Guilt

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 Fixed Stars (0)

  Before that fall, I had never lived in our house alone, as its sole adult resident. Brandon and I had had big plans for the house, but we hadn’t had the money to see them through. He’d left without complaint. You know me, he said. I’ll have fun finding a new house someday. You know I like a project. I threw out his expired prescriptions and the ominous-looking earwax-removal kit he’d never used. I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose. While I futzed, I listened to podcasts. In an episode of On Being, Krista Tippett mused with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr on the nature and necessity of suffering. It’s a simplistic metaphor, Father Rohr explains, but, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. . . . If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation. What I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. . . . Yeah, that disorder is part of the deal.”35 This was around the time that the sewer backed up onto the old cherry-red carpet of the basement bathroom. The sewer pipes under the yard had eroded and split and would have to be replaced, at substantial cost. This work would not be covered by homeowners’ insurance. Because we still owned the house jointly, Brandon and I split the bill, both pillaging our savings. I cried a lot, made calls to a contractor acquaintance, and scoured Yelp reviews of sewer companies. Water mitigation, asbestos abatement, trenchless sewer replacement: I would learn to use these terms correctly in a sentence. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done. I had developed a feverish obsession with someone who was not my spouse; had ended my marriage of a decade, thereby stripping my child of a home with both her parents in it; and had meanwhile spent five months riding the chaotic sea of a relationship that sent me pitching with lust, self-loathing, and confusion, in that order, only to end it. I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  • • • It would take the Tennessean James Agee to probe the meaning of “poor white” on a truly meaningful level. In his powerfully drawn, enduringly evocative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee attempted to toss the source of the white trash fetish back onto the middle class. The unusual book included the chaste still life–style photographs of Walker Evans, and addressed what Odum’s slow-to-change cohort refused to do: interrogate how an interpreter imposed his values on the subject. There could be no such thing as objective journalism. Agee opened the book by wondering out loud how a Harvard-educated, middle-class man like himself could write about poor whites without turning them into objects of pity or disgust. He did not want to be a mere gawker. How could he “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’”? Was it possible to convey the “cruel radiance of what is”? Probably not. 57 So Agee experimented with different strategies, offering detailed descriptions of material objects: shoes, overalls, the sparse arrangement of furnishings in the tenant's home. With a meticulous attention to detail, he tried in words to imitate the camera’s “ice-cold” vision. In another of his departures from conventional reporting, he interspersed what he imagined were the unspoken thoughts of the poor tenant with the uncensored insults he had heard from the landlord. Inside the mind of the tenant, he voiced disbelief: how did he get “trapped,” how did he become “beyond help, beyond hope”? He gave his subjects real feelings, descriptive laments. The landlord’s cruelty comes through his laughter over Agee’s enjoyment of the tenants’ “home cooking.” The landlord curses a poor cropper as a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” who had bragged that he hadn’t bought his family a bar of soap in five years. A woman in one of the tenant families was, in the landlord’s words, the “worst whore” in this part of this country—second only to her mother. The whole bunch were, to the owner, “the lowest trash you can find.” 58 There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow-

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  In my family, porn and anything sexual, was regarded as dirty and wrong. I didn’t dare ask my parents about sex. The community we lived in was so conservative that any type of reality-based sex education was banned in the schools. I grew up shy, sexually ignorant, and extremely guilty about masturbating. Like other boys, I saw porn on occasion, mostly pictures of naked women in magazines that were passed around by my friends. It really turned me on. Still, I didn’t usually look at porn when I was young. It was there and I wanted to do it, but I worried there must be something weird about me for wanting it. I did use images from porn when I masturbated though. During college, I occasionally rented porn videos and bought magazines, but still I was too ashamed and afraid to use porn regularly. After college I began dating Alice, a cute woman I didn’t know very well. I figured if a girl shows interest in me, seems to like me, and I find her attractive, then I should marry her. She said yes, but we agreed to abstain from sex for religious reasons until we got married. Alice and I were engaged for four years. We didn’t even kiss. As you can imagine, being in my early twenties, it was incredibly sexually frustrating. About this same time I went to work at a computer firm. I was paid to research and catalog Usenet groups. These are virtual communities where anyone can post anything anonymously. A large percentage of the Usenet groups are devoted to porn. If you are into an unusual type of sex, you can find porn about it easily. In the Usenet group you know that the other people posting to the newsgroup are also into it. I became fascinated with these anonymous porn worlds and the sexual content they contained. For example, I had a little bit of a foot fetish. One of my favorite groups featured the barefoot category. I’d go there and look. I also became interested in sexual photos of underage girls and visited a lot of those sites. I didn’t hide from my fiancée the fact that I used Internet porn. Alice seemed jealous and hurt, but tolerated it. I felt a lot of guilt about the porn and the masturbation, but my bad feelings only seemed to intensify my orgasms. And I justified it by thinking, It’s better than being sexually frustrated all the time, or sexual with someone else. As time went on, though, I turned my sexual attention more to the pornography and less to the relationship with my fiancée. I developed a pattern of masturbating to porn whenever I was feeling lonely, frustrated, or bored. Our decision to hold off on sex, coupled with how easy it was to access Internet porn at my job, turned my porn use into an addiction.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Fixated on efficiency, he combined salt and pepper into one shaker and would sometimes eat breakfast late at night in case he didn’t have time to do so the next morning. Jake left notes he scribbled to my mother in the refrigerator to remind her, “Sliced cheese costs the same, tastes just as good, and is easier to use when making sandwiches.” He filled plastic bags with ice and wore them around his neck on sultry summer days as he pedaled his bike toward Lake Michigan invoking his motto: Under 75 degrees or underwater! Jake brought a backpack full of maps, almanacs, and little notebooks with him wherever we went and made pronouncements about modern culture that were impossible to prove. He’d say things like, No one eats in their cars anymore or Catholics don’t buy full-length mirrors . He sounded authoritative enough, but if you asked for his sources, you’d find that they were anecdotal or based on very small sample sizes. When Jake was in seventh grade, kids beat him up on the St. Francis playground so viciously that my parents transferred him to the public school. Not only had I done nothing to stop the harassment, I pretended not to notice. Once, I even laughed nervously. Like Peter in the garden at Gethsemane, I knew instantly that I had just betrayed the one person in my life who most consistently modeled love and compassion, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being so weak. 1957, Me: The bedrooms were full by the time I arrived. So, for the first several months, I slept in a bassinet by the front door like a human burglar alarm. From the few baby pictures taken of me, I can see why there weren’t more. The left side of my face was swollen where the forceps had grabbed me, making it look like I was winking, the creepy way a prizefighter does after getting clobbered in the tenth round. My feet turned in toward each other, so I had to wear plaster casts on both legs and baby shoes affixed to a metal bar to keep them straight. My mother worried about why I didn’t walk or talk or reach for things as early as her other kids. The pediatrician examined me thoroughly and considered all the evidence. You’re right, Jean, he told her. This one is slow. But she’ll probably be okay socially. 1959, Patty: My wingman, a Goody Two-shoes who worked so hard to please me and everyone else that my friend Mary Claire nicknamed her Yygor (pronounced EE-gor), an eccentric spelling of Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant. She baked pretzels for Holmer in her Easy-Bake oven and made a papier-mâché likeness of him one Father’s Day, using one of his many empty beer bottles as the body. With my stick-straight hair, I admit to being jealous when old ladies in the grocery store would coo at Patty’s adorable ringlets.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  If a man was formerly told that if he did not submit to the power of the state he would be subjected to the attacks of evil men, of external and internal enemies; that he would be compelled himself to struggle with them and to subject himself to being killed; that therefore it would be advantageous for him to bear certain privations, in order to free himself from these calamities,—he was able to believe it all, because the sacrifices which he made for the state were only private sacrifices and gave him the hope for a peaceful life in an imperishable state, in the name of which he made these sacrifices. But now, when these sacrifices have not only increased tenfold, but the advantages promised to him are absent, it is natural for any one to imagine that his submission to power is quite useless. But not in this alone lies the fatal significance of the universal military service, as a manifestation of that contradiction which is contained in the social concept of life. The main manifestation of this contradiction consists in the fact that with the universal military service every citizen, upon becoming a soldier, becomes a supporter of the state structure, and a participant in everything which the government does and the legality of which he does not recognize. The governments assert that the armies are needed mainly for the purpose of external defence; but that is not true. They are needed first of all against their subjects, and every man who does military service involuntarily becomes a participant in all the violence which the state exerts over its own subjects. To convince himself that every man who does his military service becomes a participant in such deeds of the government as he does not acknowledge and cannot acknowledge, let a man only remember what is being done in every state in the name of order and of the good of the nation, things which the army appears as the executor of. All the struggles of dynasties and of the various parties, all the executions, which are connected with these disturbances, all the suppressions of revolts, all the employment of military force for the dispersion of popular crowds, the suppression of strikes, all the extortions of taxes, all the injustice of the distribution of the ownership of land, all the oppressions of labour,—all this is produced, if not directly by the armies, at least by the police, which is supported by the armies. He who does military service becomes a participant in all these matters, which in some cases are doubtful to him and in many cases are directly opposed to his conscience.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Now he hates you. It’s clear. You brought him here, out of his cozy home with the three children and the wife who will follow him into sepulchers. You brought him out into the demon slush of January, into this dingy room, and you are forcing him to spend all his earnings and all his parents’ savings on this slick and joyless attorney, and you are fixing to ruin his life. All that he has built. Every Fisher-Price learning desk he has switched to On in the airless expanse of seven A.M. He sold one home and bought another because of you. In North Dakota right now, Aaron Knodel is Teacher of the Year; across the whole state he is deemed the absolute best in the business. And here you are, you vagabond freak, you spawn of alcoholics, you child of suicide, you girl who has been with older men before and gotten them into trouble, army men, upright men of America, and here you are again, you destructive tart, trying to take down the Teacher of the Year. He exhales at you pungently. Breath of eggs. The other thing that is abundantly clear—you must stop caring. Immediately. If you don’t, you might never get out of this room. You search for the end of your heart and, unbelievably, you find it. Your gratitude to yourself and to God is dizzying. How many days have you felt you were doing the right thing? Today is one. Maybe the only one. You thought you’d still want to fuck him. You’d stalked him online. It’s not even stalking these days. You open your computer and ghouls pile up. You can’t avoid obsequious write-ups in local papers. Or Facebook will advertise a link to the store where your former lover’s gloves are from. The recent pictures you saw made you still tingle, and you smarted from bygone lust. But as you sit here now, there’s nothing. His tight, petite mouth. His imperfect skin. His lips aren’t sensual but dry and distracting. He looks sickly, as if he’s been eating muffins and drinking AA coffee and Coca-Cola and sitting in a drafty basement scowling at the wall. Good morning, says his lawyer, Hoy, who is a terror, with his mustachio of wiry, wizard hairs. He has made sure to announce to the press that his client had taken and passed a polygraph test, even though the prosecutor said it was unlikely to be admissible in court. You can see the judgment in Hoy’s whiskers. He’s the type that makes you feel like a poorly educated piece of shit with a car that won’t start on winter mornings like this one. He says, Would you please state your full name for the record. The court reporter taps the keys, your brother David breathes with you in unity, you say your full name out loud. You say, Maggie May Wilken. You swish your long, thought-out hair.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I endure all the risks of coitus in the same way, the eccentricities of each partner and the minor physical discomforts. This can be put down to an ability to programme the body independently of physical reactions. A body and the mind attached to it do not live in the same temporal sphere, and their reactions to the same external stimuli are not always synchronised. That is how we hear a shattering piece of news without batting an eyelid or, conversely, we can carry on crying even after we have taken on board the fact that everything possible has been done to console us. If I set an assembly-line of pleasure in motion inside me, even if my body encounters some discomforts, they will not be enough to stop the assembly-line. In other words, I will only become aware of the discomfort after the fact, after I seem to have reached the pleasure, and in the aftermath you really don’t care about the discomfort, you forget it before you have noticed it. How else could you explain the fact that for years the same men caused me the same hassles and I never complained or tried to avoid them? I am someone who hates to feel wet anywhere other than under a shower, but I have frequently been splattered with great drops of sweat by one particular man. I have never seen anyone sweat as much as he did. I could distinguish the impact of each drop as it fell onto me. He didn’t seem to be bothered about feeling too hot, but I had an icy feeling all over my soaked chest. Perhaps I compensated for this discomfort by listening to the wet smacking of his thighs against mine; I have always been stimulated by noises. I could have from time to time asked him nicely to wipe himself, but I didn’t. Nor did I ever get over the allergy I had to one particular cheek being rubbed against mine. Given that the problem was chronic, shouldn’t I have smeared myself with cream in preparation for my rendezvous with the owner of the cheek, who made a point of shaving carefully. No, I always came away from his flat with half my face on fire. The marks took hours to fade. It could also be that, on the subject of the discontinuity between the mind and body, in this case, my feelings of guilt for visiting this man in secret could have added to the allergic condition to make me go red. There, the mind was catching up with the body in spite of itself.

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

  To his thirtieth or fortieth year he lived in heathen blindness and licentiousness.1517 Towards the end of the second century be embraced Christianity, we know not exactly on what occasion, but evidently from deepest conviction, and with all the fiery energy of his soul; defended it henceforth with fearless decision against heathens, Jews, and heretics; and studied the strictest morality of life. His own words may be applied to himself: "Fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani." He was married, and gives us a glowing picture of Christian family life, to which we have before referred; but in his zeal for every form of self-denial, he set celibacy still higher, and advised his wife, in case he should die before her to remain a widow, or, at least never to marry an unbelieving husband; and he afterwards put second marriage even on a level with adultery. He entered the ministry of the Catholic church,1518 first probably in Carthage, perhaps in Rome, where at all events he spent some time1519 but, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, he never rose above the rank of presbyter. Some years after, between 199 and 203, he joined the puritanic, though orthodox, sect of the Montanists. Jerome attributes this change to personal motives, charging it to the envy and insults of the Roman clergy, from whom he himself experienced many an indignity.1520 But Tertullian was inclined to extremes from the first, especially to moral austerity. He was no doubt attracted by the radical contempt for the world, the strict asceticism, the severe discipline, the martyr enthusiasm, and the chiliasm of the Montanists, and was repelled by the growing conformity to the world in the Roman church, which just at that period, under Zephyrinus and Callistus, openly took under its protection a very lax penitential discipline, and at the same time, though only temporarily, favored the Patripassian error of Praxeas, an opponent of the Montanists. Of this man Tertullian therefore says, in his sarcastic way: He has executed in Rome two works of the devil; has driven out prophecy (the Montanistic) and brought in heresy (the Patripassian); has turned off the Holy Ghost and crucified the Father.1521 Tertullian now fought the catholics, or the psychicals, is he frequently calls them, with the same inexorable sternness with which he had combated the heretics. The departures of the Montanists, however, related more to points of morality and discipline than of doctrine; and with all his hostility to Rome, Tertullian remained a zealous advocate of the catholic faith, and wrote, even from his schismatic position, several of his most effective works against the heretics, especially the Gnostics. Indeed, as a divine, he stood far above this fanatical sect, and gave it by his writings an importance and an influence in the church itself which it certainly would never otherwise have attained.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Although this chapter has focused on the prefrontal, and to some extent the parietal, cortex in consciousness, a number of different regions of the prefrontal cortex have been implicated in one way or another. Abbreviations: PFC, prefrontal cortex; PFC DL , dorsal lateral PFC; PFC VL , ventral lateral PFC; PFC DM , dorsal medial PFC; PFC VM , ventral medial PFC; OFC, orbital frontal cortex; OFC L , lateral OFC; OFC M , medial OFC; ACC, anterior cingulate cortex. IS THAT ALL THERE IS? We still don’t fully understand how qualia of an experience, the “what it’s like” to have that experience, comes about. But much progress has been made in understanding the brain mechanisms of mental state consciousness in the past several decades. Part of this success is due to advances in the ability to measure activity in the human brain, but equally important are conceptual advances with respect to the psychological nature of consciousness. Although I did research on consciousness in split-brain patients several decades ago, I’m not a consciousness researcher these days. I therefore defer to the wisdom of the field to tell us how consciousness comes about. When this is figured out, we will then know how feelings like fear and anxiety come about as well, since they are states of consciousness. While emotional states of consciousness have ingredients that other states do not have, fundamentally they involve the same mechanisms as any other state in which you know that you are experiencing something. I focused on how we become aware of a visual stimulus in this chapter. But I ignored an important part of perceptual awareness. In order to be conscious of what a stimulus is, you need conscious access to more than just its sensory properties. You also need access to memory, which gives meaning to sensory stimuli. The next chapter explores the crucial role of memory in consciousness and the contribution of different kinds of memory to different kinds of consciousness, at least one of which may be unique to humans. CHAPTER 11 THERAPY: LESSONS FROM THE LABORATORY “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.” —ALEXANDER POPE 1 “Changing the content of our memories or altering their emotional tonalities, however desirable to alleviate guilty or painful consciousness, could subtly reshape who we are, at least to ourselves. With altered memories we might feel better about ourselves, but it is not clear that the better-feeling ‘we’ remain the same as before.” —PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS 2 I n the fall of 2000 I started getting calls and emails from people asking me to erase their memories.

• From Theology: A Very Short Introduction (2013)

  To face up to oneself in the light of God embodied in Jesus Christ is at the same time to realize both how imperfect one is and also that one is before someone who embodies an embracing forgiveness for sin. But what is sin? What about the significance of the death of Jesus? How is being forgiven related to forgiving? Later chapters will explore these questions, but for now it is worth raising the issue of worship itself going wrong. ‘The corruption of the best is the worst’, and when the dynamics of worship are distorted or misdirected they can be devastating in their effects. At its most blatant, this is what is called ‘idolatry’, when people relate to something less than God in a way appropriate only to God. All the gifts, energies, and enthusiasms of individuals and whole communities are mobilized in the service of something which is not God, and the whole ‘ecology’ of life is distorted and polluted. Some common idols are national power and glory, money and prosperity, status and reputation, ideologies and ideals of many sorts, pleasure and self-fulfilment, comfort and security, heroes and heroines. Yet the distortions of worship are often not so blatant. All the forms of true worship can remain while there is some corruption—perhaps in who is excluded, or in political allegiance, or in failure to respond to need, or in moral standards or doctrinal truth. Theology has a critical role, testing all that comes together in worship, including teaching and preaching. Theology also diagnoses and responds to the difficulties faced by worship in particular cultures. In Western culture at present, amidst the multiple overwhelmings described in Chapter 1 , worship often has to struggle to maintain its integrity, liveliness, and significance. One common response is for worshippers to become preoccupied with themselves and their communities, focusing on the means of worship (such as liturgical forms, ministerial leadership, distinctive doctrines, or religious experience) to the disadvantage of the dynamics of participation in the Trinitarian God of love, wisdom, and beauty, and the sharing of that in the world. Theology here tries to recall worshippers to full recognition of the source, character, and orientation of their worship. This is confession in the full sense, assessing the whole life of oneself and one’s community in relation to God. It is both intellectually demanding and inevitably controversial, and it can lead into deep discussion with others whose ‘worship’, in the broad sense discussed above, leads them to assessments that agree or disagree with those made in the light of the Trinitarian God. The five forms of prayer—praise, thanks, intercession, petition, and confession—are just one way into the theology of worship and the questions it raises about the interrelating of God, worshippers, other people, and the world. A crucial recurring issue in it was about how to understand the activity of God, and the next section takes up that topic in relation to human action.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He put his hand lightly around her shoulder, her soft and fragrant shoulder. Did she notice? They were each embarked on a solitary narrative of intoxication. Repartee wasn’t part of the whole thing. Davenport looked the capsules over admiringly, like a collector of fine wines. Paul let his settle under his tongue. He felt a little bad about how easy it was, leading Davenport down this road, but in the long run, by late next week, they would forgive one another. —Hey, maybe you should only take a half, old lady, Hood said to Libbets. Why don’t you put half in a glass of orange juice or something? You don’t weigh as much as we do. —You guys aren’t trying to rip me off or anything, are you? Libbets said. It was almost like she was going to cry for a second. Paul was shaking his head, he was trying to wave her off. She swallowed the whole thing. —No way, Davenport said. You mean so we could have our way with your sleeping body? Davenport laughed grimly. Libbets had breasts and hips—she was curvy in fact, she was all gentle curves—hidden under her baggy army fatigues and sweatshirt. Two against one, that was Davenport’s idea. Her parents wouldn’t be home for days. No, Paul would defend her against Davenport. Take me, but leave the girl alone. She was friendlier than she wanted to be, she smiled more than she wanted to smile. The fact that she’d permitted losers like Hood and Davenport into her manse proved it. Thank God these exceptions arose. Thank God for drinking a bottle of wine with Liza during first class Friday morning. Thank God for snorting speed with Laura and Dave and going to the Tuck Shop to eat malted milk balls. Thank God for the confraternity of burnouts. —Naw, Davenport said, we had a period in which we loved unconscious women, but we’re over that now. Time stretched out. The world was full of information, but it was all happening more slowly. Paul buried his capsule in a potted palm by the window. But he was succumbing to the pot and beer. Some labyrinthine and endless decision was being made about whether or not to go to a nightclub called Max’s something or other. Would Sue Richards return to Reed Richards? Would Francis Ford Coppola make a sequel to The Godfather? Worlds real and imagined buzzed side by side, options and conclusions appeared and disappeared. When Davenport arranged himself on the couch, to watch Sanford and Son with the sound off, Paul saw how easy some things are, how you don’t need to try so hard. Davenport wouldn’t rise from that couch for twelve hours. —I’m a hothead, Libbets, he said. I’m— —Huh? Let’s go into the living room. Let’s let him sleep. —He’s just crashed. This doesn’t last forever. —Don’t you think we ought to eat something? But they couldn’t just leave Davenport. —I wonder how bad the weather is, Paul said.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  In the story I’ve created for myself of that night so many years ago, the next thing I recall is waking and finding the whole house dark. I remember Patty in her bed next to mine. Danny, the baby, was snuggled in the crib in the corner of our room in his light-yellow Dr. Denton pajamas zipped up tight, lying on his belly with his face to the side and his little butt in the air. My throat was sore, and my head was throbbing. I stumbled down the hallway, running my arm along the wall to guide me. I remember hearing Grandma snore in the next room while her false teeth soaked in a glass on the bathroom sink. Or do I? This sounds like a cartoon. These flourishes are a little too tidy. It can’t really have happened that way. But, as I strain to fill in the blanks, that’s the way I remember it. Mom, I whispered. Mommmmmmmmm. The room glowed with the light from their TV, which emitted no sound, at least none that I can recall. I spotted Holmer lying on his side, smiling slightly and hugging his pillow like he was spooning with my mother. I sidled around to her side of the bed, hoping to burrow in next to her. We all loved to curl there with my mother at bedtime as she read us our favorite books, Nappy the Dog and, my favorite, Dr. Seuss’s Happy Birthday to You! If you’d never been born, you might be a wasn’t. A wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t. I’d often wander into my parents’ bedroom late at night after the others were asleep. I’d hop in on my mother’s side of the bed to rest my head on her soft, warm belly. Then I’d run my fingers up her arm and feel her scratchy armpit, like sandpaper or the cat’s tongue. She’d bat my arm away and roll over with her back to me. Cut that out, kid, she’d say dreamily. But the sheet on her side of the bed was cold. I reached for her pillow and tried to smell my way to her—some hairspray, a little whiff of Chanel No. 5 perhaps. Nothing. Just Holmer’s tang, a mixture of Old Spice, cigarettes, and bourbon. Or was it rum? I can’t recall, but this much I know with dead certainty: My mother wasn’t there. I remember stumbling back to my bed thinking I’d really blown it this time. Why did I have to go and ruin everything by screaming at the dinner table like that? Sister Mary Assisi says, Try to be a better girl, Margaret. Be more like the Little Flower. She coughed up blood, but no one heard her making a big fuss about it. She knew how to offer up her suffering to the poor souls in purgatory. She knew how to keep a secret.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe. But over time the innocence I laughed at began to irritate me. It was a peculiar kind of irritation. I saw it years later in men I served with, and felt it myself, when unarmed Vietnamese civilians talked back to us while we were herding them around. Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. One afternoon I pulled the trigger. I had been aiming at two old people, a man and a woman, who walked so slowly that by the time they turned the comer at the bottom of the hill my little store of self-control was exhausted. I had to shoot. I looked up and down the street. It was empty. Nothing moved but a pair of squirrels chasing each other back and forth on the telephone wires. I followed one in my sights. Finally it stopped for a moment and I fired. The squirrel dropped straight into the road. I pulled back into the shadows and waited for something to happen, sure that someone must have heard the shot or seen the squirrel fall. But the sound that was so loud to me probably seemed to our neighbors no more than the bang of a cupboard slammed shut. After a while I sneaked a glance into the street. The squirrel hadn’t moved. It looked like a scarf someone had dropped. When my mother got home from work I told her there was a dead squirrel in the street. Like me, she was an animal lover. She took a cellophane bag off a loaf of bread and we went outside and looked at the squirrel. “Poor little thing,” she said. She stuck her hand in the wrapper and picked up the squirrel, then pulled the bag inside out away from her hand. We buried it behind our building under a cross made of popsicle sticks, and I blubbered the whole time. I blubbered again in bed that night. At last I got out of bed and knelt down and did an imitation of somebody praying, and then I did an imitation of somebody receiving divine reassurance and inspiration. I stopped crying.

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

  He dedicated his book to Wolmar. It did not occur to him that anybody would ever censure him for his poems, least of all on moral grounds; but this is precisely what happened. Prurient minds have read between his lines what he never intended to put there, and imagined offences of which he was not guilty even in thought.1279 And what made the case blacker against him was his subsequent Protestantism. Because he became a leader of the Reformed Church, free-thinkers and livers and the adherents of the old faith have brought up against him the fact that in the days of his worldly and luxurious life he had used their language, and been as pagan and impure as they. The book had scarcely begun its career, and the praises had scarcely begun to be received, ere Beza fell seriously sick. Sobered by his gaze into the eyes of death, his conscience rebuked him for his duplicity in receiving ecclesiastical benefices as if he was a faithful son of the Church, whereas he was at heart a Protestant; for his cowardice in cloaking his real opinions; for his negligence in not keeping the promise he had voluntarily made to the woman he had secretly married four years before; and for the general condition of his private and public life. The teachings of Wolmar came back to him. This world seemed very hollow;. its praises and honors very cloying. The call to a higher, purer, nobler life was heard, and he obeyed; and, although only convalescent, leaving father and fatherland, riches and honors, he fled from the city of his triumphs and his trials, and, taking Claudine Denosse with him, crossed the border into Switzerland,1280 and on Oct. 23, 1548, entered the city of Geneva. He was doubtless attracted thither because his intimate friend Jean Crespin, one of the witnesses of his secret alliance, was living there, likewise a fugitive for religion’s sake—and there lived John Calvin. From being the poet of the Renaissance, bright, witty, free, Beza, from the hour he joined the Reformed Church, became a leader in all its affairs and one of the chiefs of Protestantism.1281 § 168. Beza at Lausanne and as a Delegate to the German Princes. Beza’s earliest business after greeting Calvin was to marry in church Claudine Denosse. Then he looked around for an occupation that would support him. He considered for a time going into the printing business with Crespin, but on his return from a visit to Wolmar at Tübingen he yielded to the persuasions of Pierre Viret, who entertained him as he was passing through Lausanne, and on Nov. 6, 1549, became professor of Greek in the Academy there,1282and entered upon a course of great usefulness and influence.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  פשת against individuals Gn 31" 5077 Ex 22°(E),‏ פ' Pr ro! 17! 28% 296162; mney‏ 25° ”24 18 ro, ef. 17° 19"‏ על כל-פשעים IAS Nan‏ ;125 of nation, against nation: Am 1°98‏ .2 ,28% of land 1285. | Elsewh. 3. against God: a.‏ ;21 Is 581 595 Mi 1°°* 3° Am 5”;‏ חטאת || in gen.,‏ eva‏ פ" ;”18 Ez‏ עשה פ' ;"107 "21 py Ez‏ || APD‏ על ;)1( 5° Is 59” Jb 35° Je‏ רבל ם' ;33% Jb 347 he addeth transgression unto ©‏ חטאתו פ' Is57*; personified as evil spirit,‏ יקדי פ' ; his sin‏ b. as recognized by sinner;‏ 46% נאם פשע he knows it ~51°, makes known concerning‏ Jb 31%;‏ (כסה) it to " 32°, does not cover it‏ turns from it Is59” Ez18"; casts it away from‏ him 132218. 0.6300 deals with it: by wsiting‏ it (7pp) Am 3 * 89”, dealing with one accord-‏ making 16 known to‏ ,™39 192 עשה כ ing to it,‏ sinner Jb 13” 36°; punishing in various ways:‏ because of it Is 537%; 6 by acc. to it Am 2*°‏ כזם/ La r¥ yoke of‏ על 75 :213501 for it,.c.‏ :ללד גי onde Jb 84;‏ בד פ' transgression ; personified,‏ לא נשא ל ’ he does not grant forgiveness to it,‏ it‏ (נשא) Ex 23% 108 24% )13(. d. God forgives‏ Ex 347 Nu 14%)2(, Jb 7”, cf. 32'; pardons‏ ef. Pr igi)‏ עבר K 8°; passes over (by‏ 1 (סלח) y 103"; covers over‏ (הרחיק) Mi 78; removes‏ 65';—ef. (of priest) ‘51 wpa oy 753)‏ (כפר) Ly 16% and confession of ’5 over (by) goat v";‏ ופ' ;51° שש 44% ”43 Is‏ (מחה) —God blots out‏ 39°.—Jb35"‏ הציל מן BINDS 257: delivers from,‏ read YYB forWBq.v. 4. guilt of transgression‏ without (guilt of) transgression‏ 2 פ' ,)2 (cf. yy‏ Ez 33%; 323‏ פ' inoy‏ 59% ש Tb 33° 34% BND‏ INDY‏ ;סז נקיתי מפ' ; ''5 ש Is 24%; B32‏ עליה פ' defile themselves with all (the guilt of ) their‏ לפ transgressions Ez14"37°; “2 W¥2 ON Jbr14™.‏ punishment for transgression, Dn 8° 9”,‏ .5 האתן offering for transgression,‏ .6 .3 עון ef.‏ shall I give my first-born as an‏ 67 ג31 בבורי פשעי (4 הטאת offering for my transgression (cf.‏ Trap n.({m.] solution, interpretation‏ (loan-word from Aram. 812) ;—estr.’p Ec 81.‏ n.[m.] flax, linen (/dub.; NH‏ [פשת]1 FAVA, Pun. door ; Low?) ;—sf. ‘NYS Ho 27;‏ Jos‏ פשתי elsewhere pl. ONWB Jur5"+, estr.‏ Jos 2°‏ פָּשְתִי הָע'ץ flax, after gathering,‏ .2°;—1 inflammable Ju 15" (sim.); as‏ ;)£ 2 עץ (JE, v.‏ natural product (+2¥) Ho 27; as material,‏ 2°NB Ez 40°; of various garthents Je 13' Ez‏ פ' (P), cf. Pr‏ ו FU OCS +23 Dt 22011 Ly I‏ .([שָריק] .צ) 19° 15 עַבְדִי פ' שָריקוּת ;31% 2H‏ פשתה THAW n.f. flax;—’5: 1. growing Ex‏ ge (3). 2. =wick Is 42" 43” (in sim.).‏ .פתת Ns v.‏

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Know what I mean?” I nodded, and presented her with an expression that was meant to register dawning comprehension. “Good!” she said. She slapped her palms down on the table. “Ready to try again? I said that I was. Sister James led me back to the confessional. I knelt and began again: “Bless me Father, for—” “All right,” he said. “We’ve been here before. Just talk plain.” “Yes Father.” Again I closed my eyes over my folded hands. “Come come,” he said, with a certain sharpness. “Yes, Father.” I bent close to the screen and whispered, “Father, I steal.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What do you steal?” “I steal money, Father. From my mother’s purse when she’s in the shower.” “How long have you been doing this?” I didn’t answer. “Well?” he said. “A week? A year? Two years?” I chose the one in the middle. “A year.” “A year,” he repeated. “That won’t do. You have to stop. Do you intend to stop?” “Yes, Father.” “Honestly, now.” “Honestly, Father.” “All right. Good. What else?” “I’m a backbiter.” “A backbiter?” “I say things about my friends when they’re not around.” “That won’t do either,” he said. “No, Father.” “That certainly won’t do. Your friends will desert you if you persist in this and let me tell you, a life without friends is no life at all.” “Yes, Father.” “Do you sincerely intend to stop?” “Yes, Father.” “Good. Be sure that you do. I tell you this in all seriousness. Anything else?” “I have bad thoughts, Father.” “Yes. Well,” he said, “why don’t we save those for next time. You have enough to work on.” The priest gave me my penance and absolved me. As I left the confessional I heard his own door open and close. Sister James came forward to meet me again, and we waited together as the priest made his way to where we stood. Breathing hoarsely, he steadied himself against a pillar. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. “That was fine,” he said. “Just fine.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You have a fine boy here, Sister James.” She smiled. “So I do, Father. So I do.” Just after Easter Roy gave me the Winchester .22 rifle I’d learned to shoot with. It was a light, pump-action, beautifully balanced piece with a walnut stock black from all its oilings. Roy had carried it when he was a boy and it was still as good as new. Better than new. The action was silky from long use, and the wood of a quality no longer to be found. The gift did not come as a surprise. Roy was stingy, and slow to take a hint, but I’d put him under siege. I had my heart set on that rifle. A weapon was the first condition of self-sufficiency, and of being a real Westerner, and of all acceptable employment—trapping, riding herd, soldiering, law enforcement, and outlawry.

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

  According to 2 Kings 10, the Lord began to trim off parts of the territory of Israel, through the agency of Hazael of Damascus. Moreover, Jehu had seriously ruptured relations between Israel and Phoenicia by killing Jezebel, and with Judah by killing Ahaziah and his kinsmen. Even in northern Israel, the attempt to justify his bloody coup was not entirely successful. About a hundred years afterward, toward the end of Jehu’s dynasty, the prophet Hosea announced that God would punish the house of Jehu for the bloodshed of Jezreel. This judgment did not bespeak any sympathy for the house of Omri but acknowledged that the way in which Jehu carried out his coup was blameworthy. We shall find a similar judgment on the Assyrian Empire by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 10). Assyria, according to the prophet, was “the rod of YHWH’s anger.” Nonetheless, Assyria was guilty because of the arrogant way in which it carried out the divine judgment. ELISHA Elisha inherits a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, and some of his miraculous deeds are very similar to those of his mentor. Nonetheless, the careers of the two prophets are quite different. Elisha is not engaged in conflict with the cult of Baal, and he never fights for social justice as Elijah did in the case of Naboth’s vineyard. Some of his miracles are, at best, amoral. He curses small boys who jeer at him, so that they are mauled by she-bears (2 Kgs 2:23-25). He makes an iron ax head float on the water (6:1-7). He prophesies that the Lord will enable the kings of Israel and Judah to ravage Moab, although there is no evident moral issue at stake. He also discloses the secret plans of the king of Aram and performs various miracles to aid the Israelites in battle against him. These stories are concerned with manifestations of supernatural power with little concern for moral issues. One notable feature of these stories is the way in which people cross state boundaries. Elijah had been commanded to anoint Hazael as king of Aram in 1 Kings 19. Elisha carries out that command, or at least tells Hazael that the Lord has said he should be king (2 Kgs 8:13). There is no apparent moral reason for the choice of Hazael, who is emboldened by the prophet to murder the ailing king, Ben-hadad, and who will do much evil to Israel. The encounter with Hazael comes about because the king wants to consult Elisha. The prophet’s reputation as a person with access to supernatural knowledge and power transcends ethnic and cultic boundaries. We have several instances in these stories of people seeking help from the gods of other peoples.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  At home, I fumbled in the dark on the side of the house, jammed the boots into the garbage bin. I knew I’d never get the smell out. I went inside in my socks. I must have offered some excuse to the babysitter. I brushed my teeth and stood in the doorway to June’s room. She had no idea what I’d been up to lately, what her father and I were doing. How could I ever want anything but to be here with her? The light from the hall touched her round cheek, pale as the moon. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nausea woke me at midnight. Now I knew what to do. I bolted to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and got on my knees. I could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Brandon was home. I was breathing hard. I pressed the length of my forearms into my thighs and leaned over the bowl, but nothing came up. In my lap, I noticed that my hands were closing. I tried to open my fingers, using one hand to tug at the other, but they were stuck. We’d taught American Sign Language to June as a baby: milk, water, please, flower, book, more. More, my hands said. I was panting. More air, need more air. Are you okay? Brandon said. He was in the doorway. What’s wrong, babe? I puked tonight, I said, after my talk at the UW. I was whispering. My bathrobe was too hot. Somehow I was wearing my bathrobe. The tops of my feet hurt, mashed into the floor under my folded-over body. Are you okay? he asked again. He stood behind me now, one foot on either side of my knees. There was his sock, gray at the toe. There were his hands in my hair. The space behind my eyes was too small. I decided to sit down, no more kneeling. I rocked onto one hip, braced against the wall of the bathtub with one of my clamped-up hands, which were now buzzing like they’d fallen asleep. My wrists were busy cramping now too, each contracting inward. I slid my feet out from under me, tried to wiggle my ankles, but look! there they went too, my ankles like my wrists, curling in, yanking each heel toward the other. This must be a seizure. I’m having a seizure. Someone was gasping, a sucked-in half-sob. I had to tell Brandon. He needed to see this, what was happening. What was happening? June’s room was across the hall, maybe five steps away. I imagined her standing in the doorway in her floral-print underwear from Target, eyes frosted with sleep, blinking into the bathroom. Please don’t let her wake up. How could she not wake up? My head was too loud. I gave a croak. Brandon said something, and I worked to hear it.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Witte, and that the latter had said that, the Czar being sick, nothing could be done without his consent, that I should state my request in the form of a petition, written in English and Russian, and that he would present it to the Czar with his approval upon the latter's return, and that I had complied with the advice given. The count had little faith that my petition would ever reach the eyes of the Czar—and it never did, for the Czar never returned alive. And he had little faith in all official promises. The men in power at that time he believed to be either fanatics or cowards. The former sought to secure for themselves a soft berth in heaven, the latter sought it on earth. These were afraid to speak out their honest thought and to deal an honest blow for right and justice. They were afraid of losing caste or position or of being condemned to penal servitude, as if better persons than they had not suffered martyrdom before, or were not now paying in Siberia the price for exercising their right to liberty of thought and speech. Approves of my mission but has little hope. He warmly approved of my mission but saw no present possibility of its realization. Even if the Czar were to feel kindly disposed toward my plan, Pobiedonostzeff, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, would interpose his objections to permitting Jews rooting themselves on Russian soil. The policy of the Procurator, he said, was to root out the Jews, to drive them either into the Greek Catholic Church or into exile or starvation, stupidly attributing the evils of Russia to her tolerance of non-orthodox-Christian faiths and seeing relief only in their extinction within the empire. And that miscreant considered himself the official head of the Russian church, and the administrator of its creed in the name of Jesus, of him who bade man to love even his enemy, to do good even to those who do evil, to forgive even those who offend, to bless even those who curse. Asks my attitude toward Jesus, and defines his. Stopping suddenly, and turning his face full upon me, he asked "What is your belief respecting Jesus?" I answered that I regard the Rabbi of Nazareth as one of the greatest of Israel's teachers and leaders and reformers, not as a divine being who lived and taught humanly but as a human being who lived and taught divinely. "Such is my belief," said he, and he continued "Your belief, however, is not that of the Jews in Russia. Many of them have little knowledge of Jesus, and more of them, I fear, have little love for him. And who can blame them?" he continued, "they have been made to suffer so much in his name that it would be little short of a miracle if they loved him. Mohamed was more honest, he gave to people the choice between the Koran and the sword.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Much of the early research around divorce was published in the 1960s and ’70s. Much of it measured the well-being of a group of people who were dealing with tremendous social stigma—and whose marriages must have been so bad that the stigma of divorce was preferable to staying. Back then, courts often awarded sole custody to mothers, who were both single and earned little, so children were left with few resources.56 My divorce, too, would present some financial hardship. I have had to lean regularly on savings; to budget closely, slashing items that once mattered to me; and to accept less stability than I previously had. But my divorce has not left me impoverished. More recent studies comparing sole-custody and joint-custody arrangements pull up more nuanced findings: that having close relationships with both parents is “the best predictor of future outcomes for the kids [of divorce].”57 In other words, if you’ve got to get divorced, yes, there will be pain and loss for everyone involved. But that’s not the final word, so long as we let the pain motivate us to love our children—and to let their other parent love them too.58 “It’s in the nature of the beast that no one gets out of a family unit whole or with everything they want,” writes Zadie Smith. “[T]he truth is ‘the family’ is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.”59 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Of course, this looks good on paper, but it doesn’t stick, keeps sliding off. I brought June into this. I brought her into a marriage that had cracks early on, but we ignored them and had her anyway. She is now a child of divorce. But what’s the alternative? That she didn’t exist at all? My therapist gives me homework. Look in the mirror, he says. Really look at yourself. Make eye contact. And say, “I forgive you.” Do it every day until our next session. It’s like a prescription: take one tablet by mouth daily for fourteen days. Except that when a doctor writes me a prescription, I follow it exactly. This, I only manage to do twice, furtively, when no one else is around to hear.