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 63 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation96 spectacular display, we are told that God is not present. God is not in the wind, the earthquake, or even the fire. Instead, Elijah hears God speak in a still, small voice—a quiet whisper. ‹ God tells Elijah to go back north, toward Damascus, and anoint three people, who will orchestrate a military coup in the northern kingdom of Israel. The first new leader is Jehu, who will be king over Israel. The second is Hazael, who will be king over the neighboring region of Aram or Syria. And the third will be Elisha, the prophet who will take Elijah’s place. ‹ Elijah has become convinced that everything depends on him, that he’s the only responsible person left, but before he leaves the mountain, God tells Elijah that he’s kidding himself. The prophet is so self-absorbed that he has overlooked the fact that he’s not alone. There are thousands of people in Israel who have not adopted the ways of Baal. ‹ This is the climax of the middle phase of Elijah’s story. Here, he’s not confronted by the king, the queen, or the prophets of Baal but by his own God. Elijah is being summoned to move beyond the perspectives that have driven him into hiding in order to do the work to which he is called. Return to Center Stage ‹ In the fourth part of the story (1 Kings 21), Elijah again confronts Ahab and Jezebel, this time, about the abuse of political authority. The scene is the town of Jezreel, where Ahab and Jezebel had a second palace. The man next door was named Naboth, and he had a vineyard that Ahab wanted to buy, but Naboth wouldn’t sell. ‹ There seems to have been a clash of principles involved. The king thought that everything had its price, and you got what you wanted by paying people what they asked. But Naboth wouldn’t sell the land because it belonged to his family. ‹ Ahab responds to the inability to get his way by sulking and pouting, but Jezebel comes on the scene, representing yet another set of principles. She believes that those in authority should get what they want. If Naboth won’t sell the land, she

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation188 ‹ These chapters speak to that issue in two ways. One is by emphasizing that relationships continue through the work of God’s Spirit. A second is through community. In chapter 15, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Throughout the Mediterranean world, hillsides were planted with vines. A vine had a main woody stem, from which branches grew out and became intertwined with each other. And on these interwoven branches, clusters of grapes would form. It’s one of the gospel’s most vivid images for community. The Completion of Jesus’s Work ‹ Like the other gospels, John recounts Jesus’s arrest, the hearings before the authorities, and the crucifixion. We’ve seen that each gospel must deal with what Jesus’s death means. Mark and Matthew show Jesus sharing the depth of human suffering. Luke brings out the aspect of grace in the face of judgment. In John, the meaning relates to the completion of Jesus’s work. The vine image addresses the underlying issue of separation; it pictures a community in which people’s lives intertwine with those of Jesus and with other people, like the branches on a vine.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation234 when everything they could see called it into question. The author uses athletic imagery to redefine the way the readers see themselves. They feel discouraged, but the author describes a stadium in which they are running, filled with witnesses from the past who kept the faith. The readers are engaged in a contest in which the goal is not speed but perseverance. It’s a summons to keep the faith. Letter of James ‹ According to tradition, James was the brother of Jesus. He was a leader of the church in Jerusalem and was martyred during the 60s of the 1 st century. T oday, some interpreters continue to think that James wrote the letter attributed to him, while others think the author’s identity is unknown. ‹ What’s more important for us is the way the author portrays the readers. He addresses Christians, but he refers to them as the 12 tribes of Israel. And he pictures them living in dispersion. This term was used for the people of Israel who lived outside their traditional homeland. Over the generations, some had been refugees of war; other had been exiled or had migrated. Portraying the followers of Jesus as people in dispersion suggests that socially, they felt scattered and out of place. ‹ T o address these readers, the writer offers advice on how to live, and for James, the central question concerns integrity— defined as the consistency of actions with beliefs. For example, in James 1:22, the author urges, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers, who aren’t being honest with themselves.” The writer insists that it’s not enough simply to have the right ideas. If the ideas matter, then we need to live them out. ‹ Further, James connects this broadly held value with a central element in the biblical tradition: to love one’s neighbor as oneself. In chapters 1 and 2, James refers to acting in love toward one’s neighbor as the perfect law, and he uses it as a criterion for integrity. ‹ In chapter 2, James applies that criterion to the issue of social class. The writer pictures a scene in which a group of Christians has gathered, and two people show

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 19—Ezekiel on Abandonment and Homecoming 127 ‹As we said, Ezekiel had a profound sense of dislocation. He was far from home and the temple, where God was understood to be present. Thus, it’s remarkable that God comes to the prophet while he’s in exile. The point is that God has not abandoned those who have been deported. He is present with them. That’s why the wheels of the chariot are so important: God is not confined to the temple in Jerusalem. He is quite capable of movement. In a sense, Ezekiel revitalizes the older tradition of God traveling with the people. ‹Ezekiel’s initial vision of the throne-chariot culminates when he’s given the task of prophesying to people who don’t want to hear what he has to say. In chapters 2 and 3, God hands Ezekiel a scroll, with words of lament, grief, and woe written on both sides. The prophet is told to eat the scroll, which he does, taking the message into himself. In the chapters to come, he communicates that message of lament, grief, and woe in visions that would certainly have provoked opposition. ‹Chapters 8 to 11—spoken to the exiles but set in the period before the fall of Jerusalem—give a vivid sense of the ominous side of Ezekiel’s message. Sitting among the exiled leaders, Ezekiel warns that as the people have abandoned God by their idolatry, God will abandon Jerusalem to foreign invasion. Then a strange being, who is blazing with fire, appears and grabs Ezekiel by the hair; in a vision, he is transported to the temple in Jerusalem. ‹In the temple, Ezekiel sees four examples of people abandoning God by idolatry, including one of a group worshipping the sun. As this vision continues, it will warn that because people have abandoned God for foreign deities, God will abandon Jerusalem and its temple to foreign armies. ‹In chapter 9, the prophet envisions a scene of slaughter that is both horrific and surreal; only those who refuse to share in Israel’s idolatry are spared. The scene is so terrible that Ezekiel himself must protest. He asks how God can call for such wholesale destruction, but God refuses to stop. Ultimately, God’s chariot rises up from the temple, a sign that he is abandoning his sanctuary. ‹This section seems to set up a clash of perspectives. On the one hand, it has a kind of ruthless logic: God abandons the city where the people have abandoned him. The people must accept this judgment because it’s the will of God. On the Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 128 Ezekiel came from a family of priests yet had been forcibly separated from the temple, adding to his sense of dislocation from Jerusalem.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 234 when everything they could see called it into question. The author uses athletic imagery to redefine the way the readers see themselves. They feel discouraged, but the author describes a stadium in which they are running, filled with witnesses from the past who kept the faith. The readers are engaged in a contest in which the goal is not speed but perseverance. It’s a summons to keep the faith. Letter of James ‹According to tradition, James was the brother of Jesus. He was a leader of the church in Jerusalem and was martyred during the 60s of the 1 st century. Today, some interpreters continue to think that James wrote the letter attributed to him, while others think the author’s identity is unknown. ‹What’s more important for us is the way the author portrays the readers. He addresses Christians, but he refers to them as the 12 tribes of Israel. And he pictures them living in dispersion. This term was used for the people of Israel who lived outside their traditional homeland. Over the generations, some had been refugees of war; other had been exiled or had migrated. Portraying the followers of Jesus as people in dispersion suggests that socially, they felt scattered and out of place. ‹To address these readers, the writer offers advice on how to live, and for James, the central question concerns integrity— defined as the consistency of actions with beliefs. For example, in James 1:22, the author urges, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers, who aren’t being honest with themselves.” The writer insists that it’s not enough simply to have the right ideas. If the ideas matter, then we need to live them out. ‹Further, James connects this broadly held value with a central element in the biblical tradition: to love one’s neighbor as oneself. In chapters 1 and 2, James refers to acting in love toward one’s neighbor as the perfect law, and he uses it as a criterion for integrity. ‹In chapter 2, James applies that criterion to the issue of social class. The writer pictures a scene in which a group of Christians has gathered, and two people show

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Some believed that gentile Christians should convert to Judaism, take on the Torah and face the dangerous ordeal of circumcision, but others felt that, since the present world order was passing away, conversion was unnecessary. The debate became heated but eventually it was agreed that those gentiles who accepted Jesus as messiah need not convert to Judaism. They must simply shun idolatry and follow a modified version of the dietary rules. 22 But instead of seeing these gentile converts as problematic, some enthusiasts were actually seeking them out and undertaking ambitious missions to the gentile world. Peter, one of the Twelve, had made converts in the Roman garrison town of Caesarea; Barnabas, a Greek-speaking Jew from Cyprus, had many gentiles in his ekklesia (church) in Antioch, 23 the city where those who believed that Jesus was the christos were first given the name of ‘Christians’. 24 Somebody – we have no idea who – had even founded a church in Rome. Some of the Jerusalem congregation of Christians, especially Jesus’s brother, James, found this disconcerting. These gentiles were showing a truly impressive commitment. Many Jews regarded pagans as chronically addicted to vicious habits: 25 the fact that so many of them were able to observe the high moral standards of their Jewish sect suggested that God must be at work among them. Why was he doing this? The gentile converts were prepared to cut themselves off entirely from the cults that were basic to social life in a pagan city and found themselves in an unenviable limbo; they could eat no meat that had been sacrificed to false gods, so socializing with neighbours and relatives had become well-nigh impossible. 26 They had lost their old world and did not feel wholly welcome in the new. And yet gentile converts kept arriving. What did this mean? The Jewish Christians searched the scriptures for an answer. Like the Qumran community, they developed their own pesher exegesis, scouring the Torah and the prophets for prophetic references to Jesus and gentiles in the end time. They found that while some of the prophets had predicted that goyim would be forced against their will to worship the God of Israel, others believed that they would share in Israel’s triumph and voluntarily throw away their idols. 27 So, some of the Christians decided, the presence of gentiles proved that these were indeed the last days. The process foretold by the prophets had begun; Jesus was truly the messiah and the kingdom was really at hand. One of the most forceful champions of this new eschatology was Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who had joined the Christian movement some three years after Jesus’s death.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I didn’t. Each morning I woke up at one of the hours that’s not night or day, hours familiar only to nightshift workers, cashiers in convenience stores, and mothers. I cinched the belt of my terrycloth robe, the flesh there soft and dimpled as focaccia, and shuffled to the living room to wait. June was eleven weeks old. She was sleeping the kind of long, reliable stretches we’d fantasized about two months earlier. Now I had a new fantasy: to sleep like a regular person again. During the day I’d sometimes nod off, desperate for a nap. But if I napped during the day, I’d sleep even less at night. I told Brandon that we’d made a mistake. We shouldn’t have had a baby. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My doctor wrote a prescription for Ambien. I’m so sorry, he said. I took one tablet, ten milligrams, at bedtime. That first night I was hopeful, though I worried: With me drugged like this, would I hear June when she woke? I fell asleep quickly, but five hours later I was awake, without a peep from June. Before sleeping pills, at least I’d sleep until she woke me. Now there was an alarm in my bloodstream: the half-life of Ambien. Now I started to feel able to point to it: this was not normal. “After I became a mother,” writes author Sarah Manguso, “I became at once more and less lonely. I feel less lonely when I consider the nameless others, the unknown billions, who have participated in this particular loneliness.”27 I wanted to lose myself in their number. But most nights, I could imagine no other existence. Manguso again: “Whatever you’re feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.”28 I couldn’t get far enough outside my skull to try. Like physical pain, like a broken bone, this being-alone was inside me, with no beginning or end. No one could reach it. This is when I agreed to give it a name. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Had my doctor suggested this earlier, and I’d rejected it? Had he tried to name this problem earlier, and I’d refused to hear? It had been four weeks since I’d lost the ability to sleep. It felt like decades. I don’t know. I gave June to Brandon and went into the nursery, which was empty, to take my doctor’s check-in call. I paced while we talked, my eyes grazing every object, nervous as a hummingbird. There’s Goodnight, Moon, the well-worn copy from when I was a baby; there’s the diaper pail, oh, we should empty that; there’s the mobile we got off our registry, a trio of paper swallows that dart and wheel. There’s the swaddle she slept in last night, a few hairs stuck in the Velcro. My doctor would phone in a prescription for Zoloft, fifty milligrams a day.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  And so when he faced that familiar text on the wall above his deathbed, the famous bishop approached his end not with satisfaction in a life well lived but in hope that a life badly lived would yet be absolved and redeemed. If his “heart” (the word is always a metaphor at best and one that Augustine did much to make commonplace in western vocabularies611) was worn and humbled, then he took it to be the paradoxical sign of a happiness to come. He had spoken memorably in his most famous book of the restlessness of the human heart, and he carried that restlessness with him still. His first biographer, Possidius, telling us the carefully constructed story of this deathbed, balances the story of psalm reading with a pithy quotation from “a certain wise man,” one who probably stood in a Greek rather than Hebrew tradition, offering a model of disdain rather than hope: “You won’t be a great man if you think it’s a great thing that stones and wood should fall and that mortals should die.”612 Cities and people alike vanish and the wise man remains aloof. Aloof and alone. In all the books and sermons and letters we have of Augustine’s, a consistent pattern emerges. The fundamental human relationship is the solitary individual’s relationship with his god. Every other human relationship in Augustine’s life that we know of gets rewritten in his books to be a story about him and his god. Over and over, the small and large distances that separate people from one another persist and usually grow larger for Augustine as he intensifies the divine connection, until he ends there, alone with his god, alone. Until those last days, Augustine had been working quietly on one more lonely book. THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF THE CONFESSIONS Not since the eighteenth century has any publisher (at least any that I know of ) gotten Augustine’s autobiography right. The last several hundred years have been a great age for readers of the Confessions, and translations and editions of that work appear as regularly as a New York subway train, but to read the Confessions alone is to fall squarely into one of Augustine’s most cunning traps and to miss something of great importance about him. The second half of his autobiography is almost invisible by comparison.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  Hom. (as in all derivs. except povdw), Hes., and Hdt., used also by Pind. (P. 9. 46, I. 5 (4). 15), by Soph. both in iambics and lyrics, by Aesch. only in compd. μούνωψ, by Eur. only in μούναρχος, cf. Pors, praef. Hec. p. xii: Dor. p@vos Theocr. 2. 65., 20. 45. Alone, left alone, forsaken, solitary, Lat. solus, Hom., etc.; oft. with part. of εἰμέ (sum), μοῦνος ἐὼν πολέσι μετὰ Καδμείοισι Il. 4. 388; ἢ ὅγε μοῦνος ἐών Od. 3. 217; μούνω ἄνευθ᾽ ἄλλων τό. 2320; joined with ἐρῆμος, Soph. Ant. 887, Ph. 469; μόνοι γὰρ ἐσμέν (where Ar. αὐτοί) Luc. J. Trag. 21. Ziic: gen., μόνος σοῦ reft of thee, without thee, like μεμονωμένος and povw- Geis, Soph. Aj. 511; also, μοῦνος ἀπό τινος h. Hom. Merc. 193, Soph. Ph. 183, Ap. Rh. 3. 908: hence also in many compds. with a sense of desti- tution, as in μονομήτωρ, but cf. Monk Alc. 418. II. alone, only, μοῦνον Λαέρτην ᾿Αρκείσιος υἱὸν ἔτικτεν, μοῦνον δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ᾿Οδυσῆα πατὴρ τέκεν Od. 16. 118, cf. Il. 9. 478; μόνης γὰρ σοῦ κλύων ἀνέξεται Aesch. Pers. 838, cf. 632, Pr. 425, etc.:—often much like εἷς, οὐκ dpa μοῦνον ἔην ᾿Ερίδων γένος, ἀλλὰ... δύω, Hes. Op. 11, cf. Soph, O. T. 1280; hence strengthd., εἷς μόνος, μόνος εἷς Hdt. τ. 38, Soph. O. T. 63; so once in Hom., μία μούνη Od. 23. 227 :—joined with αὐτός, αὐτὼ μόνω Plat. Lys. 211 C; αὐτοὶ καθ᾽ αὑτοὺς μόνοι Id. Polit. 307 E. 2...c. gen., μοῦνος πάντων ἀνθρώπων alone of all men, Hdt. 1. 25, cf. 2. 29; μόνος ἀνδρῶν, Ἑλλήνων Soph. O. C. 1250, El. 531; ὦ μόνα ὦ φίλα γυναικῶν Eur. Alc. 460; μόνος θεῶν γὰρ θάνατος οὐ δώρων ἐρᾷ Ar. Ran. 1392; μόνος τῶν ἄλλων Lycurg. 184. fin. 8. in Trag. often re- peated in the same clause, ξυμπεσὼν μόνος μόνοις Soph. Aj. 467 ; “Ex- τορος μόνος μόνου... ἐναντίος Ib. 1283; σὺν τέκνοις μόνη μόνοις Eur. Med. 513; so, μοῦνοι μούνοισι Hdt. 9. 48; μόνος μόνῳ Dem. 273. ΤΊ III. like οἷος 11, single in its kind, unique, as Lat. uaus for unicus, as in some compds. μονολέων, μονόλυκος. IV. Sup. μονώτατος, the one only person, one above all others, Ar. Eq. 352, Pl. 182, Lycurg. 159. 3, Theocr. 15. 137. B. Adv. μόνως, only, Thuc. 8. 81 (v. 1. μόνον), Xen, Mem. 1.5, 5, Cyr. 2-- 2} 22. II. the common Adv. is μόνον, alone, only, Lat. solum, Hdt., and Att.; οὐχ ἅπαξ μ. Aesch. Pr. 209, cf. 621, 849. 2. only, Lat. modo, often with an imperat., μ. φυλάξαι Aesch. Supp. 1012; ἀποκρίνου μ. Plat. Gorg. 494 Ὁ ; so, μ. Κράτος συγγένοιτό μοι Aesch. Cho. 244; μή με καταπίῃς μ. Eur. Cycl. 219, εἴς. ; ἐὰν p. if only, Lat. dummodo, Arist. Pol. 4. 4, 25; οὐσίαν .., οὐ χωριστὴν μ. only not

• From The City of God

  220 Books That Matter: The City of God that following amounts to is not so much a travel through space. He makes this point many times, perhaps most vividly in a sermon where he says imus autem non ambulando, sed amando: we follow not by walking—non ambulando—but by loving—sed amando. The Christian life has a level of voyaging and narration attached to it, but the notion of pilgrimage was more of a peregrination through time than it is one through space. It’s no accident that Augustine both emphasized the notion of pilgrimage and was the Church father most attuned to questions of narrative, plot, and the story-formed shape of the Christian life, and the idea that story itself could have a theological significance. We will see very soon, starting with Book 11, how deeply dramatic and story-formed was his understanding of the true nature of Creation and the life of the Christian within it. There’re just a couple last things to note here, and one is a rhetorical point. Remember, he began Book 8 with a discussion of the word philosophy. “What is it?” he said. Now we know. In fact, philosophy is not best found in the philosophers at all. True philosophy, true love of wisdom, is found in church. We’ll see him expand this claim in the next lecture, in book 10. Second, Augustine’s point about the dangers of imagining God’s transcendence in terms of distance may be of some interest existentially to some of this audience even today, whatever your own theological views, for there may be analogous social forces shaping our imaginations in ways that make it harder for us to see God and see our world as one that is infinitely potentially valuable. Today, we don’t live in a world of ancient social networks, we live in an age of individualism and the value of privacy, and in this world many of us see no way to imagine ourselves except as essentially, fundamentally alone, and of the world as an archipelago of alterities, a constellation of solitudes. We think, when we see the world, we see only blank walls, cleverly camouflaged as faces or trees or buildings or books, upon which we project our self-fashioned hypotheses. 221 Lecture 10 Transcript—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) We believe reality is inaccessible to us, and we are inaccessible to reality, and to each other. We moderns typically possess a very lonely metaphysic. Augustine thinks all of this is a lie, a mistake, a madness that we try to inhabit. In truth, we are present to one another, and to the world. And the truth that guarantees this truth, the truth that guarantees our presence, the truth that is present before all the other presences, for him, is God. We are thoroughly secondary. Perhaps Augustine’s vision of how transcendence can secure presence, not forbid it, may even be of use, far from its native land, today.

• From The City of God

  291 Lecture 14—Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12) from God, but this end cannot be understood except as derivative from the aim to reject the good that God had given. „And what caused that rejecting aim to develop? What caused Satan, when offered life, to shrug? There is no cause. There is no “efficient causality” in this case, Augustine says, only a deficient causality. The Absurdity of Evil „For many other early Christian and pagan thinkers, such as the Christian Origen, evil is contained within cyclical structures that constrain it and make it an integral part of a larger system, not a radical rupture in Creation. Irenaeus proposed that evil was a necessary stage of painful separation from a loving God. In such accounts evil is part of a larger system that will be wholly reconciled back to God, only to begin the whole cycle of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and return, ad infinitum. „For Augustine, endless cycles or necessity for evil or separation fails to sustain the distinctiveness of good and evil and undercuts creatures’ attachment to the final moment of presumably consummated union in God. „Such a view makes history both superficially frivolous and relentlessly despairing: Not only does nothing really matter, but what matters is the nothing—the absent thing that is yet to come but never arrives, for the arrival of each new event simply pushes the thing yet to come one step into the future. The idea of perfect reconciliation is bought at the price of infinite indeterminacy. Saint John’s statement that “the devil did not stand fast in the truth” means, for Augustine, that wickedness is not natural.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  We can only surmise how things went in Hippo with his own flock. Now the pulpit and the regular sermons were his prerogative, now the reception hall where pleas and complaints could be heard was his. Controlling the property of the church, he became a leading local landowner, very much like a son succeeding to a father’s estate. (Augustine and his father figures are a leitmotif in this story that we will refer to later, but he never speaks of his relationship with Valerius.) Late-antique dignitaries were expected to appear as soloists like this, centers of attention in their world, occasionally moving out to face their peers or rivals in a careful ballet of precedence, but living for the most part alone. The pulpit, above all, was a lonely eminence, where all eyes turned to the orator as monologist. Power and influence were tested every time the preacher took to his stage, but more than rhetorical and political authority were at stake. The bishop was preeminently the man in contact with the divine forces that lay behind and around all that the eye could see. Late-antique men could debate the nature of divinity and quarrel over the precise techniques for assuaging and manipulating divine crankiness, but none doubted the authority and presence of some divinity, and all surely felt that presence more vividly than moderns can. To a visitor from Mars, the sight of people coming together regularly for these rituals of no obvious value would be very striking and puzzling. But the closing of the doors after the sermon and the exclusion of all save the baptized faithful left all still inside face-to-face with divine power brandished and appeased by the bishop. None else could do what he did, touch what he touched, or say what he said. The power elevated Augustine and made him the axis around which his little community revolved. At the same time, it made Augustine even more isolated and alone. We have no frank acknowledgment of his ambitions at this moment and he wrote no strategic plans, submitted no annual performance reviews. Three things he did in his first year as bishop perhaps reveal his intentions.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  So to get to it: I don’t want you going around saying, “So what? You saw my letter, you recognized the signature—and you so easily wound a friend and turn somebody else’s malice into an insult to me?” Well, as I said, either send me a copy of the same letter with your signature or stop attacking an old man lying low in his cell. If you want to show off your intellectual prowess, look for younger men, learned and high-born—they say there are plenty of them at Rome—who are willing and able to fight with you about holy scripture, to take up the yoke and quarrel with a bishop. I’m just an old soldier, retired from the service, and I ought to be praising your victories over others, not going into battle with this weary old body again. If you keep pushing me to reply, I’ll be forced to tell the old story about how Fabius Maximus used patience and delay to break the power of Hannibal on his youthful rampage.Age carries away all things, even the mind. I remember how, as a boy, I used to sing the sun down the sky on the long afternoons, but now I’ve forgotten all those songs. Even Moeris has lost his singing voice. [Vergil, Eclogues 9] To cite an example from scriptures, it was Berzellai of Galaad, handing over all the gifts of King David to a young man [2 Kings 19.32–27], who showed that old age shouldn’t seek things like this or accept them when offered.

• From Shunned (2018)

  There was a taut air and seriousness around him. His jaw was clenched as he settled into the seat, pushed the sun visor down, and leaned back in the shade it created. I pushed my seat all the way back and turned toward him. Randy didn’t want me coming to his house. We were both free to meet only at times when his two children were home, and it would have been difficult to speak in private. I also suspected he didn’t want my niece, Sheena, to know we were talking or overhear our conversation. She looked up to me, and we often fawned over each other. I had invited him to come over to my apartment, but he had refused. I dismissed his reluctance by telling myself he was not ready to confront the full reality of my new life. When I had suggested meeting for coffee at a restaurant, he’d rejected the idea of being surrounded by strangers. Finally, he’d suggested this space for our rendezvous: a mall parking lot. I wondered if security would think a drug deal was going down. The whole scene felt covert and absurd. I had just moved into my new apartment and was tired from the intensity of the week. I’d taken a few days off work, and Lory had surprised me by coming over to help me pack my belongings. It was the first time I’d had to hire professional movers. I no longer had a community to rally around the chore, no one to call about borrowing a truck. The contrast was a bit lonely, but another part of me enjoyed the independence and simplicity of taking action without having other people in my business. Lory and I watched as the burly pair of movers loaded my few bulky possessions—bed, dresser, piano, and assorted boxes—into the moving van. She then returned home, leaving me to direct them at the other end. I’d spent the morning unpacking and hanging pictures, making a list of things to buy: bath towels, pots and pans, laundry detergent. These preoccupations kept me from preparing for this conversation, and by the time I met Randy, I was too physically spent to fret and was happily caught up in the overwhelming exhilaration of my newfound freedom. Interrupting my weekend for yet another grave and serious conversation about my “foolish” choices was annoying. I just wanted to get it over with. And yet I loved my brother and felt it was only fair that he get a chance to speak his mind. He was the one who’d requested the meeting, so I thought he’d be the one to start the conversation. And so I sat there, saying nothing, looking at him look out the window. His bent knees were even with the dashboard.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I once read some science article claiming that 90 percent of what our brains gin out involves jockeying for position. Will I get that subway seat? That job? Does he like me as much as I like him? This mind-set works in a pack of lions inclined to tear deer meat out of your chops. But in my case, it pits me against others, keeps me inwardly growling. Cut off, it leaves me. Maybe this is the brain’s natural instinct, but so is my urge to boink the UPS dude, who—as I get lonelier—starts to look like Sean Connery, which is why the phrase Think twice about that proves useful.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Roger-dodger. Repeat: one Mama, one fries, one small beer. Fire for effect. Stand by." The intercom squeaked and went dead. "Out," said Norman Bowker. When the girl brought his tray, he ate quickly, without looking up. The tired radio announcer in Des Moines gave the time, almost eight-thirty. Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go. In the morning he'd check out job possibilities. Shoot a few buckets down at the Y, maybe wash the Chevy. He finished his root beer and pushed the intercom button. "Order," said the tinny voice. "All done." "That's it?" "I guess so." "Hey, loosen up," the voice said. "What you really need, friend?" Norman Bowker smiled. "Well," he said, "how'd you like to hear about—" He stopped and shook his head. "Hear what, man?" "Nothing." "Well, hey," the intercom said, "I'm sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed to a post, for God sake. Go ahead, try me." "Nothing." "You sure?" "Positive. All done." The intercom made a light sound of disappointment. "Your choice, I guess. Over an' out." "Out," said Norman Bowker. On his tenth turn around the lake he passed the hiking boys for the last time. The man in the stalled motorboat was gone; the mud hens were gone. Beyond the lake, over Sally Gustafson's house, the sun had left a smudge of purple on the horizon. The band shell was deserted, and the woman in pedal pushers quietly reeled in her line, and Dr. Mason's sprinkler went round and round. On his eleventh revolution he switched off the air-conditioning, opened up his window, and rested his elbow comfortably on the sill, driving with one hand. There was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would. The evening was smooth and warm. If it had been possible, which it wasn't, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste. Turning on his headlights, driving slowly, Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa's boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he'd backed off and in that way had lost the Silver Star. He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important. Max Arnold, who loved fine lines, would've appreciated it. And his father, who already knew, would've nodded. "The truth," Norman Bowker would've said, "is I let the guy go." "Maybe he was already gone." "He wasn't." "But maybe." "No, I could feel it. He wasn't. Some things you can feel." His father would have been quiet for a while, watching the headlights against the narrow tar road. "Well, anyway," the old man would've said, "there's still the seven medals." "I suppose." "Seven honeys." "Right."