton. Mrs. Williams a widow; her niece melancholic ever since the groom Jim had been wounded and missing—they had married while he had been home on leave, and quite soon the poor soul was expecting a baby. Williams now dead of his third and last stroke, after having survived pneumonia. The swan called Peter no longer gliding across the lake on his white reflection, and in his stead an unmannerly offspring who struck out with his wings and tried to bite Stephen. The family vault where her father lay buried—the vault was in urgent need of repair—‘No men left, Miss Stephen, we’re that short of stonemasons; her ladyship’s bin complainin’ already, but it don’t be no use complainin’ these times.’ Raftery’s grave—a slab of rough granite: ‘In memory of a gentle and courageous friend, whose name was Raftery, after the poet.’ Moss on the granite half effacing the words; the thick hedge growing wild for the want of clipping. And her mother—a woman with snow-white hair and a face that was worn almost down to the spirit; a woman of quiet but uncertain movements, with a new trick of twisting the rings on her fingers. ‘It was good of you to come.’ ‘You sent for me, Mother.’ Long silences filled with the realization that all they dared hope for was peace between them—too late to go back—they could not retrace their steps even though there was now peace between them. Then those last poignant moments in the study together—memory, the old room was haunted by it—a man dying with love in his eyes that was deathless—a woman holding him in her arms, speaking words such as lovers will speak to each other. Memory—they’re the one perfect thing about me. ‘Stephen, promise to write when you’re out in France, I shall want to hear from you.’ ‘I promise, Mother.’ The return to London; Puddle’s anxious voice: ‘Well, how was she?’ ‘Very frail, you must go to Morton.’ Puddle’s sudden and almost fierce rebellion: ‘I would rather not go, I’ve made my choice, Stephen.’ ‘But I ask this for my sake, I’m worried about her—even if I weren’t going away, I couldn’t go back now and live at Morton—our living together would make us remember.’ ‘I remember too, Stephen, and what I remember is hard to forgive. It’s hard to forgive an injury done to some one one loves. . . .’ Puddle’s face, very white, very stern—strange to hear such words as these on the kind lips of Puddle. ‘I know, I know, but she’s terribly alone, and I can’t forget that my father loved her.’ A long silence, and then: ‘I’ve never yet failed you—and you’re right—I must go to Morton.’

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

  Additional Literature.—Letters of Urban IV. in Mansi, vol. XXIII. Potthast: Regesta, 1161–1650.—Les Registres of Alexander IV., Recueil des bulles de ce pape d’après les MSS. originaux des archives du Vatican, Paris, 1886, of Urban IV., Paris, 1892, of Clement IV., Paris, 1893–1904.—*Döllinger: Der Uebergang des Papstthums an die Franzosen, in Akademische Vorträge, III. pp. 212–222, Munich, 1891. Lives of the popes in Muratori and Platina. The death of Frederick did not satisfy the papacy. It had decreed the ruin of the house of the Hohenstaufen. The popes denounced its surviving representatives as "the viperous brood" and, "the poisonous brood of a dragon of poisonous race." In his will, Frederick bade his son Conrad accord to the Church her just rights and to restore any he himself might have unjustly seized but on condition that she, as a merciful and pious mother, acknowledge the rights of the empire. His illegitimate son, the brilliant and princely Manfred, he appointed his representative in Italy during Conrad’s absence. Innocent broke up from Lyons in 1251, little dreaming that, a half century later, the papacy would remove there to pass an exile of seventy years.279 After an absence of six years, he entered Rome, 1253. The war against Frederick he continued by offering the crown of Sicily to Edmund, son of the English Henry III. Conrad descended to Italy and entered Naples, making good his claim to his ancestral crown. But the pope met him with the sentence of excommunication. Death, which seemed to be in league with the papacy against the ill-fated German house, claimed Conrad in 1254 at the age of 26. He left an only son, Conradin, then two years old.280 Conrad was soon followed by Innocent to the grave, 1254. Innocent lies buried in Naples. He was the last of the great popes of an era that was hastening to its end. During the reign, perhaps, of no other pope had the exactions of Rome upon England been so exorbitant and brazen. Matthew Paris charged him with making the Church a slave and turning the papal court into a money changer’s table. To his relatives, weeping around his death-bed, he is reported to have exclaimed. "Why do you weep, wretched creatures? Do I not leave you all rich?" Under the mild reign of Alexander IV., 1254–1261, Manfred made himself master of Sicily and was crowned king at Palermo, 1258.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “You know why. Don’t act innocent.” I shove the hammer and stake at his chest but he won’t take them and steps away, blundering backwards. “Why don’t you kill me now? Right here?” “T can’t! But somebody should.” Oh this hurts. I didn’t expect that he would say it. “Why somebody?” “Nordchen, I love you with all my soul and I always will. But. But, . .You need to be put down.” “Put down?” To hear it said that way. It shocks me. “Why put . That is. Somebody needs . . you need . down? I’m not some mad dog, Daniel.” “Jesus, Nixie—” “Stop! Don’t say his name in vain.” “Oh now, now you're getting ali religious on me, is that it? Its not that simple, honey.” ; “Why is it not that simple! Have faith in me. I love you. Love me “I do.” “T’m saved, Daniel. I’m saved by the blood of Jesus. The holy man has removed the demon from me, did you see it? I’m just a girl now like any girl. We can have a baby. I want a baby for you. We will have a home. My sins, all my sins, they’re forgiven. We'll begin again. Make a baby with me.” |? “T don’t think it works like that, sweet pea,” he says. The fear in him is changing to rage, and ‘I can’t help but smell it. He’s getting out of my control. “Tell me something. And damn you, tell me the truth.” I know already what it is. “There’s this thing on the TV news,” he says. “No!” I say. “Don’t you keep bringing that up again.” “You listen to this. Four bodies behind the railroad yard.” “No!” _“They were torn to little pieces. Jesus.” “Shut up!” “No fucking heads! Does that mean anything to you? No heads.” “So?” It is all I can do now not to throw the hammer and wood at : him and run away crying like a little girl. 516 C. Sanchez-Garcia “T ast week I found you with blood all over you.” O02 “Blood all over you?” “T told you already — I told you. It was pig’s blood.” “Pig’s blood? Four guys, ripped to fucking little pieces. Somebody saw you. They’re calling you “The Ripper’.” Now he’s pulling at his hair. “Oh God. Oh God,” he says. “Pig’s blood! Pig’s blood?” “They were pigs!” What’s the use. “Jesus! Nixie! Je-zus!” Feebly I hold out the hammer and stake. “So do it if that’s what you want. You were afraid I’d be pissed at you, and maybe pull your head off. Is that what you think of me? I won’t fight you. Where do you want me to lie down?” “No!” He is in agony. Sweet prince. “I can’t. I won’t. I can’t stand the thought of hurting you.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  cold, and you’ve cut me off twice. I keep calling you Betty [another participant] —I don’t know why—and when I came to you to tell you how sorry I felt about that, you just said that was my problem, and turned away.” Natalie replied that her perception was very different: “I realized you were quite upset because you called me by the wrong name, but I said that though I could see it troubled you, it didn’t bother me at all. I realize I haven’t reached out to you, and I think you do want contact with me, but I don’t feel I have rebuffed you.” It seemed that Nancy felt more and more strongly about all this, and that she had not heard, or certainly had not accepted, Natalie’s response. She said that she had observed the close relationship Natalie had with Teresa, a Chicana, and that perhaps Natalie could relate only with minority persons, rather than with persons like her—tall, blonde, and middle-class. This led to an angry outburst from Teresa about being stereotyped, and about five minutes was spent rebuilding the relationship between Nancy and Teresa. The group brought Nancy back to the issue between herself and Natalie. It seemed quite obvious that her feelings were so strong that they could not come simply from the incident she mentioned. Joyce said she had noticed that she, Nancy, and Natalie were all similar—tall, slim, blonde—and that perhaps Nancy was feeling that Natalie should at least relate to someone so like her, rather than to Teresa who was short and dark. Nancy considered this, wondered if there might be something to it, but clearly was not deeply touched by the idea. At least two other possible bases for her strong feelings were caringly and tentatively suggested to her. To the first she said, “I’m trying on that hat, but it doesn’t seem to fit.” To the second she said, “That doesn’t seem to fit either.” Carl sat there “. . . feeling completely mystified. I wanted to understand just what it was she was troubled about, but I couldn’t get any clue to follow. I believe many others were feeling the same way. Here she was with tears in her eyes, feeling something far beyond some possible imaginary rebuff, but what was it?” Then Ann said, “This may be inappropriate, but I’m going to say it anyway. When you arrived, Nancy, I thought you were Natalie, you looked so much alike. I feel envious when I watch the beautiful open relationship between Natalie and her father. I had that kind of relationship with my father. I wonder if there is any connection between you and your father and Carl?” “That’s it!” Nancy sobbed, acting as though she had been struck by a bolt of lightning. She collapsed into herself, weeping her heart out. Between sobs she said, “I didn’t really cry at all at my father’s death. . . . He really died for me long before his death. . . . What can I do?” People responded that he was still part of her, and she

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Next day by an unanimous vote of the Faculty, I was expelled from the University and was free to turn all my attention to law. Judge Stevens told me he would bring action on my behalf against the Faculty if I wished and felt sure he’d get damages and reinstate me. But the University without Smith meant less than nothing to me and why should I waste time fighting brainless bigots? I little knew then that that would be the main work of my life; but this first time I left my enemies the victory and the field, as I probably shall at long last. I made up my mind to study law and as a beginning induced Barker of Barker & Sommerfeld to let me study in his law office. I don’t remember how I got to know them; but Barker, an immensely fat man, was a famous advocate and very kind to me for no apparent reason. Sommerfeld was a tall, fair, German-looking Jew, peculiarly inarticulate, almost tongue-tied, indeed, in English; but an excellent lawyer and a kindly, honest man who commanded the respect of all the Germans and Jews in Douglas County partly because his fat little father had been one of the earliest settlers in Lawrence and one of the most successful tradesmen. He kept a general provision store and had been kind to all his compatriots in their early struggling days. It was an admirable partnership: Sommerfeld had the clients and prepared the briefs; while Barker did the talking in court with a sort of invincible good humor which I never saw equalled save in the notorious Englishman, Bottomley. Barker before a jury used to exude good-nature and commonsense and thus gain even bad cases. Sommerfeld, I’ll tell more about in due time. A little later I got depressing news from Smith: his cough had not diminished and he missed our companionship: there was a hopelessness in the letter which hurt my very heart: but what could I do? I could only keep on working hard at law, while using every spare moment to increase my income by adding to my hoardings in two senses. One evening I almost ran into Lily. Kate was still away in Kansas City, so I stopped eagerly enough to have a talk, for Lily had always interested me. After the first greetings she told me she was going home: “they are all out, I believe”, she added. At once I offered to accompany her and she consented. It was early in summer but already warm, and when we went into the parlor and Lily took a seat on the sofa, her thin white dress defined her slim figure seductively. “What do you do?” she asked mischievously, “now that dear Mrs. Mayhew’s gone? You must miss her!” she added suggestively. “I do,” I confessed boldly; “I wonder if you’d have pluck enough to tell me the truth?” I went on.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “What a pity, Charlie!” I cried, “you’ll get more than a thousand dollars from your share of the cattle: I’ve told Bob, that I intend to share equally with all of you: this money must go back; but the thousand shall be sent to your mother I promise you:”— “Not on your life!”, cried the dying man, lifting himself up on one elbow: “This is my money: it shan’t go back to that oily sneak thief”: the effort had exhausted him; even in the dim light we could see that his face was drawn and gray: he must have understood this himself for I could just hear his last words: “Good-bye, boys!” his head fell back, his mouth opened: the brave boyish spirit was gone. I couldn’t control my tears: the phrase came to me: “I better could have lost a better man,” for Charlie was at heart a good fellow! I left Bent to carry back the money and arrange for Charlie’s burial, leaving Jo to guard the body: in an hour I was again with Bob and had told him everything. Ten days later we were in Kansas City where I was surprised by unexpected news. My second brother Willie, six years older than I was, had come out to America and hearing of me in Kansas had located himself in Lawrence as a real-estate agent; he wrote asking me to join him. This quickened my determination to have nothing more to do with cowpunching. Cattle too, we found, had fallen in price and we were lucky to get ten dollars or so a head for our bunch which made a poor showing from the fact that the Indians had netted all the best. There was about six thousand dollars to divide: Jo got five hundred dollars and Bent, Bob, Charlie’s mother and myself divided the rest. Bob told me I was a fool: I should keep it all and go down south again: but what had I gained by my two years of cowpunching? I had lost money and caught malarial fever; I had won a certain knowledge of ordinary men and their way of living and had got more than a smattering of economics and of medicine, but I was filled with an infinite disgust for a merely physical life. What was I to do now? I’d see Willie and make up my mind. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ STUDENT LIFE AND LOVE. Chapter IX.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Next day I led Reece and the Boss straight to the farmer’s place, but to my surprise he told me that I had agreed to give him two dollars a head, whereas I had bargained with him for only one dollar. His son backed up the farmer’s statement and the Irish helper declared that he was sorry to disagree with me, but I was mistaken; it was two dollars I had said. They little knew the sort of men they had to deal with. “Where are the cattle?” Ford asked, and we went down to the pasture where they were penned. “Count them, Harris,” said Ford, and I counted six hundred and twenty head. Fifty odd had disappeared, but the farmer wanted to persuade me that I had counted wrongly. Ford went about and soon found a rough lean-to stable where there were thirty more head of Texan cattle. These were driven up and soon disappeared in the herd; Reece and I began to move the herd towards the entrance. The farmer declared he would not let us go, but Ford looked at him a little while and then said very quietly, “You have stolen enough cattle to pay you. If you bother with us, I will make meat of you—see!—cold meat”, and the farmer moved aside and kept quiet. That night we had a great feast and the day after Ford announced that he had sold the whole of the cattle to two hotel proprietors and got nearly as much money as if we had not lost a hoof. My five thousand dollars became six thousand, five hundred. The courage shown by the common people in the fire, the wild humor coupled with the consideration for the women, had won my heart. This is the greatest people in the world, I said to myself, and was proud to feel at one with them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ON THE TRAIL! Chapter VIII. Prompted by Dell, before leaving Chicago I bought some books for the winter evenings, notably Mill’s “Political Economy”; Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero Worship” and “Latter Day Pamphlets”; Col. Hay’s “Dialect Poems”, too and three medical books, and took them down with me to the ranch. We had six weeks of fine weather, during which I broke in horses under Reece’s supervision, and found out that gentleness and especially carrots and pieces of sugar were the direct way to the heart of the horse; discovered, too, that a horse’s bad temper and obstinacy were nearly always due to fear. A remark of Dell that a horse’s eye had a magnifying power and that the poor, timid creatures saw men as trees walking, gave me the clue and soon I was gratified by Reece saying that I could “gentle” horses as well as anyone on the ranch, excepting Bob.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [31] Not just Jesus himself, but all his followers can use it: they have become the family in place of the blood-relatives he snubbed. The brutal and horrifying death of Jesus on the cross ordered by the Romans marks a reconciling end to such narrative ambiguities around family. Alone among the four Evangelists, John brings Mary to the foot of the cross to watch her son die – she is absent from the witnesses named by the Synoptics. The Evangelist builds still more on her presence (John 19.25–27): hanging half-alive on the cross, with Mary standing beside the disciple whom Jesus loves, he commands them to regard themselves as mother and son. ‘From that hour, the disciple took her to his own home’ (Plate 4). Thus were biological family and Jesus’s chosen and beloved associates melded into one as he died. [32] Interestingly, John never gives Mary her name either, consistently calling her simply the mother of Jesus; she and the unnamed disciple have both become symbols, but paired and crucial symbols. If one reads back to the beginning of the story of Jesus in John’s Gospel, the wedding at Cana, Jesus leaves for Capernaum straight afterwards ‘with his mother and brothers and his disciples’ (John 2.12; my italics). The motif seems to be that at both polarities of Jesus’s public career, his first miracle and his crucifixion, the two relational polarities are united. John must be aware of the familial tensions in other narrative traditions. * The disruptive constructions of family and relationships in the Gospels are paired with some strong opinions from Jesus on marriage: crucial and individual statements on divorce and monogamy. Jesus condemns divorce, which under existing Jewish custom was easy to obtain. To justify his condemnation (Mark 10.10; Matt. 19.9; Luke 16.18), he quotes the Creation narratives in the book of Genesis (Gen. 2.24): ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.’ [33] He uses this proof-text not simply to forbid divorce, but, by implication, polygyny as well. He thus significantly decouples this central Jewish text on marriage from Judaism’s previous history and practice of marriage. As we have seen, Genesis’s ‘one-flesh’ theology did not deter the Jews from honouring patriarchally based polygyny, as much in Jesus’s time as before or later. But in rejecting polygyny, Jesus injects the idea of a restrictive twoness into his version of the Genesis quotation, where it had not been before: ‘the two shall become one flesh’, he says, a modification of the original that is already present in the version quoted in the Gospel of Mark and repeated in Matthew’s Gospel. In many modern Christian translations of Genesis, that ‘two’ word has leaked back from the Gospels into the Hebrew Scripture, where actually it makes no such appearance – rather as some modern Christian Bibles retrofit the word ‘virgin’ into Isaiah 7.14. Why such strong and directive pronouncements on divorce and monogamy?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Perhaps, Sageman concludes, the problem was not Islam but ignorance of Islam. 52 The Saudis who took part in the 9/11 operation had had a Wahhabi education, but they were not influenced chiefly by Wahhabism but by pan-Islamist ideals, which the Wahhabi ulema had often opposed. The martyr videos of Ahmed al-Haznawi, who died in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, and Abdul-Aziz al-Omari, who was in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, dwell intensely on Muslim suffering worldwide. Yet while the Quran certainly orders Muslims to come to the aid of their brothers, Shariah law forbids violence against civilians and the use of fire in warfare, and it prohibits any attack on a country where Muslims are allowed to practice their religion freely . Muhammad Ata, leader of the Hamburg Cell, was motivated by Azzam’s global vision, convinced that every able-bodied Muslim was obliged to defend his brothers and sisters in Chechnya or Tajikistan. 53 But Azzam would have deplored the terrorist activity that this group would embrace. As moderate members fell away from the cell, they were replaced by others who shared Ata’s views. In such closed groups, isolated from any divergent opinion, Sageman believes, “the cause” becomes the milieu in which they live and breathe. 54 Members became deeply attached to one another, shared apartments, ate and prayed together, and watched endless battlefield videos from Chechnya. 55 Most important, they identified closely with these distant struggles. Modern media enables people in one part of the world to be influenced by events that happen far away—something that would have been impossible in premodern times—and to apply these foreign narratives to their own problems. 56 It is a highly artificial state of consciousness. The story of the 9/11 terrorists is now well known. Years after this tragedy, the events of that day are still horrifying. Our task in this book is to assess the role of religion in this atrocity. In the West there was a widespread conviction that Islam, an inherently violent religion, was the chief culprit.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  But Laura was gone. Again. Harry wept into the blankets for a time, thinking of all the years he and Laura had shared, all their joys and laughter. Then he grew hungry and thought about the steakhouse, then the tablecloths. He simply couldn’t wait to have dinner with Cody. “Cody? It’s Pop. Can we push that dinner to tonight? I’ve got some news.” “Elastic pants, Dad? Really? Is that what you’re wearing?” _ Harry had opted for elastic pants for two reasons: they were comfortable, and they were practical. If caught in a pinch, he could tuck away his meat hammer without anyone being the wiser, especially his bright-eyed son, Cody. 490 Mel Bosworth “I’m old,” said Harry. “I can wear what I want. Am I embarrassing you?” “No, you’re embarrassing yourself. You’ve done it for years. I suppose I should be used to it by now.” Cody had always been a good boy, and Harry’s unspoken favorite. It was not that he didn’t enjoy Heather’s company, but as she grew older, she began to take on the less desirable aspects of her mother, namely that she didn’t enjoy his fabric fetish. It probably didn’t help matters that she’d walked in on him plunging her prom dress two days before the prom. And it certainly didn’t help matters that he’d finished himself off instead of stopping, and that Heather had stood watching, mortified. It was at times like those that Harry questioned his stubborn fortitude, but it was a fleeting hesitancy in commitment that had never merited a change of behavior. “Turn away!” he’d barked to his pimpled and plump teenage daughter. She’d burst into tears as she got an eyeful of her father’s furry ass squeezing and shaking. She’d refused the replacement dress he bought her, instead looking to her mother for support and, well... sanity. Their relationship became strained from then on. The only gifts he was allowed to give her were books. He made sure to line her shelves. Cody looked over the menu. “How’s Mom?” “Your mother? She’s fine, I guess.” “What does that mean?” “What?” Harry’s distraction had already begun. His wrinkled penis was out and flirting with the overhang of green tablecloth, teasing it as one would an old lover. Cody sat up straight, and leaned in. “What are you doing, Dad?” Mr Ding Dong went back under wraps, the elastic waistband snapping loudly. “What? Me? Nothing, Cody. Tell me about you. How’s work?” “Work is fine.” Cody’s interest in his father’s subterranean activities at the table had been piqued, and his eyes were narrowed and probing. Like his sister, he too had had his share of jarring experiences with the old man, but unlike his fairer sibling, he could empathize, somewhat. After all, he was a producer in the adult entertainment industry, a career choice Harry had applauded, and Laura had merely accepted. “What news did you want to tell me, Dad?” The Hamper Affair 491

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The Tinkling of Tiny Silver Bells 243 and where all those pieces could end up, say, in a million years. You can get into some profound thoughts, laying in the dark, in the water, like that. And it can really mess with your head when the door would crash open and this demented hippie chick, all bounce and giggle, would come storming in jingling her tiny silver bells to pull off her balloon pants and squat herself down on the john to take a piss. We used to fight about it, especially when I didn’t even know she was in the house. You can imagine the shock she made after she was dead. Mornings were Jasmine’s favorite time of day. If I’d let her she would go on and on about the opening of the day, with the accompaniment of birds singing and the soft applause of butterflies. She would wax cliché about the possibilities “dawning” (and giggling at the pun) with the new day and wonder how many adventures she’d have by sunset. I am a Creature of the Night. I run from the burning rays of the sun and seek solstice in the cool darkness of my shell. But, still, I would always get up on a cheery blast furnace of a morning and be happy as a clam — especially when Jasmine treated me to one of her early bird special blowjobs. She liked that word, “blowjob” — said it sounded cute. And, boy, was Jasmine skilled in its performance. Just the right amount of tongue, Suction, lips, wet, dry, hands. She used to wake me up with soft kisses along my leg to let me know she was there and what she was up to. Then the kisses would run up to my stomach. A hand carefully placed over my cock and balls would warm them and add some sensation. When her mouth did finally touch my cock, it was after those soft, soft hands had stroked, teased, tickled and coaxed me into a painfully intense hard-on. Then the mouth. Then the real ride. Mornings haven’t been the same since she died. The sun must be a little brighter, stronger now. But then that one morning came. I was sleeping off my usual late-night writing stint (with a celebration of a new one finished: I was a Teenage Trailer Park Slut) when I got this amazing hard-on. I was so zonked that I really can’t tell you if it was because of Jasmine or just because I was remembering my past with her, but there it was: long (no brag, but seven inches), strong and mighty. It was a mechanic’s cock, a soldier’s cock, a fuckin’ basketball player’s cock (okay, one of the white ones). I was proud of my cock, pleased with it that morning. With a hard-on like that, _even hack writers can go out and become president (if you know the right people).

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We passed the whole day together and when he heard how I spent my days in casual reading and occasional speaking and my Topsy-turvey nights, he urged me to throw up the law and go to Europe to make myself a real scholar and thinker. But I could not give up Sophy and my ultra-pleasant life. So I resisted, told him he overrated me: I’d easily be the best advocate in the State, I said, and make a lot of money and then I’d go back and do Europe and study as well. He warned me that I must choose between God and Mammon; I retorted lightly that Mammon and my senses gave me much that God denied: “I’ll serve both”, I cried, but he shook his head. “I’m finished, Frank”, he declared at length, “but I’d regret life less if I knew that you would take up the work I once hoped to accomplish, won’t you?” I couldn’t resist his appeal: “All right”, I said, after choking down my tears, “give me a few months and I’ll go, round the world first and then to Germany to study.” He drew me to him and kissed me on the forehead: I felt it as a sort of consecration. A day or so afterwards he took train for Denver and I felt as if the sun had gone out of my life. I had little to do in Lawrence at this time except read at large and I began to spend a couple of hours every day in the town library. Mrs. Trask, the librarian, was the widow of one of the early settlers who had been brutally murdered during the Quantrell raid when Missourian bandits “shot up” the little town of Lawrence in a last attempt to turn Kansas into a slave-owning state. Mrs. Trask was a rather pretty little woman who had been made librarian to compensate her in some sort for the loss of her husband. She was well-read in American literature and I often took her advice as to my choice of books. She liked me, I think, for she was invariably kind to me and I owe her many pleasant hours and some instruction. After Smith had gone West I spent more and more time in the library for my law-work was becoming easier to me every hour. One day about a month after Smith had left, I went into the library and could find nothing enticing to read. Mrs. Trask happened to be passing and I asked her: “What am I to read?” “Have you read any of that?” she replied pointing to Bohn’s edition of Emerson in two volumes. “He’s good!” “I saw him in Concord”, I said, “but he was deaf and made little impression on me.” “He’s the greatest American thinker”, she retorted, “and you ought to read him.”

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The force of the argument from the injustice of evil and suffering depends upon the strong conviction that ‘the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies.’ Yet Lewis found he could not articulate a meaningful notion of ‘justice’ without grounding this transcendentally in something that lay beyond his own personal beliefs or those of the community to which he belonged. It was a classic example of the difficulties faced by thinkers of the Age of Reason – having to judge one belief in terms of another belief. In the end, Lewis set his atheism to one side, and reaffirmed faith in God. Thirty years later, however, Lewis found that the experience of the slow death of his wife, Joy Davidman, from cancer in 1960 reopened the question of pain and suffering for him emotionally, not simply intellectually. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed (1961), one of his rawest and most challenging books, as a way of recording and reflecting on his thoughts and experiences as he grieved. Suffering is portrayed as relentlessly opaque, resisting rational explanation. Where is God? … Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.57 Lewis’s journal for this difficult period records his thoughts, no matter how incoherent, as he explored every intellectual option open to him. Lewis was determined to confront and engage with each of them, experiencing the emotional distress and cognitive dissonance they each evoked. Maybe God was a tyrant. Maybe there wasn’t a God. So, was this the end of Lewis’s Christian faith? Was the suffering and death of his wife such a blatant contradiction of Lewis’s core beliefs that his only option was to abandon them? Was the cognitive dissonance unbearable for him? That is certainly the impression created by the movie Shadowlands (1993), which suggests that Lewis’s faith collapsed after Davidman’s illness and death, leading him into some undemanding form of Stoic humanism. Yet here, as so often, movies offer their own version of history. In reality Lewis’s faith recovered. A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regarded as a process of testing – not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.’58 In a letter written a few weeks before his death, Lewis remarked that while A Grief Observed ‘ends with faith’, it nevertheless ‘raises all the blackest doubts en route’.59 It was, nevertheless, a reconstructed faith, more attentive to the raw emotions caused by suffering and doubt in the life of faith.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  familiar and long, from his skin and a small angry trail of blood follows after. I can barely move, the fading pleasure in my hips, turning bitter, the feeling of the blood within. I roll to the side and tumble the carcass off of me. Kuschelbaer . . .no. 1 bury my face in his cold belly and scream my agony into his skin. Oh God. You should have killed me instead. You should have killed me. If only you had killed me instead when you could have. ’m so alone. I feel so confused. I can’t think, everything is happening too fast. Who am I? Am I supposed to be the girl or the demon? I should be dancing somewhere, am I late? Why am I naked? Where is my baby? Will the Unicorn come and call my name? Why can’t I live on the moon? Come back to me. Why are there no tears? I want my tears. There should be tears for him. My ...my big snuggly bear, kuschelbaer, don’t leave me again. Oh no, oh no, oh no... dance with me. I want to kill something. Kill it slowly. I want to feel my teeth in something and hear it cry and beg to God for its life. Jesus! Lying bastard Jesus! Blood. Over by the trees, further down the river, the whisper of blood is on the air. Under the smell is a bright feeling of pain. There is pain and there is blood and there is an emotion I can’t understand anymore. Walking through the high grass of the field between tree groves along the river bank. The bright moonlight on my skin. Without love or hope of love, I am exactly who I am meant to be. I am transforming. I am becoming glorious. The whore of Babylon riding the beast. When people see me they shall worship me. The grasshoppers jumping away from me as I pass. High above, crows are crying for me, poor black angels. The night air leading me. I am home again. Somewhere God is shaking His fist at me. Baaa baaa baaa. Weil ich Fesu Schaflein bin ... Freu’ich mich nur immerhin ... I am Jesus’s little lamb. Ich Fesu Schaflein bin. Baaa baaa baaa. Hop hop hop. I am Jesus’s little lamb chop. Baa baa baa. Chop chop chop. Blood scent coming from those trees beside the water. But there is this funny sound. I lower my head and listen carefully and there is a The Lady and the Unicorn 323 slap... slap... slap... not of skin on skin, but something else. And the sea smell of tears. Now I move like the hunter. I am the Angel that withers hope. Iam Death become woman. Cry you crows! Cry for little Nordchen. Here he is, here in the trees, I see him.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “T can’t leave you.” “T don’t want to be without you,” I said. “Then don’t be.” But five minutes later I asked what was going to happen and she said we were done and I nodded my head. Still we stayed in bed and I pressed my lips against hers, placed my hand on her ass, ran my palm over the contours of her backside to the top of her legs. I kissed her deeply and cried more. “Don’t cry,” she said. Pd cried in front of her so many times over five months. At first I had been embarrassed but then I realized she liked it so I cried freely. I was shocked by my own propensity for tears. I never knew I had so many of them and they were so close to the surface. I would cry when she was hitting me and she wouldn’t even stop. She would beat me the whole way through until the tears were gone and I relaxed again and I came back to her. She said she wanted to provide a space for that little boy inside of me. But now she didn’t want me to cry anymore and I tried to put the tears back into wherever they came from and I succeeded and then they came ” again and then they stopped. Still I knew I was making my own decision. There were things I could say to keep it going and I wasn’t saying them. I was once again jumping from a burning building, abandoning what seemed like an unsustainable situation, something I had been doing since I ran from Once More Beneath the Exit Sign 407 home when I was thirteen, moving out to the streets of Chicago. I never went back. I never did. ’ve been running away my entire life. I reached into that tub next to the bed and grabbed a condom from a paper bag. I fucked her hard and fast and in a way unlike I had ever fucked her before. She began to scream and then her own tears came, drenching her face until she resembled a mermaid. This was our due. We were breaking up and we were entitled to this sex and we were going to have it. I slammed into her with everything I had. It was like fucking in a storm. I gripped her legs, the flesh of her thighs. I sniffed at her neck. “C’mon,” I said, and she screamed and shook with orgasms. Then we rolled over and she was on top of me with her fingers in my hair and one hand on my throat. We were still _ fucking. She pinched my nipple hard, she reached down between my legs. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to come.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  As a child and a young adult, I had watched my mother grieve many deaths. I’d felt panicked when she cried, when she had “sad attacks.” But I got to see real human feeling in grown-ups, got to practice that kind of discomfort, got to see that we would survive. When my turn came to be a grown-up with feelings, I had not forgotten. I don’t think I ever fell apart in front of June, not apart-apart, but I was grouchy, weepy, tired. When I had the energy, we talked about it, and I tried to explain what she was seeing in me, to put words to my emotions and actions. I wanted to metabolize the grief for both of us, to offer her what she needed—no more and no less—to comprehend what she might feel. I hope she’d understand, as I was coming to understand it, that things might feel groundless, but she was safe. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The weekend of the Fourth of July we went on a camping trip to Lake Wenatchee—me, Ash, and June, with a couple of the Thursday-night dinner families. We didn’t have our own tent or sleeping bags, so we borrowed them, and when we arrived at the site, I saw that we were out of our league. The other families had fancy tents and cots, bins full of dedicated cooking equipment for camping, and comfortable, well-designed chairs that folded into stuff sacks. I knew they’d been camping multiple times a summer for years, but it didn’t help; they also had intact marriages, which was even worse. I woke up in the night, pinned between June and the nylon wall of the tent, and started to cry. I tried not to make any noise, but Ash reached over and touched my shoulder. You okay? they asked. I hate all of this, I squeaked. All their perfect lives. Shhhhhhhhhh, they whispered, rubbing my arm. We’ll get through this. We will. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wrote this down in a notebook. Happiness : joy :: sadness : suffering. The difference is in intensity and duration. I went around and around: Could I have done this all, all these months, differently? But really, could I? The merry-go-round was more palatable than what I’d started to suspect: that I would suffer, and that I’d probably make other people suffer too, because I couldn’t avoid it. The best-case scenario, then, might be a safe place to do the suffering, and a witness to keep me company. But Jesus, who would agree to that? Who would possibly accompany me? Because if someone agrees to be my witness, then I will have to be theirs too.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love. 1 Zeus has taught human beings to think about their predicament: we cannot forget our pain; even in sleep, the memory of past sorrow drips ceaselessly into our hearts. Men and women may try to resist the law of suffering, but the gods have ordained that their reflective powers will set them on the path to wisdom, ripeness, and blessing. In Eumenides, the last play of the trilogy, Aeschylus shows us humanity’s passage from the brutal violence of a tribal, kin-based society, with its inexorable, self-destructive ethic of revenge, to life in a civilized city (polis), where crime is judged by the rational process of law. Still in flight from the Furies, Orestes arrives in Athens and flings himself at the feet of its patronal deity Athena. She convenes the city council to decide his fate by the due process of law. The Furies argue that Orestes must pay for his crime, but the jury is split and Athena has the casting vote. She acquits Orestes but placates the Furies by offering them a shrine in the city, decreeing that henceforth they will be known as the Eumenides, “the Compassionate Ones.” The polis can be seen as a symbol of the rational new brain that enables us to hold aloof from the instinctive drives of the old brain and take responsibility for them. In their long-term effects, the dark deeds of the past live on in the polis, so Athenians must acknowledge them and make a place for them in their minds and hearts; they can then transform these primitive passions into a force for compassion. 2 But when the old brain is co-opted by the new, the result can be disastrous. Reason was an ambiguous tool, because, as we have seen throughout history, it can be used to find a logically sound rationale for actions that violate our humanity. In his tragedy Medea, Euripides (c. 484–406 BCE) told the story of the eponymous woman from Colchis who married Jason, hero of the Argonauts, and helped him find the Golden Fleece. When Jason callously casts her off, in revenge Medea kills not only Jason and his new wife, but the children she and Jason conceived together. Very few animals would slaughter their young, yet Medea is driven to this act by her uniquely human reasoning powers.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Compassion and the abandonment of ego are both essential to art: it is easy to spot a poem, a novel, or a film that is self-indulgent or brittle with cruel cleverness. When a film makes us weep, it is often because it has touched a buried memory or unacknowledged yearning of our own. Art calls us to recognize our pain and aspirations and to open our minds to others. Art helps us—as it helped the Greeks—to realize that we are not alone; everybody else is suffering too. The Greek dramatists were trying to sensitize their audience to pain. Instead of maintaining ourselves in a state of deliberate heartlessness in order to keep suffering at bay, we should open our hearts to the grief of others as though it were our own. The Tibetans call this quality shen dug ngal wa la mi sö pa , which means “the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow.” It is this, the Dalai Lama explains, that “compels us not to shut our eyes even when we want to ignore others’ distress.” 9 From early childhood, the theologian, doctor, and missionary Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was saddened by the misery that he saw around him, especially the suffering of animals. “The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker’s yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks,” he recalled. 10 He did not push the experience to the back of his mind or seek to repress it; rather, he allowed it to become a habitual memory, and this empathetic attitude would inspire him to devote his life to the alleviation of such hardship. In 1905, he decided to study medicine, a discipline that he did not find congenial, in order to practice as a doctor in Africa. “While at the university and enjoying the happiness of being able to study and even to produce some results in science and art,” he explained, “I could not help thinking continually of others who were denied that happiness by their material circumstances or their health.” 11 The suffering we have experienced in our own life can also help us to appreciate the depths of other people’s unhappiness.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In the checkout line at the grocery store I find myself behind a man and a woman with matching tattoos, till death do us part, on their forearms. I watched them ring up their ground beef, Pepsi, and corn on the cob, wondering, How do they do it—commit so deeply that they put it in their skin? I want to know how. I want to love differently this go-round—to not throw anybody, not even myself, away. What I want for my queer family is conventional. I want a partner who is home with me for dinner, who is an equal teammate in domesticity and parenting, who goes to bed at the same time I do. From the outside we may not look it, but we are the ordinary partnership I want. As gay artist and writer Joe Brainard said: “If I’m as normal as I think I am, we’re all a bunch of weirdos.” I don’t know that it’s what the rebels at Stonewall were going for. An early post-Stonewall gay-rights organization called the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had a more radical, revolutionary agenda, which they envisioned enacting through the common efforts of a variety of oppressed groups. The GLF, writes historian Martin Duberman, was “overtly anti-religious, anti-nuclear family, anti-capitalist, and antiwar,” as well as anti-racist and anti-patriarchal.65 But instead of upending these institutions, the broader LGBTQ+ movement has wound up trying to gain access to them. The movement has fought for marriage and military service because a majority of gay Americans have wanted it to do so. Public attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, in the United States at least, appear to have shifted dramatically in the half-century since Stonewall, but the gains are not secure. As of this writing, Ash and I have the right to get married, but a baker in Colorado has the right to refuse to make us a wedding cake. Black transwomen face violence of epidemic proportions. According to the Trevor Project, LGBTQ+ youth contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth.66 Even in Seattle, our progressive West Coast home, my security as a non-straight person rests on my whiteness, my being cisgender, and on the fact that I am not poor. 36In the last years of her life, Ursula K. Le Guin published an essay in which she contemplated the formation of social institutions and their relationship to the sexes. Male solidarity, she wrote, has been the shaper of government, army, priesthood, and the thing we call the corporation. But as for female solidarity, she notes, “without it human society, I think, would not exist. Female solidarity might better be called fluidity—a stream or river rather than a structure. . . . Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.”67