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 Another Country (1962)

  Eric turned back to the window. “A Southern girl,” he said. He felt a very dull, very distant pain. It all seemed very long ago, that gasping and trembling, freezing and burning time. The pain was distant now because it had scarcely been bearable then. It could not really be recollected because it had become a part of him. Yet, the power of this pain, though diminished, was not dead: Rufus’ face again appeared before him, that dark face, with those dark eyes and curving, heavy lips. It was the face of Rufus when he had looked with love on Eric. Then, out of hiding, leapt his other faces, the crafty, cajoling face of desire, the remote face of desire achieved. Then, for a second, he saw Rufus’ face as he stared on death, and saw his body hurtling downward through the air: into that water, the water which stretched before him now. The old pain receded into the home it had made in him. But another pain, homeless as yet, began knocking at his heart—not for the first time: it would force an entry one day, and remain with him forever. Catch them. Don’t let them blues in here. They shakes me in my bed, can’t sit down in my chair. “Let me fix you a fresh drink,” Cass said. “Okay.” She took his glass. As she walked to the bar, he said, “You knew about us, I guess? I guess everybody knew—though we thought we were being so smart, and all. And, of course, he always had a lot of girls around.” “Well, so did you,” she said. “In fact, I vaguely remember that you were thinking of getting married at one point.” He took his drink from the bar, and paced the room. “Yes. I haven’t thought of her in a long time, either.” He paused and grimaced sourly. “That’s right, I certainly did have a few girls hanging around. I hardly even remember their names.” As he said this, the names of two or three old girl friends flashed into his mind. “I haven’t thought about them for years.” He came back to the sofa, and sat down. Cass watched him from the bar. “I might,” he said, painfully, “have had them around just on account of Rufus—trying to prove something, maybe, to him and to myself.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  “He says it’s me trying to get us killed.” She tried to laugh. “He had a fight last week with some guy in the subway, some real, ignorant, unhappy man just didn’t like the idea of our being together, you know? and, well, you know, he blamed that fight on me. He said I was encouraging the man. Why, Viv, I didn’t even see the man until he opened his mouth. But, Rufus, he’s all the time looking for it, he sees it where it ain’t, he don’t see nothing else no more. He says I ruined his life. Well, he sure ain’t done mine much good.” She tried to dry her eyes. Vivaldo gave her his handkerchief and put one arm around her shoulders. “You know, the world is hard enough and people is evil enough without all the time looking for it and stirring it up and making it worse. I keep telling him, I know a lot of people don’t like what I’m doing. But I don’t care, let them go their way, I’ll go mine.” A policeman passed them, giving them a look. Vivaldo felt a chill go through Leona’s body. Then a chill went through his own. He had never been afraid of policemen before; he had merely despised them. But now he felt the impersonality of the uniform, the emptiness of the streets. He felt what the policeman might say and do if he had been Rufus, walking here with his arm around Leona. He said, nevertheless, after a moment, “You ought to leave him. You ought to leave town.” “I tell you, Viv, I keep hoping—it’ll all come all right somehow. He wasn’t like this when I met him, he’s not really like this at all. I know he’s not. Something’s got all twisted up in his mind and he can’t help it.” They were standing under a street lamp. Her face was hideous, was unutterably beautiful with grief. Tears rolled down her thin cheeks and she made doomed, sporadic efforts to control the trembling of her little-girl’s mouth. “I love him,” she said, helplessly, “I love him, I can’t help it. No matter what he does to me. He’s just lost and he beats me because he can’t find nothing else to hit.” He pulled her against him while she wept, a thin, tired girl, unwitting heiress of generations of bitterness. He could think of nothing to say. A light was slowly turning on inside him, a dreadful light. He saw—dimly—dangers, mysteries, chasms which he had never dreamed existed. “Here comes a taxi,” he said. She straightened and tried to dry her eyes again. “I’ll come with you,” he said, “and come right back.” “No,” she said, “just give me the keys. I’ll be all right. You go on back to Rufus.” “Rufus said he’d kill me,” he said, half-smiling. The taxi stopped beside them. He gave her his keys. She opened the door, keeping her face away from the driver.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But I, considering Thy gifts, Thou unseen God, which Thou instillest into the hearts of Thy faithful ones, whence wondrous fruits do spring, did rejoice and give thanks to Thee, recalling what I before knew, how careful and anxious she had ever been as to her place of burial, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For because they had lived in great harmony together, she also wished (so little can the human mind embrace things divine) to have this addition to that happiness, and to have it remembered among men, that after her pilgrimage beyond the seas, what was earthly of this united pair had been permitted to be united beneath the same earth. But when this emptiness had through the fulness of Thy goodness begun to cease in her heart, I knew not, and rejoiced admiring what she had so disclosed to me; though indeed in that our discourse also in the window, when she said, “What do I here any longer?” there appeared no desire of dying in her own country. I heard afterwards also, that when we were now at Ostia, she with a mother’s confidence, when I was absent, one day discoursed with certain of my friends about the contempt of this life, and the blessing of death: and when they were amazed at such courage which Thou hadst given to a woman, and asked, “Whether she were not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city?” she replied, “Nothing is far to God; nor was it to be feared lest at the end of the world, He should not recognise whence He were to raise me up.” On the ninth day then of her sickness, and the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine, was that religious and holy soul freed from the body. I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my heart, which was overflowing into tears; mine eyes at the same time, by the violent command of my mind, drank up their fountain wholly dry; and woe was me in such a strife! But when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out into a loud lament; then, checked by us all, held his peace. In like manner also a childish feeling in me, which was, through my heart’s youthful voice, finding its vent in weeping, was checked and silenced. For we thought it not fitting to solemnise that funeral with tearful lament, and groanings; for thereby do they for the most part express grief for the departed, as though unhappy, or altogether dead; whereas she was neither unhappy in her death, nor altogether dead. Of this we were assured on good grounds, the testimony of her good conversation and her faith unfeigned.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Her face changed, she rose from the table and walked back to the stove. “I’m sure it must seem like that to you,” she said—very humbly. She moved to the sink and leaned against it, watching him. “But I wasn’t trying to torment you—whenever I did. I don’t think that I thought about that at all. In fact, I know I didn’t, I’ve never had the time.” She watched his face. “I’ve just realized lately that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, certainly more than I can swallow.” He winced. She broke off suddenly: “Are you sure you’re a man, Vivaldo?” He said, “I’ve got to be sure.” “Fair enough,” she said. She walked to the stove and put a light under the frying pan, walked to the table and opened the meat. She began to dust it with salt and pepper and paprika, and chopped garlic into it, near the bone. He took a swallow of his drink, which had no taste whatever; he splashed more whiskey into his glass. “When Rufus died, something happened to me,” she said. She sounded now very quiet and weary, as though she were telling someone else’s story; also, as though she herself, with a faint astonishment, were hearing it for the first time. But it was yet more astonishing that he now began to listen to a story he had always known, but never dared believe. “I can’t explain it. Rufus had always been the world to me. I loved him.” “So did I,” he said—too quickly, irrelevantly; and for the first time it occurred to him that, possibly, he was a liar; had never loved Rufus at all, but had only feared and envied him. “I don’t need your credentials, Vivaldo,” she said. She watched the frying pan critically, waiting for it to become hot enough, then dropped in a little oil. “The point, anyway, at the moment, is that I loved him. He was my big brother, but as soon as I knew anything, I knew that I was stronger than he was. He was nice, he was really very nice, no matter what any of you might have thought of him later. None of you, anyway, knew anything about him, you didn’t know how.” “You often say that,” he said, wearily. “Why?” “How could you—how can you?—dreaming the way you dream? You people think you’re free. That means you think you’ve got something other people want—or need. Shit.” She grinned wryly and looked at him. “And you do, in a way. But it isn’t what you think it is. And you’re going to find out, too, just as soon as some of those other people start getting what you’ve got now.” She shook her head. “I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for you. I even feel kind of sorry for myself, because God knows I’ve often wished you’d left me where I was——” “Down there in the jungle?” he taunted.

• From Wild (2012)

  “The gazebo is cool in the dark,” he whispered a few minutes later, and we both looked around, seeing it in the shadowy night light. Paul and I had gotten married in it. We’d built it together for the occasion of our wedding nearly seven years before, along with help from Eddie and my mom. It was the humble castle of our naïve, ill-fated love. The roof was corrugated tin; the sides, unsanded wood that would give you splinters if you touched it. The floor was packed dirt and flat stones we’d hauled through the woods in a blue wheelbarrow my family had owned for ages. After I married Paul in the gazebo, it had become the place in our woods where people would walk to when they walked, congregate when they congregated. Eddie had hung a wide rope hammock across its length, a gift to my mother years before. “Let’s get in this thing,” Leif said, gesturing to the hammock. We climbed in and I rocked us gently, pushing off with one foot from the very stone upon which I’d stood when I’d married Paul. “I’m divorced now,” I said without emotion. “I thought you were divorced before.” “Well, now it’s official. We had to send our paperwork to the state so they could process it. I just got the final papers last week with a stamp from the judge.” He nodded and said nothing. It seemed he had little pity for me and the divorce I’d brought on myself. He, Eddie, and Karen liked Paul. I couldn’t make them understand why I’d had to smash things up. But you seemed so happy was all they could say. And it was true: we had seemed that way. Just as I’d seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn’t have a face. As Leif and I swung in the hammock, we caught glimpses of the house lights and the bonfire through the trees. We could hear the dim voices of the partiers as the party died down and disappeared. Our mother’s grave was close behind us, maybe only another thirty steps farther on the trail that continued past the gazebo and out into a small clearing, where we’d made a flowerbed, buried her ashes, and laid a tombstone. I felt her with us and I felt Leif feeling her with us too, though I didn’t say a word about it, for fear my words would make the feeling go away. I dozed off without knowing it and roused as the sun began to seep into the sky, turning to Leif with a start, having forgotten for an instant where I was. “I fell asleep.” I said. “I know,” he replied. “I’ve been awake the whole time. The ’shrooms.” I sat up in the hammock and turned back to look at him. “I worry about you,” I said. “With drugs, you know.” “You’re the one to talk.”

• From Wild (2012)

  I whispered to Lady as I put her halter on, telling her how much I loved her as I led her out of her stall. Paul shut the gate behind us, trapping Roger inside so he couldn’t follow. I led her across the icy snow, turning back to watch her walk one last time. She still moved with an unspeakable grace and power, striding with the long, grand high-stepping gait that always took my mother’s breath away. I led her to a birch tree that Paul and I had chosen the previous afternoon and tied her to it by her lead rope. The tree was on the very edge of the pasture, beyond which the woods thickened in earnest, far enough away from the house that I hoped the coyotes would approach and take her body that night. I spoke to her and ran my hands over her chestnut coat, murmuring my love and sorrow, begging her forgiveness and understanding. When I looked up, my brother was standing there with his rifle. Paul took my arm and together we stumbled through the snow to stand behind Leif. We were only six feet away from Lady. Her warm breath was like a silk cloud. The frozen crust of the snow held us for a moment, then collapsed so we all sank up to our knees. “Right between her eyes,” I said to Leif, repeating yet again the words our grandfather had said to me. If we did that, he promised, we’d kill her in one clean shot. Leif crouched, kneeling on one knee. Lady pranced and scraped her front hooves on the ice and then lowered her head and looked at us. I inhaled sharply and Leif fired the gun. The bullet hit Lady right between her eyes, in the middle of her white star, exactly where we hoped it would. She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression. “Shoot her again,” I gasped, and immediately Leif did, firing three more bullets into her head in quick succession. She stumbled and jerked, but she didn’t fall and she didn’t run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we’d done, her face a constellation of bloodless holes. In an instant I knew we’d done the wrong thing, not in killing her, but in thinking that we should be the ones to do it. I should have insisted Eddie do this one thing, or paid for the veterinarian to come out. I’d had the wrong idea of what it takes to kill an animal. There is no such thing as one clean shot. “Shoot her! Shoot her!” I pleaded in a guttural wail I didn’t know was mine. “I’m out of bullets,” Leif yelled.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He went back, hoping that she was not going to ask him about his rent. She stood in her door, with a letter in her hand. “This just came,” she said. “I thought it might be important.” “Thank you,” he said. She, too, hoped that it might be the money he was waiting for, but she closed her door behind her. It was nearly suppertime and she was cooking; in fact, the entire street seemed to be cooking, and his legs threatened to give way beneath him. He did not look carefully at the outside of the envelope because his mind was entirely occupied by the recalcitrant check, and he was not expecting a check from America, which was where the letter came from; and he crumpled it up, unread, in his trench-coat pocket and crossed the courtyard and went upstairs to his room. There, he put the letter on the table, dried himself, and undressed and got under the covers. Then he lay the cigarettes out to dry, lit the driest one, and looked at the letter again. It seemed a very ordinary letter, until the paragraph beginning We were all very fond of him, and I know that you were, too —yes, it must have been Cass who wrote. Rufus was dead, and by his own hand. Rufus was dead. Boys like me? Yves had teased. How could he tell the boy who lay beside him now anything about Rufus? It had taken him a long while to realize that one of the reasons Yves had so stirred his heart, stirred it in a way he had almost forgotten it could be stirred, was because he reminded him, somehow, somewhere, of Rufus. And it had taken him almost until this very moment, on the eve of his departure, to begin to recognize that part of Rufus’ great power over him had to do with the past which Eric had buried in some deep, dark place; was connected with himself, in Alabama, when I wasn’t nothing but a child ; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him, and as necessary as the sun which bathed the bodies of himself and his lover now. Lying in this garden now, so warm, covered, and apprehensive, he saw them on the angular, blazing streets of his childhood, and in the shuttered houses, and in the fields.

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

  So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil and practicing selected portions of the rule. The postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay. We all knew that we were free to leave at any time, and often a girl would be sent home because it was clear that she was not suited for convent life. At the end of the nine months, we received the habit and began two years in the noviceship. This was a particularly testing time, and we were often told that if we did not find it almost unbearable, we were not trying hard enough. My superiors should, therefore, have been delighted with me, because I spent a good deal of my noviceship in tears. As if to fend off unwelcome change, they had appointed a particularly conservative nun as novice mistress the year before I arrived. In Through the Narrow Gate, I called her Mother Walter. She was unswervingly devoted to the old ways, and revived many disciplines that her two predecessors had discarded as unsuitable for twentieth-century girls. The system she devised, I now believe, was extremely unhealthy, but I threw myself into it because I was convinced that the harder I found it, the sooner it would bring me to God. Much later I was told that several nuns had been concerned about what was happening in the noviceship during those years. As I shall explain in the early chapters of this book, the system was a form of conditioning. It was meant to change us irrevocably, and it did—in my case, for the worse. I suspect that pressure was brought to bear upon Mother Walter, however, because toward the end of my noviceship, she relaxed some of her draconian innovations. A new batch of novices had arrived who were older and more worldly-wise than my own set, and they simply would not put up with some of her more outrageous rules. But again, the change came too late for me.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He seems then to have applied the passage about the shepherds both to his own critique of Israel’s leadership and, more strikingly still, to his own forthcoming fate. For our purposes, the main thing to notice here is that Zechariah, like Isaiah and Daniel, envisages the same three lines all converging: the wicked pagan nations who fight against God and his people; the failed Jewish leadership; and God himself coming to do what nobody else can do. These are the three elements that, as seen by Jesus himself, constituted the perfect storm into which he rode, sorrowful but determined, for that final Passover in Jerusalem. I said there were three main scriptural passages that seem to have contributed to Jesus’s sense of vocation as he undertook this final journey. I mentioned then, and now recall, a fourth element we should factor in as well: the Psalms. We should assume that Jesus knew the Psalms as well as anyone and that they formed his natural prayer book and, as such, played a major role in shaping his worldview. And it is in the Psalms that we find, once more, the major themes of YHWH becoming king, installing his Messiah—his “son”!—in Jerusalem, and bidding the surrounding nations pay him homage (e.g., Pss. 2; 72). But it is in the Psalms too that we find, even in a psalm that speaks so powerfully of God’s kingdom coming, the sense of utter desolation, of being abandoned by God to horrible and shameful suffering and death (Ps. 22). These themes come together in many different ways in these ancient poems, and we are on utterly safe ground in assuming that Jesus not only knew them and reflected on them, but made them the very stuff of his vocation. He found himself in them and determined to act accordingly. All of this means that we can at last approach the central questions of who, what, and why. Who did Jesus think he was, what was he intending to do, and why? What did he think it would all accomplish? What did he think it would all mean? L Chapter 13 Why Did the Messiah Have to Die? AYER UPON LAYER it comes, dense and rich within the texts, echo upon echo, allusion and resonance tumbling over one another, so that for those with ears to hear it becomes unmissable, a crescendo of questions to which in the end there can be only one answer. Why are you speaking like this? Are you the one who is to come? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What sign can you show us? Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? Where did this man get all this wisdom? How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Who are you? Why do you not follow the traditions? Do the authorities think he’s the Messiah?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before it shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away, Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgressions of my people . They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of YHWH to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of YHWH shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. The result, in the great prophetic poem, is the new covenant (Isa. 54) and the new creation (Isa. 55). The book then moves into a new mode in the last eleven chapters (56–66), focused on the coming glory of Zion, though here again highlighting the work of a strange figure, part salvation bringer, part rescuer, part judge (61:1–7; 63:1–6). And now it becomes more and more explicit that the work of bringing salvation is YHWH ’s own work. He watched and saw that there was nobody else to do it, so “his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him” (59:16). Israel’s God himself must do what needs to be done, as at the time of the Exodus: “It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them” (63:9). But this sense of a rescue job to do and only YHWH to perform it may undergird the “servant” poems in the central section of the book as well.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For “Hitler,” then, also read “Babylon.” Other disasters had come crashing down on the Israelites. But easily the worst was when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, decimated the royal family, smashed the Temple to bits, and carried away its treasures, dragging off most of the population into an exile from which few would ever return. It was like Egypt all over again: enslavement in a foreign land. “By the rivers of Babylon,” wrote one of their poets, “there we sat down and there we wept” (Ps. 137:1). And it was memories of Jerusalem, of “Zion,” that made the tears bitter. They had lived at the fault line in world history and geography, and the earthquake had swallowed them up alive. And now here comes the extraordinary bit, the part of the story many miss out, the twist in the tale responsible for the fact that, by the time the high-pressure system of Jewish history reached the first century, it was already dangerously close to storm force. Though many Jews had, remarkably enough, been brought back from Babylon and by the end of the sixth century had even rebuilt the Temple, there remained a strong sense that this was not yet the real “new Exodus” for which they longed. Babylon itself had fallen, overthrown by a rival empire (Persia); but the phenomenon of which Egypt a thousand years before had been one classic example, and Babylon the most recent, was continuing. New wicked empires had arisen, and Israel was still enslaved to them. And there grew up a sense that a new Exodus, a real “return from exile,” was still to be awaited, had not yet happened. It would come when the last great world empire had done its worst. Indeed, it would result in the overthrow of that dark power. This is the long story, the great narrative of hope, the prospective eschatology, within which many Jews of Jesus’s day were living, had been living for a long time, and would continue to live. In Jesus’s day it was obvious which world power had taken on the role of Egypt and Babylon. This is where our high-pressure system meets our gale. The long story of Israel must finally confront the long story of Rome. This is no time to be out on the sea in an open boat. Or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The clash of these two stories produced several movements within a couple of hundred years on either side of the time of Jesus. We shall look at these in a later chapter. For the moment we move on to the third element in the perfect storm of the first century. 4 Eclogues 4.Chapter 5 The Hurricane THE GALE OF ROME and the high-pressure system of Jewish hopes. It takes one more wind to make the perfect storm. And, as in the original Massachusetts disaster, this one was of a different order altogether.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It gets worse again. The Temple had come to symbolize the nationalist movement that had led many Jews to revolt against pagan oppression in the past and would lead them to do so once more. As we see graphically throughout the history of Israel, and not least in the first century, the Temple was the sign that Israel’s God, the world’s creator, was with his people and would defend them against all comers. Battle and Temple had gone together for a thousand years, from David himself through to Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. And Jesus had come as the Prince of Peace. “If only you’d known,” he sobbed out through his tears, “on this day—even you!—what peace meant. But now it’s hidden, and you can’t see it.” Enemies will come, he said. “They won’t leave one single stone on another, because you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you” (Luke 19:42–44). Israel’s God was coming back at last, and they couldn’t see it. Why not? Because they were looking in entirely the wrong direction. The Temple, and the city of which the Temple was the focal point, had come to symbolize violent national revolution. Instead of being the light of the world, the city on the hill that should let its light shine out to the nations, it was determined to keep the light for itself. The Temple was not just redundant; not just a place of economic oppression. It had become a symbol of Israel’s violent ambition, a sign that Israel’s ancient vocation had been turned inside out. In Luke’s gospel, the scene of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem balances the scene near the start in which Jesus goes to Nazareth and risks his neck by declaring God’s blessing on the pagan nations. Then it was the synagogue; now it’s the Temple. It also balances the scene even earlier, when the twelve-year-old Jesus stays back in Jerusalem, to his parents’ alarm, at the end of a Passover celebration—and is finally discovered sitting in the Temple with the teachers, listening to them, quizzing them in turn, and explaining that he had to be getting involved with his father’s work (2:49). Now here he is, back again, involved up to the neck in his father’s work, astonishing the Jerusalem authorities for a different reason. This is the climax of his father’s work, and that work is now focused on Jesus himself, not the Temple. If Jesus is acting out a vision—astonishing, risky, and one might say crazy—in which he is behaving as if he is the Temple, redefining sacred space around himself, something equally strange and risky is taking place in the realm of time. Time Fulfilled

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  A few months before meeting Zane, I sat in the audience of a new production of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning two-part play about the AIDS epidemic and gay identity in 1980s New York. I’d lived in Manhattan during the era when the play was set, and tears streamed down my face as I remembered friends who had died of “the gay plague.” It took enormous courage to come out in those days, to face likely rejection by parents and community, discrimination by employers; to forfeit the legal protections of marriage and any hope of parenthood. How, I wondered, might life have been different for my gay peers (male and female) had they come of age today? Attitudes have shifted more dramatically than could once have been imagined: in 2004, for example, only 31 percent of Americans approved of same-sex marriage; by 2019, 61 percent did. Even among groups traditionally most opposed to the concept, tolerance is on the rise: two-thirds of Catholics and over a third of white evangelical protestants now endorse it. The boys I interviewed could hardly remember a time before wedding a person of the same sex was legal. They grew up binge-watching Glee and Modern Family and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They helped drive the box office for The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Love, Simon and pushed “Same Love” up the Billboard charts. In the corporate world, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is openly gay, as, at this writing, are the CEOs of Qantas, Burberry, DowDuPont, and Lloyd’s of London; gay men now earn on average 10 percent more than straight men with similar education, experience, and job profiles. In 2019, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a former naval officer, became this country’s first openly gay presidential candidate. As acceptance has risen, the average age of coming out has dropped from twenty-five to sixteen; many children do so even younger and, in general, with more societal support. Twenty percent of millennials—dubbed “the gayest generation in history”—are LGBTQ+; more than half of those identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. Among Gen Z, only two-thirds say they are “exclusively heterosexual,” and a record number reject all binaries (gay/straight, man/woman), preferring the all-inclusive “queer.” Some of the gay boys I interviewed pledged frats; some of the trans boys played on men’s sports teams. The most conventional, straight, penis-toting dudes spontaneously offered up their “pronouns” when I asked how they identified, although I was usually referring to ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, not gender.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.” He looked down, then over to the front row. “You got to remember,” he said, gently, “he was trying. Ain’t many trying and all that tries must suffer. Be proud of him. You got a right to be proud. And that’s all he ever wanted in this world.” Except for someone—a man—weeping in the front row, there was silence all over the chapel. Cass thought that the man must be Rufus’ father and she wondered if he believed what the preacher said. What had Rufus been to him?—a troublesome son, a stranger while living and now a stranger forever in death. And now nothing else would ever be known. Whatever else had been, or might have been, locked in Rufus’ heart or in the heart of his father, had gone into oblivion with Rufus. It would never be expressed now. It was over. “There’re some friends of Rufus’s here,” said Reverend Foster, “and they going to play something for us and then we going to go.” Two young men walked up the aisle, one carrying a guitar, one carrying a bass fiddle. The thin dark girl followed them. The black- robed boy at the piano flexed his fingers. The two boys stood directly in front of the covered corpse, the girl stood a little away from them, near the piano. They began playing something Cass did not recognize, something very slow, and more like the blues than a hymn. Then it began to be more tense and more bitter and more swift. The people in the chapel hummed low in their throats and tapped their feet. Then the girl stepped forward. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and that voice rang out again: Oh, that great getting-up morning, Fare thee well, fare thee well! Reverend Foster, standing on a height behind her, raised both hands and mingled his voice with hers: We’ll be coming from every nation, Fare thee well, fare thee well! The chapel joined them, but the girl ended the song alone: Oh, on that great getting-up morning, Fare thee well, fare thee well! Then Reverend Foster prayed a brief prayer for the safe journey of the soul that had left them and the safe journey, throughout their lives and after death, of all the souls under the sound of his voice. It was over. The pallbearers, two of the men in the front row, and the two musicians, lifted the mother-of-pearl casket to their shoulders and started down the aisle. The mourners followed. Cass was standing near the door. The four still faces passed her with their burden and did not look at her. Directly behind them came Ida and her mother. Ida paused for a moment and looked at her—looked directly, unreadably at her from beneath her heavy veil. Then she seemed to smile.

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

  But that didn’t seem right either. I didn’t want to make those years a dark secret. After all, I hadn’t robbed a bank or been in prison. But neither did I want to get unduly heavy and ruin the party. Despite all my negative feelings about religion, I still felt protective about the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal. I still mourned the girl I had been, with her sense of high adventure, the hope and the crazy optimism that had led me into the religious life. None of this was suitable conversational fodder for a dinner party. So it was really easier to fob my guests off with a couple of funny stories and leave it at that. I realized that I scarcely knew anybody who was religious these days. There were one or two churchgoers at college, but they were not soul mates and I didn’t see much of them. It was odd to think how completely my life had changed. Just five years earlier I had been enveloped in a monastic atmosphere, and now I had swung a full 180 degrees and was living in a wholly secular environment. Some people in my life were still involved in religion. Jacob continued to attend Mass, because a member of the Blackfriars congregation had volunteered to take him. And then there was my sister, Lindsey. She had not stayed long in Canada. The man she had pursued had been a disappointment, and she hated the long winters. So she had married an Englishman whom she had met in Winnipeg and had driven all the way to California with him and their two Siamese cats. She had also become a Buddhist of the Nichiren school. I had no idea what that involved, but apparently it did not require her to wear a yellow robe or become a vegetarian. She chanted a mantra for about an hour each day, my mother told me. I found it hard to imagine this. Lindsey and I seemed to have changed places. “I don’t know what it is with this family and religion,” my long-suffering mother said in mock bewilderment. “Where did I go wrong?” Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about my religious obsessions anymore. My involvement with God was well and truly over. Pleased with myself, and with a mounting sense of excitement, I patted the bulky parcel containing three copies of my thesis, duly typed and bound in important-looking black covers with gilt lettering. It was a very satisfying sight. It had not been easy, but I had managed to complete this task.

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

  The restraints had been removed too late and she would never walk normally again. I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that without realizing it, I had indeed become like Saint Ignatius’s dead body or old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind there was now a curious blank. Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had had God as its pivotal point. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me. Every morning at 6 a.m. we had knelt in the convent church for an hour of meditation, according to the method that Saint Ignatius had designed for his Jesuits in the Spiritual Exercises. This had been a highly structured discipline. As a preliminary step, we prepared the topic the night before. Each of us spent fifteen minutes selecting a passage from scripture or a devotional book, and making a note of the topics that we intended to consider in the morning. Ignatius’s meditation was based on a three-part program: see, judge, and act. First we all stood in silence for a few minutes, reciting to ourselves a prayer that reminded us that we were in the presence of God, and then we knelt down, took out our books and notes, and began with “see.” This meant that we had to use our imaginations to picture the gospel scene we had chosen, and even if the subject of our meditation was more abstract, we had to give it a local habitation and place it in some concrete way. Ignatius had thought it very important that all the faculties be engaged, so that the whole man (Ignatius had little opinion of women) was brought into the divine ambience. This “composition of place,” as it was called, was also meant to ward off distraction. If you were busily picturing the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, evoking a sense of the Middle Eastern heat, looking at the sand dunes, listening to the braying donkeys, and so forth, your imagination was less likely to stray to profane topics. At least, that was the theory. Next came “judge,” when the intellect was brought into play.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was a horny old bastard too, I thought, while Stevie Ray the dog licked my knee methodically and the other Stevie Ray launched into a smoking rendition of “Pride and Joy.” The place on my leg where Spider had touched me seemed to pulse. I wished he’d do it again, though I knew that was ludicrous. A laminated card with a cross on it dangled from the stem of the rearview mirror, alongside a faded Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and when it spun around I saw that on the other side there was a photograph of a little boy. “Is that your son?” I asked Lou when the song ended, pointing to the mirror. “That’s my little Luke,” she said, reaching to tap it. “Is he going to be in the wedding?” I asked, but she made no reply. She only turned the music down low and I knew instantly that I’d said the wrong thing. “He died five years ago, when he was eight,” said Lou, a few moments later. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “He was riding his bike and he was hit by a truck,” she said plainly. “He wasn’t killed right away. He held on for a week in the hospital. None of the doctors could believe it, that he didn’t die instantly.” “He was a tough little motherfucker,” said Spider. “He sure was,” said Lou. “Just like his mom,” Dave said, grabbing Lou’s knee. “I’m so very sorry,” I said again. “I know you are,” said Lou before she turned the music up loud. We drove without talking, listening to Vaughan’s electric guitar wail its way through “Texas Flood,” my heart clenching at the sound of it. A few minutes later Lou shouted, “Here’s your junction.” She pulled over and shut the engine off and looked at Dave. “Why don’t you boys take Stevie Ray for a leak?” They all got out with me and stood around lighting up cigarettes while I pulled my pack out of the trunk. Dave and Spider led Stevie Ray into the trees by the side of the road and Lou and I stood in a patch of shade near the car while I buckled Monster on. She asked me if I had kids, how old I was, if I was married or ever had been. No, twenty-six, no, yes, I told her. She said, “You’re pretty, so you’ll be okay whatever you do. Me, people always just gotta go on the fact that I’m good-hearted. I never did have the looks.” “That’s not true,” I said. “I think you’re pretty.” “You do?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, though pretty wasn’t precisely how I would have described her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was back before Kitty had even stirred; and when she woke I didn’t mention it.I didn’t tell her about Alice’s reply, either. This came a few days later - came while Kitty and I were at breakfast, and had to stay unopened in my pocket until I could make time to be alone and read it. It was, I saw at once, very neat; and knowing Alice to be no great penwoman, I guessed that this must be the last of several versions.It was also, unlike my letter, very short - so short that, to my great dismay and all unwillingly, I find that I remember it, even now, in its entirety.‘Dear Nancy,’ it began.‘Your letter was both a shock to me and no surprise at all, for I have been expecting to receive something very like it from you, since the day you left us. When I first read it I did not now whether to weep or throw the paper away from me in temper. In the end I burned the thing, and only hope you will have sense enough to burn this one, likewise.‘You ask me to be happy on your behalf. Nance, you must know that I have always only ever had your happiness at my heart, more nearly even than my own. But you must know too that I can never be happy while your friendship with that woman is so wrong and queer. I can never like what you have told me. You think you are happy, but you are only misled - and that woman, your friend “so-called”, is to blame for it.‘I only wish that you had never met her nor ever gone away, but only stayed in Whitstable where you belong, and with those who love you properly.‘Let me just say at the last what you must I hope know. Father, Mother and Davy know nothing of this, and won’t from my lips, since I would rather die of shame than tell them. You must never speak of it to them, unless you want to finish the job you started when you first left us, and break their hearts completely and for ever.‘Don’t burden me, I ask you, with no more shameful secrets. But look to yourself and the path that you are treading, and ask yourself if it is really Right.‘Alice.’She must have kept her word about not telling our parents, for their letters to me continued as before - still cautious, still rather fretful, but still kind. But now I got even less pleasure from them; only kept thinking, What would they write, if they knew? How kind would they be then? My replies, in consequence, grew shorter and rarer than ever.As for Alice: after that one brief, bitter epistle, she never wrote to me at all. Chapter 6 [image "008" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_008_r1.jpg] The months, that year, seemed to slide by very swiftly; for, of course, we were busier now than ever.

• From Wild (2012)

  I thought of the woman I always thought of in such moments: an astrologer who’d read my natal chart when I was twenty-three. A friend had arranged for the reading as a going-away gift just before I left Minnesota for New York City. The astrologer was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman named Pat who sat me down at her kitchen table with a piece of paper covered in mysterious markings and a quietly whirring tape recorder between us. I didn’t put much faith in it. I thought it would be a bit of fun, an ego-boosting session during which she’d say generic things like You have a kind heart. But she didn’t. Or rather, she said those things, but she also said bizarrely specific things that were so accurate and particular, so simultaneously consoling and upsetting, that it was all I could do not to bawl in recognition and grief. “How can you know this?” I kept demanding. And then I would listen as she explained about the planets, the sun and the moon, the “aspects” and the moment I was born; about what it meant to be a Virgo, with a moon in Leo and Gemini rising. I’d nod while thinking, This is a bunch of crazy New Age anti-intellectual bullshit, and then she’d say another thing that would blow my brain into about seven thousand pieces because it was so true. Until she began to speak of my father. “Was he a Vietnam vet?” she asked. No, I told her, he wasn’t. He was in the military briefly in the mid-1960s—in fact, he was stationed at the base in Colorado Springs where my mother’s father was stationed, which is how my parents met—but he never went to Vietnam. “It seems he was like a Vietnam vet,” she persisted. “Perhaps not literally. But he has something in common with some of those men. He was deeply wounded. He was damaged. His damage has infected his life and it infected you.” I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still at the moment an astrologer told me that my father had infected me. “Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.” “Hmm,” I said, my face blank. “I could be wrong.” She gazed down at the paper between us. “This isn’t necessarily literal.” “Actually, I only saw my father three times after I was six,” I said. “The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.” O “But—I think I have already,” I sputtered. “I’m strong—I face things. I—”

• From Wild (2012)

  “You do? Thanks. That’s nice to hear. Usually Dave’s the only one who thinks that.” She looked down at my legs. “You need a shave, girl!” she bellowed, then laughed in the same raucous way she had when she’d said how big my pack was. “Nah,” she said, blowing smoke from her mouth. “I’m just giving you shit. I think it’s neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me—just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we’d be better off.” She took a drag and blew the smoke out in a hard line. “Anyway, after all that stuff about my son getting killed? After that happened, I died too. Inside.” She patted her chest with the hand that held the cigarette. “I look the same, but I’m not the same in here. I mean, life goes on and all that crap, but Luke dying took it out of me. I try not to act like it, but it did. It took the Lou out of Lou, and I ain’t getting it back. You know what I mean?” “I do,” I said, looking into her hazel eyes. “I thought so,” she said. “I had that feeling about you.” I said goodbye to them, crossed the intersection, and walked to the road that would take me to Old Station. The heat was so potent it rose in visible waves from the ground. When I got to the road, I saw three figures undulating in the distance. “Stacy!” I shouted. “Trina!” They saw me and waved their arms. Odin barked hello. [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] Together we hitched a ride to Old Station—another tiny village that was more a gathering of buildings than a town. Trina walked to the post office to mail a few things home while Stacy and I waited for her in the air-conditioned café, drinking soda pop and discussing the next section of the trail. It was a slice of the Modoc Plateau called Hat Creek Rim—desolate and famous for its lack of shade and water, a legendary stretch on a trail of legends. Dry and hot, it was scorched clean by a fire in 1987. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California informed me that although there was no reliable water source from Old Station to Rock Springs Creek thirty miles away, when the book went to print in 1989, the Forest Service was about to install a water tank near the ruins of an old fire lookout tower, fifteen miles in. The book cautioned that this information should be verified and that even if it was installed, such tanks can’t always be relied upon because of vandalism in the form of bullet holes.