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 The Battle for God (2000)

  Because of the decline in agriculture, there was a massive exodus from the country to the cities: between 1968 and 1978, the urban population rose from 38 percent to 47 percent. The population of Tehran almost doubled during these years, increasing from 2.719 million to 4.496 million.34 The rural migrants did not integrate successfully, but lived in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities, eking out a precarious living as porters, taxi drivers, and street vendors. Tehran split into modernized and traditional sectors: the Westernized upper and middle classes moved away from the old city to the new residential neighborhoods and the business area in the north of the city, where there were bars and casinos, and where women dressed like Europeans and mixed freely with men in public. It seemed like a foreign country to the bazaaris and the poor, who remained in the old city and the adjacent southern areas. The vast majority of Iranians were thus experiencing one of the most unsettling of human emotions. The familiar world had grown unfamiliar; it was itself and yet not itself, like a close friend whose appearance and personality have been disfigured by illness. When the world we know changes as rapidly as Iran did during the 1960s, men and women begin to feel like strangers in their own country. Increasingly, a worrying number of Iranians found that they did not feel at home anywhere. The debacle of 1953 had left many with a corrosive sense of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the international community. 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.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I don’t think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors’ waiting rooms, hotels, airports. In summer we had lunch on a big terrace looking over the river, and coffee was served in the garden covering the whole roof. There was a swimming pool. But no one went in. We just sat and looked at Paris. The empty avenues, the river, the streets. In the empty streets, catalpas in flower. Marie-Claude Carpenter. I looked at her a lot, practically all the time, it embarrassed her but I couldn’t help it. I looked at her to try to find out, find out who she was, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why she was there rather than somewhere else, why she was from so far away too, from Boston, why she was rich, why no one knew anything about her, not anything, no one, why these seemingly compulsory parties. And why, why, in her eyes, deep down in the depths of sight, that particle of death? Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why did all her dresses have something indefinable in common that made them look as if they didn’t quite belong to her, as if they might just as well have been on some other body? Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter. Betty Fernandez. My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women. Betty Fernandez. She was a foreigner too. As soon as I say the name there she is, walking along a Paris street, she’s short-sighted, can’t see much, screws up her eyes to recognize you, then greets you with a light handshake. Hello, how are you? Dead a long time ago now. Thirty years, perhaps. I can remember her grace, it’s too late now for me to forget, nothing mars its perfection still, nothing ever will, not the circumstances, nor the time, nor the cold or the hunger or the defeat of Germany, nor the coming to light of the crime. She goes along the street still, above the history of such things however terrible. Here too the eyes are pale. The pink dress is old, the black wide-brimmed hat dusty in the sunlight of the street. She’s slim, tall, drawn in India ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen.

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

  Jewish division of the week into seven days rather than the traditional Roman eight, probably in the same century that they destroyed the Temple.88 Christians who finally broke their links with the parent culture would find no such recognition from the Roman government, although it also meant that they avoided the special tax, and they may have been anxious to avoid association with the ‘guilt’ of the Jews in the rebellion of 66–70 as well. Interestingly, such was Christians’ sense of alienation from the Jewish world that they made no attempt to cling on to that privileged status.89 Thanks to these developments, and to the energy of Paul’s work in reaching out to the non-Jewish world, the movement which had started as a Jewish sect decisively shifted away from its Palestinian home, and all the sacred writings which form the New Testament were written in Greek. The Christ revealed in the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, much more than in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a cosmic ruler and his followers must conquer the whole world. For Paul, that meant setting his sights westwards across the Mediterranean Sea, to the capital of the empire of which he was a citizen, Rome. But very early on, other preachers of Christ looked east, to the capital of the Persian king at Ctesiphon in what is now Iraq, or even beyond, to the remote cultures with which the Mediterranean world traded, far to the east in India and maybe further. Paul had apparently met failure in his first mission to Arabia; these others did not, as we will see. If the new religion had remained focused on the Middle East, there were obvious contenders among Roman imperial cities to replace the lost Jerusalem in its significance for the followers of Christ. There was Alexandria, capital of Egypt, home to the largest single Jewish community beyond Palestine itself, and there was also Antioch of Syria, the old Seleucid capital, still then the chief city in Rome’s eastern imperial provinces. It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) – Christiani.90 This name ‘Christian’ has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origin in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah, Christos. With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life- story, this very name ‘Christian’ embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the word has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. ‘Christian’ embodies the two languages which became the vehicle for talking about Christianity within the Roman Empire: Latin and Greek, the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Chapter Twenty-one AFTER SEVERAL FALSE STARTS AND STOPS, I FOUND A PATH THAT LED away from the tent and the Terrellites. I went to college and studied philosophy, literature, and journalism. For a long time I felt like a cardboard cutout of a person, flat and one-dimensional, propped up with a plastic stand, nothing behind me. I watched the students, teachers, employers, friends, and colleagues around me and picked up cues on how to be in the world: Look them in the eye, firm up the handshake, file down the emotion, read good books, wear good shoes, dark colors, the best haircut you can afford. Fake it till you make it. Gradually, the years between me and the tent stacked up until they formed a wall of experience that separated me from my former self. Upon meeting my relatives who remained in the ministry, my husband and friends commented, “I don’t know what to think. They’re so different from you.” The elevenand-a-half-year- old girl who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the world—the very thing everyone under the tent warned against—had gotten exactly that: the world, in all its messy glory. When casual acquaintances asked where I grew up, or where I came from, as we say in Texas, there was a long and uncomfortable pause. After a moment I might say, “Oh, we moved around,” or “We lived all over,” which led to questions about whether my “stepfather” was in the military. If I felt brave, I laughed and said, “Oh, something like that,” and made a fast getaway. Most times I stammered and shifted my eyes until the conversation limped off in another direction. The question of where I came from struck me as a paradox. I had not lived anywhere long enough for a place to stamp itself upon my psyche in the cozy shape of a Monopoly house. Brother Terrell’s ministry was the only home I had known, and that did not constitute an answer anyone could understand. I experienced myself as an exile, an orphan, a ghost girl, all of the above. There was the time I had passed through and the time I now inhabited. I had no way to connect the two. Until my sister’s telephone call and Randall’s funeral. Randall knocked on death’s door off and on for forty years. Maybe that’s why when the door finally opened and he slipped through, it came as a shock. With the help of his daddy’s prayers, he had spent most of his life proving doctors

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The vast majority of Iranians were thus experiencing one of the most unsettling of human emotions. The familiar world had grown unfamiliar; it was itself and yet not itself, like a close friend whose appearance and personality have been disfigured by illness. When the world we know changes as rapidly as Iran did during the 1960s, men and women begin to feel like strangers in their own country. Increasingly, a worrying number of Iranians found that they did not feel at home anywhere. The debacle of 1953 had left many with a corrosive sense of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the international community. 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 1960 S 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 1960 S and 1970 S , 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.

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

  towards the ferocious landscapes of the far north towards the Arctic Circle. Communities here could be tiny, vulnerable and widely separated; loneliness was part of everyday experience even more than is normal for human beings. Russian Christianity drew on the features of imported Orthodoxy which seemed valuable in such conditions. The emphasis of Orthodoxy on corporate life, expressed in its liturgy and sacred music, appealed to medieval Russian society, for here people needed to cooperate to survive at all. Individualism was not a virtue unless it was in the celebratory, counter-cultural form exemplified by the Holy Fool, who could only exist because he knew which aspects of the strongly rule-bound society to overturn and mock, and thereby to reaffirm. Russian Orthodoxy was not a spirituality which valued new perspectives or original thoughts about the mysteries of faith: it looked for deepening of tradition, enrichment of the existing liturgy, enhanced insight through meditation. Reform meant recalling the life of the Church to previous standards. That was of course also the consistent rhetoric of the Western Latin tradition, but in the West the language of restoration disguised much more the steady creation of radical innovation, in a fashion which for Orthodoxy everywhere virtually ended with the acceptance of Hesychasm in the fourteenth century. One sign of the way in which radical structural initiative now proved unwelcome in the Muscovite Church came in the Church’s deliberate reshaping of a mission eastwards which was begun by the priest and monk Stefan (Stephen) Khrap. Galvanized by his conviction that the world would come to an end with the completion of a seventh millennium since Creation – dangerously near his own time – Stephen felt a call to spread the Christian message beyond the eastern frontier of the Muscovite lands, to within sight of the Ural Mountains. In 1376 he set out to establish his mission among the Komi people of the Perm’ region, and achieved enough success for the Metropolitan to make him bishop (at the same time, significantly, his mission resulted in the Grand Prince of Muscovy replacing Novgorod as the overlord of that area). Like Cyril and Methodios, Stephen of Perm’ created an alphabet for his converts and translated the Bible and liturgical texts for them, but times had changed. Despite the reverence which Stephen’s memory inspired, the authorities in Moscow eventually decided that it was unhelpful to sanction another ecclesiastical language. After the region had been brought more firmly under the political control of the grand prince in the late fifteenth century, Church Slavonic replaced the local vernacular in Church life, and the use of Stephen’s alphabet faded away.37 The dominant personality in the spiritual life of the Church in Rus’ during the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the same time as the rabbis first excommunicated Prado, they also opened proceedings against Baruch Spinoza, who was only twenty-three years old. Unlike Prado, Spinoza had been born in Amsterdam. His parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza, therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the opportunity to practice his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza had seemed devout, but in 1655, shortly after Prado’s arrival in Amsterdam, he suddenly stopped attending services in the synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied the possibility of revelation, and argued that “God” was simply the totality of nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon Spinoza, and, unlike Prado, Spinoza did not ask to remain in the community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion. It was easier for Spinoza to survive in the gentile world than it had been for Prado or Da Costa. He was a genius, able to articulate his position clearly, and, as a genuinely independent man, could sustain the inevitable loneliness it entailed. He was at home in the Netherlands, and had powerful patrons who gave him a reasonable allowance, so that he did not have to live in abject poverty. Spinoza was not, as is often supposed, forced to grind lenses to earn a living; he did it to further his interest in optics. He was able to form friendships with some of the leading gentile scientists, philosophers, and politicians of the day. Yet he remained an isolated figure. Jews and gentiles alike found his irreligion either shocking or disconcerting.37

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  RICHARD: Your beauty Now she was more alone than ever, and more dependent on him. was the cause of that effect— \ Your beauty, that Near the end of the trip, Aly Khan proposed to Rita. She turned him did haunt me in my sleep \ down; she did not think he was the kind of man you married. He followed To undertake the death of her to Hollywood, where her former friends were less friendly than be-all the world, \ So I might fore. Thank God she had Aly Khan to help her. A year later she finally live one hour in your sweet bosom. succumbed, abandoning her career, moving to Aly Khan's château, and — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, marrying him. THE TRAGEDY OF KING RICHARD III Interpretation. Aly Khan, like a lot of men, fell in love with Rita Hayworth the moment he saw the film Gilda, in 1948. He made up his mind My child, my sister, dream that he would seduce her somehow. The moment he heard she was coming \ How sweet all things to the Riviera, he got his friend Elsa Maxwell to lure her to the party and would seem \ Were we in seat her next to him. He knew about the breakup of her marriage, and that kind land to live together, \And there love how vulnerable she was. His strategy was to block out everything else in slow and long, \ There love her world—problems, other men, suspicion of him and his motives, etc. and die among \ Those His campaign began with the display of an intense interest in her life— scenes that image you, that sumptuous weather. \ constant phone calls, flowers, gifts, all to keep him in her mind. He set up Drowned suns that the fortune-teller to plant the seed. When she began to fall for him, he in-glimmer there \ Through troduced her to his friends, knowing she would feel alienated among them, cloud-dishevelled air \ Move me with such a and therefore dependent on him. Her dependence was heightened by the mystery as appears \ trip to Spain, where she was on unfamiliar territory, besieged by reporters, Within those other skies \ and forced to cling to him for help. He slowly came to dominate her Of your treacherous eyes \ thoughts. Everywhere she turned, there he was. Finally she succumbed, out When I behold them shining through their tears. of weakness and the boost to her vanity that his attention represented. Un- \ There, there is nothing der his spell, she forgot about his horrid reputation, relinquishing the suspi-else but grace and measure, cions that were the only thing protecting her from him. \ Richness, quietness, and pleasure. . . . \ See, It was not Aly Khan's wealth or looks that made him a great seducer. Isolate the Victim • 315

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Islam had been infected and weakened by the imperialists. People wanted to separate religion and politics on the Western model, and this had perverted the faith: “Islam lives among the people as if it were a stranger,” Khomeini lamented. “If somebody were to present Islam as it truly is, he would find it difficult to make people believe him.” 72 The Iranians were in the grip of spiritual malaise. “We have completely forgotten our identity, and have replaced it with a Western identity,” Khomeini used to say. Iranians had “sold themselves and do not know themselves, becoming enslaved to alien ideals.” 73 He believed that the way to heal this alienation was to create a society based entirely on the laws of Islam, which were not only more natural for Iranians than the imported law codes of the West, but were of sacred origin. If they lived in a divinely ordered milieu, impelled by the law of the land to live exactly as God intended, they themselves and the meaning of their lives would be transformed. The disciplines, practices, and rituals of Islam would create within them the Muhammadan spirit that was the ideal for humanity. For Khomeini, faith was not a notional acceptance of a creed, but an attitude and lifestyle that embodied a revolutionary struggle for the happiness and integrity that God intended for humanity. “Once faith comes, everything follows.” 74 Such faith was revolutionary because it constituted a revolt against the hegemony of the Western spirit. A Westerner was likely to find Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih (“the Government of the Jurist”) sinister and coercive, but the “modern” government that Iranians had experienced had not brought them the freedoms that people took for granted in Europe and America. Khomeini was coming to embody in his own person an alternative Shii ideal to the Pahlavi monarchy. He was known to be a mystic and to embody divine knowledge in a way that was similar, if not identical, to that of the Imams. Like Husain, he had challenged the corrupt rule of a tyrant; like the Imams, he had been imprisoned and almost put to death by an unjust ruler; like some of the Imams, he had been forced into exile and deprived of what was rightfully his. Now in Najaf, living beside the shrine of Imam Ali, Khomeini seemed rather like the Hidden Imam: physically inaccessible to his people, he still guided them from afar and would one day return. There was a rumor that Khomeini had dreamed that, despite his present exile, he would die in Qum. Western people found it difficult to understand how Khomeini, who had none of the charm or charisma that they expected in a political leader, had managed to inspire such devotion in the Iranian people.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I married a month before I turned sixteen. Mama sold the house, and my family hightailed it out of town. I quit school. It’s one thing to leave home and another to have home leave you. I missed my family. Everything that had been familiar began to look and feel like a foreign object, including me. I stopped eating and was hospitalized for pneumonia. I began to talk to God. Please help me. I am so lost. One day a friend from the nearby town of Mexia (a Spanish word mangled as “Ma-hair” by local farmer-rancher types) dropped by, and for lack of anything better to do we took a stroll around the courthouse. I pointed to the statue of the World War II soldier and told him about the time a visiting movie star, a hometown boy made good, got drunk and hung a dead skunk from the bayonet of the statue’s rifle, just in time for the homecoming parade. My friend said something about being surprised he hadn’t read that on the front page, and pulled a folded copy of the Mexia News from his jacket. There on the front page was an AP wire story on evangelist David Terrell, along with a photograph. I stammered through an explanation of why we kept my stepdad’s profession a secret, and heard my mother’s voice. “It’s so he can get some rest. People would bother him day and night if they knew where he lived.” My friend shrugged. “I kinda knew. Rumors have been going around for years.” I scanned the story. Brother Terrell’s followers, dubbed Terrellites by the press, were descending en masse on backwaters in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. People were selling everything they owned and moving to makeshift camps in these “Blessed Areas” to survive the coming apocalypse prophesied by Brother Terrell. A six-year-old girl had died in the camp in Bangs, Texas, from a minor kidney ailment that could have been treated had her parents taken her to a doctor. They had opted for prayer instead. With winter approaching, the local authorities worried about more deaths. The reporter wrote that some of the Terrellites lived in tar-paper shacks and gave everything they had to the prophet, who traveled between revivals in a Mercedes-Benz. That, at least, sounded familiar. The prophet owned property all over the United States and was under investigation by the IRS. The IRS? No wonder my mother had been in such a hurry to get out of town. I pulled my sunglasses out of my purse and put them on. My friend laughed. “Pretty weird, huh?” Since Groesbeck and Mexia were only a few miles apart, everyone in town

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Meeting other lesbians was very difficult, except for the bars which I did not go to because I did not drink. One read The Ladder and the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter and wondered where all the other gay-girls were. Often, just finding out another woman was gay was enough of a reason to attempt a relationship, to attempt some connection in the name of love without first regard to how ill-matched the two of you might really be. Such were the results of loneliness, and this was certainly the case between Bea and me. For starters, our backgrounds and outlooks on important issues could not have been more different. Her family was old, mainline, white, and monied. Psychologically, she had left very little of them behind. Most importantly, our attitudes toward sex were totally different. Sexual expression with Bea was a largely theoretical satisfaction, a very pleasant pastime, and one to which she had great intellectual commitment but apparently little visceral response. It was hard to believe her protestations and assurances that this had nothing to do with me. Whatever fears of reprisal from her upper-class family had turned her off, they had been quite successful. Despite our hours of love-making, our most impassioned shared connections were our love of guitars and old music. I would take the night train to Philly and then a bus to the Arch Street YWCA, where Bea would have rented a room for us for the weekend. The rooms were small and plain and all alike, with single beds. Bea’s face was square and rosy-cheeked, with a rosebud mouth whose corners always pointed down. She had wide, light blue eyes and strong beautiful teeth. Her blonde body was smooth and without fault—small-breasted, long-waisted, with sturdy hips and long smooth legs. It was a body not unlike the ivory statues I used to buy in Oriental import stores when I was in high school, with the money that I stole from my father’s pants pockets. At first, I looked forward to our weekends with wild anticipation. The hope that this time it was going to be different. Bea’s acknowledged gayness was some connection, some living reality within the emotional desert around which I existed. And she was always quite honest about what she didn’t feel. So weekend after weekend, in YWCA bed after YWCA bed, I ran my hot searching mouth over her as against a carved mound of smooth stone, until lip-bruised and panting with frustration, I fell back for a brief rest. “That was really nice,” she would say. “I think I almost felt something.” The scenario was always depressingly the same.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It is among these Portuguese Jews and their descendants that we find the most outright and dramatic instances of atheism. Some of these Jews desperately wanted to retain their Jewish faith, yet found it either difficult or impossible to do so because they had no adequate cult. The Jews who fled to Portugal in 1492 were tougher than the Spanish conversos: they preferred to be deported rather than abjure their faith. When Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, he was compelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, to have the Jews in his domains forcibly baptized, but he compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for a generation. These Portuguese Marranos had almost fifty years to organize an underground in which a dedicated minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and tried to win others back to the old faith. 28 But these Judaizing Marranos were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world. They had received a Catholic education, and their imaginations were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines. They often thought and spoke about Judaism in Christian terms: they believed, for example, that they had been “saved” by the Law of Moses rather than by Jesus, a concept that has little meaning in Judaism. They had forgotten a great deal of Jewish law, and as the years slipped by, their understanding of Judaism became still more attenuated. Sometimes their only sources of information about the faith were the polemical writings of anti-Semitic Christians. What they ended up practicing was a hybrid faith that was neither truly Jewish nor truly Christian. 29 Their dilemma was not unlike that of many people in the developing world today, who have only a superficial understanding of Western culture but whose traditional way of life has been so undermined by the impact of modernity that they cannot identify with the old ways either. The Marrano Jews of Portugal experienced a similar alienation. They had been forced to assimilate to a modernized culture that did not resonate with their inner selves. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jews were permitted to leave the Iberian Peninsula. A Marrano diaspora had already formed in some of the Spanish colonies, as well as in southern France, but here Jews were still not allowed to practice their faith. However, during the seventeenth century, Judaizing Marranos migrated to such cities as Venice, Hamburg, and—later—London, where they could openly return to Judaism. Above all, the Iberian refugees from the Inquisition poured into Amsterdam, which became their new Jerusalem. The Netherlands was the most tolerant country in Europe. It was a republic, with a thriving commercial empire which, during its struggle for independence from Spain, had created a liberal identity as a contrast to Iberian values.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For the Haredim, modernity—even in the State of Israel—was simply the latest manifestation of Galut, the state of exile, alienation, and distance from God. The Holocaust had revealed its essential malignity. A Jew was not supposed to feel at home in such a world, even though, paradoxically, in both Israel and America, Torah education was generously funded and flourished as never before. Students were, however, taught to keep apart from the secular world. 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 (1954), 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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1492, about eighty thousand Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity had been given asylum in Portugal by King João II. It is among these Portuguese Jews and their descendants that we find the most outright and dramatic instances of atheism. Some of these Jews desperately wanted to retain their Jewish faith, yet found it either difficult or impossible to do so because they had no adequate cult. The Jews who fled to Portugal in 1492 were tougher than the Spanish conversos: they preferred to be deported rather than abjure their faith. When Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, he was compelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, to have the Jews in his domains forcibly baptized, but he compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for a generation. These Portuguese Marranos had almost fifty years to organize an underground in which a dedicated minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and tried to win others back to the old faith.28 But these Judaizing Marranos were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world. They had received a Catholic education, and their imaginations were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines. They often thought and spoke about Judaism in Christian terms: they believed, for example, that they had been “saved” by the Law of Moses rather than by Jesus, a concept that has little meaning in Judaism. They had forgotten a great deal of Jewish law, and as the years slipped by, their understanding of Judaism became still more attenuated. Sometimes their only sources of information about the faith were the polemical writings of anti-Semitic Christians. What they ended up practicing was a hybrid faith that was neither truly Jewish nor truly Christian.29 Their dilemma was not unlike that of many people in the developing world today, who have only a superficial understanding of Western culture but whose traditional way of life has been so undermined by the impact of modernity that they cannot identify with the old ways either. The Marrano Jews of Portugal experienced a similar alienation. They had been forced to assimilate to a modernized culture that did not resonate with their inner selves.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Many of these superimposed Westernized cities surrounded the “old town,” which, in comparison, looked dark, threatening, and outside the rationally ordered modern world.53 Egyptians were thus forced to live in a dual world: one modern and Western, the other traditional. This dualism would lead to a grave crisis of identity, and, as in other experiences of modernization, to some surprising religious solutions. Iran had not yet embarked on the modernizing process, even though the arrival of Napoleon in the Middle East had begun an era of European domination in this country too. Napoleon had intended to invade British India, with the help of the Emperor of Russia; this gave Iran a wholly new strategic importance in the eyes of the European powers. In 1801, Britain signed a treaty with the second Qajar shah, Fath Ali (1798–1834), promising British military equipment and technology in return for Iranian support. Iran had also become a pawn in the power games of Europe, which continued long after Napoleon’s downfall. Britain wanted to control the Persian Gulf and the southeast regions of Iran in order to safeguard India, while Russia tried to establish a base in the north. Neither wanted to make Iran a colony, and both worked to preserve Iranian independence, but, in practice, the shahs did not dare to risk offending either power, without the support of one of them. The Europeans presented themselves to the Iranians as the bearers of progress and civilization, but in fact both Britain and Russia promoted only those developments that furthered their own interests, and both blocked the introduction of such innovations as the railway, which could have benefited the Iranian people, lest it endanger their own strategic plans.54

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  was easy. No problems. Nothing to worry about. Aly Khan had to fly off on business for a few days; he begged her to Or regret. It was always, stay at the Riviera until he got back. While he was away, he telephoned 'What can I do for you? constantly. Every morning a giant bouquet of flowers arrived. On the tele-What do you need?' phone he seemed particularly annoyed that the Shah of Iran was trying Airplane tickets, cars, boats; you felt you were on hard to see her, and he made her promise to break the date to which she a pink cloud." had finally agreed. During this time, a gypsy fortune-teller visited the hotel, —LEONARD SLATER, and Rita agreed to have her fortune read. "You are about to embark on the ALY: A BIOGRAPHY 314 • The Art of Seduction ANNE: Didst thou not kill greatest romance of your life," the gypsy told her. "He is somebody you althis king [ Henry VI] ? \ ready know. . . . You must relent and give in to him totally. Only if you do R I C H A R D : I grant ye. . . . \ that will you find happiness at long last." Not knowing who this man could ANNE: And thou unfit for any place, but hell. \ be, Rita, who had a weakness for the occult, decided to extend her stay. RICHARD: Yes, one place Aly Khan came back; he told her that his château overlooking the Mediter-else, if you will hear me ranean was the perfect place to escape from the press and forget her trou-name it. \ ANNE: Some dungeon. \ RICHARD: bles, and that he would behave himself. She relented. Life in the château Your bedchamber, \ ANNE: was like a fairy tale; wherever she turned, his Indian helpers were there to Ill rest betide the chamber attend to her every wish. At night he would take her into his enormous where thou liest! \ ballroom, where they would dance all by themselves. Could this be the RICHARD: So will it, madam, till I lie with you. man the fortune-teller meant? . . . But gentle Lady Aly Khan invited his friends over to meet her. Among this strange Anne . . . \ Is not the company she felt alone again, and depressed; she decided to leave the causer of the timeless deaths \ Of these château. Just then, as if he had read her thoughts, Aly Khan whisked her off Plantagenets, Henry and to Spain, the country that fascinated her most. The press caught on to the Edward, \ As blameful as affair, and began to hound them in Spain: Rita had had a daughter with the executioner? \ ANNE: Thou wast the cause and Welles—was this any way for a mother to act? Aly Khan's reputation did most accursed effect. \ not help, but he stood by her, shielding her from the press as best he could.

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

  calls her and places her in his flowering garden to consummate this most joyful state of marriage with Him. The union wrought between the two natures and the communication of the divine to the human in this state is such that even though neither change their being, both appear to be God.30 He spoke not only of love in such very physical modes, but also searingly explored the ultimate loneliness of humanity – the loneliness and sense of rejection and debasement to which he himself had sunk during nine months’ close solitary confinement in 1577–8 at the hands of the leadership of his own Carmelite Order, from which imprisonment he had to effect a dramatic escape. His incomplete meditation Dark Night of the Soul was the culmination of the treatise which he called The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The Ascent described this ‘dark night’ as the third stage of the soul’s experience after its early sensuality and subsequent purification, ‘a more obscure and dark and terrible purgation’.31 The treatise presents itself as an exposition of the eight-stanza love poem, whose later stanzas have already been quoted. It breaks off before no more than a few lines have been subjected to John’s intense scrutiny: in its detailed and patient explanation of the myriad meanings which they present to the reader, it reveals how far the mystic might travel beyond the deep sensuality of the poetry, which has the power to astonish the modern secular reader. This journey in the poem is what Juan describes as purgative contemplation, which causes passively in the soul the negation of itself and of all things referred to above. And this going forth it says here that it was able to accomplish in the strength and ardour which love for its Spouse gave it for that purpose in the dark contemplation aforementioned. Here it extols the great happiness which it found in journeying to God through this night with such signal success that none of the three enemies, which are world, devil and flesh (who are they that ever impede this road), could hinder it.32 After all the conflicts which Teresa and Juan experienced and to some extent initiated, the Discalced Carmelites were left flourishing, backed at the highest levels of Spanish society. The order was determined not merely that Rome should recognize its foundress as a saint (achieved in 1612, only thirty years after her death) but, in a much more ambitious project, that she should replace Santiago himself as the patron saint of Spain. This was both a devotional act and a political self-assertion against all the forces of the Church which had made life so difficult for Teresa and Juan: luckily for the Carmelites, it had the backing of the Spanish monarchy. In 1618 King Philip III, strongly seconded by the Castilian assembly, the Cortes, persuaded the Pope to designate Teresa co-patron of Spain, though opposition was by no means at an end, and became much entangled in Spanish high politics.33 John of the Cross had to wait until 1726 before he was finally officially declared to be a saint of the Church.

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

  as the surplus of seminary-educated clergy children. In their attempts to find a role for themselves, many were completely alienated from the Church, while others turned their aspirations on to its identity: at one end of a polarity, absorbed by Slavophile insistence on the self-sufficiency of Russian identity and by a fierce hatred of everything defined as opposing it; at the other, possessed by a revolutionary nihilism which (encouraged by sporadically savage official reprisals) turned to crime or political assassination, as a symbol that there was nothing worthwhile or sacred in contemporary society. The first successful suicide bombers in human history were anarchists responsible for the murder of Alexander II in 1881.80 The Church shared in this self-examination. How far could it look beyond itself for its spiritual resources? The problem was not new: in the perceptive words of one Orthodox priestly theologian born in post-1917 exile, ‘if there is a feature of “Russian” Orthodoxy which can be seen as a contrast to the Byzantine perception of Christianity, it is the nervous concern of the Russians in preserving the very letter of the tradition received “from the Greeks” ‘.81 It is an irony that this yearning to be faithful to a tradition beyond Russia led many churchmen to play a prominent role in the Slavophile movement. Slavophilism was itself a modern invention influenced by external forces: Aleksei Khomiakov, a nobleman who was one of its first exponents and also one of Russian Orthodoxy’s first ever lay theologians, was profoundly learned in Western history and culture and much influenced by German Romanticism. He also defiantly grew his beard when it was frowned on in upper-class society, and urged his fellow Slavs to keep their distinctive clothing rather than adopt Western fashions. Key to his thought was a concept which has become central to modern Russian Orthodox thinking, Sobornost’, the proposition that freedom is inseparable from unity, communion or community. In Khomiakov’s view, the concept contained a critique of both halves of Western Christianity, as Catholicism presented unity without freedom and Protestantism freedom without unity. It was within a pan-Slav community that the Orthodox Church would carry out the divine commission entrusted to it, but (in ways which Khomiakov did not clearly specify) its historic destiny was also to bring the whole world under its ‘roof’.82 For others in the Church, there was less inhibition about looking to Western liberalism or socialism. In St Petersburg, that most cosmopolitan of Russian cities, where the main streets were hospitable to an extraordinary spectrum of churches representing the variety of European Christianity, many Orthodox parish clergy spoke of social progress and questioned tsarist autocracy, in a fashion which had more in common than might be expected with the reformist

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Keeping ourselves together and on our own tracks, however wobbly, was like trying to play the Dinizulu War Chant or a Beethoven sonata on a tin dog-whistle. The important message seemed to be that you had to have a place. Whether or not it did justice to whatever you felt you were about, there had to be some place to refuel and check your flaps. In times of need and great instability, the place sometimes became more a definition than the substance of why you needed it to begin with. Sometimes the retreat became the reality. The writers who posed in cafés talking their work to death without writing two words; the lesbians, virile as men, hating women and their own womanhood with a vengeance. The bars and the coffee-shops and the streets of the Village in the 1950s were full of non-conformists who were deathly afraid of going against their hard-won group, and so eventually they were broken between the group and their individual needs. For some of us there was no one particular place, and we grabbed whatever we could from wherever we found space, comfort, quiet, a smile, non-judgment. Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different . Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances. Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing. It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference. (And often, we were cowards in our learning.) It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own. The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other’s names, but we seldom looked into each other’s Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness. Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes. Sistah outsiders. Didi and Tommy and Muff and Iris and Lion and Trip and Audre and Diane and Felicia and Bernie and Addie . Addie was Mari Evans beautiful, a wasted sister-soul.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  No longer was the spacecraft 202,700 miles from Earth; it was now 38,760 miles from the Moon. And it was picking up speed, passing 2,700 miles per hour and gaining by the minute. At their consoles, controllers made printouts of their displays to commemorate the moment. Someday they would show these papers to their grandchildren and tell them what they’d seen. A few minutes later, Collins radioed Apollo 8 with an update on their recent television broadcast. “We are having a playback of your TV shows and are all enjoying it down here. It was better than yesterday because it didn’t preempt the football game.” “Don’t tell me they cut off a football game,” Borman said. “Didn’t they learn from Heidi ?” Just a month earlier, as millions of Americans watched the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders battle into the final minute of a spectacular game, NBC stuck to its strict broadcast schedule, switching over at 7:00 P .M . to Heidi, a film about a young girl who was living with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Viewers erupted in protest, flooding the network with irate calls (and threats) and blowing out twenty-six fuses on the NBC switchboard while the Raiders scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to pull off a miracle come-from-behind win. The next day, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the debacle, and David Brinkley addressed it on the evening news—then showed tape of the game’s last minute. Even on this pioneering trip to the Moon, Borman wanted nothing to do with messing with his beloved game of football. Thirty minutes after she’d arrived, Marilyn left Mission Control with astronaut John Young, who was going to drive her home. “Have you seen Susan yet?” Young asked, then offered to take her over to the Borman house. When they arrived, Marilyn found a familiar scene—loads of visitors, trays of food, kids pinballing between rooms, squawk boxes chirping. The only thing missing was Susan. “She’s in the bedroom,” someone said. “I’ll tell her you’re here.” Marilyn sat in the living room and waited, chatting with other visitors and fixing herself a drink. She kept waiting, for thirty minutes, an hour. After two hours, Susan still had not emerged. I’m part of this just as much as you are, Marilyn thought. My husband is on this flight, too . Marilyn didn’t know how painful things had been for Susan after the Apollo 1 tragedy. She didn’t know how clearly Susan pictured herself as a widow in the coming hours. If Marilyn had known any of this, she would have understood and would have tried to help. But Susan never showed that vulnerability to anyone, not even to Frank. As Marilyn waited, Susan remained curled up on the bed in her bedroom, listening for her husband’s voice on the squawk box. When Marilyn left, she left with hurt feelings. Back at home, Marilyn found her house oddly empty.