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.

Page 4 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  If you’re numbed out, you act based on how you’re supposed to feel rather than how you actually feel. You need a toolbox of sober alternatives. Get more women’s numbers. If I’m not around, you’ll have to call somebody else. I hate everybody else. For somebody who worries about being judged so much, you’re a tough crowd. I say, Maybe I should use Jake’s line: I tell people I have an allergy to liquor. When I drink it, I break out in handcuffs. See, you’re starting to like the group. The religious shit— Spiritual shit, Joan corrects. Whatever. It makes my skin crawl. Anyway, I don’t get how it works. Joan says, You don’t know how electricity works, either, but you use light switches. I suspect a trap, I say. Like those ladies at the meeting. They’re always offering to take care of Dev if I need help. This bothers you? Joan says. One of your big grumbles is how no one helps with your son. Warren helps more and more, the more incompetent I get. I got more accomplished when I drank, actually. At this point in your life, you don’t know how not to drink yet. No alcoholic does. It takes training. I watch the yellow leaves blow down the street and eventually say, Maybe those women want to kidnap Dev, even. Joan shakes her head and grins. Now that I’ve begun to say aloud what I actually think, head-shaking is a common response. She says, You spend way too much time alone. Cut off as I felt from Warren before I quit drinking, it’s worse sober. Now everything he does just irritates the shit out of me. I say, The only time I connect with people is away from Warren. That can’t be good. You told me yourself, Joan says, how weighed down with school he is—plus work, plus your three-year-old. Give getting sober a chance. Try not to make any big moves. The only way I know to arrive at balance in my choices is through prayer. Like I get on my knees and say to the air molecules, Do I get divorced—and some note with yes or no gets lowered down to eye level, suspended on a fishhook. If you need God with skin on, go to your group and ask the first person you see. You want me to go to this group of virtual strangers and ask whoever I see first whether to stay married or not, then do what they say? If you get miserable enough, you’ll start taking suggestions. But I didn’t share my difficulties, and I didn’t pray, and a month later, I got drunk.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One tradition has it that the widow Ursula Cotta took him in because she liked his singing and sympathised with his reluctance to beg; another story tells of how he was left alone suffering with fever while the rest of the household was in church, and had to crawl to the kitchen on hands and knees to get the water he needed.* Apocryphal though the stories may be, perhaps they reflect the psychological reality that Luther both needed and found a connection to his mother in Eisenach. From Eisenach, Luther moved on to university at Erfurt in 1501, the institution that his revered older friend Johannes Braun had attended. Although further away from home than the rival University of Leipzig, it was closer to Eisenach and his maternal family. Luther may have lodged at the student house of St George — choosing another institution named for the patron saint of Mansfeld — or he may have joined the Amplonian College near St Michael’s Church, Heaven's Gate, the biggest of the student bursas or residential colleges. These institutions followed a strict quasi-monastic regimen: students had to be in bed at 8 p.m., rose at 4 a.m., and Luther would have shared a room. Many students seem to have found their way around the rules, however, for as Luther acidly remembered, “Erfurt is a whorehouse and beerhouse; these two lessons are what students got from that gymnasium.” Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources. Yet although he was influenced by these intellectual trends, Luther apparently developed no contacts to leading humanists at Erfurt, such as Eobanus Hessus and Conrad Mutian, in contrast to two of his later friends, Georg Spalatin and Johannes Lang, who were both part of Mutian’s circle. And although the humanist Crotus Rubeanus later described Luther as his good friend and remembered how he and Luther were united by an enthusiasm THE SCHOLAR 45 for study, there is perhaps something extravagant about his claims to friendship as he avers that ‘my soul has always remained yours’.*° After all, he was writing in 1519 after Luther had become famous. Luther started out as a rather average student, coming thirtieth in his cohort of fifty-seven baccalaureates.“ We do not know what it was that opened his scholarly imagination at university, but it seems likely that it was philosophy — even though he complained about being forced to study the subject. Erfurt University was a hotbed of the via moderna and nominalism, a direction in philosophy that reached back to William of Ockham in the fourteenth century. Luther's teachers included cutting-edge nominalists who wrote textbooks that would become standard teaching tools.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The danger of discovery meant that Luther became utterly dependent on Spalatin, who was now his chief means of 198 MARTIN LUTHER communication with the outside world. The solitude soon irked Luther, and he wrote to his friends complaining of his enforced ‘leisure’, that made him heavy-headed and inclined to drunkenness.’ In the castle, he rigged up the small chamber he was assigned as a study, and asked Spalatin for books. But this ‘leisure’ also gave him time for reflection, and his letters from this period are amongst his fullest and most revealing. Not only do they tell us much about the nature of his friendships, but they show Luther beginning to reassess his own life and especially his relationship with his father as he gradually came to terms with the public figure he had become. Sitting high up in his eyrie, Luther had no way of controlling what was happening in the world below. He had to wait for news from Wittenberg. The pattern of his correspondence betrays the shrinking compass of his world. There are letters to his friend Nikolaus Gerbel in Strasbourg, but remarkably, none that survive to Nuremberg, Augs- burg or Basle, and therefore nothing to suggest that he was increasing his influence in the prosperous south.* We do not know whether this was because of the difficulty of sending messengers to southern Germany without betraying his hiding place, or because the Nurem- bergers, once such enthusiastic members of the Staupitz sodality and so keen to spread the word about Luther, now wanted to distance themselves from him. Two of them, the lawyer Willibald Pirckheimer and civic secretary Lazarus Spengler, had been named in the bull of excommunication alongside Luther, but Pirckheimer had humiliatingly sought and received absolution from Eck. Luther’s correspondence network contracted, concentrating on Wittenberg, Saxony and the mining areas of Mansfeld, and so did his political reach. Beyond it, other reformers emerged who would take his Reformation in different directions. In the Wartburg, Luther began to suffer from severe constipation, which had first affected him at Worms. As he wrote to Spalatin, ‘the Lord strikes me in my posterior with serious pain’. The pains were his own special ‘relic of the Cross’, he quipped.? He went for four, sometimes even six days without a bowel movement and the excre- ment was so hard that it caused bleeding. “Now | sit in pain like a woman in childbirth, ripped up, bloody and I will have little rest tonight’, he wrote.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Most of all, he was a radical mystic, who sought union with God, not primarily a social radical. His theology displays an underlying tension between his mysticism, rejecting everything to do with the flesh, and his revolutionary radicalism, which led him to engage with the material world. Some of these paradoxes are evident in his views of sexuality, for example. For Müntzer, like Karlstadt, Christ’s call to his disciples to leave behind wife and family was a key text, and there is a powerful streak of asceticism in his writings. When Melanchthon defended the marriage of monks, Müntzer castigated him: “By your arguments you drag men to matrimony although the bond is not yet an immaculate one; but a Satanic brothel, which is as harmful to the church as the most accursed perfumes of the priests. Do not these passionate desires impede your sanctification?” 29 Yet although he commended virginity, he took a wife in June 1523, and like Karlstadt, he chose a noblewoman. 30 Müntzer seems to have nursed a strong sense of dispossession, and his conviction of being a persecuted outsider made him able to articulate a shared sense of social alienation, reaching out to others across class barriers. A powerful speaker, he knew how to inspire groups of peasants, townsfolk, and villagers, women as well as men. Throughout his career, whether in Zwickau, Allstedt, or Mühlhausen, he seems to have followed the same political strategy. Starting from his local community, he created a movement that he interpreted in apocalyptic terms, and he gave his followers a sense of imminent danger and excitement by identifying and denouncing their enemies. He then proceeded to build alliances and coalitions, at first locally and then farther afield. His theology had the capacity to inspire large groups of people, drawing intense personal commitment from them, even to risk their lives. He enjoyed no network of large urban presses to print his work, there was no university behind him, and no territorial ruler to protect him. His success, albeit short-lived, suggests that what the Reformation meant to many ordinary people in Saxony and Thuringia could be very different from what it meant to Luther. — I N the meantime, Karlstadt, having been forced out of Orlamünde and a series of south German cities, had ended up more than 250 miles to the southwest, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where he was living in hiding. The city was surrounded by a peasant army and one day, when he went on a stroll outside the city, he came upon a group of illiterate peasants, who ordered him at gunpoint: “Are you a brother, then read the messenger’s letters.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  To be a bishop, he averred, means “to practice Greek ways, to sodomize and to live in a Roman manner,” and to amass personal property, “that is, the insatiable hell of avarice.” Although Luther was careful to point out that Staupitz was of course far removed from such vices, he asked Spalatin straight out: “do you want to be guarantor that when the opportunity is there…or when he is driven to it by necessity, this man will not be sucked into the maelstrom and raging storms of the courts of bishops?” 8 It seems that by this point Luther thought that Staupitz’s love of luxury—or perhaps his sexual inclinations (the verbs pergraecari, sodomari, romanari hint at homosexuality or pederasty)—outweighed his zeal for the Christian life. Now, in a letter of October 3, 1519, Luther castigated Staupitz for being too busy to write to him—usually it was the other way around, as Luther endlessly apologized to his correspondents for his failure to write. In one chatty letter sent to the older man in February of that year, packed with gossip about friends, he cheerfully said that the bishop of Brandenburg had taken to remarking, as he put logs on the fire, that he would not be able to have a good night’s sleep until Luther was thrown into the flames as well. Then in the October letter Luther lamented that his confessor was “deserting him too much,” making him feel, in the words of Psalm 131, “like a child weaned from its mother.” Luther continued: “I am empty of faith, full of other gifts, Christ knows how little I desire these, if I cannot serve him”—an appeal to his confessor who like no one else understood his Anfechtungen . Then in the letter’s final paragraph, he described a dream: “This night I had a dream about you, as if you wanted to retreat from me, but I wept bitterly and suffered; but you waved to me and said I should be calm, and that you would return to me. This certainly has come true this very day.” 9 Having not heard from Staupitz for some time, Luther was clearly suffering from what he felt to be his increasing coldness. Indeed, it would not be long before the rift between the two men became irreparable as Staupitz refused to follow Luther in rejecting the Pope and leaving the Church; he finally deserted his former protégé when Luther was excommunicated in early 1521. The instruction Staupitz gives Luther in his dream—to be calm—is exactly what he found difficult. Indeed, in a previous letter to Staupitz on February 20 Luther had opened dramatically, saying he wanted to be “still,” but was seized and driven by God, and “thrown into the noise.” 10 The entire October letter is full of noise: news about disputations, envy, and argument. So what does the dream mean? Is Staupitz’s moving hand reaching out to Luther or waving him goodbye?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Interestingly, Luther passed over this particular exchange in his protocol of the discussion at Augsburg, although he exploited Cajetan’s mistake to the hilt in his correspondence with Spalatin and in his report to the Elector. In any case, since Luther was now arguing for the primacy of Scripture over papal decrees, the exact wording of Unigenitus was becoming a sideshow. For Luther, Christ’s merits did not constitute any kind of credit system. Rather his merits gave the church its ‘keys’, that is, the power to admit or reject individuals from the sacrament and the fellowship 118 MARTIN LUTHER of Christians. Moreover, because every human action was tainted with sin, there could be no satisfactory payment for sin, no good deeds to be set in the balance, no way for the individual to make him or herself acceptable to God by purchasing indulgences or any other means; the banking-system model of ‘merits’ had to be rejected altogether. The flipside of the argument is that whereas the practice of indulgences permitted people to pray for one another, and fostered the creation of a whole series of co-operative prayers, sayings of Mass, chantries and collective efforts towards salvation, for Luther the Christian stood alone before God, devoid of any assistance. On the face of it, this is a bleak and individualistic concept of salvation, where the emphasis is squarely placed on the believer's encounter with the living God. It must also have accorded with Luther’s own experience — and perhaps his sense of isolation, as he stood alone to defend himself. The other topic of debate concerned the role of faith in the efficacy of the sacraments. Luther argued that the sacraments were ineffective without faith, while Cajetan insisted that they were valid in and of themselves; indeed, as the cardinal argued, since one could never be entirely sure of one’s faith, it was vitally important that the sacraments did not depend on it. Yet Cajetan eventually proved willing to compromise on this issue, insisting that Luther recant only on the other point, that the Pope had the power of the keys. The underlying intellectual issue at Augsburg concerned authority. When Luther presented his scriptural passages in support of his position on indul- gences and repentance, it seems that Cajetan hardly bothered to read them. One person’s interpretation of the Bible, Cajetan believed, could not possibly be as weighty as papal decree. The proceedings thus exposed what Luther felt to be the authoritarianism of the Church and the Pope. At the end of the third and last meeting on 14 October, Cajetan finally lost patience.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [image "9. I n the Wartburg" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_042_r1.jpg] [image "9. I n the Wartburg" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_042_r1.jpg] NO ONE WAS to know Luther’s whereabouts. After the excitement of Worms, where the great princes of the empire had lined up to meet him, where he had been surrounded by supporters and friends from dawn till dusk, and where his every word had been noted and its significance weighed, Luther was now alone. On May 4, having visited his relatives in Möhra on his way back from the Diet, Luther had been kidnapped near Burg Altenstein and brought by a circuitous route to Wartburg Castle, towering high up above Eisenach, hidden in the woods. The castle walls are hewn into the rock of the hills with views on three sides; to Luther it felt as if he were in the kingdom of the birds. The monk who was now famous throughout the empire had returned to where, as a schoolboy, he had stolen strawberries in the woods, and where his mother’s family still lived.1 The kidnapping had been staged by the Elector, who feared the emperor’s wrath for harboring a man the Edict of Worms had now declared a “stubborn schismatic and public heretic.”2 So he was kept in the Wartburg in disguise. Dressed in the clothes of a knight, Luther let his tonsure grow out, and was no longer clean-shaven. The figure-hugging attire, with hose designed to show off well-turned legs, fine linen shirt, doublet, and showy codpiece, must have been a shock for a monk used to wearing a shapeless woolen cassock belted at the waist. When he secretly returned to Wittenberg in December, six months later, his friends did not at first recognize him: In his riding coat he looked like a nobleman with “a thick beard over his whole mouth and cheeks.”3 [image "(GERMANY OUT) Luther, Martin - Priest, Reformer, D *10.11.1483-18.02.1546+ - Portrait of Martin Luther as the 'Junker Joerg', engraving by Lucas Cranach the Elder - undated Vintage property of ullstein bild (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_043_r1.jpg] [image "(GERMANY OUT) Luther, Martin - Priest, Reformer, D *10.11.1483-18.02.1546+ - Portrait of Martin Luther as the 'Junker Joerg', engraving by Lucas Cranach the Elder - undated Vintage property of ullstein bild (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_043_r1.jpg] 37. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as Junker Jörg, 1522.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Exploring his inner world, however, and the context into which his ideas and passions flooded, opens up a new vision of the Reformation. W HEN YOUNG M ARTIN left Mansfeld in 1497 to go to school in Magdeburg, he was in his fourteenth year and his father’s future as a substantial smelter-master still looked rosy. He went with Hans Reinicke, the mining inspector’s son; ambitious as ever, his father wanted the same education for Martin as that enjoyed by the son of the most prominent man in town. Young Martin lodged with the archbishop’s official, Dr. Paul Moshauer, who also came from a mining family. 1 The careers of the two bright young lads offer a telling contrast. Martin went on to university at Erfurt, becoming a monk, while Reinicke followed in the family business, and married in 1511, aged around twenty-eight. By 1512, Luther had risen to become subprior and director of study for the monastery, while Reinicke ran his first two smelters. 2 In 1519, when Martin was a famous but penniless monk, Hans inherited the family house in Mansfeld, and by 1522 he had become one of the wealthiest mine owners in the town. 3 Luther, meanwhile, had made his famous appearance at the Diet of Worms, and in 1522 he was hiding in the Wartburg Castle. Throughout the 1520s and 1530s, alone of all the mine owners of his generation, Hans Reinicke made a success of it, joining the capitalists of the Steinacher Saigerhandelsgesellschaft, dominating the silver production of Mansfeld, and acting as spokesperson for the mine owners; in the same decades, Luther became world famous. 4 Reinicke’s was the life that Luther could have led and had chosen not to. The two men remained friends and kept in contact, the friendship a powerful anchor in both their lives. Reinicke visited Luther during the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, while the reformer was suffering from loneliness in Coburg Castle. It was Reinicke who broke the news of Hans Luder’s death: When a letter arrived from his friend shortly afterward, Luther took one look and said, “Now I know that my father is dead.” As Melanchthon put it: “There was exceptional mutual kindness between these two, Luther and Reinicke, whether by some concord of nature or whether rising from that companionship of boyhood studies.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Now, in a letter of October 3, 1519, Luther castigated Staupitz for being too busy to write to him—usually it was the other way around, as Luther endlessly apologized to his correspondents for his failure to write. In one chatty letter sent to the older man in February of that year, packed with gossip about friends, he cheerfully said that the bishop of Brandenburg had taken to remarking, as he put logs on the fire, that he would not be able to have a good night’s sleep until Luther was thrown into the flames as well. Then in the October letter Luther lamented that his confessor was “deserting him too much,” making him feel, in the words of Psalm 131, “like a child weaned from its mother.” Luther continued: “I am empty of faith, full of other gifts, Christ knows how little I desire these, if I cannot serve him”—an appeal to his confessor who like no one else understood his Anfechtungen. Then in the letter’s final paragraph, he described a dream: “This night I had a dream about you, as if you wanted to retreat from me, but I wept bitterly and suffered; but you waved to me and said I should be calm, and that you would return to me. This certainly has come true this very day.”9 Having not heard from Staupitz for some time, Luther was clearly suffering from what he felt to be his increasing coldness. Indeed, it would not be long before the rift between the two men became irreparable as Staupitz refused to follow Luther in rejecting the Pope and leaving the Church; he finally deserted his former protégé when Luther was excommunicated in early 1521. The instruction Staupitz gives Luther in his dream—to be calm—is exactly what he found difficult. Indeed, in a previous letter to Staupitz on February 20 Luther had opened dramatically, saying he wanted to be “still,” but was seized and driven by God, and “thrown into the noise.”10 The entire October letter is full of noise: news about disputations, envy, and argument. So what does the dream mean? Is Staupitz’s moving hand reaching out to Luther or waving him goodbye? Is his confessor’s return dependent upon Luther becoming “calm” or “still” (quietus), or indeed, on his keeping “quiet,” as the Latin word may also imply—that is, halting his struggle against the Pope?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Not for the first or last time, Luther reached an intellectual breakthrough by attacking authority, but his victory unleashed enormous creativity as well as sadness and fear. The righteous anger and aggression he displayed seemed to give him the energy to develop his own identity—and may have helped smother the feelings of melancholy, tristitia, that so often plagued him and blocked his way. The rejection of the cardinal’s authority, however, was one thing; the separation from Staupitz quite another. His other close friend and fellow Augustinian, Wenzeslaus Linck, also left Augsburg. Years later, Luther recalled feeling very alone at this time. Staupitz “left me alone at Augsburg,” he recalled in 1531, and “when I departed from Augsburg, I was afraid because I was alone.” 40 Luther had been a monk for years, an institutional man who knew how to manage those in his care and to owe obedience to superiors. Now without authority and institutional support, he was left alone in his relationship with God—the singularity that he both craved and feared. Four days passed without any summons from Cajetan or reply to the written defense. On October 18, Luther composed a formal letter to the Pope protesting against his treatment, and had it certified by two notaries. He also wrote again to the cardinal, an extraordinarily rude letter that boasted of his “flawless obedience”: “You, Most Reverend Father, have seen—and I emphasize this—and become sufficiently acquainted with my obedience. This obedience made me undertake such a long journey and endure so many dangers—weak in body and with extremely limited means—in order to appear before you and make myself available to you.” This was hardly likely to cut much ice with Cajetan, who, after all, had been forced to delay his own return to Rome on Luther’s account for several months. Luther continued that he did not “want to spend time here in vain,” pointing out that “you…have ordered me, with a loud voice [my emphasis], not to return to your sight unless I wish to recant”—impudently presenting his imminent departure from Augsburg as an act of “obedience” to Cajetan’s ill-tempered order. He signed off as “your dedicated son.” 41 Like the letter to the archbishop of Mainz that accompanied the Ninety-five Theses in October 1517, Luther’s tone was utterly lacking in contrition, his protestations of “obedience” deeply ironic. Cutting through the relations of authority, he put himself on an equal footing with the letter’s recipient. Nor could he resist another little joke, when he wrote of appealing to “a pope ill-informed who should be better informed.” 42 Although his Appellation to the Pope, written in formal legal language, was ostensibly more polite, Luther made it clear that he had no confidence in the judgment of the Church. By this point, Luther’s new Augsburg friends, fearing that Rome was going to put him on trial, urged him to leave town, and on the night of October 20–21, he apparently climbed over the city wall.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As a Haredi educationalist explained, the yeshiva not only taught a young man “total dedication to Torah,” but also how “to distance himself from the experiences of this world.” 35 The yeshiva walls were a constant reminder that the Torah can never be at home in the Galut. The counterculture was designed to enhance the students’ separation from the mainstream. As Avraham Woolf observed in Education in the Face of the Generation (1 954), the yeshiva Jew was dedicated to the task of reviving the world of his father and grandfather, despite the indifference of the secularists. “We stand all alone in this. We are different from all around us. Reform historians … poets [are seen as great men by all the others].” Even in the Jewish state the Haredim were isolated. “Streets are named for historical figures whom we see in an utterly negative light. We stand all alone.” 36 The Haredi rebellion against rational modernity consists largely of retreat. But in this period, the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had long nurtured a militancy in the Habad yeshiva in Russia, went on the offensive. The Bolsheviks had virtually annihilated the Habad in Russia. Jewish schools and yeshivot were closed, Torah study was condemned as counterrevolutionary, and defiance meant starvation, imprisonment, or death. The Sixth Rebbe (Joseph Isaac Schneerson, 1880–1950) could only see these measures as the “birth pangs of the Messiah.” It was not enough for the religious to retreat from the world; Hasidim must try to conquer the modern world for God. In Russia, the Rebbe organized a Jewish underground, where the graduates of the Habad yeshiva gave Torah and Talmud classes, and taught young Jews to observe the commandments. He was exiled, but continued his work from Poland, reorganizing and centralizing his court on modern lines, and using the new communications technology to keep in touch with the Lubavitch all over the world. When the Rebbe was forced to flee Hitler and arrived in the United States, he continued his mission and began a propaganda campaign to reclaim Jews who had assimilated or felt deracinated in the New World. Instead of withdrawal, there was outreach. In 1949, the Rebbe took the remarkable step of founding Kfar Habad, the first Hasidic settlement in Israel. He had not abated his hostility to Zionism one whit, but believed that in these Last Days, his mission must also reach the Jews in the defiled land of Israel. 37 In 1950, the Rebbe died and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1904–94). This was an astonishing development, which must reflect the Habad’s willingness to embrace the secular world in an attempt to convert it. The Seventh Rebbe had not been educated in a yeshiva , but had received a modern education. He had studied Jewish philosophy in Berlin and marine engineering at the Sorbonne.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  They live as though certain things were important, so those things become important. Right here Amanda says, “If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can recreate ourselves.” A resurrection a day if you work at it. That’s something I can believe in. It’s the same thing Castaneda means when he says that by the power of our will we can stop the world and remake it. And the same thing Fitzgerald shows in The Great Gatsby with the schedule Gatsby followed as a kid—exercising and studying needed inventions and practicing elocution and poise and reading an improving book each week and taking a bath every day. The problem with old Gatsby, though, was that he just wasn’t tough enough. With all his discipline, he wasn’t willing to face alone the world he’d made. He wanted Daisy along, and there was no way that stain would do anything that took independence. I guess a lot of people are concerned about how to take charge of their lives and make them better. And not just writers, either. My own dad is trying to change. I can see him doing it. And Kuch. Kuch has put it all into his vision quest. I think a lot about this stuff when I can’t sleep. It’s lonely without Carla beside me and Dad upstairs. I’m just not real comfortable in somebody else’s house. * * * I wake to a crash of pool balls overhead. Rance is up and at it already. “Prokoff,” I growl. “If you want to live to lose a wrestling match this afternoon, you’ll lighten up on that pool stick.” CRASH! Rance drills one into the corner pocket above my head. “Stay down there, Swain, or I’ll clout ya on the nose.” The news is really out on my tragic flaw. “What time is it?” “It’s nine thirty and Mrs. Carpenter says breakfast in ten minutes.” “Suppose they’ve got any spinach?” I ask on my way to the bathroom. When I come out Chris Carpenter is shooting a game with Rance. Chris looks sharp in his cowboy clothes. His eye is all puffy. “Looks like Schmoozler got a piece of your eye yesterday,” I greet him. “It’s an infection,” Chris replies. “I get it every season. The doctor says it’s like athlete’s foot.” “Typical cowboy disease,” I say, smiling. “Athlete’s foot of the eye.” Rance laughs and Carpenter brings his stick back extra far and jabs him a firm one in the gonies. Rance shrieks in surprise and doubles over, more in reflex than in pain. Wrestlers are a playful bunch. “Breakfast, you boys!” yells Chris’s mom from upstairs. Chris and Rance are both a couple pounds light, so they’re looking forward to something substantial for breakfast. I weighed 147 on the nose after my morning dump. But since I won’t wrestle tonight, I can’t count on that weight loss, so I’d better go easy. Mrs.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Engulfed in the comfort of darkness and cool sheets, I set my muddled mind free to float around the words just spoken. I mentally replayed the conversation, embellishing with flip imaginary comments, dumbfounded Ross couldn’t see how he had violated my trust. The whiskey had loosened my tongue, exposing realizations I’d been shaping for months. The avalanche of true feelings was an exhausting relief to express. Suddenly, out of my stupor rose an essential truth I couldn’t believe I had forgotten. This is what Witnesses do when someone is “ailing.” Just like loyal geese who temporarily abort migration to nurse and beseech a member of the flock who has fallen behind, they will blab and squawk to each other, deliberately assigning roles, a communal effort to protect and nurture. Ross was following Witness protocol, offering help that trumped all marital confidences. Who needs it? My head was filled with ideas and voices— worldly voices—Ross would never be able to hear. Perhaps it was I who had betrayed Ross. He still didn’t know I was seeing a therapist. There, in my personal sacristy, I’d been gathering the clarity and will to speak up. Ross’s action was equivalent to calling in the cavalry. I wondered how I might summon the courage to stand in my questions for however long it took to land on my own ground. Inside me, a hysterical angst was building. I was now facing a series of conversations I wasn’t sure I was ready for. I wallowed in the peculiar sort of loneliness reserved for married couples engulfed in conflict. Deeply connected by the ups and downs that come from nine years of shared living, we now stood at separate ends of a vast chasm, and I couldn’t fathom how to make things right without short-changing my process. A sense of belonging was very important to both of us. These new developments would bring an end to our blending in. Ross had married me thinking I would be his ideal Christian mate. We moved around a community that valued togetherness and idealized conformity. These thoughts plagued me as I drifted to sleep. The next thing I knew, I was being jostled awake as someone sat down at the foot of the bed. Lifting my head from the pillow, I saw Ross, still wearing the same clothes from the night before. Dawn slipped through the blinds. His side of the bed was undisturbed. It was just a few minutes before my alarm was set to go off. “Linda, wake up. I have something to tell you.” His shirt was untucked and wrinkled. “What is it? What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up in bed. My head began to pound, an aggressive reminder of too much whiskey. I switched on the lamp and winced. “First, promise not to kill me; then I’ll tell you,” Ross said. His face was drained of color. “I promise. Now, can we get on with it?

• From Shunned (2018)

  Collecting myself, I peeled away the smiling Santa paper and found the perfect present, under the circumstances: a pound of dark-roast coffee and a handheld coffee grinder. “Thank you,” I said, bewildered and near tears. One glance at Steve and I knew he was in on this. “Steve told us you love your morning coffee,” Bernie said, beaming at the obvious success of her choice. “Last week, when you were getting dressed I snuck around your kitchen and realized you didn’t have a grinder,” Steve said, smiling a little. In that moment, I forgave him for the underwear, though I could still anticipate the groans of my girlfriends. I was deeply moved by the thought and collaborative effort that had gone into this gift. The gesture both warmed my heart and made me feel very alone in the strangest way. It was the kind of thing my own family would have done for me, and I couldn’t help but wonder what each of them was doing that day, back home. It was Sunday, so I guessed they had gone to the Kingdom Hall for services, a sermon followed by a discussion of a Watchtower article, like any other Sunday. They would have made no special acknowledgment of the “worldly” holiday. I had avoided calling them over the last few days, and they hadn’t reached out to me, either. They may have suspected my heathen activities and didn’t want to be faced with the truth or a lie. Better to let the whole thing blow over. Every bit the guilty pagan, I felt my heart murmuring with faint echoes of shame. “It must be hard to be away from your family,” Bernie said. “Especially at Christmas.” “It is,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. I knew Steve had not shared my situation with her, and that she might misread the meaning behind my emotions. I took a deep breath to recover my bearings. “Being here has helped me along. You are very generous, and this present is perfect for me. Thank you. I’ll use it often; I’m sure of it.” Steve placed a Kleenex on my knee, and I dabbed my cheeks, grateful the attention had shifted to the next round of gifts. Without my asking, PFQ brought me another whiskey, which I gladly accepted and sipped through an evening that asked nothing more from me. Later, after we helped clear the discarded gift wrap and stacked the dishes, we said goodbye. Steve drove us back to the city, where the streets had an eerie stillness and repose, dark and cold as a butcher’s locker. Steve and I walked through the deserted lobby of my building and rode the elevator uninterrupted to the fourteenth floor. When we walked through my front door, Steve set down my gift in the kitchen and followed me to the bedroom. The blinds were open, and the city lights cast a blue aura, adding to the spectral mood.

• From Shunned (2018)

  My thinking had pushed beyond that, and their company reminded me of how many questions I was living with. I wasn’t even praying anymore, shying away from the face of Jehovah, not even sure what to pray for, yearning for a sense of innocence I thought I’d lost, innocence I imagined this group still possessed. Deborah saw me to the door, her long, wavy hair still pulled into a ponytail, showing the full bevel curve of her cheeks. “Perhaps we’ll see you at the Hall soon,” she said in a breezy, offhanded manner. “And we have weekly book study here on Tuesday. You’re always welcome. Most of the regulars are people who were here tonight.” “Thank you,” I said. “We’ll see.” I was numb to any feelings about going to the Kingdom Hall. I didn’t want to go, per se, but felt compelled to keep the option open. At the very least, it felt good to be known by such a warm soul. I could have a good friend in her if I wanted, I thought. Traffic along Lake Shore Drive was at a standstill in both directions. I’d slipped out of the office early that afternoon, my first week back after the holiday break, feeling frail and small, possibly coming down with a virus, vacant any ambition, in no condition to conduct business. The lake was at my right, the wind stirring it into a mean, choppy stew that spread out empty, as far as the eye could see. It started to rain. Traffic reports and news blurbs gave way to music and the beat of my windshield wipers. I had no appointment to keep. No one was waiting for me. My only plan for the evening was to hibernate. There was little else to do but creep forward, following the taillights ahead of me, getting lost in my thoughts. Earlier that week, I’d received a phone call from my former boss Brian Martin in Portland. He was involved in a new business venture that was recruiting sales talent. He’d thought of me. “Just in case things aren’t working out as you’d hoped,” he’d said. I was flattered, but of course I declined, explaining how I was just hitting my stride, feeling phony as I talked about how much I loved everything in my new world and yes, thank you, was thriving on all fronts. “I thought it was a long shot,” Brian said. “But what could it hurt to make you aware of it?” I was too proud to be honest with Brian, but our conversation triggered several days of ambivalent thinking. In private, I needed to face facts.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The danger of discovery meant that Luther became utterly dependent on Spalatin, who was now his chief means of communication with the outside world. The solitude soon irked Luther, and he wrote to his friends complaining of his enforced “leisure,” which made him heavy-headed and inclined to drunkenness. 7 In the castle, he rigged up the small chamber he was assigned as a study, and asked Spalatin for books. But this “leisure” also gave him time for reflection, and his letters from this period are among his fullest and most revealing. Not only do they tell us much about the nature of his friendships, but they also show Luther beginning to reassess his own life and especially his relationship with his father as he gradually came to terms with the public figure he had become. Sitting high up in his eyrie, Luther had no way of controlling what was happening in the world below. He had to wait for news from Wittenberg. The pattern of his correspondence betrays the shrinking compass of his world. There are letters to his friend Nikolaus Gerbel in Strasbourg, but remarkably, none that survive to Nuremberg, Augsburg, or Basle, and therefore nothing to suggest that he was increasing his influence in the prosperous south. 8 We do not know whether this was because of the difficulty of sending messengers to southern Germany without betraying his hiding place, or because the Nurembergers, once such enthusiastic members of the Staupitz sodality and so keen to spread the word about Luther, now wanted to distance themselves from him. Two of them, the lawyer Willibald Pirckheimer and civic secretary Lazarus Spengler, had been named in the bull of excommunication alongside Luther, but Pirckheimer had humiliatingly sought and received absolution from Eck. Luther’s correspondence network contracted, concentrating on Wittenberg, Saxony, and the mining areas of Mansfeld, and so did his political reach. Beyond it, other reformers emerged who would take his Reformation in different directions. In the Wartburg, Luther began to suffer from severe constipation, which had first affected him at Worms. As he wrote to Spalatin, “the Lord strikes me in my posterior with serious pain.” The pains were his own special “relic of the Cross,” he quipped.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Nick’s creased brow, a mix of patience and pensiveness, dominated my thoughts. Each time I thought of our exchange on his doorstep, I was riddled with tension. My entire life was spent secure in the knowledge that I had The Truth. Witnesses refer to people as being either “in” or “out” of The Truth. The “T” is always capitalized. Jesus said the truth would set you free, and I had always felt lucky to be born into the one true way. And when we knocked on doors, we were bearing witness to the One True God, Jehovah. “‘You are my witnesses,’ says Jehovah.” I understood my role in the world to be one of telling The Truth about Jehovah and his purposes, like a character witness in a court of law. (“Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” “I do.”) From my earliest days, I was certain of my religious beliefs. During my grammar school years, my convictions for political neutrality excused me from things like saying the Pledge of Allegiance and standing for the National Anthem. I didn’t attend birthday or Christmas parties because their pagan origins could poison my worship of the Almighty. When it came time for the annual school holiday program, I would venture off to the library, reading a book while “Silent Night” floated through the hollow halls. Crouched in a wooden chair of the fiction section, I sat, a lone soul among a sea of books—a bit lonely, yes, but innocent the hypocrisy of false Christianity, which had bastardized true worship by embracing heathen rituals. Lucky for me, I liked to read. During the third grade, I found a wise and sympathetic teacher in Ms. Levy. She was pretty, kind, and smart. All the girls wanted to grow up and be just like her, driving a convertible VW bug and wearing hoop earrings. Every boy had a crush on her. When it came time for that year’s holiday program, which would be held in the gymnasium, she invited me to stay in the classroom. She reserved a film projector to play cartoons and gave me a fresh box of colored chalk and free rein over the long blackboard. As the other kids lined up to leave for the program, I slipped into the bathroom, hoping no one would notice I was staying behind. Being a Witness often meant being different and standing out, but there was no need to call undue attention to myself. My ear to the door, I prayed for a clean exit. If anyone found out I was in there, they might feel sorry for me, or I’d have to explain myself. When all was quiet, I emerged into the room, now empty. The only movement was the class’s pet gerbil spinning on her wheel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Those few who had had a Western education felt estranged from their parents and families, caught between two worlds and at ease in neither. Life seemed drained of meaning. In the prolific literature of the 1960s, the most recurrent symbols expressed the growing alienation: walls, solitude, nothingness, loneliness, and hypocrisy. The contemporary Iranian critic Fazaneh Milani noted the persistence during the 1960S and 1970s of imagery depicting “ingenious forms of protection and secrecy.” Walls surround houses. Veils cover women. Religious taqiyyah protects faith. Taarof [ritualistic modes of discourse] disguise real thoughts and emotions. Houses become compartmentalized with their darni [inner] and biruni [external] and batini [hidden] spheres. 35 Iranians were hiding from themselves and from one another. They no longer felt safe in the Pahlavi state, which was becoming a very frightening place. The shah had begun his White Revolution by closing the Majlis, believing that he could only push his reforms forward by dictatorial rule and by silencing all opposition. He was supported by the SAVAK, his secret police, formed in 1957 with the help of the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad. SAVAK’s brutal methods, its regime of torture and intimidation, made people feel that they were held prisoner in their own country, with the connivance of Israel and the United States. 36 During the 1960S and 1970S, two paramilitary organizations were formed, similar to other guerrilla groups that were emerging in the developing world at this time: the Fedayin-e Khalq, a Marxist group founded by members of the now suppressed Tudeh and National Front parties, and an Islamic corps, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Force seemed the only way to fight a regime which blocked all normal opposition and which was based on coercion rather than consent. Intellectuals tried to fight the regime with ideas. They were disturbed by the malaise in the country, and could see that modernization had been too rapid and had resulted in widespread alienation. The brilliant philosopher Ahmed Fardid (1912–94), who became a professor at the University of Tehran in the late 1960S, coined the term gharbzadegi (“West-toxication”) to describe the Iranian dilemma: the people had been poisoned and polluted by the West; they must create a new identity for themselves. 37 This theme was amplified by the secularist and onetime socialist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69), whose Gharbzadegi (1962) became a cult book for Iranians during the 1960s. This “rootlessness” and “Occidentosis” was “a disease from without, spreading in an environment susceptible to it.” It was the plight of a people “having no supporting tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.” 38 This plague could devastate Iran’s integrity, eradicate her political sovereignty, and destroy the economy. But Al-e Ahmad was himself torn both ways: he was influenced by such Western writers as Sartre and Heidegger, and attracted by the Western ideals of democracy and liberty; but he did not see how they could be successfully transplanted in the alien soil of Iran.

• From The Lover (1984)

  He starts to look like them, drinks a lot, gets bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. In Tours he had nothing. Both houses had been sold off. Nothing. For a year he lived in a furniture warehouse leased by my mother. For a year he slept in an armchair. They let him go there. Stay for a year. Then they threw him out. For a year he must have hoped to buy his mortgaged property back. He gambled away my mother’s furniture out of storage, bit by bit. The bronze Buddhas, the brasses, then the beds, then the wardrobes, then the sheets. And then one day he has nothing left, that does happen to people like him, one day he has the suit on his back and nothing else, not a sheet, not a shelter. He’s alone. For a year no one will open their door to him. He writes to a cousin in Paris. He can have a servant’s room in the boulevard Malesherbes. And when he’s over fifty he’ll have his first job, his first wages ever, as messenger for a marine insurance company. That lasted, I think, fifteen years. He had to go into the hospital. He didn’t die there. He died in his room. My mother never talked about that one of her children. She never mentioned the rummager in closets to anyone. She treated the fact that she was his mother as if it were a crime. She kept it hidden. She must have thought it was unintelligible, impossible to convey to anyone who didn’t know her son as she did, before God and only before Him. She repeated little platitudes about him, always the same ones. That if he’d wanted to he could have been the cleverest of the three. The most “artistic.” The most astute. And he was the one who’d loved his mother most. The one, in short, who’d understood her best. I didn’t know, she’d say, that you could expect that of a boy, such intuition, such deep affection. We met again once, he spoke about our dead brother. He said of his death, What an awful thing, how dreadful, our little brother, our little Paulo. There remains this image of our kinship: a meal in Sadec. All three of us are eating at the dining-room table. They’re seventeen, eighteen. My mother’s not with us. He watches us eat, my younger brother and me, then he puts down his fork and looks at my younger brother. For a very long time he looks at him, then suddenly, very calmly, says something terrible. About food. He says he must be careful, he shouldn’t eat so much. My younger brother doesn’t answer. The other goes on. Reminds him the big pieces of meat are for him, and he mustn’t forget it. Or else, he says. I ask, Why are they for you? He says, Because that’s how it is. I say, I wish you’d die. I can’t eat any more.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1843, the French writer Gérard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city. Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.... What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French. 51 The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad Ali and Ismail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence: Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated. The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role. 52 The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation. For the vast majority of the people, who were not involved in the process, it was also an experience of alienation. A “modern” city, such as Muhammad Ali’s Cairo, was built on entirely different principles from those that gave meaning to the indigenous towns of Egypt. As Gilsenan points out, tourists, colonialists, and travelers have often found Oriental cities confusing and even frightening: the unnamed and unnumbered streets and twisting passages seem to have no order or orientation; Westerners get lost and can make no sense of their surroundings. For most of the colonized peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, the new Westernized cities were equally incomprehensible, and bore no relation to their instinctive sense of what a city should be. They frequently felt lost in their own country.