Loneliness

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 Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  [image "9780785263708_0166_005" file=Image00055.jpg] I know about that feeling, that feeling of walking out into the darkness. When I lived alone it was very hard for me to be around people. I would leave parties early. I would leave church before worship was over so I didn’t have to stand around and talk. The presence of people would agitate me. I was so used to being able to daydream and keep myself company that other people were an intrusion. It was terribly unhealthy. [image "9780785263708_0166_007" file=Image00056.jpg] My friend Mike Tucker loves people. He says if he isn’t around people for a long time he starts to lose it, starts to talk to himself, making up stories. Before he moved to Portland he was a long-haul trucker, which is a no-good job for a guy who doesn’t do well alone. He said one time, on a trip from Los Angeles to Boston, he had a three-hour conversation with Abraham Lincoln. He said it was amazing. I bet it was, I told him. Tuck said Mr. Lincoln was very humble and brilliant and best of all a good listener. Tuck said prostitutes would hang out at truck stops, going from truck to truck asking the guys if they needed company. He said one night he got so lonely he almost asked a girl to come in. He didn’t even want to have sex. He just wanted a girl to hold him, wanted somebody with skin on, somebody who would listen and talk back with a real voice when he asked a question. Sometimes when I go to bed at night or when I first wake up in the morning, I talk to my pillow as if it were a woman, a make-believe wife. I tell her I love her and that she’s a beautiful wife and all. I don’t know if I do this because I am lonely or not. Tuck says I do this because I am horny. He says loneliness is real painful, and I will know it when I feel it. I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, when, really, it is like setting your soul down on a couch and not exercising it. The soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy. [image "9780785263708_0167_004" file=Image00057.jpg] A long time ago I was holed up in an apartment outside Portland. I was living with a friend, but he had a girlfriend across town and was spending his time with her, even his nights. I didn’t have a television. I ate by myself and washed clothes by myself and didn’t bother keeping the place clean because I didn’t know anybody who would be coming by. I would talk to myself sometimes, my voice coming back funny off the walls and the ceiling. I would play records and pretend I was the singer.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. I am a terrible day-dreamer. I have been since I was a boy. My mind goes walking and playing and skipping. I invent characters, write stories, pretend I am a rock star, pretend I am a legendary poet, pretend I am an astronaut, and there is no control to my mind. When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn’t normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body. A few years back some friends and I hiked to Jefferson Park, high on the Pacific Crest Trail at the base of Mount Jefferson. One evening we were sitting around a campfire telling stories when we spotted a ranger slowly walking toward our camp. He was a small man, thin, but he moved slowly as though he was tired. He ascended the small slope toward our fire by pushing his hands against his knees. When he met us he did not introduce himself, he only gazed into the fire for a while. We addressed him, and he nodded. He kindly asked to see our permits. We went to our tents and to our backpacks and brought the permits to him unfolded. He studied each of them slowly, staring at the documents as if he had slipped into a daydream. They were simple documents, really, just green slips of paper with a signature. But he eyed them like moving pictures, like cartoons. Eventually he handed our permits back to us, smiling, nodding, looking awfully queer. And then he stood there. He leaned against a tree only two feet from our campfire and watched us. We asked him a few questions, asked him if he needed anything else, but he kindly said no. Finally, I figured it out. He was lonely. He was alone and going nuts. He had forgotten how to engage people. I asked him how long he had been at Jeff Park. Two months, he said. Two months, I asked, all by yourself ? Yeah, he said and smiled. That’s a long time to be alone, I told him. Well, he said to me, this conversation has worn me out. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled again. He looked out into the distance and stretched his neck to look at the stars. “Do believe I will head back to camp,” he said. He didn’t say good-bye. He walked down the little hill and into the darkness.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  We left the dorms and walked across Blue Bridge, a beautiful walking bridge on the campus at Reed that stretches across a canyon, fit with blue lights, which, when you look at them with blurred eyes, feels like stars lighting a path winding toward heaven. The air was very cold, but Penny and I sat outside commons and smoked pipes, and she asked me about my family and asked me what I dreamed and asked me how I felt about God. Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other, love each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live. Rick told me, a little later, I should be living in community. He said I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow—I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families, he said, and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among one another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus, he told me, you are a human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy. Rick told me there was a group of guys at the church looking to get a house, looking to live in community. He told me I should consider joining them. 15 Community Living with Freaks BEFORE I LIVED IN COMMUNITY, I THOUGHT FAITH, mine being Christian faith, was something a person did alone, like monks in caves. I thought the backbone of faith was time alone with God, time reading ancient texts and meditating on poetry or the precepts of natural law and, perhaps, when a person gets good and godly, levitating potted plants or pitchers of water. It seems that way in books. I had read a Christian book about the betterment of self, the actualization of the individual in the personal journey toward God. The book was all about focus and drive and perspective. It was all stuff you did in a quiet room. None of it had anything to do with community.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Even his narrow youthful moustache, which runs diagonally down to the corners of his mouth and could not have been given a point or curve, helped to reinforce this unmartial overall impression. The strangest thing about him, however, were his eyes: large, extraordinarily shining eyes, so black that they seemed like unfathomable, glowing depths, eyes which rested enthusiastically, earnestly and shimmering on things and faces... Doubtless he had joined the army against his will, or at least without love of the cause, for, despite his physical strength, he was unfit for service and unpopular with his comrades, their interests and pleasures - the interests and pleasures of young officers who had recently been conquered by a victorious Campaigns had returned - he shared too little. It was for one disagreeable and flamboyant oddball among them, who went for solitary walks, who loved neither horses, nor hunting, nor games, nor women, and whose whole mind was turned to music, for he played several instruments and, with his glowing eyes and unmilitary, at the same time casual and theatrical attitude, to be seen in all operas and concerts, while disregarding club and casino. For better or for worse, he did the most necessary visits to prominent families; but he turned down almost all invitations and actually only frequented the Buddenbrooks' house... too much, according to the people, too much, according to the senator himself... Nobody suspected what was going on in Thomas Buddenbrook, nobody was allowed to suspect it, and just this: it was so terribly difficult to keep everyone in ignorance about his grief, his hate, his powerlessness! People were beginning to find him a little ridiculous, but perhaps they would have felt pity and repressed such feelings if they had remotely suspected the anxious irritability with which he was wary of the ridiculous, as he had long been from afar approaching and anticipating it before any of it had even occurred to them. His vanity, too, this much-ridiculed "vanity," was largely the result of this concern. He had been the first to point out the constantly emerging disparity between his own appearance and Gerda's strange innocence, It goes without saying that Gerda Buddenbrook and the young, peculiar officer had found each other in the field of music. Herr von Throta played the piano, violin, viola, cello, and flute - all excellently - and the Senator was often informed of the coming visit in advance by Herr von Throta's boy dragging the cello case on his back passed the green window projections of the private office and disappeared into the house ... Then Thomas Buddenbrook sat at his desk and waited until he saw himself, his wife's friend, enter his house, until the harmonies that under singing surged up above him in the drawing room , laments and superhuman jubilation, as it were, with convulsively outstretched, folded hands, and after all the crazy and vague ecstasies in weakness and sobs sank into night and silence.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Now there comes a very interesting development. The word paroikos means a ‘resident alien’; the verb paroikein meant to stay in a place, but not to be a naturalized citizen of it. So the noun paroikia came to mean ‘a body of aliens in the midst of any community’; and it is from this word paroikia that the English word ‘parish’ is derived. The Christian community is a body of people who live in this world, but who have never accepted the standards and the methods and the ways of this world. Their standards are the standards of God. They accept the law of the place wherein they dwell, but beyond them and above them, for them there stands the law of God. The Christian is essentially a person whose only real citizenship is citizenship of the Kingdom of God. The idea of the Christian as a stranger and a pilgrim in the world became so much part of Christian thought that it is worthwhile to consider it a little further. (i) In the ancient world to be a stranger in a strange place was to be unhappy. It is true that there was respect for the stranger. In Greek religion one of the titles of Zeus was Zeus Xenios. ‘Zeus, the god of strangers’; and strangers were held to be under the protection of the gods; but none the less there was a certain wretchedness in the lot of the stranger. The Letter of Aristeas (249) has it: ‘It is a fine thing to live and to die in one’s own land; a foreign land brings contempt to the poor, and to the rich it brings suspicion that they have been exiled because of some evil they have done.’ Ecclesiasticus (29.22-28) has a famous and wistful passage about the lot of the stranger: Better the life of the poor under a shelter of logs, Than sumptuous fare in the house of strangers. With little or with much, be contented; So wilt thou not have to bear the reproach of thy wandering. An evil life it is to go from house to house, And where thou art a stranger thou must not open thy mouth. A stranger thou art in that case, and drinkest contempt; And besides this thou wilt have to bear bitter things: ‘Come hither, sojourner, from the face of honour, My brother is come as my guest, I have need of my house.’

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy’s story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing. After I thought about Stacy’s story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all. [image "9780785263708_0185_002" file=Image00071.jpg] Stacy’s story frightened me badly so I called Penny. Penny is who I call when I am thinking too much. She knows about this sort of thing. It was late, but I asked her if I could come over. She said yes.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  A long time ago I was holed up in an apartment outside Portland. I was living with a friend, but he had a girlfriend across town and was spending his time with her, even his nights. I didn’t have a television. I ate by myself and washed clothes by myself and didn’t bother keeping the place clean because I didn’t know anybody who would be coming by. I would talk to myself sometimes, my voice coming back funny off the walls and the ceiling. I would play records and pretend I was the singer. I did a great Elvis. I would read the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud and pretend to have conversations with her. I asked her what she meant by “zero at the bone,” and I asked her if she was a lesbian. For the record, she told me she wasn’t a lesbian. She was sort of offended by the question, to be honest. Emily Dickinson was the most interesting person I’d ever met. She was lovely, really, sort of quiet like a scared dog, but she engaged fine when she warmed up to me. She was terribly brilliant. I had been living in that apartment for two years when I decided to cross the country to visit Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily lived and died. Back then I imagined her as the perfect woman, so quietly brilliant all those years, wrapping her poems neatly in bundles of paper and rope. I confess I day-dreamed about living in her Amherst, in her century, befriending her during her days at Holyoke Seminary, walking with her through those summer hills she spoke so wonderfully of, the hills that, in the morning, untied their bonnets. My friend Laura at Reed tells me that half the guys she knows have had crushes on Emily Dickinson. She says it is because Emily was brilliant and yet not threatening, having lived under the thumb of her father so long. She thinks the reason guys get crushes on Emily Dickinson is because Emily is an intellectual submissive, and intellectual men fear the domination of women. I don’t care why we get crushes on Emily Dickinson. It is a rite of passage for any thinking man. Any thinking American man. I only tell you all of this to show you how bad it gets when you aren’t around real people for a long time. I tell you of Emily Dickinson because she reminds me of the first time I thought, perhaps, I had lost my mind in isolation. I know now it was an apparition of loneliness, but I cannot tell you how very real it seemed that evening in Amherst. The other times I had seen her it was all invention; I was creating her out of boredom. But this was different.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  In the papyri a man asks for permission parepidēmein pros kairon, to reside temporarily in a place for a certain time; and another man is given permission to stay but he must not parepidēmein for more than twenty days; his temporary residence must not exceed that length of time. The Christian is essentially a temporary resident in this world. He is a person who is essentially on the way. He may be here but his roots are not here, and his permanent home is not here. He is always living as one who is looking beyond. It so happens that this view of life was not uncommon in the great Greeks. Marcus Aurelius (2.17) said: ‘Life is a warfare and a sojourn (parepidēmia) in a foreign land.’ Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Philosophers, 2.3.7) tells of a saying of Anaxagoras: ‘He was eminent for wealth and noble birth, and furthermore for magnanimity, in that he gave up his patrimony to his relations. For, when they accused him of neglecting it, he replied: “Why then do you not look after it?” And at last he went into retiremen and engaged in scientific investigation without troubling himself about public affairs. When someone inquired: “Have you no concern in your native land?” gently, he said, “I am greatly concerned with my fatherland,” and pointed to the sky.’ Epictetus (2.23.36 ff.) draws a picture of life as he sees it: ‘Men act like a traveller on the way to his own country, who stops at an excellent inn, and, since the inn pleases him, stays there. Man, you have forgotten your purpose; you were not travelling to this but through it. “But this is a fine inn.” And how many other inns are fine, and how many meadows—yet simply for passing through.’ Epictetus saw the world, not as the destination of the journey, but as an inn upon the way. The word parepidēmos describes a man who is passing a temporary sojourn in a place, but who has no permanent residence there. The Christian does not despise the world, but he knows that for him the world is not a permanent residence but only a stage upon the way. The third word which describes the relationship of the Christian to the world is the noun paroikos, with its verb paroikein. In classical Greek the word is more usually metoikos, and it describes what was known as a ‘resident alien’. The resident alien was a man who came to stay in a place without being naturalized. He paid an alien tax; he was a licensed sojourner. He stayed in some place, but he had never given up citizenship of the place to which he truly belonged. In the NT the word is used several times. God told Abraham that his descendants would ‘sojourn’ in a strange land (Acts 7.6).

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Even so, the Christian is a xenos, a stranger in this world. In the ancient world the ‘stranger’ had an uncomfortable time. In the papyri a man writes that he was despised by everyone ‘because I am a xenos, a stranger’. Another writes home to tell his people: ‘Do not be anxious about me because I am away from home, for I am personally acquainted with these places and I am no xenos, stranger, here.’ Another writes: ‘It is better for you to be in your own homes, whatever they may be like, than to be epixenēs, in a strange land.’ In the ancient world clubs in which the members met to have a common meal were very common; and those who sat down were divided into sundeipnoi, fellow-members, and xenoi, outsiders, who are guests only on sufferance and by courtesy. A mercenary soldier who was serving in a foreign army was xenos, a stranger (Xenophon, Anabasis, 1.1.10). In Sparta the ‘stranger’ was automatically regarded as a ‘barbarian’. Xenos and barbaros meant one and the same thing (Herodotus, 9.11). Here then we have the truth that in this world the Christian is always a stranger; in this world he is never at home; he can never regard this world as his permanent residence. And just because of that he will always be liable to be misunderstood; he will always be liable to be looked upon as a strange character, who follows queer ways which are not the ways of other people. So long as the world is the world, the Christian must remain a stranger in it, because his citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3.20). The second word which describes the Christian’s position in the world is the word parepidēmos. In classical Greek parepidēmos was the word of a person who had settled temporarily in a place without making it a permanent place of residence. In the NT it is used of the patriarchs, who never had a settled residence, but who were strangers and ‘pilgrims’ (Heb. 11.13). Peter uses it to describe the Christians who lived in Asia Minor; they were ‘strangers’ scattered throughout the country; they were exiles from home (I Pet. 1.1). His appeal to his people is that they should abstain from fleshly lusts which attack the soul, because they are strangers and pilgrims (I Pet. 2.11). This word is used in the same way in the Septuagint. When Sarah died Abraham went to the children of Heth to ask for land wherein to bury her. He said: ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying-place with you, that I may bury my dead’ (Gen. 23.4). The Psalmist speaks of himself as a stranger and a sojourner as all his fathers were (Ps. 39.12). The Greeks who lived at Rome called themselves parepidēmoi (Polybius 32.22.4).

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘About love and sex and life in general.’ He put down his coffee mug as if it were a nuisance. ‘I don’t know, I just feel so out of it. I’m working so hard I can scarcely do anything I want—I never see anybody. Well, I see hundreds of people, but never anybody I want to see. When did we last meet, for instance? I know you’re busy with your boys and what have you—but I would like to see you darling a bit more often, you know? You are one of my oldest, dearest friends, fuck it.’ ‘I do feel the same, James. I’m always thinking of you and having conversations with you in my head and imagining what you would say about things. You’re my most constant companion, even though I’m so pathetic and never get in touch with you.’ He smiled: ‘You see, just talking to you now makes me feel better. Which proves we should meet more often.’ He turned away. ‘How’s it going with Phil?’ I wasn’t sure if he wanted the gratifying news that it was all over, a mere flash amid the long day of our relationship, or the mortifying assurance that it was all going fine. ‘I must say, we do rather adore each other,’ I offered, with a modesty that may have sounded like bragging. ‘He’s really cuddly.’ ‘That’s it,’ James said, with nodding recognition. ‘It’s cuddling I want really as much as everything else. It’ll sound stupid to you, Willy, but over the last few weeks I’ve just felt … so out of it. I’ve gone so long without love and I’ve become simply so accustomed to it all, as if that’s how life is and evermore shall be—death—horror—amen. It struck me that I’ve turned into the archetypal middle-class intellectual out of touch with everything, just like someone in a Forster novel, and that was eighty years ago … It’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone …’ He wailed a little but was unable to cry. I went over and held him. ‘Darling heart, of course people want you. You’re so adorable.’ I kissed away the tears that weren’t there. I found him very slightly repellent. ‘They don’t. No one ever wants to fuck me.’ I chuckled almost. ‘I’ll fuck you—here and now, if that’s what you want,’ and I let my hand drift down his back and over his big schoolboy bum. He smiled shyly. ‘That would never do,’ he said. It wouldn’t of course. I held him away from me, looked at him frankly. ‘Last night,’ I reminded him.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  “I figured that.” He figures it, perhaps, because he has already long anticipated it, because it is how Jay processes things lately, through an outsider’s eye. At the far edge of his high school career he has slowly begun pulling away. He keeps his cadre of friends at a purposely small level; when I ask him with whom he stays in touch, he thinks for a minute and then says, “I call Mitch or Kyle sometimes.” Otherwise, goes to practice, hangs out with Jillian, gets something to eat, and hits the health club for a nighttime session with the weights. School itself has become almost an afterthought; Jay is breezing through his senior classes with minimal effort. He can’t tell if he is being rewarded for years of fairly decent work in the classroom or if his senior courses are just too easy. Either way, he is investing little time there. “Conserving,” he says with a smile. He will use any leftover energy, after all. He is insulating, getting himself inside a protective cover as he hunkers down to focus on the only thing that is currently before him, this sports thing, his definition of himself. Winning can be as lonely as anything else. Jay wants to get on with it. Of course, there is no real “they” out there. Iowa may have been collectively taken aback at the sight of three top wrestlers all heading off to Virginia Tech together, and there certainly were those who immediately set about explaining why Jim Zalesky didn’t actually need those three in his program. There were some who questioned the wisdom of Jay in choosing to leave the state for college when he just as easily could have found a way to stay home. But, anecdotally at least, those people constitute a minority. The mass of wrestling fans in Iowa will be rooting for Jay and Dan to become four-timers at State three weeks from now, because the majority of wrestling fans in Iowa truly love the sport. And because it is theirs. The Mississippi Valley Conference tournament, held in Dubuque the first week in February, is technically the beginning of the run-up to the State Tournament. In reality, it is nothing so much as a reunion. Because of their teams’ affiliations with the conference, Jay’s closest friends are here: Kyle Anson, Mitch Mueller, Joey Slaton. It’s a celebration of some of the finest wrestling around, one they all have come to look forward to. It is a great time. Assuming, of course, that nobody screws up. For four years they’ve been coming together at this time, the one time of year when the families know they’ll see each other all at once. A while back, Jim and Carol Borschel and the other parents managed to sit down for a pre-tournament breakfast together, and they’ve been coming together ever since, trading stories about the year and catching up with the people who have been their running partners throughout this entire thing.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Lucian (De Calum.) said that the man who is eusebēs, pious, religious, is a lover of the gods (philotheos). Xenophon (Memorabilia 4.3.2) said that such a man was wise concerning the gods. It was always the Greek custom to define every virtue and every good quality as the mean between two extremes. Virtue was the right point, the happy medium, between some defect and some excess. So Plutarch says that eusebeia is the mean between atheotes, which is atheism, and deisidaimonia, which is superstition; Philo said it was the mean between asebeia, which is impiety, and deisidaimonia. That is to say, eusebeia is the right attitude to God and to things divine, the attitude which does not eliminate God altogether, and which does not degenerate into futile superstition, the attitude which gives God the place he ought to occupy in life and in thought and in devotion. Josephus sets eusebeia over against eidōlolatreia, which is idolatry. Eusebeia gives God the right place, and worships God in the right way. Plato urges all men to eusebeia, that we may avoid evil and obtain good, and so become the friends of God (Plato, Symposium 193d). But not only does eusebeia put a man into the right relationship with God; it also puts him into the right relationship with men. Plato speaks of eusebeia both to God and to parents (Plato, Republic 615c). In Greek thought the word eusebeia has certain uses which will still further illustrate the idea behind it. Even in pagan religion eusebeia was a word of a noble lineage. (i) Sometimes it can mean that respect for the gods which issues in a careful carrying out of all the ritual which the worship of the gods demands. That is to say, sometimes it can be a word of correct ritual rather than of moral quality. There is an inscription in which the town of Priene is praised for its ‘reverence for things divine‘, that is for the care of the ritual of the temples of the gods. Payments to the temples are said to be ex eusebeias, in consequence of piety. This is to some extent the lower and the ritual meaning of the word. (ii) Sometimes the word can mean loyalty, but that loyalty is always to a royal figure. In the papyri there is a letter in which the Emperor Claudius, after a visit to Britain, writes to thank a certain club for a golden crown, which they had presented to him, and which he regards as a token of their eusebeia, their loyalty. Nero invites the Greeks to meet him at Corinth in order that he may requite them for their good will and eusebeia, loyalty, to him. So then eusebeia can express a man’s loyalty to his king. (iii) But the word goes higher than that. To Sophocles eusebeia was the greatest of all the virtues.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “Eventually, if you don’t have that pebble removed, you will end up with either a serious limp or have your leg cut off. You will say to me, ‘Ted, why are you asking me about that again?’ Here’s why: it’s like a football game—you know how they film every play and if something happens they replay that film from every possible angle to come to the truth. That’s what we need to do with your lives gentlemen, if you are going to heal and have healthy relationships. It will be some of the hardest work you have ever done, but I promise it will be the best thing you have ever done. And if you do the work, you will get healthy. Much of the work we will do is grief work. Yep, you are going to learn how to grieve the bad stuff that has happened to you. But if you don’t, you will keep medicating the pain with something: work, women, porn, sex, alcohol, food, success—you name it—we all do until we get that pebble out of our soul. Maybe yours is a pebble, some of you have some boulders, whatever the size doesn’t matter, what matters is you are all in. What do you say, gentlemen? Are you in?” Ted looked each man square in the eyes. A little afraid, a little unsure what to think, Jason said, “Yes, sir.” The other three wide-eyed young men nodded their heads in agreement with Jason. “You men are young. You may not have hit bottom yet or tried hard enough. I hope you’re ready, because I would rather you do this work now than when you are fifty and have blown through a couple marriages or ruined your life in some other way. Here’s what I do know; you can’t heal alone. Jesus didn’t do life alone. He chose twelve men to do life with and, heck, he is a member of the Holy Trinity. I imagine if he didn’t do his earthly life alone, then maybe we shouldn’t either. So who wants to tell their story?” “I have something to say,” Jason volunteered as he turned to Kevin. “I owe you an apology. I told you Grace and I almost went all the way, but I stopped before we did. I was too embarrassed to tell you the truth. The truth is—Grace is pregnant.” Jason put his head in his hands and let the emotion out along with the secret he had been keeping from his newfound friends.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  And Moses was right. God is not here to worship me, to mold Himself into something that will help me fulfill my level of comfort. I think part of my problem is that I want spirituality to be more close and more real. I understand why people wear crystals around their necks and why they perform chants and gaze at stars. They are lonely. I’m not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny little people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars. And it’s not like God has a call-in radio show. But as Trendy Writer read from his book that night at Powells, I thought about the Muslim babies dying in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I thought about the economic crisis in Saudi Arabia and the children of Iraq who are being bombed because their ridiculous dictator won’t cooperate with the United Nations. And then I thought about Khwaja Khandir, and I wondered what gave Trendy Writer the audacity to assume that Khwaja Khandir would have the time, or the desire, to take him fishing. Trendy Writer was trying to be hip and relevant, but in doing so he was cheapening the entire nation of Islam. And he was cheating on Jesus. He reminded me of Lot, who offered his daughters to the perverts because he wanted peace. Trendy Writer was sending out Muhammad and Jesus, asking them to hold hands so nobody would have to feel wrong or, rather, so he could have something fashionable to believe. I talked to Tony about Trendy Writer. I told him how offensive it was that this guy was betraying Jesus and trampling all over Islam. When I told him the story of Trendy Writer, Tony closed his eyes and sighed. I asked him why he looked so troubled. He said it was because he felt convicted. “Convicted about what, Tony?” “I am convicted about what you are saying,” he began. “Here is a guy using Islamic verbiage to make himself look spiritual, and yet he really hasn’t researched or subscribed to the faith as it presents itself. He’s just using it. Raping it for his own pleasure.” “Why are you convicted about that?” I asked him. “I’ve never heard you talk about Islamic ideas that way.” “I know,” Tony said. “But I do the same thing with Jesus.” When Tony said that, it was as if truth came into the room and sat down with us. I felt as though Jesus were gently holding my head so He could work the plank out of my eye. Everything became clear. I realized in an instant that I desired false gods because Jesus wouldn’t jump through my hoops, and I realized that, like Tony, my faith was about image and ego, not about practicing spirituality.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I heard the sound of more gin being poured, then the pressing of keys, then the distinctive inflating chime of Skype as it opened. I went to join him, and watched as Mitko began what would be a long series of conversations over the Internet, voice and video chats with a number of other young men. I sat in a chair some distance behind him, where I could see the screen without myself falling within the frame. These men seemed all to be speaking from darkened rooms, in voices that were hushed, I realized, to avoid disturbing their families sleeping (it was late now, one or two in the morning) in the next room. Most of them existed only as faces, which was all that could be seen of them in a single bulb’s small circle of light. They greeted Mitko fondly, familiarly, though I would come to learn that he had never met most of them in the flesh, that their friendship was restricted to these disembodied encounters. As I listened to these men, all of whom lived outside of Sofia, many in small villages and towns, I was struck by the strangeness of the community they had formed, at once so limited and so lively. Mitko moved from conversation to conversation, speaking and typing at once, the screen lighting up regularly with new invitations. I couldn’t follow what they said, I could hardly understand anything; I was exhausted, and as time passed I grew bored. Every now and again I would snap to attention, alerted by some stray word or tone of voice that Mitko was discussing me; and I felt helpless at being the object of conversations I couldn’t understand or partake in. Once or twice Mitko orchestrated an introduction, tilting the screen so that I was captured in the image, and the stranger and I would smile awkwardly and wave, having nothing at all to say to each other. I became increasingly ashamed as the night wore on, as more and more I suspected I was the object of mockery or scorn; and besides this I felt bitter at my exclusion from Mitko’s enthusiasm, and jealous of the attention he lavished on these other men.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  But I want to be with you, I said, only with you, and he smiled and allowed himself to be dragged to the bed, where I tugged off his shoes, unbuttoned his pants and his shirt. He lay next to me, accepting my caresses, every now and then propping himself up to drink from the whiskey he had poured himself as soon as we got in, despite his illness and his pledge, he had told me, to drink less. He was watching television as well, flipping through channels until he stopped at a film, an American film dubbed in Bulgarian, as though to distract himself from what I was doing to him, so that I felt not only alone in my longing, but for the first time like an aggressor. When I pulled back from him, he reached down and started to stroke himself, slowly and with something like languor, even when he went soft maintaining the same regular motion of his arm. It was now, lying next to him but excluded from this mechanical exercise, that I noticed the movie he had chosen. It was a famous film, recent, a historical drama that for all its artifice was as brutal as the film I had watched on the bus the day before. But this was a different sort of violence, more invested in genuine suffering; it wasn’t gunfire and explosions we watched, Mitko and I, but the lashing of whips and the hacking of swords. It killed my desire, but Mitko watched it without once looking away, not avidly but with a strange dullness, the same quality with which his hand moved at his waist. Can we change it, I said, can we watch something else, but he murmured no, he was watching, it was interesting, he wanted to see what would happen. It was history I had learned in school, first as a child and then again later, when I could understand more of its horror; I knew what would happen, and I didn’t want to be drawn into that cumulative helplessness portrayed on the screen. I wanted him to stop jerking off to these images, though it didn’t seem to me that that was quite what he was doing, the two actions—his eyes motionless and his hand in constant motion—seemed detached from each other, even if they shared the same languorous quality. Maybe you want to stop, I said, you don’t have to finish now, using the Bulgarian euphemism svurshish , more accurate but less hopeful than our own verb, come, the openness of which I preferred, you can wait until later.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Shawnden has kept a hand in wrestling all the way through. Jim would like to believe that the involvement helped keep Shawnden—and Jay, and most of the other wrestlers, for that matter—out of trouble as he grew up, and in that he shares a sentiment with many other parents, the ones who seek out sports for their children as a way of keeping them busy. But the young ones grow up, and, as Jay and Shawnden will later suggest, they cannot be protected forever. Now Shawnden has grown to a heavyweight’s class, 275 pounds and beyond, but wrestling for him has always remained something more fun or enjoyable than really critical—not a passion so much as a welcome release. He likes to win but refuses to be devastated by a defeat. He has qualified for State twice with the talent and strength he already possesses, and thus appears in no great hurry to find another level of performance. A current knee injury, here in January, will keep him out for weeks, and the one thing evident is that, though he wants to wrestle again and attempt to reach Des Moines one final time, there is no severe urgency attached to the effort. He gets there if he gets there. As much as Jay likes Shawnden, he just can’t grasp that thinking. Even in the case of his friend, the mention of his comparatively easygoing approach to wrestling elicits a shaking of the head. “It’s just not right,” Jay says, setting his jaw. He can’t handle the mentality. He cannot abide the idea that people like Mitch Benfer and Bryan Telgenhoff could be better, but just aren’t—that they could win the matches they’re losing, place in the tournaments in which they’re failing to advance. These are his friends, people whose company he is generally glad for—and yet, when it comes time to flip the switch and really get after the work of becoming great wrestlers, Jay finds himself alone. The thing they don’t tell you is that it’s lonely being great, that it can be a separating existence. It can be ludicrously difficult to come to grips with the mere fact of one’s difference—in this case, the fact that Jay wants to excel so much more desperately than so many of the people around him, even though they’re ostensibly wrapped up in the same general pursuit. And it takes a very specific desperation to get there. In some ways, that inner drive has become Jay’s companion to the exclusion of his other relationships. It is Jay who reaches for that next level—and sometimes Jay alone. He has his friends. He has his teammates, and certainly his coaches. He has his family. But, in the end, most of them will wind up doing the watching, not the acting. And that’s the difference. It may explain why, as the season wears on, Jay becomes gradually closer with Matt McDonough, a freshman wrestling at 103 pounds.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  There once was a man named Don Astronaut. Don Astronaut lived on a space station out in space. Don Astronaut had a special space suit that kept him alive without food or water or oxygen. One day there was an accident. And Don Astronaut was cast out into space. Don Astronaut orbited the earth and was very scared. Until he remembered his special suit that kept him alive. But nobody’s government came to rescue Don Astronaut because it would cost too much money. (There was a conspiracy, and they said he had died, but he hadn’t.) So Don Astronaut orbited the earth again and again, fourteen times each day. And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for months. And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for decades. And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for fifty-three years before he died a very lonely and crazy man—just a shell of a thing with hardly a spark for a soul. One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.

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

  In the 1960s, however, the tide had turned, and scholars started to rediscover the extraordinary beauty and power of some of Tennyson’s verse. I had been drawn to it at once. Writing years before Darwin had published his Origin of Species, Tennyson had been one of the first people to realize the impact that modern biology and geology would have on religion, and his great poem In Memoriam plangently explored the ambiguities of doubt and faith in a way that reflected my own perplexities. But at a deeper level, there was a mood in Tennyson’s poetry that I immediately recognized. So many of his characters seemed walled up in an invincible but menacing solitude, as I was. They too seemed to see the world at one remove, as if from a great distance. Mariana was trapped in her lonely moated grange, where old faces glimmered at the windows and mice shrieked in the wainscot. The Lady of Shalott was imprisoned in a tower, confined there by some unexplained curse, because she could not confront external, objective reality. When she finally did fall in love and ventured into the outside world, it killed her immediately. All this resonated with the hallucinatory visitations that kept me imprisoned in my own inner world. Like so many of Tennyson’s people, I too longed to join in the vibrant life that was going on all around me, but found myself compelled to withdraw by forces that I did not understand. Like me, Tennyson seemed sucked into a horror of his own. When he contemplated the yew tree beside the grave of Arthur Hallam, he imagined the roots of the tree wrapping themselves around the bones and skull of his friend’s body. Mesmerized and (as I so often was) unable to break away from the grotesque vision that he had spun from his own brain, he told the corpse-rooted tree, “I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee.” Still more reminiscent of my own plight were those odd passages from The Princess, where the hero describes the “weird seizures” which periodically descended upon him and drained his surroundings of reality: On a sudden in the midst of men and day, And while I walk’d and talk’d as heretofore, I seemed to move amongst a world of ghosts, And feel myself the shadow of a dream. When I read Tennyson, it seemed that I had found a friend. Our circumstances could not have been more different, but it was as though we inhabited the same unpredictable world, in which “all things were and were not.” I felt closer to him than to almost any of my living contemporaries—because, despite Dr. Piet’s confident predictions, my anxiety states were becoming more frequent. Increasingly I found myself unable to sleep because of this sense of encroaching dread, and the more exhausted I became, the more I was assailed by this hallucinatory fear.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I know about that feeling, that feeling of walking out into the darkness. When I lived alone it was very hard for me to be around people. I would leave parties early. I would leave church before worship was over so I didn’t have to stand around and talk. The presence of people would agitate me. I was so used to being able to daydream and keep myself company that other people were an intrusion. It was terribly unhealthy. My friend Mike Tucker loves people. He says if he isn’t around people for a long time he starts to lose it, starts to talk to himself, making up stories. Before he moved to Portland he was a long-haul trucker, which is a no-good job for a guy who doesn’t do well alone. He said one time, on a trip from Los Angeles to Boston, he had a three-hour conversation with Abraham Lincoln. He said it was amazing. I bet it was, I told him. Tuck said Mr. Lincoln was very humble and brilliant and best of all a good listener. Tuck said prostitutes would hang out at truck stops, going from truck to truck asking the guys if they needed company. He said one night he got so lonely he almost asked a girl to come in. He didn’t even want to have sex. He just wanted a girl to hold him, wanted somebody with skin on, somebody who would listen and talk back with a real voice when he asked a question. Sometimes when I go to bed at night or when I first wake up in the morning, I talk to my pillow as if it were a woman, a make-believe wife. I tell her I love her and that she’s a beautiful wife and all. I don’t know if I do this because I am lonely or not. Tuck says I do this because I am horny. He says loneliness is real painful, and I will know it when I feel it. I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, when, really, it is like setting your soul down on a couch and not exercising it. The soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.