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 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 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.

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

  One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self—the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards from friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved—full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption—like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself forever. Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another. But to my dismay, I found a new obstacle. This term I was sent out to study with a young tutor at one of the men’s colleges. My tutorial partner was Charlotte, an immensely gifted girl who had her own troubles. Her mother had died during our first year and Charlotte had become anorexic. Even though she seemed over the worst, she was still thin and wary of food.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He began to give away his memories to the morning, bleaching them with light so that later in another country, he would remember only the color white. The White Terror: When I tell you its name, you think I mean white as in the American kind. It’s true, the Americans gave the bullets, but these are the men that spent them: your agong your agong your agong. Not even the stars were spared a curfew. Someone once told me if the moon stayed out too long, the soldiers would shoot it down by morning. Ba ran away from his post for months at a time, selling coconuts on a mountain road. He emptied the coconut of water and meat, placed two bars of gold inside, hid it at the bottom of his stack. One day, there was a snake slung across the road. He cleaved its head off, slung the body around his neck. By the time you were born, Ba could only tell one piece of the story at a time before he forgot it was about him. The first day, he would say, I was a soldier. On the second day, he would say, I was a snake. Once, you stole the phone from my hands. You spoke into it, to him: Agong, tell me the story about the snake. And he said, I slung a mother my neck. They strung up my snake in the branches. They beat it sticks. I killed a mother in the middle of the road. I took her head home. The mother was so long it died. wanted to go back home but I was afraid it still dying. I sent letters to the snake the sea shut off and I never arrived _ The toes, my toes, I know. You’re still waiting for me to explain my feet. You’re asking what this has to do with saving Agong. This story was meant to show you: The ones we should save are already dead. Before he was your agong, he was my ba. Before he was my ba, he was a soldier. When you’re a soldier, nothing comes before or after. Don’t think I forgive him. Forgiveness is surgery, and I don’t have the hand or the eye. I can’t see him as Ma must have seen him: his gun first, then his hands. I hear only the way his hands shake when he holds the phone, when he has to prop it against a wall and speak to me like I’m standing there, like I never left, like his shadow is mine.

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

  Maybe Dr. Piet would help me. So when I faced him in his small, functional office, I had hopes that together we could find a solution. He asked me about the fainting and the panic, and I described the strange smell, the mounting fear, those moments when the world became unrecognizable, the hallucinatory glimpses of something horrifying, the senile old man, his cavernous head nodding on a frail, stalklike neck. “Have you ever seen him—or anyone like him—in real life?” Dr. Piet wanted to know. “Yes.” In fact, this interested me. I had dropped into the Junior Common Room one evening and joined a group who were watching an adaptation of a D. H. Lawrence short story on the television. It had been about a young woman in flight from her sexuality. The play had ended with the disturbing shot of the rich old man she eventually married, who was rather like my visitant. As I explained this connection, I saw Dr. Piet brighten and scribble something on the pad in front of him. My heart sank. You didn’t have to be a genius to see how he would interpret this information. And sure enough: “Did you find yourself relating to the heroine in that play?” he asked. “Did you feel that she was like you?” As a matter of fact, I did not. She had been very flighty, beautiful, uneducated, had lots of money and not enough to fill her day. No, not very much like me. But then, what did I know? I probably was in flight from my sexuality, though as no man ever displayed the slightest interest in me, I did not see what I could do about this. Dr. Piet smiled rather smugly when I said this, as though he knew better. Perhaps he did. In the interests of my own recovery, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m interested that it is only the old man’s head that you see.” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, your life seems to revolve around the intellect. You seem fixated on heads and brains,” Dr. Piet continued. “You never see any of the other parts of his body.” I reflected, wryly, that perhaps I ought to be thankful for small mercies. If Dr. Piet meant what I thought he meant, these visions could be a lot worse. “I think we’re going to look at your relations with your parents,” Dr. Piet continued, leaning back in his chair and looking at me in a pleased kind of way, as though I were a promising child who had come out with all the right answers. “You see, these panic attacks seem to me to relate to your early childhood. To some shock or deprivation that occurred while you were growing up. They are rather classic images.” Again, the nod of professional pleasure. “And then, of course, we have to find out why you went into a convent in the first place.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had cast off all my friends and joys, and embraced misery as my career. For a week - and then another - and another, and another - I did nothing but slumber, and weep, and pace my chamber; or else I would stand with my brow pressed to the dirty window, gazing at the Market, watching as the carcases were brought and piled, and heaved about, and sold, and taken away. The only faces I saw were those of Mrs Best, and Mary - the little skivvy who had opened the door to me, who changed my pot and brought me coal and water, and who I sometimes sent on errands to buy me cigarettes and food. Her expression as she handed me my packages showed me how strange I had become; but to her fear and her wonder alike, I was indifferent. I was indifferent to everything except my own grief - and this I indulged with a strange and horrible passion.I believe I barely washed in all those weeks - and certainly I did not change my dress, for I had no other. Very early on I gave off wearing my false chignon, too, and let my hair straggle greasily about my ears. I smoked, endlessly - my fingers grew brown, from the nail to the knuckle; but I ate hardly at all. For all that I liked to watch the carcases being towed about at Smithfield, the thought of meat upon my tongue made me nauseous, and I had stomach for none but the blandest of foods. Like a woman quickening with child I developed a curious appetite: I longed only for sweet, white bread. I gave Mary shilling after shilling, and sent her to Camden Town and Whitechapel, Limehouse and Soho, for bagels, brioches and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries. These I would eat dipped in mugs of tea, which I brewed, ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk. It was the drink I had used to make for Kitty, in our first days together at the Canterbury Palace. The taste of it was like the taste of her; and a comfort, and a frightful torment, all at once. The weeks, for all my carelessness to their passing, passed by anyway. There is little to say about them, except that they were dreadful. The tenant in the room above my own moved out, and was replaced by a poor couple with a baby: the baby was colicky, and cried in the night.

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

  Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead, but I realized that as long as Western people continued to accept the old distorted portrait of Islam, they would simply compound the original error. Perhaps this series could show the viewers that Islam was not the demon that haunted their imaginations, and that Muslims could be as flawed, imperfect, courageous, and idealistic as their own heroes. If we could achieve this, we would do something important. But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind . My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen.

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

  The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies. Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness. We have seen too much religious certainty recently. Maybe this is a time for honest, searching doubt, repentance, and a yearning for holiness in a world that has lost its bearings. The best theologians and teachers have never been afraid to admit that in the last resort, there may be Nothing out there. That is why they spoke of a God who in some sense did not exist. It is why the Buddha refused to comment on the metaphysical status of a Buddha after death, and why Confucius would not speak of the Tao. What is vital to all of the traditions, however, is that we have a duty to make the best of the only thing that remains to us— ourselves. Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies. September 11 changed my life once again. Suddenly my subject had acquired a terrible new relevance. I wish with all my heart that it had not happened in this way. I have spent most of the months since that fearful day in the United States trying to share my understanding of Islam and fundamentalism. I have spoken to senators and congressmen, to members of the State Department, and at the United Nations. I see this as a form of ministry. The September apocalypse was a revelation—an “unveiling” of a reality that had been there all the time but which we had not seen clearly enough before: we live in one world. What happens in Gaza or Afghanistan today will have repercussions in New York or London tomorrow. We in the First World cannot continue to isolate ourselves in our wealth and good fortune. If we do that, those who feel dispossessed or excluded will come to us, in a terrible form.

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

  But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings. Why had this happened now? One reason was certainly my improved health. Now that the drugs were effectively stabilizing my faulty brain rhythms, I no longer saw everything from a great distance or through a hazy screen. I felt as though I had been plugged in, like an electrical appliance, and suddenly come to life. To paraphrase my friend Saint Paul, instead of experiencing reality as through a glass darkly, I could now see it face-to-face. This meant that nothing now interposed itself between the material I was studying and my emotional and intellectual reflexes. It was also true that, working as I was in Israel, I was out of my usual environment, and could no longer operate on automatic pilot. Removed from the reflexive skepticism of Channel 4, I could not simply dismiss the Crusaders as “bonkers.”

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

  Instead of reaching out to the Jews in their midst, instead of trying to learn from Islam (a far more advanced civilization than their own), the Crusaders had been unable to govern their fears and resentment. They had killed, maimed, burned, desecrated, and destroyed what they were psychologically incapable of understanding. And in doing so, they had vitiated their own integrity and their own moral vision. Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead, but I realized that as long as Western people continued to accept the old distorted portrait of Islam, they would simply compound the original error. Perhaps this series could show the viewers that Islam was not the demon that haunted their imaginations, and that Muslims could be as flawed, imperfect, courageous, and idealistic as their own heroes. If we could achieve this, we would do something important. But this long exposure to the crusading ethos had another effect on me that was just as long-lasting. It broke my heart. The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, month after month, and—as it turned out—year after year breached the barricades I had erected to block out strong feeling. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick, cerebral spirit that had characterized my television work hitherto. As with Saint Paul, I began to feel emotionally involved. The story of the Crusades was a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fanaticism, and cruelty. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses; of Jews herded into their synagogues and burned alive; and of women and children raped and slaughtered. An Anglican bishop recently rebuked me during a radio discussion for my condemnation of crusading. It had simply been Europe “flexing its muscles” and “getting a little carried away.” I was unable to reply, because I found this one of the most shocking remarks I had ever heard. These crimes were committed deliberately and in cold blood. The Crusaders enjoyed hating their victims. When an eyewitness described the conquest of Jerusalem in July 1099, in which some forty thousand Jews and Muslims were massacred in two days, he crowed in delight that this was a “glorious” day and the most important historical event since the crucifixion of Jesus. Living with this sorry tale of murderous bigotry was very different from living with Saint Paul. There was nothing inspiring about it. Instead, I was forced to confront the darkness of the human heart: we were beings who positively loved to hate our own kind. My heart was beginning to thaw. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the pain of other human beings.

• From Wild (2012)

  Paul reached for me and squeezed my leg, consoling me. I couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him I would cry. We’d agreed to this together, but I knew that if I turned to him and proposed we forget about divorcing and get back together instead, he would agree. I didn’t turn. Something inside of me whirred like a machine that I had started but could not stop. I put my hand down and placed it on top of Paul’s hand on my leg. Sometimes we wondered together if things would have turned out differently if one thing that was true hadn’t been true. If my mother hadn’t died, for example, would I still have cheated on him? Or if I hadn’t cheated on him, would he have cheated on me? And what if nothing had happened—no mother dying, no cheating on anyone—would we still be getting divorced anyway, having simply married too young? We couldn’t know, but we were open to knowing. As close as we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true. “Now that we’ve been through all this, we should stay together,” I half joked in the tender wake of our last heartrending, soul-baring discussion—the one we’d had to decide at last whether or not to get divorced. We were sitting on the couch in the dark of my apartment, having talked through the afternoon and into the evening, both of us too shattered by the time the sun set to get up and switch on a light. “I hope you can do that someday with someone else,” I said when he didn’t reply, though the very thought of that someone else pierced my heart. “I hope you can too,” he said. I sat in the darkness beside him, wanting to believe that I was capable of finding the kind of love I had with him again, only without wrecking it the next time around. It felt impossible to me. I thought of my mother. Thought of how in the last days of her life so many horrible things had happened. Small, horrible things. My mother’s whimsical, delirious babblings. The blood pooling to blacken the backs of her bedridden arms. The way she begged for something that wasn’t even mercy. For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what we don’t even have a word for. Those were the worst days, I believed at the time, and yet the moment she died I’d have given anything to have them back. One small, horrible, glorious day after the other. Maybe it would be that way with Paul as well, I thought, sitting beside him on the night we decided to divorce. Maybe once they were over, I’d want these horrible days back too.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Be my rock-brother and I’ll be your stone-wife. Remember that gumball machine outside the Ranch 99 where he skinned fish? Remember how you only wanted the green ones, the ones you said would taste like our planet, and when you got the red one, you cried? Your father fed it more quarters, but the next one was white, then yellow, then pink, then white again. The gumballs stained your palms like a crime scene, and still you asked for green. He went inside the store and exchanged half a day’s wage for more quarters, kept feeding the machine until you got your green, your planet to suck soft, to embalm in spit. This is the man I want you to remember, the one who committed himself to your hunger: his hands cradling quarters, your green mouth glowing go like a stoplight. Don’t tell me when to stop. Here’s the third story, the one you need to believe. There was a god sent to earth, looking for disciples. He walked the forest—not jungle—and told all the animals that he was starving. The snakes volunteered to steal him an egg. The birds left to hunt him a mouse. The fox skulked off to rob a neighboring chicken farm in Arkansas. Only the rabbit offered itself. It leapt straight into the starving man’s cooking fire, inviting teeth to its meat. To commemorate the rabbit, the god hung the rabbit’s bones in the sky. And that is the moon. That’s how we know all sources of light begin as sacrifice. Your father, born year of the rabbit, hated that story. He thought no god was owed flesh or fidelity. But he still expected both of me. The year we were married I asked him to get baptized. Ma says our tribe used to have as many deities as trees, and that having many gods only multiplies your losses, diversifies your debts. The moon was our priest that night. I filled a kiddie pool with water from a park fountain. He said he wanted to be baptized in his own spit. I said no man can fit inside his own mouth. Get in. On the third day, your brother removes the paper from the windows. You decide that being nocturnal is lonely, and when you check the mirror, your eyes aren’t glowing. When your brother rips away the paper, I see you in the light for the first time in days, and your skin is no closer to being bone. When you go outside to feed your yard-holes, I drag you home by your calf. You bite my hand but I stay holding you. You’ll need more than teeth to be free of me. _ The last time I talked to Ba in person was after my wedding. My belly was filling with your brother, but I wouldn’t know for another month.

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

  His sojourn there was embittered by the ravages of the pestilence in Strassburg, which carried away his beloved deacon, Claude Féray (Feraeus), his friends Bedrotus and Capito, one of his boarders, Louis de Richebourg (Claude’s pupil), and the sons of Oecolampadius, Zwingli, and Hedio. He was thrown into a state of extreme anxiety and depression, which he revealed to Farel in a melancholy letter of March 29, 1541.544 "My dear friend Claude, whom I singularly esteemed," he writes, "has been carried off by the plague. Louis (de Richebourg) followed three days afterwards. My house was in a state of sad desolation. My brother (Antoine) had gone with Charles (de Richebourg) to a neighboring village; my wife had betaken herself to my brother’s; and the youngest of Claude’s scholars [probably Malherbe of Normandy] is lying sick in bed. To the bitterness of grief there was added a very anxious concern for those who survived. Day and night my wife is constantly present to my thoughts, in need of advice, seeing that she is deprived of her husband.545 ... These events have produced in me so much sadness that it seems as if they would utterly upset the mind and depress the spirit. You cannot believe the grief which consumes me on account of the death of my dear friend Claude." Then he pays a touching tribute to Féray, who had lived in his house and stuck closer to him than a brother. But the most precious fruit of this sore affliction is his letter of comfort to the distressed father of Louis de Richebourg, which we shall quote in another connection.546 § 90. Calvin and Melanchthon. The correspondence between Calvin (14 letters) and Melanchthon (8 letters), and several letters of Calvin to Farel from Strassburg and Regensburg. Henry, Vol. I. chs. XII. and XVII,—Stähelin, I. 237–254.—Merle D’Aubigné, bk. XI. ch. XIX. (vol. VII. 18–22, in Cates’ translation). One of the important advantages which his sojourn at Strassburg brought to Calvin and to the evangelical Church was his friendship with Melanchthon. It has a typical significance for the relationship of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions, and therefore deserves special consideration. They became first acquainted by correspondence through Bucer in October, 1538. Melanchthon brought Calvin at once into a friendly contact with Luther, who read with great pleasure Calvin’s answer to Sadolet (perhaps also his Institutes), and sent his salutations to him at Strassburg.547

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

  The Martyrol. Hieronymianum (ed. Florentini, Luc. 1668, and in Migne’s Patrol. Lat. Opp. Hieron. xi. 434 sqq.); the Martyrol. Romanum (ed. Baron. 1586), the Menolog. Graec. (ed. Urbini, 1727); De Rossi, Roller, and other works on the Roman Catacombs. II. Works. John Foxe (or Fox, d. 1587): Acts and Monuments of the Church (commonly called Book of Martyrs), first pub. at Strasburg 1554, and Basle 1559; first complete ed. fol. London 1563; 9th ed. fol. 1684, 3 vols. fol.; best ed. by G. Townsend, Lond. 1843, 8 vols. 8o.; also many abridged editions. Foxe exhibits the entire history of Christian martyrdom, including the Protestant martyrs of the middle age and the sixteenth century, with polemical reference to the church of Rome as the successor of heathen Rome in the work of blood persecution. "The Ten Roman persecutions" are related in the first volume. Kortholdt: De persecutionibus eccl. primcevae. Kiel, 1629. Gibbon: chap. xvi. Münter: Die Christen im heidnischen Hause vor Constantin. Copenh. 1828. Schumann Von Mansegg (R.C.): Die Verfolgungen der ersten christlichen Kirche. Vienna, 1821. W. Ad. Schmidt: Geschichte der Denk u. Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums. Berl. 1847. Kritzler: Die Heldenzeiten des Christenthums. Vol. i. Der Kampf mit dem Heidthum. Leipz. 1856. Fr. W. Gass: Das christl. Märtyrerthum in den ersten Jahrhunderten. 1859–60 (in Niedner’s "Zeitschrift für Hist. Theol." for 1859, pp. 323–392, and 1860, pp. 315–381). F. Overbeck: Gesetze der röm. Kaiser gegen die Christen, in his Studien zur Gesch. der alten Kirche, I. Chemn. 1875. B. Aubé: Histoire des persécutions de l’église jusqu’ à la fin des Antonins. 2nd ed. Paris 1875 (Crowned by the Académie française). By the same: Histoire des persécutions de l’église, La polémique paÿenne à la fin du II. siècle, 1878. Les Chréstiens dans l’empire romain, de la fin des Antonins au milieu du IIIe siécle (180–249), 1881. L’église et L’état dans la seconde moitié du IIIe siécle, 1886. K. Wieseler: Die Christenverfolgungen der Cäsaren, Hist. und chronol. untersucht. Gütersloh, 1878. Gerh. Uhlhorn: Der Kampf des Christenthums mit dem Heidenthum. 3d ed. Stuttgart, 1879. Engl. transl. by Smyth & Ropes, 1879. Theod. Keim: Rom und das Christenthum. Berlin, 1881. E. Renan: Marc-Aurèle. Paris, 1882, pp. 53–69. § 13. General Survey. The persecutions of Christianity during the first three centuries appear like a long tragedy: first, foreboding signs; then a succession of bloody assaults of heathenism upon the religion of the cross; amidst the dark scenes of fiendish hatred and cruelty the bright exhibitions of suffering virtue; now and then a short pause; at last a fearful and desperate struggle of the old pagan empire for life and death, ending in the abiding victory of the Christian religion. Thus this bloody baptism of the church resulted in the birth of a Christian world. It was a repetition and prolongation of the crucifixion, but followed by a resurrection.

• From Wild (2012)

  I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. I called everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some said. Yes, it was true, said others, he’d been hanging out with a girl from St. Cloud named Sue. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that this was it. I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a little boy he was. My little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life, having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work. Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids. “I can’t do this,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I can’t live without Mom. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” “We have to,” I replied, though I couldn’t believe it myself. We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep. I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. By eight o’clock we were on our way to Duluth, my brother driving our mother’s car too fast while U2’s Joshua Tree blasted out of the speakers. We listened intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the snow on the sides of the road. When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. This was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. A nurse approached us in the hallway as we walked toward the station, and before I spoke she said, “We have ice on her eyes. She wanted to donate her corneas, so we need to keep the ice—” “What?” I said with such intensity that she jumped.