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 Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Once you finished high school you didn’t want any part of it and she took it up. You’d never really given it a thought, but now you feel good about it. You cut eight lines. Michael begins to snore. You call his name and then you get up and gently shake his shoulder. He turns his face into the cushions. You do two of the lines and sit back in the chair. A year ago tonight you were up until daybreak, sitting beside your mother’s bed. You thought you would faint when you came home the last time, three days before she died, and saw the ravaged form. Even the smile had shifted. After months of waffling, the doctors had admitted there was not much they could do, and agreed she could stay at home if the family would attend her constantly. When you got home, Michael and your father, who had traded twelve-hour shifts for a week, were exhausted. For the last seventy-two hours, you took the night shift, midnight to eight. You gave her the morphine injection every four hours, and tended as best you could to the symptoms of the disease. When you first saw her, even after Michael had warned you, you wanted to run away. But the horror passed, and you were glad you could do something for her. You were glad you could be with her. But for those last hours you might never have really known her. The last few nights she was not sleeping at all, so you talked. “Have you ever tried cocaine,” she asked that last night. You didn’t know what to say. A strange question from a mother. But she was dying. You said you had tried it. “It’s not bad,” she said. “When I could still swallow they were giving me cocaine with morphine. To ease the depression. I liked it.” You mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, who got loopy on two drinks. She said the morphine was good for the pain but made her drowsier than she wanted to be. She wanted to be clear. She wanted to know what was happening. Then she said, “Do young men need sex?” You asked what she meant by need . “You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don’t have much time and there’s so much I’ve always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated.” You always thought your mother was the last Puritan. “Have you slept with a lot of girls?” “Mom, really,” you said. “Come on. What’s to hide? I wish I’d known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could’ve gotten to know each other a lot better.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He flicked his cigarette butt into the creek, stood up, and left. We followed him. Even in defeat, he was still the Colonel. fifty-one days after THE INVESTIGATION STALLED, I took to reading for religion class again, which seemed to please the Old Man, whose pop quizzes I’d been failing consistently for a solid six weeks. We had one that Wednesday morning: Share an example of a Buddhist koan. A koan is like a riddle that’s supposed to help you toward enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. For my answer, I wrote about this guy Banzan. He was walking through the market one day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best.” Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is, and poof, he reached enlightenment. Reading it the night before, I’d wondered if it would be like that for me—if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I’d played in her dying. But I wasn’t convinced enlightenment struck like lightning. After we’d passed our quizzes, the Old Man, sitting, grabbed his cane and motioned toward Alaska’s fading question on the blackboard. “Let’s look at one sentence on page ninety-four of this very entertaining introduction to Zen that I had you read this week. ‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’” the Old Man said. “Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.” We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did. Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again. The Colonel, who had driven the Investigation from the start, who had cared about what happened to her when I only cared if she loved me, had given up on it, answerless.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  make the bold move to which she will have to succumb. His hesitation successful gallant said to his shows that he is thinking of himself, not of her; that he is worrying about companion: "Hark to our how he will look, not feeling overwhelmed by her charms. Nothing could ladies, which do cry out at you, and mock you sore. be more anti-seductive. Recognize such types, and if they are past the You will find you have young age that would give them an excuse, do not entangle yourself in overplayed the prude and their awkwardness—they will infect you with doubt. coxcomb this bout." So much he did allow; but there was no more time to remedy his error, for 4. In the Heian court of late-tenth-century Japan, the young nobleman opportunity gave him Kaoru, purported son of the great seducer Genji himself, had had nothing no other handle to seize her by. but misfortune in love. He had become infatuated with a young princess, — S E I G N E U R DE BRANTÔME, Oigimi, who lived in a dilapidated home in the countryside, her father LIVES OF FAIR & GALLANT having fallen on hard times. Then one day he had an encounter with LADIES, TRANSLATED BY A. R.. Oigimi's sister, Nakanokimi, that convinced him she was the one he actu-ALLINSON ally loved. Confused, he returned to court, and did not visit the sisters for some time. Then their father died, followed shortly thereafter by Oigimi herself. Now Kaoru realized his mistake: he had loved Oigimi all along, and she had died out of despair that he did not care for her. He would never meet her like again; she was all he could think about. When Nakanokimi, her father and sister dead, came to live at court, Kaoru had the house where Oigimi and her family had lived turned into a shrine. One day, Nakanokimi, seeing the melancholy into which Kaoru had fallen, told him that there was a third sister, Ukifune, who resembled his beloved Oigimi and lived hidden away in the countryside. Kaoru came to life—perhaps he had a chance to redeem himself, to change the past. But how could he meet this woman? There came a time when he visited the shrine to pay his respects to the departed Oigimi, and heard that the mysterious Ukifune was there as well. Agitated and excited, he managed to catch a glimpse of her through the crack in a door. The sight of her took his breath away: although she was a plain-looking country girl, in Kaoru's eyes she was the living incarnation of Oigimi. Her voice, meanwhile, was like The Anti-Seducer • 141 the voice of Nakanokimi, whom he had loved as well. Tears welled up in his eyes.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Ottomans which they had carried out in the years immediately before 1914. They exultantly sought to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 with the defeated empire; this allotted them substantial parts of Anatolia’s west coast as part of a Greater Greece. Turkish armies then rallied under Mustapha Kemal, who would soon restyle himself as Kemal ‘Atatürk’, and in September 1922, as the routed Greeks fled, Smyrna, one of the greatest cities in the Greek-speaking world, was near-obliterated by fire (see Plate 51). In the flames perished Asia Minor’s nineteen centuries of Christian culture, and ten earlier centuries of Greek civilization. A Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 overturned the agreements of Sèvres, and the flood of refugees in both directions across the Aegean Sea was formalized into population exchanges on the basis of religion, not language. The effect was that religious identity transmuted into national identity: Christians became Greeks regardless of what language they then spoke, and Muslims became Turks. Within a few years, virtually all the mosques of Athens had been levelled to the ground, while the toll of church ruination in Asia Minor is still all too obvious. It was a trauma so deep that in neither country has it been possible to talk freely about refugee ancestry until very recent years.19 The only significant exception to the general exchange, and that tragically short-lived, was Istanbul, as the wider world learned to call Constantinople in the 1930s. The Greek and Orthodox population of the city was exempted from exile, and in a commendable and surprising display of swift reconciliation, Atatürk, now leader of a Turkish Republic, and the veteran Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos sealed this agreement in 1930. Alas, the one continuing major territorial dispute between Greece and Turkey, over the future of ethnically divided Cyprus, poisoned the deal in little more than two decades. As the British sought unhappily to scramble out of colonial rule in Cyprus in the 1950s, and Greeks demanded the island’s union with the kingdom of Greece, Turkish anger mounted. In 1955 the Turkish government of Adnan Menderes, on the most charitable interpretation, did nothing to stop two days of vicious and well-organized pogroms against Greeks in Istanbul; the flashpoint was the false rumour that Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki (the ancient Thessalonica) had been burned down by the Greeks. There were death and rape throughout the city, and the wrecking of most of what survived of Istanbul’s heritage of Greek Orthodox churches. In their wake, a Greek citizen population of some 300,000 in 1924 and 111,200 in 1934 has now been reduced to a probable figure of two thousand or less. The present Oecumenical Patriarch is a lonely figure in his palace in the Phanar. He is an international ecclesiastical statesman rightly much respected, but like his predecessors and presumably successors, he was chosen from the now tiny native Orthodox Turkish citizen population, and he does not

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Your first love had given notice of departure and Amanda’s application was on file. Mom never said it would do her heart good to see you married, but you were so eager to please her you would have walked through fire, given your right and left arms ... You wanted her to be happy and she wanted you to be happy. And, in the end, you might have confused what she wanted with what Amanda wanted. Before it happened you couldn’t believe you would survive your mother’s death. Torn between thinking it was your duty to throw yourself on her pyre and her wish that you should not waste time mourning, you knew no reaction that satisfied both conditions. You spent so much time in anticipation that when her death came you didn’t know what you felt. After the funeral it seemed as if you were wandering around your own interior looking for signs of life, finding nothing but empty rooms and white walls. You kept waiting for the onset of grief. You are beginning to suspect it arrived nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure. Michael orders the shepherd’s pie. You wave the menu away. You talk about the past and the present. You ask about the twins, Peter at Amherst and Sean at Bowdoin. Having already discussed your travails at the magazine, including your recent ferret gambit, you ask Michael about his business—restoring old houses—and he tells you it’s going well. He’s working on a derelict carriage house in New Hope. “I’m going to hire out some grunt work. Maybe you’d be interested. At least it’s a change of scene. Say, three or four weeks of work.” You tell him you’ll think about it. You are surprised that he would offer. Michael has long considered you incompetent. By the time he was twelve he was bigger than you. He shaped an ethic of engagement with the physical world under which your aptitudes and accomplishments were suspect. You drink and talk. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede. You and Michael and Peter and Sean and Dad stand against the world. The family has been fucked over, but you’re going to tough it out. Forget that slut Amanda. The doctors who couldn’t save your mother’s life and wouldn’t tell you what was going on. Clara Tillinghast. The priest who, at your mother’s deathbed, said, “We’ve seen some beautiful deaths with

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  “Thanks.” You stand up. “Take it easy, Coach.” He puts his arm around your shoulders. “I just realized something.” “What’s that?” “You and Amanda would make a terrific couple.” “I suppose that means that you get Odysseus all to yourself.” “Later, Tad.” A set of bedrooms is tucked away in a corner of the loft. The first two rooms are full of coke fiends and earnest conversers. The third is free, and a phone sits on a table beside the bed. You find the number in your wallet. “What time is it?” Vicky says after you identify yourself. “Where are you?” “It’s late. I’m in New York. I just wanted to talk.” “Let me guess; you’re with Tad.” “I was with Tad.” “It’s a little late for a chat. Is something wrong?” “I just wanted to tell you my mom died.” You hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. You are moving too fast. “Oh, God,” Vicky says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was ... when?” “A year ago.” The Missing Person. “A year ago?” “I didn’t tell you before so I wanted to tell you now. It seemed important.” “I’m sorry.” “It’s all right. It’s not so bad. I mean, it was.” You can’t manage to say what you mean. “I wish you could’ve met her. You would’ve hit it off. She had hair like yours. Not just that.” “I’m not sure what to say.” “There’s something else I didn’t tell you. I got married. Bad mistake,

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  days before she died, and saw the ravaged form. Even the smile had shifted. After months of waffling, the doctors had admitted there was not much they could do, and agreed she could stay at home if the family would attend her constantly. When you got home, Michael and your father, who had traded twelve-hour shifts for a week, were exhausted. For the last seventy-two hours, you took the night shift, midnight to eight. You gave her the morphine injection every four hours, and tended as best you could to the symptoms of the disease. When you first saw her, even after Michael had warned you, you wanted to run away. But the horror passed, and you were glad you could do something for her. You were glad you could be with her. But for those last hours you might never have really known her. The last few nights she was not sleeping at all, so you talked. “Have you ever tried cocaine,” she asked that last night. You didn’t know what to say. A strange question from a mother. But she was dying. You said you had tried it. “It’s not bad,” she said. “When I could still swallow they were giving me cocaine with morphine. To ease the depression. I liked it.” You mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, who got loopy on two drinks. She said the morphine was good for the pain but made her drowsier than she wanted to be. She wanted to be clear. She wanted to know what was happening. Then she said, “Do young men need sex?” You asked what she meant by need. “You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don’t have much time and there’s so much I’ve always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated.” You always thought your mother was the last Puritan. “Have you slept with a lot of girls?” “Mom, really,” you said.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and smelled violets in her hair. “I don’t forgive you,” Katie said, appearing in the doorway. And although Katie and I were not well acquainted, she felt comfortable enough to knee me in the balls. She smiled then, and as I crumpled into a bow, Katie said, “Now I forgive you.” Lara and I took a walk to the lake—sans Katie—and we talked. We talked— about Alaska and about the past month, about how she had to miss me and miss Alaska, while I only had to miss Alaska (which was true enough). I told her as much of the truth as I could, from the firecrackers to the Pelham Police Department and the white tulips. “I loved her,” I said, and Lara said she loved her, too, and I said, “I know, but that’s why. I loved her, and after she died I couldn’t think about anything else. It felt, like, dishonest. Like cheating.” “That’s not a good reason,” she said. “I know,” I answered. She laughed softly. “Well, good then. As long as you know.” I knew I wasn’t going to erase that anger, but we were talking. — As darkness spread that evening, the frogs croaked and a few newly resurrected insects buzzed about campus, and the four of us—Takumi, Lara, the Colonel, and I—walked through the cold gray light of a full moon to the Smoking Hole. “Hey, Colonel, why do you call eet the Smoking Hole?” Lara asked. “Eet’s, like, a tunnel.” “It’s like fishing hole,” the Colonel said. “Like, if we fished, we’d fish here. But we smoke. I don’t know. I think Alaska named it.” The Colonel pulled a cigarette out of his pack and threw it into the water. “What the hell?” I asked. “For her,” he said. I half smiled and followed his lead, throwing in a cigarette of my own. I handed Takumi and Lara cigarettes, and they followed suit. The smokes bounced and danced in the stream for a few moments, and then they floated out of sight. I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering. In China, the Old Man had told us, there are days reserved for grave cleaning, where you make gifts to the dead.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  114 Lecture 21: Pericles, Oration; Lincoln, Gettysburg Address He continued, “It is altogether fi tting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” Dedicate, consecrate, and hallow are religious words. These men have made this ground sacred in dying for their country. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” When Americans cease to be touched by walking on the hallowed ground of Gettysburg, the ideals of those who fought will be but shadows. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the un fi nished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Like Pericles, Lincoln shifts back to the present: The living must take up the challenge. “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Although the Declaration of Independence mentions or invokes God four times, the Constitution does not refer to God. Further, it condones slavery. Lincoln is stating that the Constitution had a fl aw. The United States must have a new birth of freedom, and it must be under the will of God, who created all men equal. Although Lincoln used the word liberty at the beginning of the speech, he used the word freedom toward the end. The term liberty refers to political liberty; Lincoln is saying that the United States is about true freedom of the entire human race. Lincoln’s largely Christian audience would have understood that “shall not perish from the earth” echoes John 3:16, which states: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.” Lincoln has again transformed each of these soldiers into Christ, an individual who suffered and died so that the nation might live on. Lincoln was not an ostentatiously religious man, but he believed—and became more convinced as the war went on—that he had been called to this duty, to end the great sin of slavery. Both Pericles, in his long Funeral Oration, and Lincoln, in his brilliant two-minute address, made a statement that the noblest thing that any person can do is to die for his or her country.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  The Image presents a less clear-cut case. While the enigmatic transactions between the three characters are charged with a sense of the obscene—more like a premonition, since the obscene is reduced to being only a constituent of voyeurism—the book has an unequivocally happy ending, with the narrator finally united with Claire. But Story of O takes the same line as Bataille, despite a little intellectual play at the end: the book closes ambiguously, with several lines to the effect that two versions of a final suppressed chapter exist, in one of which O received Sir Stephen’s permission to die when he was about to discard her. Although this double ending satisfyingly echoes the book’s opening, in which two versions “of the same beginning” are given, it can’t, I think, lessen the reader’s sense that O is death-bound, whatever doubts the author expresses about her fate.) Bataille composed most of his books, the chamber music of pornographic literature, in récit form (sometimes accompanied by an essay). Their unifying theme is Bataille’s own consciousness, a consciousness in an acute, unrelenting state of agony; but as an equally extraordinary mind in an earlier age might have written a theology of agony, Bataille has written an erotics of agony. Willing to tell something of the autobiographical sources of his narratives, he appended to Histoire de l’Oeil some vivid imagery from his own outrageously terrible childhood. (One memory: his blind, syphilitic, insane father trying unsuccessfully to urinate.) Time has neutralized these memories, he explains; after many years, they have largely lost their power over him and “can only come to life again, deformed, hardly recognizable, having in the course of this deformation taken on an obscene meaning.” Obscenity, for Bataille, simultaneously revives his most painful experiences and scores a victory over that pain. The obscene, that is to say, the extremity of erotic experience, is the root of vital energies. Human beings, he says in the essay part of Madame Edwarda , live only through excess. And pleasure depends on “perspective,” or giving oneself to a state of “open being”, open to death as well as to joy. Most people try to outwit their own feelings; they want to be receptive to pleasure but keep “horror” at a distance. That’s foolish, according to Bataille, since horror reinforces “attraction” and excites desire. What Bataille exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death. Bataille conveys this insight not by devising sexual acts whose consequences are lethal, thereby littering his narratives with corpses. (In the terrifying Histoire de l’Oeil , for instance, only one person dies; and the book ends with the three sexual adventurers, having debauched their way through France and Spain, acquiring a yacht in Gibraltar to pursue their infamies elsewhere.) His more effective method is to invest each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically “mortal”.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  12 Lecture 2: Homer, Iliad request of Priam, Hector’s father, and the story itself ends with the funeral of Hector. Central questions of the Iliad include the following: Why are we here? Why is war waged? Why do innocents suffer? The Iliad is considered the fi rst great work of literature. It was the work most revered by the ancient Greeks. One theme of the Iliad is the role of the gods. Homer states, “Thus was the will of Zeus ful fi lled.” Who were the gods of Homer? Homer was a polytheist, believing in many gods. For Homer, these gods were real, not silly creations of mythology. These real gods embodied powerful forces. Polytheists de fi ne a divinity as a being capable of rendering supernatural benefi ts to the community. These powers could do good or harm. Mythology is a means of expressing a higher truth. The god Zeus, the king of gods and men, represents a seed of development that leads to an idea of one all- powerful and all-controlling god. Zeus can control fate, but men and women can make conscious decisions about good and evil. It was the will of Zeus that the Greeks and Trojans should suffer and that Troy be destroyed. Fate is what the gods decree for us in their power and knowledge. People make conscious decisions about good and evil, and these decisions give meaning to their lives. Agamemnon’s wife murdered Agamemnon because he had acquiesced in the sacri fi ce of their daughter. Hybris, defi ned as outrageous arrogance by which power is used to infl ict pain upon the innocent, is a moral wrong. Acquiescing in this sacrifi ce represented an act of hybris. Agamemnon believed his duty was to conquer Troy and return home in glory. The gods had made him morally blind. His absence of moral vision led him to commit hybris. The gods do not forget such outrages. His judgment would come. Agamemnon might come home, but he would die. One lesson of Homer is that the gods care about good and evil. Absolute right and absolute wrong exist. The gods ultimately punish what is wrong and reward what is right. Mortals lack vision to understand what is good and what is evil until it is too late. Homer believed that people do not understand the ways of the gods. The Iliad was a means of beginning to One lesson of Homer is that the gods care about good and evil.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Alaska would have liked this Rabe’a woman, I wrote in my notebook. But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine her looking down on us, still aware of us, but it seemed like a fantasy, and I never really felt it—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering. Like Rabe’a, I didn’t think people should believe in God because of heaven and hell. But I didn’t feel a need to run around with a torch. You can’t burn down a made-up place. — After class, as Takumi picked through his fries at McInedible, eating only the crunchiest, I felt the total loss of her, still reeling from the idea that she was not only gone from this world but from all of them. “How have you been?” I asked. “Uh,” he said, a mouth full of fries, “nah good. You?” “Not good.” I took a bite of cheeseburger. I’d gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels. “I miss her,” Takumi said, pushing away his tray, uninterested in the remaining soggy fries. “Yeah. I do, too. I’m sorry, Takumi,” and I meant it in the largest possible way. I was sorry we ended up like this, spinning wheels at a McDonald’s. Sorry the person who had brought us together now lay dead between us. I was sorry I let her die. Sorry I haven’t talked to you because you couldn’t know the truth about the Colonel and me, and I hated being around you and having to pretend that my grief is this uncomplicated thing—pretending that she died and I miss her instead of that she died because of me. “Me too. You’re not dating Lara anymore, are you?” “I don’t think so.” “Okay. She was kind of wondering.” I had been ignoring her, but by then she had begun to ignore me back, so I figured it was over, but maybe not. “Well,” I told Takumi, “I just can’t—I don’t know, man. That’s pretty complicated.” “Sure. She’ll understand. Sure. All good.” “Okay.” “Listen, Pudge. I—ah, I don’t know. It sucks, huh?” “Yeah.” twenty-seven days after SIX DAYS LATER, four Sundays after the last Sunday, the Colonel and I were trying to shoot each other with paintball guns while turning 900s in a half pipe. “We need booze. And we need to borrow the Eagle’s Breathalyzer.” “Borrow it? Do you know where it is?” “Yeah. He’s never made you take one?” “Um.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard III, Richard, when still the Duke of Gloucester, has murdered King Henry VI and his son, Prince Edward. Shortly thereafter he accosts Lady Anne, Prince Edward's widow, who knows what he has done to the two men closest to her, and who hates him as much as a woman can hate. Yet Richard attempts to seduce her. His method is simple: he tells her that what he did, he did because of his love for her. He wanted there to be no one in her life but him. His feelings were so strong he was driven to murder. Of course Lady Anne not only resists this line of reasoning, she abhors him. But he persists. Anne is at a moment of extreme vulnerability—alone in the world, with no one to support her, at the height of grief. Incredibly, his words begin to have an effect. Murder is not a seductive tactic, but the seducer does enact a kind of killing—a psychological one. Our past attachments are a barrier to the present. Even people we have left behind can continue to have a hold on us. As a seducer you will be held up to the past, compared to previous suitors, perhaps found inferior. Do not let it get to that point. Crowd out the past with your attentions in the present. If necessary, find ways to disparage their previous lovers—subtly or not so subtly, depending on the situation. Even go so far as to open old wounds, making them feel old pain and seeing by con- Isolate the Victim • 317 trast how much better the present is. The more you can isolate them from their past, the deeper they will sink with you into the present. The principle of isolation can be taken literally by whisking the target off to an exotic locale. This was Aly Khan's method; a secluded island worked best, and indeed islands, cut off from the rest of the world, have always been associated with the pursuit of sensual pleasures. The Roman Emperor Tiberius descended into debauchery once he made his home on the island of Capri. The danger of travel is that your targets are intimately exposed to you—it is hard to maintain an air of mystery. But if you take them to a place alluring enough to distract them, you will prevent them from focusing on anything banal in your character. Cleopatra lured Julius Caesar into taking a voyage down the Nile. Moving deeper into Egypt, he was further isolated from Rome, and Cleopatra was all the more seductive.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  mind— an unassailable libido-position which we ourselves spring, mourned for him, have since abandoned. and cut off their hair in tribute to their brother. The —SIGMUND FREUD wood nymphs mourned him too, and Echo sang her refrain to their lament. • The pyre, the tossing 74 • The Art of Seduction torches, and the bier, were Keys to the Character now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a According to the popular concept, Coquettes are consummate teases, experts at arousing desire through a provocative appearance or an al-flower with a circle of white luring attitude. But the real essence of Coquettes is in fact their ability to petals round a yellow trap people emotionally, and to keep their victims in their clutches long af-centre. ter that first titillation of desire. This is the skill that puts them in the ranks — O V I D , M E T A M O R P H O S E S , of the most effective seducers. Their success may seem somewhat odd, TRANSLATED BY MARY M. INNES since they are essentially cold and distant creatures; should you ever get to know one well, you will sense his or her inner core of detachment and self-love. It may seem logical that once you become aware of this quality you Selfishness is one of the will see through the Coquette's manipulations and lose interest, but more qualities apt to inspire love. often we see the opposite. After years of Josephine's coquettish games, — N A T H A N I E L HAWTHORNE Napoleon was well aware of how manipulative she was. Yet this conqueror of kingdoms, this skeptic and cynic, could not leave her. To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first The Socrates whom you understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you see has a tendency to fall in pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away. Too much at-love with good-looking tention can be interesting for a while, but it soon grows cloying and finally young men, and is always in their society and in an becomes claustrophobic and frightening. It signals weakness and neediness, ecstasy about t h e m . . . b u t an unseductive combination. How often we make this mistake, thinking once you see beneath the our persistent presence will reassure. But Coquettes have an inherent un-surface you will discover a degree of self-control of derstanding of this particular dynamic. Masters of selective withdrawal, which you can hardly form they hint at coldness, absenting themselves at times to keep their victim off a notion, gentlemen. . . . balance, surprised, intrigued. Their withdrawals make them mysterious, He spends his whole life pretending and playing and we build them up in our imaginations. (Familiarity, on the other hand, with people, and I doubt

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In the long negotiating sessions, Zhou made a show of enjoying his hosts' vodka. He never argued, and in fact agreed that the Chinese had made many mistakes, had much to learn from the more experienced Soviets: "Comrade Stalin," he said, "we are the first large Asian country to join the socialist camp under your guidance." Zhou had come prepared with all kinds of neatly drawn diagrams and charts, knowing the Russians loved such things. Stalin warmed up to him. The negotiations proceeded, and a few days after Zhou's arrival, the two parties signed a treaty of mutual aid— a treaty far more useful to the Chinese than to the Soviets. In 1959, China was again in deep trouble. Mao's Great Leap Forward, an attempt to spark an overnight industrial revolution in China, had been a devastating failure. The people were angry: they were starving while Beijing bureaucrats lived well. Many Beijing officials, Zhou among them, returned to their native towns to try to bring order. Most of them managed by bribes—by promising all kinds of favors—but Zhou proceeded differently: he visited his ancestral graveyard, where generations of his family were buried, and ordered that the tombstones be removed and the coffins buried deeper. Now the land could be farmed for food. In Confucian terms (and Zhou was an obedient Confucian), this was sacrilege, but everyone knew what it meant: Zhou was willing to suffer personally. Everyone had to sacrifice, even the leaders. His gesture had immense symbolic impact. When Zhou died, in 1976, an unofficial and unorganized outpouring of public grief caught the government by surprise. They could not understand how a man who had worked behind the scenes, and had shunned the adoration of the masses, could have won such affection. The capture of Chiang Kai-shek was a turning point in the civil war. To execute him might have been disastrous: it had been Chiang who had held the Nationalist army together, and without him it could have broken up into factions, allowing the Japanese to overrun the country. To force him to sign an agreement would have not helped either: he would have lost face before his army, would never have honored the agreement, and would have done everything he could to avenge his humiliation. Zhou knew that to execute or compel a captive will only embolden your enemy, and will have repercussions you cannot control. Charm, on the other hand, is a manipulative weapon that disguises its own manipulativeness, letting you gain a victory without stirring the desire for revenge. Zhou worked on Chiang perfectly, paying him respect, playing the inferior, letting him pass from the fear of execution to the relief of unexpected release. The general was allowed to leave with his dignity intact. Zhou knew all this would soften him up, planting the seed of the idea that perhaps the Communists were not so bad after all, and that he could change 90 • The Art of Seduction

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  them off. Tailor your sweet words to your targets' particular problems and fantasies. Promise something realizable, something possible, but do not make it too specific; you are inviting them to dream. If they are mired in dull routine, talk of adventure, preferably with you. Do not discuss how it will be accomplished; speak as if it magically already existed, somewhere in the future. Lift people's thoughts into the clouds and they will relax, their defenses will come down, and it will be that much easier to maneuver and lead them astray. Your words become a kind of elevating drug. The most anti-seductive form of language is argument. How many silent enemies do we create by arguing? There is a superior way to get people to listen and be persuaded: humor and a light touch. The nineteenth-century English politician Benjamin Disraeli was a master at this game. In Parliament, to fail to reply to an accusation or slanderous comment was a deadly mistake: silence meant the accuser was right. Yet to respond angrily, to get into an argument, was to look ugly and defensive. Disraeli used a different tactic: he stayed calm. When the time came to reply to an attack, he would slowly make his way to the speaker's table, pause, then utter a humorous or sarcastic retort. Everyone would laugh. Now that he had warmed people up, he would proceed to refute his enemy, still mixing in amusing comments; or perhaps he would simply move on to another subject, as if he were above it all. His humor took out the sting of any attack on him. Laughter and applause have a domino effect: once your listeners have laughed, they are more likely to laugh again. In this lighthearted mood they are also more apt to listen. A subtle touch and a bit of irony give you room to persuade them, move them to your side, mock your enemies. That is the seductive form of argument. Shortly after the murder of Julius Caesar, the head of the band of conspirators who had killed him, Brutus, addressed an angry mob. He tried to reason with the crowd, explaining that he had wanted to save the Roman Republic from dictatorship. The people were momentarily convinced— yes, Brutus seemed a decent man. Then Mark Antony took the stage, and he in turn delivered a eulogy for Caesar. He seemed overwhelmed with emotion. He talked of his love for Caesar, and of Caesar's love for the Roman people. He mentioned Caesar's will; the crowd clamored to hear it, but Antony said no, for if he read it they would know how deeply Caesar had loved them, and how dastardly this murder was. The crowd again insisted he read the will; instead he held up Caesar's bloodstained cloak, not-ing its rents and tears. This was where Brutus had stabbed the great general, he said; Cassius had stabbed him here. Then finally he read the will, which

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "I guess so." 527 "I'm sorry, honey. Pm sorry this happen to you." "It's all right." "I'm sorry, honey mouV "I like my life," I told her. "I'm going to have a good life." She still looked pained, so I took her hand. "Don't worry, yiayia. I won't tell anyone." "Who's to tell? Everybody's dead now." "You're not. I'll wait until you're gone." "Okay. When I die, you can tell everything." "I will." "Bravo, honey num. Bravo." At Assumption Church, no doubt against his wishes, Milton Stephanides was given a full Orthodox funeral. Father Greg per- formed the service. As for Father Michael Antoniou, he was later convicted of attempted grand larceny and served two years in prison. Aunt Zo divorced him and moved to Florida with Desdemona. Where to exacriy? New Smyrna Beach. Where else? A few years later, when my mother was forced to sell our house, she moved to Florida, too, and the three of them lived together as they once had on Hurl- but Street, until Desdemona's death in 1980. Tessie and Zoe are still in Florida today, two women living on their own. Milton's casket remained closed during the funeral. Tessie had given Georgie Pappas, the undertaker, her husband's wedding crown, so that it could be buried along with him. When it came time to give the deceased the final kiss, the mourners filed past Milton's coffin and kissed its burnished lid. Fewer people came to my father's funeral than we expected. None of the Hercules franchise owners showed up, not one of the men Milton had socialized with for years and years; and so we realized that, despite his bonhomie, Milton had never had any friends, only business associates. Family members turned out instead. Peter Tatakis, the chiropractor, arrived in his wine-dark Buick, and Bart Skiotis paid his respects at the church whose foundation he had laid with substandard materials. Gus and Helen Panos were there and, because it was a funeral, Gus's trache- otomy made his voice sound even more like the voice of death. Aunt Zo and our cousins didn't sit in front. That pew was reserved for my mother and brother. 528 And so it was I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one re- membered anymore, stayed behind on Middlesex, blocking the door, so that Milton's spirit wouldn't reenter the house. It was always a man who did this, and now I qualified. In my black suit, with my dirty Wallabees, I stood in the doorway, which was open to the win- ter wind. The weeping willows were bare but still massive and threw up their twisted arms like women in grief. The pastel yellow cube of our modern house sat cleanly on the white snow. Middlesex was now almost seventy years old. Though we had ruined it with our colonial furniture, it was still the beacon it was intended to be, a place with

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  After everything she’s done?”We shook our heads and cried on.After a few miles, Evelyn spoke up again. “I have some news from your mother.” We stopped sobbing.“Your mama didn’t give you to Sister Coleman.”I sat up and moved my head close to the back of Evelyn’s shoulder. “But I saw her handwriting on that paper.”“She gave her something called power of attorney. That way if there was an emergency, she could take you to the doctor.”“Really?”“Really. She’s in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’ll be there in the morning.” [image "006" file=Image00005.jpg] I woke the next day as I always did, with the image of my mother’s face fixed in my mind, only this time it didn’t recede. She looked at me through the car window, then the door opened and we tumbled into her. I buried my face in her neck and wept into her hair.“You’re here. You’re really here.”Gary climbed all over her. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he called again and again.“Yes, yes, I’m really here. It’s okay. It’s okay now.”That morning in Baton Rouge Mama promised she would never leave again. By the time the revival ended, she had changed her mind.“It’s just for two or three months, kids. There’s no one to play for the revivals right now, and until we find someone, I have to do it.”She said it broke her heart to leave us, and I believe it did. She cried and cried as she climbed into the backseat of someone’s old black Chevy. My brother, a quiet, easygoing kid, fell apart as the car drove away. He climbed the chain-link fence and when someone pulled him down, he kicked and flailed and cut his legs on the pointed metal pieces at the top. Blood ran in small streams down his legs as he raced the length of the fence howling, “No,” his mouth stretched into a wide, red o , like the entrance to a fun house. My mom’s face, framed in the car’s rear window, wore a look of surprise. Her arm waved from side to side, good-bye, good-bye. I watched the car grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared into that thin space where heaven and earth meet. The End-Time1966–2001 SUPPOSE YOU BREAK THIS WORLD TO BITS, ANOTHER MAY ARISE. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Faust Chapter SeventeenGOD WORKS IN SEVENS. THE RAINS CAME SEVEN DAYS AFTER NOAH SHUT the door of the ark. Egypt had seven fat years and seven lean years. The book of Revelation refers to seven churches, seven spirits, seven golden candlesticks, seven stars, seven lamps, seven seals, seven horns, seven eyes, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven thunders, seven thousand slain, seven heads, seven crowns, seven last plagues, seven golden vials, seven mountains, and seven kings. The only thing missing is seven swans a-swimming and the tune to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”Gary and I wandered through seven households in three years, and then Mama reappeared. Her return was as unfathomable as her departures.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  before he reached the end of his story, Brother Terrell slapped his hand on the man’s head, shouting, “In the name of Jesus! Be made whole!”He hit the guy so hard, the man fell to the ground.“Now, get up and walk. Don’t be afraid. Come on.”He pulled the man up and together they walked across the front of the tent. When they reached the altar area, the man grabbed his crutches and beat them into splinters on the ground. The spirit, and some would say frenzy, could not be contained. A woman who sat close to us and who had been too shy to make eye contact earlier was suddenly running around the tent at full speed, hair and skirts flying. Another woman close by thrust her baby into the arms of a nearby stranger and took off after her. I figured they would be walking by the time they made it all the way around, but they didn’t even look winded when they returned. Men all over the tent climbed the new tent poles for Jesus. Brother Terrell made his way to Randall’s cot and knelt beside him. We expected him to rise with Randall on his arm, but he stood up alone.Brother Terrell preached on divine healing every night. “I feel the presence of the Most High God tonight. Someone, oh, someone is reaching out to God tonight. Some-ooooooooone is touching the hem of his garment.”He paused and looked over his shoulder at the men on the platform. “Would some of y’all go bring Randall up here? I want him to be right in the middle of this divine power.”Just as the men settled Randall and his cot at the very front of the tent, the blood came. It covered the sheet that draped Randall and turned the sawdust around him red. The crowd issued a collective ooh .Brother Terrell never missed a beat. “Clean him up.”A couple of women scurried to the front and washed Randall’s face with a damp towel. Someone exchanged the bloody top sheet for a clean one from a nearby camper, and Brother Terrell preached on.“By the spi-rit of the Most High God, I was sent here tonight to set the captives free. By his stripes we are made whole, not just better, but whole. I proclaim victory over death, victory over disease, victory over the devil, victory over everything that would destroy God’s people.”He stood over Randall and began to sing “Victory in Jesus” a cappella and the crowd joined in. He broke down by the end of the chorus and someone led him away. Dockery and the other tent men carried Randall behind the platform and the crowd sang on.Randall went to the hospital for a transfusion. Brother Terrell didn’t want him to go, but the evangelistic team talked him into it; just so the boy could get some blood in him, they said. Two days after the transfusion, Randall was back at the front of the tent on the cot.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  o. _ The early followers of Jesus, however, did not share our common view of the afterlife, in which a person dies and goes to heaven. Jesus's early followers were apocalypticists who believed that at the end of the age, all dead people would be physically raised. o When these people had visions of Jesus, possibly induced from agony over his death, guilt, or anger, they naturally believed that he had been physically raised from the dead. And this led to two immediate conclusions: First, God had raised Jesus and made him his son, and second, the resurrection had started. Those who had experienced visions concluded that because Jesus had been raised, the general resurrection of all people was soon to come. For this reason, these followers of Jesus concluded that they were living in the last days. oc The early followers were wrong, of course; time has continued to march on. But the belief in Jesus’s resurrection has marched on, as well, and became the basis of the Christian faith held by some | billion people in the world today. The first followers of Jesus came to believe in it because they had visions of Jesus after his death. Suggested Reading Allison, Resurrecting Jesus. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Lidemann, 7he Resurrection of Christ. 74 Scanned by CamScanner Did the Jews Expect a Suffering Messiah? Lecture 12 n the aftermath of Jesus’s death, his followers insisted on four points: Jesus was the Jewish messiah; Jesus was crucified; therefore, the Jewish messiah was supposed to suffer and die; and the suffering and death of the messiah had been predicted in the Jewtsh scriptures. Three of these four points put Christians into direct conflict with Jews who were not followers of Jesus, All agreed that Jesus had been crucified, but on the other points, there were harsh disagreements, Non-Christian Jews insisted and, for the most part, continue to insist that Jesus was not the messiah, that the messiah was not supposed to suffer and die, and that scripture did not predict a suffering messiah. The Anointed One e The word Christos, from which we get the English word “Christ,” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word mashiach, from which we get the English word “messiah.” “Christ” (Greek) and “messiah” (Hebrew) mean the same thing. Christians so commonly and widely called Jesus the messiah that Christ eventually came to be taken as his actual name, even though it was originally a title. e The Hebrew word mashiach literally means “anointed one,” which is also the root meaning of the Greek word Christos. Why would anyone call a savior figure the anointed one? Understanding the answer to this question can take us a long way toward understanding why Jews and Christians never agreed on whether Jesus could be the messiah.