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 The Ice Storm (1994)

  By the early sixties, her mother often threatened to take her own life. Elena calmly woke Benjamin and, as the sun rose, she caught the first train to New Haven, to the airport there. The threats had always evaporated by the time she arrived. Her mother was asleep, or on her bed, placidly doing a crossword puzzle, drinking gin and smiling. They dried out Margaret and then released her to the world. Dried her out and released her again. It was like any annual occurrence, like a harvest or saint’s day. They dried her out, and all were hopeful for a couple of weeks, even her father would seem to be of good cheer, and then her mother would drink again— sometimes she would even toast returning to the house—and soon it was back to the weekly delivery of cases. Elena’s father paid for her detoxifications and for her wardrobe and the tabs at each and every liquor store and for the long- distance telephone calls, and he paid extra to have her bathed and cared for at home. All the bills were paid. Had it been just the three of them, there would have been cause enough to leave Weston, Mass. But she had a brother, too. A carbon copy of his father—as stable as some inflammable gas—full of impatience and hate. And he drank like his mother. He was the most difficult man Elena had ever met. He actually argued about the weather. His sense of rectitude was so finely tuned that he lay awake nights ordering and enumerating worldly infractions according to a code he could never observe himself. Billy O’Malley was ten years older than Elena and he had taken her education entirely into his own hands. He claimed even to have named her himself, according to rules of prosody. Two bacchic feet. Elena O’Malley. No middle name. She’d just get rid of it later. He’d named her for Bacchus. Her parents were mostly busy anyway. Instructing her in water safety, he had pushed her, as an infant, into the swimming pool. She sank. Instructing her in etiquette, he had removed her elbows from the supper table with the sharp side of a steak knife. She took a number of stitches. Instructing her in respect for her elders, he’d dangled her by the ankles from a third story window. Instructing her in the management of local mass transit, he’d abandoned her blindfolded in downtown Boston. Elena had been a good student. Thanksgiving dinner at the O’Malleys, as Benjamin had often pointed out, was like waiting for the end of a ceasefire. Billy and her father would assume a guarded silence until the first drinks had been consumed. Then Billy would launch into his list of dissatisfactions beginning with, say, her father’s preposterous support for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Open disgust was not far away.

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

  From these two confessions should be distinguished the Anglican Church, which the continental historians from defective information usually count with the Reformed Church, but which stands midway between evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and may therefore be called Anglo-Catholic. She is indeed moderately Reformed in her doctrinal articles,39 but in polity and ritual she is much more conservative than the Calvinistic and even the Lutheran confession, pays greater deference to the testimony of the ancient fathers, and lays stress upon her unbroken episcopal succession. The confessional division in the Protestant camp arose very early. It was at first confined to a difference of opinion on the eucharistic presence, which the Marburg Conference of 1529 could not remove, although Luther and Zwingli agreed in fourteen and a half out of fifteen articles of faith. Luther refused any compromise. Other differences gradually developed themselves, on the ubiquity of Christ’s body, predestination, and baptismal regeneration, which tended to widen and perpetuate the split. The union of the two Confessions in Prussia and other German states, since 1817, has not really healed it, but added a third Church, the United Evangelical, to the two older Confessions which, still continue separate in other countries. The controversies among the Protestants in the sixteenth century roused all the religious and political passions and cast a gloom over the bright picture of the Reformation. Melanchthon declared that with tears as abundant as the waters of the river Elbe he could not express his grief over the distractions of Christendom and the "fury of theologians." Calvin also, when invited, with Melanchthon, Bullinger and Buzer, in 1552, by Archbishop Cranmer to Lambeth Palace for the purpose of framing a concensus-creed of the Reformed churches, was willing to cross ten seas for the cause of Christian union.40 But the noble scheme was frustrated by the stormy times, and still remains a pium desiderium. Much as we must deplore and condemn sectarian strife and bitterness, it would be as unjust to charge them on Protestantism, as to charge upon Catholicism the violent passions of the trinitarian, christological and other controversies of the Nicene age, or the fierce animosity between the Greek and Latin Churches, or the envy and jealousy of the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, or the unholy rivalries between Jansenists and Jesuits, Gallicans and Ultramontanists in modern Romanism. The religious passions grow out of the selfishness of depraved human nature in spite of Christianity, whether Greek, Roman, or Protestant., and may arise in any denomination or in any congregation. Paul had to rebuke the party spirit in the church at Corinth. The rancor of theological schools and parties under one and the same government is as great and often greater than among separate rival denominations. Providence overrules these human weaknesses for the clearer development of doctrine and discipline, and thus brings good out of evil.

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

  His later years were disturbed by the death of his dearest and kindest friend, John Froben (1527), to whose memory he paid a most noble tribute in one of his letters; and still more by the progress of the Reformation in his own neighborhood. The optimism of his youth and manhood gave way to a gloomy, discontented pessimism. The Lutheran tragedy, he said, gave him more pain than the stone which tortured him. "It is part of my unhappy fate, that my old age has fallen on these evil times when quarrels and riots prevail everywhere." "This new gospel," he writes in another letter, "is producing a new set of men so impudent, hypocritical, and abusive, such liars and sycophants, who agree neither with one another nor with anybody else, so universally offensive and seditious, such madmen and ranters, and in short so utterly distasteful to me that if I knew of any city in which I should be free from them, I would remove there at once." His last letters are full of such useless lamentations. He had the mortification to see Protestantism triumph in a tumultuous way in Basel, through the labors of Oecolampadius, his former friend and associate. It is pleasant, however, and creditable to him, that his last interview with the reformer was friendly and cordial. The authorities of the city left him undisturbed. But he reluctantly moved to the Roman Catholic city of Freiburg in Baden (1529), wishing that Basel might enjoy every blessing, and never receive a sadder guest than he.512 He bought a house in Freiburg, lived there six years, and was treated with every demonstration of respect, but did not feel happy, and yielded to the solicitations of the Queen Regent of the Netherlands to return to his native land. On his way he stopped in Basel in the house of Jerome Froben, August, 1535, and attended to the publication of Origen. It was his last work. He fell sick, and died in his seventieth year, July 12, 1536, of his old enemies, the stone and the gout, to which was added dysentery. He retained his consciousness and genial humor to the last. When his three friends, Amerbach, Froben, and Episcopius, visited him on his death-bed, he reminded them of Job’s three comforters, and playfully asked them about the torn garments, and the ashes that should be sprinkled on their heads. He died without a priest or any ceremonial of the Church (in wretched monastic Latin: "sine crux, sine lux, sine Deus"), but invoking the mercy of Christ. His last words, repeated again and again, were, "O Jesus, have mercy; Lord, deliver me; Lord, make an end; Lord, have mercy upon me!"513

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

  The order of degradation was carried out by six bishops, who disrobed the condemned man of his vestments and destroyed his tonsure. They then put on his head a cap covered over with pictures of the devil and inscribed with the word, heresiarch, and committed his soul to the devil. With upturned eyes, Huss exclaimed, "and I commit myself to the most gracious Lord Jesus." The old motto that the Church does not want blood—ecclesia non sitit sanguinem — was in appearance observed, but the authorities knew perfectly well what was to be the last scene when they turned Huss over to Sigismund. "Go, take him and do to him as a heretic" were the words with which the king remanded the prisoner to the charge of Louis, the Count Palatine. A guard of a thousand armed men was at hand. The streets were thronged with people. As Huss passed on, he saw the flames on the public square which were consuming his books. For fear of the bridge’s breaking down, the greater part of the crowd was not allowed to cross over to the place of execution, called the Devil’s Place. Huss’ step had been firm, but now, with tears in his eyes, he knelt down and prayed. The paper cap falling from his head, the crowd shouted that it should be put on, wrong side front. It was midday. The prisoner’s hands were fastened behind his back, and big neck bound to the stake by a chain. On the same spot sometime before, so the chronicler notes, a cardinal’s worn-out mule had been buried. The straw and wood were heaped up around Huss’ body to the chin, and rosin sprinkled upon them. The offer of life was renewed if he would recant. He refused and said, "I shall die with joy to-day in the faith of the gospel which I have preached." When Richental, who was standing by, suggested a confessor, he replied, "There is no need of one. I have no mortal sin." At the call of bystanders, they turned his face away from the East, and as the flames arose, he sang twice, Christ, thou Son of the living God, have mercy upon me. The wind blew the fire into the martyr’s face, and his voice was hushed. He died, praying and singing. To remove, if possible, all chance of preserving relics from the scene, Huss’ clothes and shoes were thrown into the merciless flames. The ashes were gathered up and cast into the Rhine. While this scene was being enacted, the council was going on with the transaction of business as if the burning without the gates were only a common event. Three weeks later, it announced that it had done nothing more pleasing to God than to punish the Bohemian heretic. For this act it has been chiefly remembered by after generations.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  (iv) The immoralities of the Gentile world are due to the fact that their understandings were darkened because of the pōrōsis of their hearts (Eph. 4.18). The idea is that they have so long stifled conscience that conscience has ceased to function. Conscience has petrified. It is so calloused that it has no sensitiveness left. (v) When Jesus was about to heal the man with the withered hand in the Synagogue and when he saw the bleak looks of the orthodox because the deed was going to be done on a Sabbath he was grieved at the ‘hardness’ (pōrōsis) of their hearts (Mark 3.5). There are two things there, (a) They had so long identified religion with rules and regulations that they could not recognize real religion when they saw it. (b) They had so legalized religion that they had forgotten human sympathy. Because they had so long taken their way and not God’s way they were completely insensitive alike to the appeal of God and the appeal of human need. Whenever a man sets his own ideas in the place that God should take, whenever he stubbornly goes his own way, he is on the way to a condition in which his heart is petrified, in which his heart and his conscience have become insensitive and when his eyes are blind. PRAUS AND PRAOTĒSCHRISTIAN GENTLENESSThe word praus is the word which is used in the Beatitude which says, Blessed are the meek (Matt. 5.5). This adjective occurs three other times in the NT. Twice it is used of Jesus himself (Matt. 11.29; 21.5). The other occasion is in I Pet. 3.4. The noun praotēs is the word which is used for ‘meekness’ in Paul’s account of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5.23). Its other occurrences are I Cor. 4.21; II Cor. 10.1; Gal. 6.1; Eph. 4.2; Col. 3.12; II Tim. 2.25; Tit. 3.2; James 1.21; 3.13; I Pet. 3.15. The AV without exception translates the adjective by ‘meek’ and the noun by ‘meekness’. Moffatt has ‘humble’ in the Beatitude; ‘modesty’ in the James passages; and ‘gentle’ or ‘gentleness’ in all the others. He never retains the translation ‘meek’. The American RSV has ‘humble’ once, in Matt. 21.5; ‘meek’ or ‘meekness’ five times, included among which is the Beatitude; and ‘gentle’ or ‘gentleness’ in the remaining passages. In classical Greek this is a lovely word. Of things it means ‘gentle’. It is used, for instance, of a gentle breeze or a gentle voice. Of persons it means ‘mild’ or ‘gracious’. Menander has a fragment in which he says, ‘How sweet is a father who is mild and young in heart.’ It would be true to say that in classical Greek it is a word with a caress in it. Indeed Xenophon uses the neuter plural of the adjective in the sense of caresses. It is characteristically a kindly and a gracious word.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Elena tried to interpret, mediate, and assuage; she tried silence and she tried slipping out to chat with the staff in the kitchen. It did no good. And then her mother would appear for dinner, having spent hours arranging herself, balancing between the spot where she couldn’t button a button because of tremors and where the double vision got the best of her. Elena’s mother would descend and the evening would really get under way. Holy mother of God, why did you even bother to attend? Will someone call for a bib, please? Or a stretcher? Maybe a stretcher is in order. Could we have a stretcher, please? At which Billy would fly into a rage. Because Billy and Elena’s mother were attached by more than drink. They were attached by their sadness and their lying and their self-pity. They died in the same year, the way lovers of long standing did. Margaret O’Malley’s liver succumbed, and Bill went down in a plane about six months later. Plaques commemorating their unhappy terms in this life adorned the stone wall in a lonely New England churchyard. And these plaques had been joined recently by one bearing her father’s name. He had supported Nixon right through Checkers, but the flimsy valves of his heart—tinkered with by the eminent cardiologists of the day—couldn’t survive Watergate. He died the day Cox was appointed special prosecutor, April 17. When Elena was small, she had played in her mother’s dressing room, where two mirrored walls faced one another. The reflections traveled back ceaselessly in that space. When Elena stepped into the purview of these mirrors, she too was reproduced innumerably. She was always trying to catch a glimpse of her incalculable selves. She stretched, she sensed, toward the origin of her family, into its pedigreed peeves and illnesses and delinquencies. But no matter how she tried to sneak around the margins of her reflection, to see the edges of that parade, her mirrored self shadowed her. In silence. So: Paul and Wendy and Benjamin. And Daisy Chain, the dog, presently sprawled—licking himself—on the library carpet. This little family had tightened around Elena. She put aside Masters and Johnson, marked with a New Canaan Bookshop bookmark—at the page concerning the onset of menopause, just by chance—and repaired to the kitchen. She threw light switches up and down the hall. Because of the oil embargo the British were working a three-day work week, but Elena was uncomfortable in darkness. Duraflame logs. She needed more. The President was pondering special powers to ration electrical resources. Sunday leisure driving was officially discouraged. The market had plunged fifty points this week. Three percent, Benjamin had said, only three percent. She thought of Janey Williams’s breasts, the perfect way she presented them, in a brassiere that probably carved tracks in her shoulders. Her breasts were large and rounded. This you couldn’t miss, through her lacy, flimsy chemises.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  [1255] A little wooden vessel, of which we spoke above, p. 334. [1256] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 508-510. The other final rite at which Spencer and Gillen assisted is described on pp. 503-508 of the same work. It does not differ essentially from the one we have analysed. [1257] _Nor. Tr._, pp. 531-540. [1258] Contrarily to what Jevons says, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, pp. 46 ff. [1259] This makes Dawson say that the mourning is sincere (p. 66). But Eylmann assures us that he never knew a single case where there was a wound from sorrow really felt (_op. cit._, p. 113). [1260] _Nat. Tr._, p. 510. [1261] Eylmann, pp. 238-239. [1262] _Nor. Tr._, p. 507; _Nat. Tr._, p. 498. [1263] _Nat. Tr._, p. 500; Eylmann, p. 227. [1264] Brough Smyth, I, p. 114. [1265] _Nat. Tr._, p. 510. [1266] Several examples of this belief are to be found in Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 435. Cf. Strehlow, I, 15-16; II, p. 7. [1267] It may be asked why repeated ceremonies are necessary to produce the relief which follows upon mourning. The funeral ceremonies are frequently very long; they include many operations which take place at intervals during many months. Thus they prolong and support the moral disturbance brought about by the death (cf. Hertz, _La Representation collective de la mort_, in _Année Sociol._, X, pp. 48 ff.). In a general way, a death marks a grave change of condition which has extended and enduring effects upon the group. It takes a long time to neutralize these effects. [1268] In a case reported by Grey from the observations of Bussel, the rite has all the aspects of a sacrifice: the blood is sprinkled over the body itself (Grey, II, p. 330). In other cases, there is something like an offering of the beard: men in mourning cut off a part of their beards, which they throw on to the corpse (_ibid._, p. 335). [1269] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 135-136. [1270] Of course each churinga is believed to be connected with an ancestor. But it is not to appease the spirits of the ancestors that they mourn for the lost churinga. We have shown elsewhere (p. 123) that the idea of the ancestor only entered into the conception of the churinga secondarily and late. [1271] _Op. cit._, p. 207; cf. p. 116. [1272] Eylmann, p. 208. [1273] _Ibid._, p. 211. [1274] Howitt, _The Dieri_, in _J.A.I._, XX (1891), p. 93. [1275] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 394. [1276] Howitt, _ibid._, p. 396. [1277] Communication of Gason in _J.A.I._, XXIV (1895), p. 175. [1278] _Nor. Tr._, p. 286. [1279] Gason, _The Dieri Tribe_, in Curr, II, p. 68. [1280] Gason, _The Dieri Tribe_: Eylmann, p. 208. [1281] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 277 and 430. [1282] _Ibid._, p. 195.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Buzz, beep. Buzz, beep. The sounds and feelings start to fade. In my head, I see my closet. The brown-orange shag carpet. I picture a ruched floral dress on the floor, a pair of discarded jeans. I see me, maybe six years old, with big eyes and thick, straight-across bangs. I’m wearing a T-shirt and turquoise shorts. And then I see her. Some amalgamation of my mother and Faye Dunaway maybe, screaming, wielding a wire hanger. She is whipping a child version of me as I stand to the side, watching. Red welts form on my child-self’s upper legs. My mother screams. “How many times have I told you to hang these up? Why can’t you take care of nice things? Why do we spend all this money on you when you just waste it? What kind of daughter are you?” “I don’t know. I’m trying. I forgot. I’m sorry,” little me says. “You’re talking back. You’re not sorry! You’re giving excuses! How dare you!” Her voice is unbearably loud. My adult self recoils at the detail of the scene I’m witnessing—it is much more vivid than ever before. Eleanor pauses the machine. I open my eyes, almost surprised to see her there. “What happened?” she asks. I give a brief summary of the movie that played in my head. “Okay,” she says. “Now keep going, paying attention to the You’re not sorry.” The buzzers begin again. “You’re not sorry,” my mom says. “You’re never sorry. You do this to torture me, to hurt me. You’re just like him. You have his huge, flat nose, his stupid expressions. I want to throw up just looking at you.” She is talking about my father. “But I am sorry,” little me says. “You care about me so much. You take me to tennis and piano practice. You volunteer at school. You give me so much support. I am so grateful. I love you, Mommy.” Oh my God. It hits me: I was constantly having to beg my parents to believe they were loved. That was my primary job as their child. It should have been the other way around. The buzzers pause. I open my eyes, and my cheeks are wet with tears, but my breath is steady. “I didn’t expect this,” I manage. I hadn’t trusted Eleanor and her crappy dollar-store fans! I had barely trusted this process! What the hell was happening? “Okay,” Eleanor says. “Now, send Joey in to rescue the baby version of you from this situation.” Buzzers on. Eyes closed. Strong Joey. I imagine him striding in with his big-ass muscles bulging as I watch from the sidelines. He yanks the child version of me away from my mother. “You have to come with me,” he says. To my mother, he snarls, “This is unacceptable. Stop. You are not going to hurt her.” Baby me starts to cry. “No! It’s my mom. What are you doing? Who are you? Don’t take me away from my mom.”

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Any major illness transforms a patient’s—really, an entire family’s—life. But brain diseases have the additional strangeness of the esoteric. A son’s death already defies the parents’ ordered universe; how much more incomprehensible is it when the patient is brain-dead, his body warm, his heart still beating? The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. When my mother, alone at college, heard that her father, who had championed her right to an education in rural 1960s India, had finally died after a long hospitalization, she had a psychogenic seizure—which continued until she returned home to attend the funeral. One of my patients, upon being diagnosed with brain cancer, fell suddenly into a coma. I ordered a battery of labs, scans, and EEGs, searching for a cause, without result. The definitive test was the simplest: I raised the patient’s arm above his face and let go. A patient in a psychogenic coma retains just enough volition to avoid hitting himself. The treatment consists in speaking reassuringly, until your words connect and the patient awakens. Cancer of the brain comes in two varieties: primary cancers, which are born in the brain, and metastases, which emigrate from somewhere else in the body, most commonly from the lungs. Surgery does not cure the disease, but it does prolong life; for most people, cancer in the brain suggests death within a year, maybe two. Mrs. Lee was in her late fifties, with pale green eyes, and had transferred to my service two days earlier from a hospital near her home, a hundred miles away. Her husband, his plaid shirt tucked into crisp jeans, stood by her bedside, fidgeting with his wedding ring. I introduced myself and sat down, and she told me her story: For the past few days, she had felt a tingling in her right hand, and then she’d begun to lose control of it, until she could no longer button her blouse. She’d gone to her local ER, fearing she was having a stroke. An MRI was obtained there, and she was sent here. “Did anyone tell you what the MRI showed?” I asked. “No.” The buck had been passed, as it often was with difficult news. Oftentimes, we’d have a spat with the oncologist over whose job it was to break the news. How many times had I done the same? Well, I figured, it can stop here. “Okay,” I said. “We have a lot to talk about. If you don’t mind, can you tell me what you understand is happening? It’s always helpful for me to hear, to make sure I don’t leave anything unanswered.” “Well, I thought I was having a stroke, but I guess…I’m not?”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  —Look, this isn’t all that important now. We have a couple of real problems, Jim Williams said. There’s a leak in the bathroom somewhere. I’m a little concerned about the … that the pipes may have burst. That’s big trouble. And— —You’ll figure it out, Janey said. Like Wendy, Sandy was paralyzed. Halted by the snowballing of points of view, by the partition and division of points of view. As Janey Williams swept by him and his dad on the stairs, in her wrinkled silk pajamas (draping her wool coat on the banister), she leaned to kiss Sandy on the forehead. She began to sob, choking, heaving sobs. Some women in New Canaan were beautiful when they cried: all sorrow was bound inside them like the bound feet of Asian women. Their tears cut delicate tracks in their pristine cheeks. Not so with Janey Williams. She coughed and gasped and hawked up more of what she was keeping down. Her nose was red and raw—Wendy could see—like her dad’s gin-blossomed nose. Janey tried to shout some invective as she cried but the flash flood was too heavy now, and the best she could do was struggle away from her family, struggle away from all that promise and kindness. On the way to her bedroom she paused—at Mike’s door. She reached for the knob. The trick buzzer sounded. Janey swore. And then she turned the knob and found the bed empty. —Where’s Mike? she called. —That’s what I. … Down with Ben, Jim said. We think. —Why would he be down there? she called, hysteria creeping into the mix of her temper. Ben hates Mike. Don’t be stupid. Don’t tell me you didn’t even— —Calm down, why don’t you. Jim was turning the wrench over in his palm. But he didn’t move. Janey was at the top of the stairs, frozen in latitudes of regret. They were all isolated in that foyer, all of them. Then the ambulance pulled up in front of the house. An ambulance of quaint, nostalgic design. An old American station wagon, in bright red, with a revolving yellow light on top. The light, rotating slowly, coming to a stop. Sunlight picking up the reflectors in the lamp and elsewhere on the ambulance. The sun reflecting on the limitless array of reflecting surfaces. The sun, the reflections of the sun, the fallen limbs of trees. A vast sweetshop of sugar-coated treats, some kid’s fantasy of a Christmas world of candies. Sweetmeats. Ice everywhere, and icicles, brittle, crunchy snow and ice, through which Benjamin Hood trudged now, falling into ice, rescuing himself, jogging from the ambulance to the exterior of the Williamses’ house. Hood’s face was swollen and pink-orange with embarrassment and anxiety. His progress up what would once have been a flagstone path—he was actually veering across a flower bed now—couldn’t really be called progress. He hustled, he urged his flaccid thighs and calves on, and yet he wasn’t getting anywhere.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Now, as we know, martyrdom is a conveyor of truth: evidence of the belief for which one dies, a manifestation that life here below is nothing but a death, but that death gives access to true life, a testimony by which this truth enables one to face suffering without collapsing. The martyr, without even having to speak, and by his very conduct, makes a truth shine forth that, in destroying life, makes one live beyond death. In the complex economy of the martyr’s conduct, truth is affirmed in a belief, is shown to everyone’s eyes as a force, and inverts the values of life and death. It constitutes a “test” [épreuve] in the triple sense that it expresses the sincerity of a man’s belief, it confirms the all-powerful force of that which one believes, and it dispels the deceptive appearances of this world to reveal the reality of the beyond. If exomologesis is so important in penance, if it is synonymous with it in public and ostentatious rites, this is because the penitent must testify like the martyr: express his repentance, show the strength his faith gives him, and make it clear that this body that he humiliates is only dust and death, and that true life is elsewhere. By reproducing the martyrdom that he hasn’t had the courage (or the opportunity) to endure, the penitent places himself at the threshold of a death that hides beneath the deceptive appearances of life, of a genuine life that is promised by death. This threshold is that of metanoia, or conversion, when the soul does a complete turnaround, inverts all its values, and changes in every respect. Exomologesis as a manifestation by the penitent himself of that death which his life has been, and of the life he will access through death, constitutes the evidential and exemplary expression—the proof—of his metanoia.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  There were older people you couldn’t imagine young, and there were those whose faces still held on to what they’d looked like at twenty-five. Nora was of another breed, the ones who had apparently reverted to their own childhood faces. Yale looked at Nora and saw the five-year-old she’d been, impish and precocious and blue-eyed. Maybe it had something to do with her smile, too, the way she touched all her fingers to her cheeks. Cecily was just sitting there, so Yale filled the silence. “You’re Fiona’s great-aunt,” he said. Nora beamed. “Don’t you just love her? My brother Hugh, that was her grandfather. Hers and Nico’s,” she said. “Nico and I were the artists in the family. Everyone else is so literal-minded, every one of them. Well, we’re still waiting on Fiona. We’ll see about her. Don’t you worry a bit? But Nico was a true artist.” Yale said, “We were close friends.” He didn’t want to get emotional now. What would Cecily think if he broke down here on the couch? This old woman didn’t look much like Nico, but she was beautiful, and Nico had been beautiful, and wasn’t that enough? Nora rescued him. “Tell me about the gallery.” She coughed into the balled-up Kleenex she’d held, this whole time, in her hand. Yale turned to Cecily, who shrugged. And though Yale had no serious illusions left about the woman’s art collection—the only framed things in the room were snapshots and studio family portraits—he began talking. “We started five years ago. Right now we only do rotating exhibitions, both our own and from peer institutions, but we’re starting to build a permanent collection. That’s my job.” “Oh!” Nora looked agitated, impatient. She shook her head quickly. “I hadn’t realized you were a Kunsthalle .” Yale was surprised by the word, and Cecily looked confused, irritated. “It just means a rotating gallery,” he said to Cecily, but perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, making her seem uninformed. To Nora he said, “But we’re building a permanent collection. We have the power of a world-class university behind us, plus the donor potential of a successful alumni base and one of the world’s major art cities.” He was talking like a fundraising robot, not like someone who’d slow danced with this woman’s grandnephew last New Year’s Eve, someone who’d stood over Nico’s hospital bed and said that no matter what happened, he and Charlie would take care of Fiona. Nora blinked, expecting more. He said, “We’re already strong in prints and drawings. I understand some of your works are sketches.” He stopped, because here was Debra with a tray and a real old-fashioned tea service: thin, chipped cups with little flowers, a steaming teapot. Nora looked at Cecily and said, “And you’re his assistant?” Yale was so offended for Cecily that he almost answered the question himself—but that would only make things worse.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A few days later, I heard that Laurie, a friend from medical school, had been hit by a car and that a neurosurgeon had performed an operation to try to save her. She’d coded, was revived, and then died the following day. I didn’t want to know more. The days when someone was simply “killed in a car accident” were long gone. Now those words opened a Pandora’s box, out of which emerged all the images: the roll of the gurney, the blood on the trauma bay floor, the tube shoved down her throat, the pounding on her chest. I could see hands, my hands, shaving Laurie’s scalp, the scalpel cutting open her head, could hear the frenzy of the drill and smell the burning bone, its dust whirling, the crack as I pried off a section of her skull. Her hair half shaven, her head deformed. She failed to resemble herself at all; she became a stranger to her friends and family. Maybe there were chest tubes, and a leg was in traction… I didn’t ask for details. I already had too many. In that moment, all my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize—they all returned, vengeful, angry, and inexorable. I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focused on the rote treatment of disease—and utterly missing the larger human significance. (“Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from.”) A mother came to me, newly diagnosed with brain cancer. She was confused, scared, overcome by uncertainty. I was exhausted, disconnected. I rushed through her questions, assured her that surgery would be a success, and assured myself that there wasn’t enough time to answer her questions fairly. But why didn’t I make the time? A truculent vet refused the advice and coaxing of doctors, nurses, and physical therapists for weeks; as a result, his back wound broke down, just as we had warned him it would. Called out of the OR, I stitched the dehiscent wound as he yelped in pain, telling myself he’d had it coming. Nobody has it coming.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  As an intern in the first year of residency, one is little more than a paper pusher against a backdrop of life and death—though, even then, the workload is enormous. My first day in the hospital, the chief resident said to me, “Neurosurgery residents aren’t just the best surgeons—we’re the best doctors in the hospital. That’s your goal. Make us proud.” The chairman, passing through the ward: “Always eat with your left hand. You’ve got to learn to be ambidextrous.” One of the senior residents: “Just a heads-up—the chief is going through a divorce, so he’s really throwing himself into his work right now. Don’t make small talk with him.” The outgoing intern who was supposed to orient me but instead just handed me a list of forty-three patients: “The only thing I have to tell you is: they can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.” And then he walked away. I didn’t leave the hospital for the first two days, but before long, the impossible-seeming, day-killing mounds of paperwork were only an hour’s work. Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren’t just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks and triumphs. An eight-year-old named Matthew, for example, came in one day complaining of headaches only to learn that he had a tumor abutting his hypothalamus. The hypothalamus regulates our basic drives: sleep, hunger, thirst, sex. Leaving any tumor behind would subject Matthew to a life of radiation, further surgeries, brain catheters…in short, it would consume his childhood. Complete removal could prevent that, but at the risk of damaging his hypothalamus, rendering him a slave to his appetites. The surgeon got to work, passed a small endoscope through Matthew’s nose, and drilled off the floor of his skull. Once inside, he saw a clear plane and removed the tumor. A few days later, Matthew was bopping around the ward, sneaking candies from the nurses, ready to go home. That night, I happily filled out the endless pages of his discharge paperwork. I lost my first patient on a Tuesday. She was an eighty-two-year-old woman, small and trim, the healthiest person on the general surgery service, where I spent a month as an intern. (At her autopsy, the pathologist would be shocked to learn her age: “She has the organs of a fifty-year-old!”) She had been admitted for constipation from a mild bowel obstruction. After six days of hoping her bowels would untangle themselves, we did a minor operation to help sort things out. Around eight P.M. Monday night, I stopped by to check on her, and she was alert, doing fine. As we talked, I pulled from my pocket my list of the day’s work and crossed off the last item (post-op check, Mrs. Harvey). It was time to go home and get some rest.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  Elsewhere in the Bible, we occasionally encounter human sacrifice in early Israel, but it seems to be exceptional. The most famous instance is the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. God commands Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Abraham does not hesitate. In the end, Abraham is not required to kill the boy. But, he is praised for his willingness: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. (22:16–17) It is not apparent from this story that God intended to abolish human sacrifice, and there is certainly no suggestion that Isaac had a right to life. Abraham has no difficulty in accepting the command to sacrifice his son as a valid divine command.12 Jephtah’s daughter is less fortunate than Isaac. Her father made a vow to the Lord: If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD ’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering. (Judges 11:30–31) There can be little doubt that human sacrifice was intended. Jephtah would surely not have sacrificed a dog if the animal had come out to meet him. His vow has often been judged rash by modern critics, but the biblical text passes no judgment on it. Indeed, the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament lists him among the heroes of faith (11:32). He is heartbroken when his daughter comes out to meet him, but father and daughter agree that the vow must be honored.13 There are parallels for the efficacy of human sacrifice in other ancient cultures. The Spartan king Agamemnon allegedly sacrificed his daughter to gain favorable winds to sail to Troy. In 2 Kings 3:26 the king of Moab reportedly sacrificed his firstborn son to turn the tide of battle against Israel and succeeded. Two kings of Judah, Ahaz and Manasseh, are accused of child sacrifice, and the prophet Micah imagines that an Israelite might think that he should offer his firstborn as atonement for sin (6:7). To be sure, many voices in the Hebrew Bible, including Micah’s, were raised in protest against the practice of child sacrifice. Jeremiah claims that the idea had never entered God’s mind (19:4–6). Ezekiel says that God gave the Israelites “statutes that were not good, and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them” (20:25–26).

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  The period had its AIDS tragedies (“You remember your little hustler friend Mark?” a redheaded hustler, Tony, in black leather pants and black leather jacket, who specialized in heavy S&M topping, told me one evening, elbow to elbow with me at the bar in Trix. “Two weeks before he died, we all got together and sent him home—upstate, to Binghamton. He wanted to die at home. So we sent him there. And he did.”) and jailhouse cases (blue-eyed, black-haired Paul, who came out of Rikers Island correctional facilities, back to the Venus, with the worst case of crabs I’ve ever seen; and hulking German John, whom I met on the strip when he was twenty-one [with his own movie tales: “Once this guy takes me into the Cameo, and he has me take my sneakers off and sit in the row behind him and put my feet over the seats in front. Then he plays with them, and kisses them, and fondles ’em and stuff—and they were pretty damned powerful, too, ’cause I’d been sleeping on the street for almost three weeks by then”] and who, eighteen years later, still writes and phones me now and again from jail in Southern California, where he’s been serving time for the last six years. And scruffy little “Sundance” McLoughlin, missing a forefinger from a motorcycle accident, a regular in the back balcony of the Capri, who last phoned me from jail in Toronto). But not all tales end in premature death or incarceration. For most, indeed, we never learn an end at all. Maybe thirty-six, Bobby lived in Oliver Sacks land. Homeless, he collected cans and frequented the Capri for about three years in the late eighties. Among our dozen encounters in the theater, I took him home with me some three times. Once, in the midst of sex, suddenly he insisted that I “fuck him like a whore!” Bobby didn’t know where he was from, what his last name was—and was unclear on his first. (“Bobby” was just the one I picked for him; but, in his vague, friendly way, he responded pretty much to any name you addressed him by.) The last time I saw him, sometime in ’87 or ’88, sitting on the island in the middle of Broadway, with his green plastic garbage bag of empty beer and soda cans against his knee, without shoes and wearing a pair of dress pants so tight he could not close the zipper, Bobby—like the soldier of Arete—avowed with as much sincerity as he had the second, the fourth, the sixth time we’d met, and, indeed, all three times he’d come to my house, that he had no memory of me whatsoever.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  On the one hand, there is the conviction, eloquently expressed by Hosea, that God is good and must be imagined in accordance with the highest ideals of humanity. On the other hand, there is belief that God is revealed in history, and specifically in the history of Israel. The first conviction leads to the assertion that God is merciful and compassionate, but this conviction is often hard to reconcile with the death and destruction to which human beings are subject and which were all too often the fate of Israel. The Judean Edition of Hosea Like the book of Amos, Hosea was preserved and edited in the south, after the fall of Samaria. His prophecies of destruction had been fulfilled and stood as a warning to Judah. Hosea himself had commented on Judah as well as Israel on occasion, although he was primarily concerned with the northern kingdom, and specifically with the Israelite heartland of Ephraim. So, for example, he comments on the sickness of both Israel and Judah in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite war (5:13). A number of passages, however, contrast Judah with Israel, and these are likely to come from the Judean editors. Hosea 1:7 assures the reader that God will have pity on the house of Judah. Hosea 3:5 inserts a reference to “David, their king,” that is inconsistent with Hosea’s attitude toward kings of any sort. Hosea 4:15 warns Judah not to become guilty by worshiping at Gilgal or Bethel, probably reflecting the Deuteronomic condemnation of worship outside Jerusalem. Perhaps the most obvious editorial contribution to the book, however, is the positive ending, which promises restoration if only the people will return to the Lord. The final saying (“those who are wise understand these things”) is typical of the wisdom literature and shows the hand of the scribes who were finally responsible for the edition of the book. From the viewpoint of these scribes, the oracles provided a moral lesson on the consequences of following “the ways of the Lord.” This lesson could be applied to individuals as well as to kingdoms. FOR FURTHER READING Amos J. Barton, The Theology of the Book of Amos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Discussion of major themes in historical context. Also attention to reception history. M. D. Carroll R., Amos . The Prophet and His Oracles: Research on the Book of Amos (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). Wide ranging history of research. M. L. Chaney, “ ‘Bitter Bounty’: The Dynamics of Political Economy Critiqued by the Eighth-Century Prophets,” in N. K. Gottwald and R. A. Horsley, eds., The Bible and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). Takes the social critique realistically. D. J. A. Clines, “Metacommentating Amos,” in idem, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup 205; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 76–93. Critical questioning of the perspective of Amos. W. J. Houston, “Exit the Oppressed Peasant?

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Still, one aspect of this group made my attendance worth it—the ability to see that C-PTSD did not inherently make a person monstrous. Each of the group’s members was profoundly shattered. But they were all trying their damnedest to piece themselves back together in a way that didn’t hurt anyone else. They told darkly funny jokes, set out good cheese when they hosted at their apartments, and wrapped their arms around one another when they cried. They all had fierce protective streaks and passionately defended one another against the negative voices in their heads. They were talented and charismatic, quick to be introspective. They read self-help books and danced all night and painted bright, joyful canvases. So it broke my heart to see this: At the beginning of each meeting, we would go around in a circle and say how we were doing that month. And we almost never said “good.” Okay, we said. Meh. There was always a current struggle, a friendship on the precipice, a narcissistic parent sending passive-aggressive texts. We were all deserving. Why couldn’t any of us just be good? I wished so badly for us to be good. — Soon my calendar was packed with trauma-centered activities. Sound baths, yoga classes, my support group, Buddhist talks, massages. I hightailed it on the subway to make a meditation class in Midtown after a yoga class in Brooklyn, then hustled back for a physical therapy appointment. On these hectic journeys, I of course made mistakes. I forgot to bring a healthy snack, or I wasted too much time huffing essential oils in a gift shop and arrived too late to a yoga class, where I lost my $15 deposit. Each time I fucked up, I chastised myself: You’re jobless and bleeding money! You’re living like an entitled socialite! Except without any of the fun parts! Like octopus carpaccio! Or yachts! One day, I arrived at a meditation class five minutes late and had to step over crossed thighs, shuffling apologetically to my spot, where I stewed in shame on my pillow. Everyone thinks I’m an asshole! They can hear me panting! I’m ruining the vibe! And then it dawned on me: I was stressing out about not being perfect at my relaxation class. I was approaching “wellness” with the same obsessive, perfectionistic tendencies I’d brought to my job. This was no less disordered than being a workaholic, and the pattern had a distinct echo: moments of intense joy through achievement followed by anxiety over finding my next success. I decided to cut down on the number of wellness activities I participated in, keeping only my favorites, the ones that brought me sincere and easy joy. And I spruced up my at-home meditation routine, setting down a special cushion in front of my bay window, surrounded by my plants. I told myself that self-care shouldn’t cost money or come from a place of obligation. Being truly healthy should feel like a pleasure.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  If there was any such “golden age,” I never had any experience of it, nor was I aware of any such thing at the time. (I assume he must mean pre-1982, possibly pre-’84.) The only thing I can think that lies behind Berman’s misunderstanding is the erroneous assumption that all or most of the homosexual contact around Times Square was commercial, that is, involved hustlers or other sex workers. But the whole point is that, while the lure of hustlers most certainly helped attract the sexually available and sexually curious to the area, a good 80 or 85 percent of the gay sexual contacts that occurred there (to make what is admittedly a totally informal guess) were not commercial. I do not want to demonize the profession of sex worker per se; but, as a material social practice that can be carried on in many ways and at many levels, the sex work that occurred there in many of its aspects can certainly be criticized—or, indeed, praised. And the relation of commercial sex to noncommercial sex was intricate and intimate. What I regret personally is, however, the dissolution of that 80 percent where my own sexual activity and that of many other gay men were largely focused—though I am quite sure that others, both gay and straight, do miss equally the commercial side. The two orders of sexual relationship sat by one another in the sex movie theaters, drank shoulder to shoulder in the same bars, walked down the same streets, and lingered by the same shop windows to make themselves available for conversation in the afternoons and evenings. Though the relation between commercial and noncommercial sex was not without its hostilities (occasionally intense), in such a situation there is a far greater interpenetration of the two modes than in other areas—due to contact. §E. If, as I say, 80 to 85 percent of the (gay) sexual encounters in the Times Square neighborhood were noncommercial, why does hustling so dominate the fictional accounts of the area’s sexual machinery? (John Rechy’s City of Night, Paul Rogers’s Saul’s Book, and Bruce Benderson’s User are three excellent examples.) I can offer three reasons.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  The thing he said that day in my doorway stayed with me. I wondered at it sometimes, tugged at it like one of June’s tiny hair ties in my pocket. What would he say to me now? About Brandon, about my falling in love with a woman, about divorce, or climate change, white nationalism, bump stocks, the audacity of Donald Trump running for president? Given everything—my life as it now looks and the world we live in, the abyss of which my father seemed to peer down that day—do we get to be happy? How often? I want to know what he would say about June, in whose face I now find his eyes. I want to know what he would say about the mess I’ve made of her family, about how to help her survive it, about how to be her mother and also myself. I want to know if my father would tell me what I have begun to suspect: that I couldn’t have done any of this without her. I think a seismic shift started in me, millimeter by millimeter, when June was born. Having a baby, having her, softened me. It broke me a little. It gave me intimate knowledge of the emptiness that is clinical depression, and it also gave me access, on the other side, to a rounder fullness of joy. Having her made me value my body, and femaleness, in a new way. Becoming her mother grew me up. It committed me to becoming the kind of person I want her to know, remember, be proud of. It committed me to becoming the person I want her to have as a parent. [image file=image_rsrc2FS.jpg] 24In October, we drove east to go apple-picking. Friends had chosen an orchard from a list online and invited us to come along. We took my car: me, Brandon, June, and my mother. But when we got there the apples were picked over, and those that remained were covered in brown scabs and scales. June began to pout, stomping around with an empty basket. I wanted to leave everyone by the side of the road, go home and back to bed. In an attempt to recover the afternoon, someone suggested a picnic. We found a spot by a river nearby. I cut slices of salami and managed to chase the kids around, and June’s spirits rose. Her cheeks were pink in the cool air, and for once, she didn’t trip or fall down or skin some body part or other. We played hide-and-seek behind a stand of wilting anemones. But I stayed vaguely grouchy all day, outside of myself, as though my skin were too tight. I glared at our friends, the couple who’d hosted June’s birthday party two months earlier. They were so good, their marriage purring along like a sleek new coupe in a car commercial. I wanted to be with my own people, whoever they were.