Longing

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)

  Swaggart was a Pentecostalist. In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth. As such, it had always courted the danger of an undisciplined entry into the unconscious world and the perils that always attend an abdication of reason. But early Pentecostalism at its best had been characterized by inclusion and a compassionate breaking down of racial and class barriers. Swaggart, however, preached a religion of hatred. He had become famous for his foulmouthed attacks on homosexuals, an obsession that almost certainly revealed buried anxieties about his own sexual proclivities. He had also turned viciously on other ministers and rival televangelists, and joined the judgmental crusade of Moral Majority. By casting off the restraints imposed by the discipline of charity as well as those of reason, Swaggart had embraced a religiosity that was, in its way, as self-destructive and nihilistic as some of the other movements we have considered. American journalist Lawrence Wright found himself attracted to Swaggart’s emotional preaching style. He sensed that Swaggart was rebelling against the strictures of rational modernity; it was “defiantly emotional,” light-years away from the “arid intellectual refinements” of Wright’s own childhood religion. He found that a part of himself craved Swaggart’s “ecstatic abandonment of my own busy, judgmental, ironic mentality.”117 And so did Swaggart’s audience, who responded ecstatically to his orgasmic preaching: He would sink deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he would journey past reason and conscious meaning into the slashing emotions and buried fears and unnamed desires that bubble below. His voice would rise and tremble, his grammar would fall away, but still he stumbled toward that cowering raw nerve of longing. He knew where it was. One watched him with both dread and desire, because this is the nerve that is attached to faith. Longing to be loved and saved—it is when he finally touches this nerve that the tears flow and the audience stands with its hands upraised, laughing, wailing, praising the Lord, speaking in unknown languages and quivering with the pain and pleasure of this thrilling public exposure.118

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth. As such, it had always courted the danger of an undisciplined entry into the unconscious world and the perils that always attend an abdication of reason. But early Pentecostalism at its best had been characterized by inclusion and a compassionate breaking down of racial and class barriers. Swaggart, however, preached a religion of hatred. He had become famous for his foulmouthed attacks on homosexuals, an obsession that almost certainly revealed buried anxieties about his own sexual proclivities. He had also turned viciously on other ministers and rival televangelists, and joined the judgmental crusade of Moral Majority. By casting off the restraints imposed by the discipline of charity as well as those of reason, Swaggart had embraced a religiosity that was, in its way, as self-destructive and nihilistic as some of the other movements we have considered. American journalist Lawrence Wright found himself attracted to Swaggart’s emotional preaching style. He sensed that Swaggart was rebelling against the strictures of rational modernity; it was “defiantly emotional,” light-years away from the “arid intellectual refinements” of Wright’s own childhood religion. He found that a part of himself craved Swaggart’s “ecstatic abandonment of my own busy, judgmental, ironic mentality.” 117 And so did Swaggart’s audience, who responded ecstatically to his orgasmic preaching: He would sink deeper and deeper into his subconscious, he would journey past reason and conscious meaning into the slashing emotions and buried fears and unnamed desires that bubble below. His voice would rise and tremble, his grammar would fall away, but still he stumbled toward that cowering raw nerve of longing. He knew where it was. One watched him with both dread and desire, because this is the nerve that is attached to faith. Longing to be loved and saved—it is when he finally touches this nerve that the tears flow and the audience stands with its hands upraised, laughing, wailing, praising the Lord, speaking in unknown languages and quivering with the pain and pleasure of this thrilling public exposure. 118 The best premodern spirituality, such as that of John of the Cross, Isaac Luria, or Mulla Sadra, had eschewed such emotional excess, claiming that it had nothing to do with religion; they had insisted that the interior journey was calm, disciplined, and complemented by reason. No one was initiated into the Kabbalah until he was at least forty years old and married, and had achieved sexual equilibrium. The modern world, which had neglected the more intuitive paths to knowledge, had for the most part lost this mystical lore. Swaggart’s success shows that people longed for ecstasy in an over-rationalized world, but also shows that such a quest can become unbalanced. Swaggart’s frenzy seemed to have more to do with the sexual needs that drove him (to use Wright’s words in a different context) to the “thrilling public exposure” in the Baton Rouge motel than with spirituality.

• From Action (2014)

  (Brafe, if you’re reading this: Thanks for the follow-up texts, dude, but I didn’t want to see you again because it was so gargantuanly perfect that one time that I didn’t want to risk altering the memory, which… I’m now infuriated by how ferociously boneheaded that decision was. I still can’t believe you post-coitally played me Backstreet Boys on the piano while singing along in perfect pitch. The sex was also that perfect, times about 72.) (Brafe, were you even real?) (Call me, Brafe.) • The fried chicken spot near my house. At Palace Fried, the guys behind the counter call me “Miss Spicy” and can recite my phone number from memory, but not because I use this place as a pick-up spot. It’s because I order a spicy chicken sandwich three to four times a week when my vegetarianism is lapsing particularly exceptionally… wait, wait. No. It’s definitely because of this. Goddamnit. Any solid nickname is borne of a reputation. I first earned this one on some summer night. I had just come from a tepid party next door and was in no great rush to return—I had dipped for chicken upon hearing a cluster of bona fide adults literally talking about their SAT scores, shudder. A guy was in front of me in line, and as we waited for our respective three-piece and characteristic spicy chicken, I noticed that he was wearing a Hüsker Dü shirt. Since I am, apparently, still of the seventh-grade mindset that if a person likes what you’re into musically, they are definitely meant to come home and neck with you, I complimented it. We got to talking. Then we got to eating our drumsticks together, and I decided to see what would happen if I told him that my apartment was around the corner if he might like to drop by real quick. Smash cut to us smashing, then cheerily parting forever. (Dear Hüsker Dü: I love you even more now, which I did not think previously possible. Ever yours, Miss Spicy.) • Concerts. If I am willing to come out and advocate for capitalizing on common musical tastes as shared at a scrappy purveyor of breaded poultry, please trust I find it even easier to do so at venues that more straightforwardly celebrate the musical acts I love. Just go up to some hot person and talk about the lineup, or related acts, or other shows you’ve seen at the outlet in which you’re both standing. I have gotten laid via this brand of taxonomizing/cultural fetishism more times than I can now recall.

• From Action (2014)

  If I do like them a lot straight out of the gate, I might say, “Sure, we can go out. I think I’m free in eight days?” I have meant this every single last solitary time I’ve said it. That’s because I have a life to lead—meeting a cute person doesn’t have to crown them the monarch of your head. You still have friends to see later that night/some sleep to catch (the taxi goodbye)/a business trip to California to make (Hanukkah-length SEE YA LATER)/or other people to break it off with in order to respect their feelings (the guy who texted me, “Wow your super anti huh,” which no one says unless they are profoundly about it, while I took my time kindly ending things with another person—which I was doing anyway, I solemnly swear). If you would like to stretch this to longer than a night without having to employ these pretenses and have shared a significant deal of interesting and intriguing time together already, just fail to say goodbye when you leave. Nothing incubates a fledgling crush like ghosting out on it. If they don’t sleuth you down by the next evening, follow or friend them on social media, or otherwise bat-signal, “Hiiiiiiii thar.” If another day passes, write a brief note: “You have a funny way of saying goodbye.” This is the only subterfuge I am willing to recommend, and only because it works so well. On the off chance they don’t write back, leave it—rejection is the condom of the universe &c. If they do, WE’VE GOT A LIVE ONE HERE. What you do now is all on you, McBeautiful. Introducing Everyone [image file=image_316.jpg] Online dating can be a laborious hell-venture. It can also get you VERY laid if you simply prod at your cell phone a few times. The latter might sound like an appealing premise, but it’s also one of the reasons that I don’t recommend it unless you live somewhere remote, are queer (homos tend to be more capable at acting like actual humans on the cold, vast internet—we often need to, because of scarcity and safety, even in big cities)—or are a thick-skinned pillar of resilience who doesn’t mind being told to “show me ur ass cheexz.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The best premodern spirituality, such as that of John of the Cross, Isaac Luria, or Mulla Sadra, had eschewed such emotional excess, claiming that it had nothing to do with religion; they had insisted that the interior journey was calm, disciplined, and complemented by reason. No one was initiated into the Kabbalah until he was at least forty years old and married, and had achieved sexual equilibrium. The modern world, which had neglected the more intuitive paths to knowledge, had for the most part lost this mystical lore. Swaggart’s success shows that people longed for ecstasy in an over-rationalized world, but also shows that such a quest can become unbalanced. Swaggart’s frenzy seemed to have more to do with the sexual needs that drove him (to use Wright’s words in a different context) to the “thrilling public exposure” in the Baton Rouge motel than with spirituality.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Instead of prophets, the Shaitan was quite happy with fortune-tellers, his mosque was the bazaar, he was most at home in the public baths, and instead of seeking God, his quest was for wine and women. 58 He was, in fact, incurably trivial, trapped forever in the realm of the exterior (zahir) world and unable to see that there was a deeper and more important dimension of existence. For many Iranians, America, the Great Shaitan, was “the Great Trivializer.” The bars, casinos, and secularist ethos of West-toxicated North Tehran typified the American ethos, which seemed deliberately to ignore the hidden (batin) realities that alone gave life meaning. Furthermore, America, the Shaitan, had tempted the shah away from the true values of Islam to a life of superficial secularism. 59 Iranian Shiism had always been motivated by two passions: for social justice and the Unseen (al-ghayb) . Where Western people had, over the centuries, carefully cultivated a rational ethos which concentrated entirely on the physical world perceived by the senses, Iranian Shiis, like other premodern peoples, had nurtured a sense of the hidden (batin) world evoked by cult and myth. During the White Revolution, Iranians had acquired electricity, television, and modern transport, but the religious revival in the country showed that for many people these external (zaheri) achievements were simply not enough. Modernization had been too rapid and was inevitably skin-deep. Many Iranians still hungered for the batin and felt that without it their lives had neither value nor significance. As the American anthropologist William Beeman explained, an Iranian who believed himself to be trapped on the material surface of life felt that he had lost his soul. The drive for a pure inner life was still a supreme value in Iranian society, so much so that one of the greatest compliments one person could pay another was to say that “his/her inside (batin) and outside (zahir) are the same.” 60 Without a strong sense of the spiritual, many Iranians felt utterly lost. During the White Revolution, some had become convinced that their West-toxicated society had been poisoned by the materialism, consumer goods, alien modes of entertainment, and the imposition of foreign values. Further, the shah, with the enthusiastic support of the United States, seemed determined to destroy Islam, the source of the nation’s spirituality. He had exiled Khomeini, closed the Fayziyyah Madrasah, insulted the clergy, cut their revenues, and killed theology students. The Iranian Revolution was not merely political. Certainly, the cruel and autocratic regime of the shah and the economic crisis were crucial: there would have been no uprising without them. Many secularist Iranians who did not experience this spiritual malaise would eventually join the ulema simply to get rid of the shah, and without their support, the Revolution would not have succeeded. But it was also a rebellion against the secularist ethos which excluded religion and which many ordinary Iranians felt was being imposed upon them against their will.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the Battle of the Bulge. The Colonel taught us a semester’s worth of precalc, although he was too good at math to teach it very well—“Of course it makes sense. Just trust me. Christ, it’s not that hard”—and I missed Alaska. And when I could not catch up, I cheated. Takumi and I shared copies of Cliffs Notes for Things Fall Apart and A Farewell to Arms (“These things are just too damned long!” he exclaimed at one point). We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t need to. one hundred twenty-two days after A COOL BREEZE had beaten back the onslaught of summer, and on the morning the Old Man gave us our final exams, he suggested we have class outside. I wondered why we could have an entire class outside when I’d been kicked out of class last semester for merely glancing outside, but the Old Man wanted to have class outside, so we did. The Old Man sat in a chair that Kevin Richman carried out for him, and we sat on the grass, my notebook at first perched awkwardly in my lap and then against the thick green grass, and the bumpy ground did not lend itself to writing, and the gnats hovered. We were too close to the lake for comfortable sitting, really, but the Old Man seemed happy. “I have here your final exam. Last semester, I gave you nearly two months to complete your final paper. This time, you get two weeks.” He paused. “Well, nothing to be done about that, I guess.” He laughed. “To be honest, I just decided once and for all to use this paper topic last night. It rather goes against my nature. Anyway, pass these around.” When the pile came to me, I read the question: How will you—you personally—ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? Now that you’ve wrestled with three major religious traditions, apply your newly enlightened mind to Alaska’s question. After the exams had been passed out, the Old Man said, “You need not specifically discuss the perspectives of different religions in your essay, so no research is necessary. Your knowledge, or lack thereof, has been established in the quizzes you’ve taken this semester. I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it. “Next year, assuming my lungs hold out, we’ll study Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism together—” The Old Man coughed and then started to laugh, which caused him to cough again. “Lord, maybe I won’t last. But about the three traditions we’ve studied this year, I’d like to say one thing. Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism each have founder figures—Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha, respectively.

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

  2 Israel (c. 1000 BCE–100 CE) A PEOPLE AND THEIR LAND Along the south-eastern end of the Mediterranean coast lies a land difficult to name. In a very remote past it was called Canaan, but its later turbulent history left it with two names, Israel and Palestine, both of which are in use today, and both of which carry a heavy weight of emotion and contested identity. For one people, the Jews, the land is the Promised Land, granted to them in solemn pronouncements made by God to a succession of their forefathers; Jews are so called from what was originally the southern part of it, Judah or in Greek Judaea, which contrived to keep its independence from great empires longer than its rival northern kingdom, which had arrogated to itself the name of Israel. Christians have their own name for Palestine or Israel: they call it the Holy Land, because Jesus Christ was born and died here. He was executed outside the city of Jerusalem, once briefly the capital of a united kingdom of Israel. The name Jerusalem (often called Zion after its citadel) echoes through the sacred songs of the Jews, in accents of longing or joy, and Christians have sung the same texts. Jerusalem has preserved its ancient and medieval walls intact, and even with the extensions to their area made in the Roman period, the old city usually surprises those who visit it for the first time by how small it is. Yet great human longing and passions are focused on that small compass. Medieval Christians made maps of the world with Jerusalem at the centre, and it is the setting for one of the most ancient and revered shrines of Islam, built on the site of the Temple which long before had been the centre of Jewish worship. So Jerusalem is resonant for all three linked monotheistic faiths, often with tragic consequences as they have fought each other to gain exclusive control over this small city.1 Jerusalem is the contested heart of Palestine or Israel, whose modest overall extent, no more than 150 miles by 100 miles when undivided, belies its importance in the history of the world. Those without some idea of its geography and climate will not fully understand the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, whose horizons it sets.

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

  But now, in this cold and raucous country called america, Linda missed the music. She even missed the annoyance of the early Saturday morning customers with their loose talk and slurred rhythms, warbling home from the rumshop. She knew about food. But of what use was that to these crazy people she lived among, who cooked leg of lamb without washing the meat, and roasted even the toughest beef without water and a cover? Pumpkin was only a child’s decoration to them, and they treated their husbands better than they cared for their children. She did not know her way in and out of the galleries of the Museum of Natural History, but she did know that it was a good place to take children if you wanted them to grow up smart. It frightened her when she took her children there, and she would pinch each one of us girls on the fleshy part of our upper arms at one time or another all afternoon. Supposedly, it was because we wouldn’t behave, but actually, it was because beneath the neat visor of the museum guard’s cap, she could see pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if we were a bad smell, and this frightened her. This was a situation she couldn’t control. What else did Linda know? She knew how to look into people’s faces and tell what they were going to do before they did it. She knew which grapefruit was shaddock and pink, before it ripened, and what to do with the others, which was to throw them to the pigs. Except she had no pigs in Harlem, and sometimes those were the only grapefruit around to eat. She knew how to prevent infection in an open cut or wound by heating the black-elm leaf over a wood-fire until it wilted in the hand, rubbing the juice into the cut, and then laying the soft green now flabby fibers over the wound for a bandage. But there was no black-elm in Harlem, no black oak leaves to be had in New York City. Ma-Mariah, her root-woman grandmother, had taught her well under the trees on Noel’s Hill in Grenville, Grenada, overlooking the sea. Aunt Anni and Ma-Liz, Linda’s mother, had carried it on. But there was no call for this knowledge now; and her husband Byron did not like to talk about home because it made him sad, and weakened his resolve to make a kingdom for himself in this new world. She did not know if the stories about white slavers that she read in the Daily News were true or not, but she knew to forbid her children ever to set foot into any candystore. We were not even allowed to buy penny gumballs from the machines in the subway.

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

  Louisa had agreed to let her go and live with Phil and Ella. I was just grateful she was still alive. I started going back to Mass on Sundays for a while, and found an out-of-the-way church on the East side and went to confession. Autumn came very quickly. Gennie and I saw less of each other since we were at different schools. I told her I missed her over the phone. Life over at Phil and Ella’s was very different, I sensed, from living with Louisa, but Gennie didn’t like to talk about it much. Sometimes I’d visit her there, and we sat on the daybed in Phil and Ella’s room and drank Champale and ate marshmallows toasted on a pencil with a match. You have to keep blowing the flame around the candy. But there was an uneasy feeling about that house for me, and Gennie always seemed different around there, probably because I heard Ella always listening outside the closed door from where she was sweeping or dusting. It seemed Ella was always cleaning house, with carpet slippers on and a rag around her head, humming the same little tune over and over and over and over under her breath. We could never go over to my house because my parents didn’t allow visitors when they were not home. They didn’t approve of friends in general, and they did not care much for Gennie because my mother thought she was too “loud.” So we usually made dates to meet at Columbus Circle or in Washington Square Park, and for a while the golden leaves near each fountain hid the harshness of the confused and alien colors that were sweeping up over our paths. Without Gennie, Hunter was another set of worlds. Mostly, that autumn, it was Maxine and her music and her acne treatments and her desperate crush on the chairwoman of the music department. It matched my own on the latest addition to the english faculty who wore suits and flats and had a most charming malocclusion. And it was our getting into constant trouble for hanging out in the lockers after school. We never really knew what we were being accused of doing down there. We just knew that we weren’t supposed to be there, and that it was the only place where we could be totally alone, meaning without our mothers. Neither one of us ever wanted to go home to the family wars. The lockers were a private world for Maxine and me. Sometimes, when we roamed through the locker room, we crossed the private worlds of other fugitives from the warlight, whispering animatedly two by two in the aisles of lockers, as we ran by. I played gallant swain and stepped boldly and fearlessly upon the hard swift waterbugs that seemed to ride back and forth on horseback.

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

  thoughts of a Dutch Reformed monopoly. It was New York that first experienced the bewildering diversity of settlers which, during the eighteenth century, swelled into a flood, and made any effort to reproduce old Europe’s compartmentalized and discrete confessional Churches seem ludicrous. Rather than the colonies of north and south which had been English from the beginning, this Dutch settlement pointed to the future diverse religious pattern of North America.26 Further religious experiments intersected with the crises of mid-seventeenth- century England in different ways from New England and Virginia. In 1632 Roman Catholic aristocrats friendly with Charles I sponsored a colony in a region known as the Chesapeake north of Virginia, and named it Maryland after the King’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. In fact the Royalists’ defeat in the English civil wars meant that Catholics did not take the leading role in Maryland. Feeling that their already tenuous position was under threat, in 1649 they seized on a brief moment of local strength and sought to create a unique freedom to practise their religion by outmanoeuvring their Protestant opponents in a huge concession. They guaranteed complete toleration for all those who believed in Jesus Christ. They ordered fines and whipping for anyone using the normal religious insults of seventeenth-century England, elaborately specified in a list: ‘heretic, schismatic, idolator, Puritan, Independent, Presbyterian, Popish priest, Jesuit, Jesuited Papist, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Brownist, Antinomian, Barrowist, Roundhead, Separatist’.27 This was an extraordinary effort to blot out the bitterness of the Reformation; it approached Rhode Island’s universal toleration by a very different route. Maryland showed the limitations of its vision by still ordering property confiscation and execution for anyone denying the Trinity, and Anglicans seized control of the colony in the 1690s, doing their best to restrict Roman Catholic rights — an ironical outcome of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which is seen in English history as a milestone in the development of public religious toleration (see pp. 733–6). Nevertheless, amid the steadily encroaching diversity of the whole colonial seaboard, the Maryland example was not forgotten. A new chance for the hard-pressed Quakers came when one of their number, William Penn, became interested in founding a refuge for them. He was the son of an English admiral, and friendly with the Catholic and nautically minded heir to the throne, the future James II. Drawing on these useful connections, he got a royal charter in 1682 for a colony to be called Pennsylvania, in territories lying between Maryland and New England. His plan was bold and imaginative: going further than the Catholic elite of Maryland, he renounced the use of coercion in religion, and granted free exercise of religion and political participation to all

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I rolled over and looked at the clock: 7:52. My first Culver Creek class, French, started in eighteen minutes. I blinked a couple times and looked up at the Colonel, who was standing between the couch and the COFFEE TABLE, holding his well-worn, once-white tennis shoes by the laces. For a long time, he stared at me, and I stared at him. And then, almost in slow motion, a grin crept across the Colonel’s face. “I’ve got to hand it to them,” he said finally. “That was pretty clever.” “What?” I asked. “Last night—before they woke you up, I guess—they pissed in my shoes.” “Are you sure?” I said, trying not to laugh. “Do you care to smell?” he asked, holding the shoes toward me. “Because I went ahead and smelled them, and yes, I am sure. If there’s one thing I know, it’s when I’ve just stepped in another man’s piss. It’s like my mom always says: ‘Ya think you’s a-walkin’ on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes.’ Point those guys out to me if you see them today,” he added, “because we need to figure out why they’re so, uh, pissed at me. And then we need to go ahead and start thinking about how we’re going to ruin their miserable little lives.” — When I received the Culver Creek Handbook over the summer and noticed happily that the “Dress Code” section contained only two words, casual modesty, it never occurred to me that girls would show up for class half asleep in cotton pajama shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Modest, I guess, and casual. And there was something about girls wearing pajamas (even if modest), which might have made French at 8:10 in the morning bearable, if I’d had any idea what Madame O’Malley was talking about. Comment dis-tu “Oh my God, I don’t know nearly enough French to pass French II” en français? My French I class back in Florida did not prepare me for Madame O’Malley, who skipped the “how was your summer” pleasantries and dove directly into something called the passé composé, which is apparently a verb tense. Alaska sat directly across from me in the circle of desks, but she didn’t look at me once the entire class, even though I could notice little but her.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Westerner there—at last a taste of something real and exotic. Pei Pu, it overwhelming and turned out, had been a well-known actor in Chinese operas and came from separated from the life of a family with connections to the former ruling dynasty. Now he wrote the ground. operas about the workers, but he said this with a look of irony They began —BERNARD BOURISCOUT, IN to meet regularly, Pei Pu showing Bouriscout the sights of Beijing. Bouris- JOYCE WADLER, LIAISON cout loved his stories—Pei Pu talked slowly, and every historical detail seemed to come alive as he spoke, his hands moving to embellish his words. This, he might say, is where the last Ming emperor hung himself, pointing Romance had again come her way personified by a to the spot and telling the story at the same time. Or, the cook in the handsome young German restaurant we just ate in once served in the palace of the last emperor, and officer, Lieutenant Konrad then another magnificent tale would follow. Pei Pu also talked of life in the Friedrich, who called upon her at Neuilly to ask her Beijing Opera, where men often played women's parts, and sometimes be- help. He wanted Pauline came famous for it. [ Bonaparte] to use her 291 298 • The Art of Seduction influence with Napoleon in The two men became friends. Chinese contact with foreigners was re-connection with providing stricted, but they managed to find ways to meet. One evening Bouriscout for the needs of the French tagged along when Pei Pu visited the home of a French official to tutor the troops in the Papal States. He made an instantaneous children. He listened as Pei Pu told them "The Story of the Butterfly," a impression on the princess, tale from the Chinese opera: a young girl yearns to attend an imperial who escorted him around school, but girls are not accepted there. She disguises herself as a boy, passes her garden until they arrived at the rockery. the exams, and enters the school. A fellow student falls in love with her, There she stopped and, and she is attracted to him, so she tells him that she is actually a girl. Like looking into the young most of these tales, the story ends tragically. Pei Pu told it with unusual man's eyes mysteriously, emotion; in fact he had played the role of the girl in the opera. commanded him to return to this same spot at the A few nights later, as they were walking before the gates of the Forbid-same hour next day when den City, Pei Pu returned to "The Story of the Butterfly" "Look at my she might have some good hands," he said, "Look at my face. That story of the butterfly, it is my story news for him. The young officer bowed and took his too." In his slow, dramatic delivery he explained that his mother's first two leave. . . . In his memoirs

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

  A few minutes later, while millions of Americans watched, the crew of Apollo 8 began its sixth and final scheduled television broadcast. For nearly a minute, almost nothing appeared onscreen as Anders tried to frame the shot. But then a planet emerged, half lit, half in darkness, and there was no mistaking the swirls of clouds, the grooves of continents, the scoops of oceans. This was Earth, from 110,000 miles away. This, every person could see, was where they lived. Lovell pointed to a storm over South America, the waters around the West Indies, and Florida. Looking through his telescope, he said he could see the central and southern United States. He asked Anders to describe his view. “As I look down on the Earth here from so far out in space,” Anders said, “I think I must have the feeling that the travelers in the old sailing ships used to have—going on a very long voyage away from home, and now we’re headed back, and I have that feeling of being proud of the trip, but still…still happy to be going back home and back to our home port.” —Nineteen hours remained until Apollo 8’s scheduled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. With no major milestones due between now and then, the media was hungry for stories, and they turned to the astronauts’ families to find them. Valerie Anders reported that she was locked to her squawk box. Her son, Alan, was playing with his dog, Luna, and cat, Dudley, while the other Anders kids concentrated on their Christmas presents. Valerie also noted that ten-year-old Glen had mowed the lawn that morning, a job Bill had given him before leaving. Marilyn Lovell reported that she was trying to recover from all the excitement of the past several days. She told how daughter Susan had been jumping on her pogo stick. Susan Borman said she’d spent much of the morning cleaning the house for friends who would join her for reentry and splashdown, and for Frank’s return home. She noted that her two sons, seventeen-year-old Fred and fifteen-year-old Ed, would be helping her with clean-up duties. There was a reason for that. Earlier that day, away from home, Fred and Ed had gotten into a fight, and Ed broke his left thumb throwing a punch to Fred’s head. The boys knew this would be a problem and swore each other to secrecy. When they returned home, Ed walked around hiding his hand from Susan, but the pain only grew worse. The boys sneaked out of the house, drove to NASA, and found a doctor, who X-rayed Ed’s hand. A short time later, Ed left wearing a giant white cast that reached halfway up his forearm. There would be no hiding that from their mother. When they returned home, Susan was angry that they could even think of fighting as their father plummeted toward Earth. At the same time, she was proud that they’d figured out how to handle the problem themselves.

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

  Only, Susan Borman was not at home. To find respite from reporters and commotion, she’d taken her sons to a friend’s house in Houston to eat dinner and watch the telecast in peace. There, she thought back to 1951, to the only time she and Frank had ever been separated at Christmas. Frank had been ordered to the Philippines for fighter pilot training. On Christmas Eve, his transport ship stopped in Hawaii. He’d never missed Susan more than on that night, nor she him. Susan presumed she wouldn’t hear from Frank for days, but he resolved to find a phone. Only the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had one in the vicinity, so Frank went into the phone booth in the lobby, dialed the operator, and asked to place a call to Arizona. “I’m sorry, all the phone lines have been booked for months,” the operator told him. Years later, Frank would remember this as the lowest moment of his life to that point. A well-dressed gentleman must have noticed the expression on his face. “What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” he asked. Borman explained. The man introduced himself as the hotel manager, then gave Frank a key and told him to use the phone in one of the rooms. “Talk as long as you want,” he said. Frank offered money but the man refused. Soon, Frank and Susan were talking and saying “I love you” and wishing each other a merry Christmas. Their call lasted for more than an hour. Now, seventeen years later to the day, Susan remembered that call, and how close she had felt to Frank despite their distance, and from outer space, Frank remembered it, too. —One of Apollo 8’s objectives was to investigate the effects of mass concentrations, or “mascons,” on a spacecraft’s orbit. These areas of increased density in the Moon’s crust, primarily caused by massive asteroid impacts, subtly altered a ship’s trajectory (by changing the gravity field) and, if not compensated for, would eventually cause it to crash into the lunar surface. As it looked now to Mission Control, the mascons were detectable, but their effect on Apollo 8 was slight. Future lunar modules, however, would be flying much lower, and be more subject to their influence. As the spacecraft traveled yet again behind the Moon, one hour remained until the broadcast. Even now, the astronauts weren’t sure how they wanted to run it. “I don’t think we ought to screw around with this,” Borman told his crewmates. “We’ve got to do it up right because there will be more people listening to this than ever listened to any other single person in history.” They had long known that they would need words worthy of the moment. The astronauts had tossed around ideas in the weeks leading up to the flight, but none had seemed appropriate. They considered telling a Christmas story, but the flight was important not just to Christians but to all faiths, and to humanity.

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

  In Timber Cove, Marilyn Lovell’s concern had shifted to her son, Jay, who had begun to complain of stomach pains. Spiriting him to a neighbor’s car and hiding him under blankets to avoid being trailed by the media, she drove to NASA, where doctors attributed his symptoms to the excitement that comes from having a father on his way to the Moon. While Marilyn and Jay were gone, two-year-old Jeffrey did his best to stand in for his mother, opening the door and answering questions from reporters while wearing a plaid jumper and his toy astronaut helmet, occasionally looking skyward in case his dad flew by. Now 186,000 miles above him, Apollo 8 was at precisely the distance at which it took light (and radio transmissions) one full second to reach Earth. If Jeffrey had seen his father flying by, the image would have come from history, not the present. By the looks of things, Apollo 8 was in cruise mode, so Valerie Anders decided to visit Mission Control—for a change of scenery, and to feel closer to Bill. There she took George Low’s hand and told him how grateful she was that Bill and his crewmates were being looked after so well. Low’s blend of intellect and calm had made him a favorite of Valerie’s, and his was the perfect hand to hold while she watched the green blip on the distant screen inch closer to the Moon. A few minutes later, she heard Bill announce that he was going to “take a little snooze here for a while” and then sign off. She smiled and whispered something to a NASA official, who walked over to the public affairs officer, who in turn walked over to Collins. Shortly after that, Collins radioed to Borman aboard Apollo 8. “Paul tells me Valerie is over here and wishes Bill a happy nap.” “Okay, thank you,” Borman answered. “Tell her that he makes us tired sometimes, too, will you?” Collins laughed. “Roger. I will deliver a modified version of the message.” —At 53 hours into the flight, the guidance and trajectory specialists in Houston were delighted by the precision of the journey. After Apollo 8 left Earth orbit, Houston had planned for up to four midcourse corrections for the coast to the Moon. But the first, accomplished during the brief test of the SPS engine about eleven hours into the flight, had been so accurate that the next two were dispensed with. Now, as they neared the Moon, only one tiny adjustment would be required, and that would use the spacecraft’s small control thrusters. The second live television broadcast was scheduled to begin in an hour. Despite the best advice from experts—on filters, lenses, switches, brackets, interior lighting, and exposure levels—Borman remained skeptical. “I bet the TV doesn’t work,” he told Collins. Just before 3:00 P .M . EST, with Apollo 8 at an altitude of 200,000 miles, the crew got ready to transmit.

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

  Barbados, where Anglicanism survived through the 1650s as an established Church.3 Yet after 1660, the Virginian colonists’ theoretical love of bishops was not ardent enough to lend much support to proposals to establish a bishop on their side of the Atlantic, let alone any system of English-style church courts. They made sure that their parishes were run by powerful ‘vestries’ of laypeople rather than clergymen. Virginian Anglicanism was thus made safe for gentry who appreciated a decent and edifying but not overdramatic performance of the Prayer Book, and the colony continued much more reminiscent of the hierarchical countryside of Old England than any of the other more northern English ventures. These northern colonies saw the early Stuart Church of England as too flawed to be truly God’s Church. America was often not the first choice of these settlers when they looked for somewhere to build a purer community. Some migrated to the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands, as discontented English godly folk had done since the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, but however godly the atmosphere in this properly reformed Church setting, there was little land to spare, and rather too many Dutch people. Ireland offered better possibilities, but by the late 1620s Charles I had an unfriendly eye on potentially subversive settlers from England; when in 1632 his aggressive Lord Deputy, the Earl of Strafford, arrived to lead the government in Dublin, he even made major concessions to Irish Roman Catholics. So the best alternative was in the new lands of America. The godly ventured far to the north of Virginia, in an area of forests and deep sea inlets soon named New England. The first colony in this northern region, Plymouth in what later became part of Massachusetts, was founded in 1620, by separatists who made no bones about their wish to isolate themselves completely from corrupt English religion. This group, since the nineteenth century commonly given the celebratory title the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, had first migrated as a single congregation to the Netherlands, but now sought a less restricting place, to become a ‘civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation’.4 For all its subsequent fame in American mythology, the settlement remained small and poor, for not many wished to join the Pilgrims; they made their brave voyage in the years before the group around William Laud achieved power in England. Notably, for all their intense practice of piety, there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth’s existence; the sacrament of the Eucharist was not among their devotional priorities. The impulse during the 1630s was different: the ‘Arminian’ innovations of Charles I’s regime encouraged many gentry, clergy and ordinary people who had no inclination to separatism to risk the long Atlantic voyage. Up to the 1630s

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

  The proudly maintained Syriac Orthodox church of St George in Aleppo boasts a pastiche-Assyrian bas-relief of King Abgar receiving the Mandylion (see pp. 180–81), as well a reproduction of the version of the Mandylion in Rome, presented to the congregation by the Pope himself. There are also two touching and unexpected relics of old Edessa: the church bell and a massive crystal chandelier, both given to the Edessan Christians by Queen-Empress Victoria of the United Kingdom. What trouble it must have taken to transport these unwieldy objects over the border amid the chaos and terror of 1924! Yet one can understand why. The British Empire then seemed a possible protector for an eventual return to the homeland and these would be useful symbols for an appeal to the British. The Urfalese Christians were not to know all was not what it seemed with that great imperial power. GREAT BRITAIN: THE LAST YEARS OF CHRISTIAN EMPIRE It was not yet publicly apparent that victorious Great Britain had been seriously undermined by the conflict of 1914–18. Its empire was augmented by virtually all of Germany’s colonial possessions, together with large sections of the Ottoman Empire, mostly in the guise of ‘mandates’ from the newly established League of Nations, plus some client kingdoms. Alone among the major combatants in the European war, Britain retained its pre-war combination of monarchy and distinct national established Churches – Anglican in England, Presbyterian in Scotland – so its Christianity, lacking the shock of defeat or regime change, had a greater inclination to enjoy the luxury of moderation than elsewhere. Yet Britain could not escape the general trauma of the war. Sensible British politicians saw that British power was not what it had been, particularly in relation to their belated war ally, the United States. As the world’s largest imperial power, Britain was bound to be affected by the general perception among colonized peoples that they had been dragged into a conflict which was not their concern. Whatever moral authority their colonial masters possessed was severely tarnished, and that did not bode well for Britain’s comparatively recent worldwide imperial project. Moreover, the British Isles themselves were poisoned by a civil war which the general war had only postponed, and whose origins were religious, in Ireland. The Protestants, predominant in the north- eastern Irish counties of Ulster, refused to accept any deal for Home Rule across the island which would leave them in the hands of a Roman Catholic majority, and open violence broke out only a few months after the worldwide Armistice of November 1918.

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

  in the balance of power between the sexes. It became the expectation that girls would receive as good an education as boys; indeed, over the next decades, it became apparent that in many circumstances girls achieved better results at school. Women began discovering past generations of female writers often then languishing unpublished and unstudied, and found that such pioneers as Mary Astell more than two centuries before (see pp. 793–4) had already provided the arguments which they were discovering for themselves. A word had been coined in 1882 for this consciousness: feminism.46 Its inventor, Hubertine Auclert, had campaigned in France for women’s political rights at a time when women were asserting their right to take initiatives and exercise leadership in a variety of ways, largely within the context of the Christian Church (see pp. 818–20 and 828–30). Auclert herself had left behind her family’s Catholic piety for a French Republican anticlericalism. Now, a century later, feminism was decisively moving beyond its Christian roots to a ‘second wave’, a more general assertion, not of particular spheres of action such as prophecy or temperance campaigning, but of equality of opportunity and activity in society. Since it was becoming less easy to see why women and men should not pursue the same occupations in later life, surely that must apply in the Church as well as beyond it? What would happen to the formation of Christian theology if women joined in what had overwhelmingly been a male task for twenty centuries? We have observed that at intervals the Holy Spirit has been described in female terms through Christian history, but it was rare for the other persons of the Trinity to be conceived without the language of Fatherhood and Sonship. Authority in the Church seemed to have been concentrated in the male gender – although careful scrutiny of the early Church’s history now revealed significant exceptions to this generalization.47 It had been difficult enough for many Churches to get past St Paul’s admonitions against women holding positions of leadership or even speaking in church, but now there gathered strength a movement to open the ordained ministry of Churches to women, an impulse which had previously only appeared in the most resolutely unhierarchical of Churches, such as Quakers and Congregationalists. Even the episcopal Anglican Communion became involved in the struggle, following a precocious precedent in 1944: in the extraordinary circumstances of the Japanese occupation of China, the Bishop of Hong Kong first conferred priestly orders on a woman, Florence Lee Tim Oi, to much worldwide Anglican surprise and episcopal scolding. With great self-abnegation, Lee Tim Oi ceased to exercise her orders and bided her time until the world and the Church changed.48 New Zealand, a conservative, inward-looking society which has nevertheless repeatedly displayed a remarkable capacity to create social change

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

  picture of Christ’s coming was ‘premillennial’ and not post-millennial like Edwards’s (see p. 759), and it did not encourage any sunny Enlightenment optimism about human prospects: only Christ could effectively change the world, not human effort. Premillennialism stressed division and separation within society, to gather in the elect, and its frostiness to Enlightenment projects of social reform contributed to that peculiar process by which ‘liberal’ has become a word of abuse in the United States, in sharp contrast to its esteem in European society. From the 1870s, this theology was promoted through the series of semi-institutional conferences held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada and Keswick in northern England, and other gatherings connected with them (or often deliberately not connected – premillennialists have a habit of falling out with each other).120 This was the milieu which also bred the defensive proclamations of the Fundamentalist movement (see pp. 862–3). Amid this clash of Evangelicalisms, there remained the longing of Protestant blacks for full acceptance in American society, a widespread weariness at denominational barriers amid so much shared Evangelical rhetoric and an equally widespread instinct that Protestant emphasis on sermons and the intellectual understanding of the word of God did not give enough room for human emotion. Around 1900, speaking in ‘tongues’ began playing a major role: in a new enactment of the first Christian Pentecost described in Acts 2, ‘tongues’ created messages unrecognizable to the uninitiated, and expressing praise or worship to those within the community. The precedent was once more Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church, because it had first emerged from the excitement generated by the ‘tongues’ exhibited by the Scottish sisters Isabella and Mary Campbell (see p. 829). When Irving broke with the Church of Scotland, his newly founded Church continued the practice of speaking in tongues until the end of the 1870s, although it began fencing the practice around in 1847. The free expression of tongues had been effectively frozen out by an unpredictable development in the Catholic Apostolics’ Church life, their penchant for some of the most elaborate liturgical ritual ever invented by a Western Church.121 The Catholic Apostolic Church itself was gradually killed off by its apocalyptic refusal to provide for ordination of subsequent generations of clergy after the first.122 Yet the Catholic Apostolic example was not forgotten and splinter groups from it carried on the tradition of tongues. There were other remarkable outbreaks of the same phenomenon around the world – for instance, in the Russian Empire in the 1850s during the Crimean War – a reflection of Christianity’s growing globalization and the effects of sudden change in previously stable religious landscapes.123 Here was an unstable balance of incompatible forces (who could be more incompatible than Arminians and