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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The summer it’s done, I fly her up to Syracuse. Right off, she drops her purse in the hall and falls on the manuscript like a harpie. No, she doesn’t want to come to the park with Dev and me. She waves us on. I’m not going anywhere, she says. She takes up a lounge chair in the backyard with pages in her lap while I obsessively assemble cold soups and dips and marinades for the grill nearby, trying not to vulch over her. What am I waiting for? Given that she takes in books the way a junkie shoots dope, I want it to mesmerize her, which—since she’s its subject—is pretty much a slam dunk. I’m also hoping she’ll confirm in detail what she’s agreed in broad stroke is true. But there’s something more ineffable at stake, winding like thin smoke through me, unnamed. It’s as if—through the writing—I’ve assembled some miniature replica of myself as a girl, and she’s now being lowered onto Mother’s lap to be verified somehow. For all the schisms in my upbringing, the most savage scars didn’t come from pain. Pain has belief in it. Pain is required, Patti likes to say; suffering is optional. What used to hurt was the vast and wondering doubt that could spread inside me like a desert, the niggling suspicion that none of the hard parts even happened. So the characters that so vividly inhabited me were phantasms, any residual hurt my own warped concoction. I wanted Mother to see the girl I was—the girls Lecia and I were, really—to take us into her body as we’ve taken her so indelibly into ours. Is that love or need? As Mother reads, I grind beans to brew her coffee. I cut her sandwich into quarters. I keep wiping her ashtray clean. I dissolve sugar into tea and shave ice into a frosted glass. Occasionally, she hollers out, How’d you ever remember all this crazy crap? She laughs a lot. Once she says, This is your daddy to a T. I can smell him. But her strongest emotion seems to be for an alligator belt of hers I wrote about, which she mists up over, saying, I wonder where that went to? She absorbs the material—maybe as she did being our mother—as if it were a novel she’d already seen the film of, though like any mother, she’s inclined to heap on undiluted praise. No more convincing cheerleader ever shook a pom-pom. She’s almost to the end when she claims her eyes are tired. From downstairs that night, I hear small noises from the bathroom—stifled, intermittent squeaks like a mouse might make. I tap on the door, which opens to her red-rimmed eyes. You are so busted, I say. She has on a black T-shirt and yoga pants. You caught me, she says, wiping her nose. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mother, I say. She looks surprised: I’m not the least bit hurt, she says. You’re not festive.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy. In the Lincoln, the image faded inside me, and I heard myself say, What use am I now? Doonie said, Something wrong? What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I’d planned to be, but it felt like…like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it. I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud. Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards. Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners. But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes…. (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.) At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I floundered and skipped classes that winter till, shortly before finals that spring, I just stopped showing up. Over a hotfudge malted with Walt at the corner drugstore one afternoon, I tried to make my slapdash bailout sound like a literary escapade prompted by a lack of funds. I’d get some writing done while working to save up. Then I’ll come back, I told him—though I intended no such thing. Shirley and I have been talking about that, Walt said, his long spoon scraping the muddy fudge from the glass bottom. And you’ve decided to donate a million bucks to me, right? If we adopted you, he said, the college would have to let you go to school as a faculty child gratis. I lowered my spoon. Stunned, I was, and touched. They’d never fall for that, I said. I think they’d have to, Walt said, signaling for a check. Shirley talked to a lawyer friend of ours. Lifelong, I’d been trying to weasel into another tribe. Back in my neighborhood, I was shameless about showing up on people’s porches come supper, then sprawling around their dens till they kicked me out. Wrapped in a crocheted blanket on a hook rug with the game on and the family cheering around me—digging my grubby hand into their popcorn bowl—I could convince myself I was one of them. A few times it almost surprised me when I heard the inevitable sentence: Time to go home, Mary Marlene . Fishing for his wallet, Walt explained how easy it’d be. He and Shirley had talked it over, and even the kids were all for it. His youngest boy had asked whose room I’d sleep in. Would I have to change my name? I said. Somehow that would seal my betrayal. I don’t think so, he said. Or you can petition to change it back. The sun was warm on us through the plate glass, and I stared at the door, wishing with all my might that Daddy would come striding through to lay his claim. He’d shake Walt’s hand all nice, saying how he appreciated it, but—he’d squeeze my shoulder—he just had to keep me. The truth was, if it helped with money, Daddy would sign me over in a heartbeat. I was the one who couldn’t bear legally lopping myself off from an upbringing I was working so hard to shed. So I lied that it would hurt my parents too bad, the same way I used to tell those neighbors I horned in on—right before I figured they’d throw me out—that I had to rush home for a curfew that didn’t exist. Well, think about it, Walt said. We were at the register by then. How’ll I ever pay you back? I said. For what? He limped back to leave a bill under the salt shaker. All these lunches, dinners, jobs…. You’re not gonna pay me back, he said. It’s not that linear.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (Ignorant, I was, till she cried out, of the trick Mother and Lecia had played on me by dispatching me to explain the cremation to Aunt Gladys. ) After the service at Mother’s house, I’m lowering to the table a bowl of mustard greens salty with hunks of fatback. Lecia asks, Where’s Warren? She’s upending a Tupperware carton of fried chicken onto a platter. He’s gotta be in the bathroom, I figure. Not long after that, my cousin Jim Ed—wearing, I believe, the same blazer from our granddaddy’s funeral when I was in sixth grade—asks, Where’s your good-looking husband? I’d like to shake his hand. Jim Ed has retired from coaching football, and he talks about how Daddy had taught him to catch the pigskin two-handed. My favorite cousin, Peggy Ruth, says, That man of yours oughta try these biscuits I brought. I know—as my husband does not—that you thumb a hole in a cold biscuit and fill it with a stiff smidge of creamery butter and a lolly gob of cane syrup and bite down so your chin is not spared the squish. And I know that the maple syrup Yankees favor is a paltry stand-in for the burnt-sugar taste you squeeze from sugar cane, whose white inner pulp is sheathed inside purplish-brown bark I can peel with a pocketknife. And where is Warren, anyway? Outside, the hundred-degree air is sopping. But someone had seen him in jogging clothes, so I look up and down the road edged with bleached oyster shells. Under mimosa trees, I cross the neighbor’s yard, past the garage where I was raped as a child. I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in (not because the neighbor boy who was the culprit might have thrown me there, but because part of me knew I was already over). My silk blouse is wet at the pits, my pencil skirt at the waistband. I long to peel off my pantyhose. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the landscape for Warren’s tall form: he’s nowhere. I’m not so much pissed that he’s vanished, just left town, which—given Mother’s penchant for flight—seems feasible even for Warren . Eventually, we call Lecia’s house, and her housekeeper says she let Warren in to shower. He didn’t have a car to drive back to my mother’s so he stayed on. Hours later, when we come in, he’s on the sofa alongside the basketball playoffs with the remote in his hand. (Did we fight about this? I can’t dredge it up.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  And just as the baby rhesus monkeys used attachment behaviors to repair their relationships with their monster mothers, women in unstable relationships may use sex as an attachment behavior to build or repair the attachment. So what Isabel “wanted,” to answer Bergner’s titular question, was proximity with her attachment object, in the face of separation anxiety. The hormones dopamine and oxytocin were having their wicked way with her wanting system, pushing her toward the attachment object who would never commit to her and who therefore chronically activated her attachment system’s need for safe haven.20 This is the dark side of pairing stress and attachment: the “I am lost” feeling, which motivates us to stabilize our connection with our attachment object—“I am home.” Therapist and author Sue Johnson calls this “solace sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.21 Now in a relationship with a man who is kind and attentive and committed, Isabel’s “I am lost” fire is not burning—which is a good thing!—and it can’t, therefore, ignite desire. Which doesn’t feel so good. Solution? Isabel needs to advance the plot. attachment and sex: sex that advances the plotWe never get to see Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester have sex, but I imagine it would be similar to the sex in modern romance novels, metaphorizing penile-vaginal intercourse in terms of that “pursuit of wholeness.” As if Edward Rochester’s penis is the key to the lock of Jane’s vagina, which opens the door to her heart. Modern romance novels thrive on this kind of thing. I am a romance reader. I do a lot of work around sexual violence, so I require “happily ever afters” in my life, and romance is a place where I can get them. It’s a genre written primarily by women, primarily for women, primarily aboout women’s sexual and relationship satisfaction. To that end, many twenty-first-century romance novels are not like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice. They have sex in them. A lot of sex. Some of them have so much sex, they’re basically Porn For The Ladies. But the best romance novels are the ones where the sex isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment. In the best romances, the sex advances the plot, carrying the hero and heroine, against all odds and in the face of many obstacles, through one of the behavioral markers of attachment. As just one example, the heroine of Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm keeps trying to leave the hero and return to her father, but as she rides away she grows “more uneasy every mile” (separation distress) “until she turn[s] her back on her father and return[s]” to the hero (proximity seeking) and reunites with him, with, ahem, “rough vigor.”22 Romance novels are about the narrative of stressed attachment, from “I am lost” to “I am home,” and sex has a starring role as an attachment behavior.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  During this time, the teenage Luther through some connections became acquainted with the prominent Schalbe family and lived with them for some years. Heinrich Schalbe was mayor of the town during this period, first in 1495 and again in 1499. So once again, far from being the son of a horn-handed miner, Luther was already at the very young age of fourteen ensconced in the life of a wealthy, well-connected young man with tremendously bright prospects. The Schalbe family were not only prominent and affluent but also deeply pious and as such were leading patrons of the local Franciscan monastery. It was Heinrich Schalbe’s wife who first planted in the young Luther’s mind the notion that marriage could be something out of the ordinary. She sometimes quoted a verse Luther recalled decades later: “To whom it can be given, there is no dearer thing on earth than a woman’s love.”10 During his nearly four years in Eisenach, Luther also came under the influence of Father Johannes Braun, at that time vicar of the foundation of St. Mary there. Braun had a relationship with St. George’s school and seems frequently to have entertained its students at his home, and it is there that Luther would have become acquainted with him. We gather from their later letters that Braun was a powerful spiritual influence on Luther and that the godly Braun early on saw in Luther a brilliant and sensitive soul upon whom God surely had particular designs, if only he would be open to them. The Schalbe family not only taught Luther that God must be at the center of life in a way that far surpassed anything he would have learned at home in Mansfeld but also exposed him to the idea that there could be a dark side to the church and that there might be some daylight between God’s idea of the church and the institution of the church itself. It was through the paterfamilias Heinrich Schalbe that Luther would first have heard of the elderly Franciscan monk Johannes Hilten, who was at that time imprisoned in the Eisenach monastery for his pronounced criticisms of the church.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  A perfectly normal and very tempting way for Laurie to think about this situation would have been to say, “Look, my life is out of whack, therefore my sexual interest is out of whack. So be it. No sex for me.” Plenty of women think the same thing every day and are rightly satisfied to wait until their lives improve before they try to get their sex lives back into whack. It’s a matter of priorities. And in fact, the main reason Laurie kept trying to want sex more was not that she really wanted to want sex, but that Johnny wanted her to want it. In frustration, she booted him out of the house for the day, sent him with Trevor to the library so that she could have the luxury of the house to herself, to do laundry, get some work done, and maybe, if she was really lucky, take a nap. And once they were gone… she missed them. Often the best part of her day was her son’s bath time—far from being an exhausting chore or a hassle, she loved to splash and play with him. And now she found herself looking forward to their return, because… bath time! And then she compared her feeling about sexy-pleasure to her feeling about mommy-pleasure. She thought, “It’s not selfish of me to enjoy being with my kid—enjoying it makes me a better parent! So how come I can give myself permission to have that pleasure, but I can’t give myself permission to enjoy other kinds of pleasure?” Something clicked. She had all kinds of insights about having been taught that being a mom was the best thing about being a woman but having sex wasn’t okay, that the pleasure of delicious food was blocked by guilt about her body… lots of things. But in the end, something just clicked, and she let go of a bunch of stuff. She started wondering if maybe sex could be for her pleasure, too, rather than something “for Johnny.” Laurie remembered Johnny saying, “Maybe it’s about what it feels like, not about where we are or what we’re doing.” Maybe she could try that, try paying attention to what it feels like, regardless of what’s going on. your vagina’s okay, either wayI get asked a lot about orgasm during penile-vaginal intercourse, so let’s spend a little time with that. As we saw in chapter 1, the clitoris is your Grand Central Station for erotic sensation. The dominance of the clitoris in women’s orgasms explains why 80–90 percent of women who masturbate typically do so with little or no vaginal penetration, including when they use vibrators.11 But ya know, there’s this old saying: “It ain’t the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they’d celebrate my homecoming at term break. 2The Mother of InventionIf Jesus had said to her before she was born, “There’s only two places available to you. You can either be a [n-word] or you can be white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please. Jesus, please,” she would’ve said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available.” —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks. But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage. She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas. We got peaches galore, I said. The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore? Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity. To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand. Out the window, legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Outside, the hundred-degree air is sopping. But someone had seen him in jogging clothes, so I look up and down the road edged with bleached oyster shells. Under mimosa trees, I cross the neighbor’s yard, past the garage where I was raped as a child. I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in (not because the neighbor boy who was the culprit might have thrown me there, but because part of me knew I was already over). My silk blouse is wet at the pits, my pencil skirt at the waistband. I long to peel off my pantyhose. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the landscape for Warren’s tall form: he’s nowhere. I’m not so much pissed that he’s vanished, just left town, which—given Mother’s penchant for flight—seems feasible even for Warren. Eventually, we call Lecia’s house, and her housekeeper says she let Warren in to shower. He didn’t have a car to drive back to my mother’s so he stayed on. Hours later, when we come in, he’s on the sofa alongside the basketball playoffs with the remote in his hand. (Did we fight about this? I can’t dredge it up. I’d started to mistrust what I wanted, since my therapy at the time involved sifting reasonable wants from the nutty ones rearing up from the past.) On the plane, Warren and I fly back in a silence that I’ve learned to copy from him, and since birth offsets the agony of death like nothing else, I carry in me the feverish craving of a woman wanting to lodge some luminescent bubble of baby in my middle. I take his hand to ask if we can start trying. We’re not really in a financial position yet, he says. Maybe if I wind up taking over the curatorship in a year or two. He pushes his glasses up his nose and fetches his book from the seat pocket, but I push on, saying, I’m teaching part-time now—a better schedule for a baby. The editing stuff I can do at night. We haven’t even started saving for a house yet. Why can’t your dad help us with a down payment? I ask. Warren looks out the plane window at the arctic of floofy clouds. I mean, he could take it from whatever you’ll inherit, no? I doubt I’ll inherit anything, he says. There are six children. Just drop it, Mare. I can’t accept the fact that Warren’s family ethos reflects Andrew Carnegie’s old saw about how inherited money has to be held back at the risk of withering ambition, but I sit in silence. The plane flies on, carrying us in its hull. Warren stares off into the distance the rich enter when talk of money comes up.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  more good news! it’s not monogamy, eitherMuch has been made recently of the “unnaturalness” of monogamy and the death of erotic connection when people commit to a long-term, sexually exclusive relationship. By now you can probably anticipate my view of the subject: It’s the context that matters, and no two people are alike. Some monogamous couples create a context that sustains and enlivens desire, and some couples… don’t. The same is true for people in open relationships. It’s not that either monogamy or polyamory is inherently good or bad for desire, it’s the way people do monogamy or polyamory that can kill desire. If monogamy is your preferred relationship structure, this section is for you. There are currently two general schools of thought on strategies for sustaining desire in long-term monogamous relationships. I’m going to frame them as the Esther Perel school and the John Gottman school, though that’s just a shorthand for a much richer and more complex issue. In Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel presents a contradiction at the core of modern relationships: the antithetical pull between the familiar versus the novel, the stable versus the mysterious. We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty. Love is having, desire is wanting, and you can want only what you don’t already have, goes the reasoning. If the problem is that long-term love is antithetical to long-term passion, then the solution, says Perel, is to maintain autonomy, a space of eroticism inside yourself, as a way to maintain the distance necessary to allow wanting to emerge. As Perel puts it, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”11 This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction. By way of contrast, John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy. From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship. Gottman reports the findings of a study of one hundred couples, all age forty-five or older, half with good sex lives and half with poor sex lives. Those who reported that they had good sex lives, he writes, “consistently mentioned: (1) maintaining a close, connected, and trusting friendship; and (2) making sex a priority in their lives.”12 In other words, sustaining desire isn’t about having a bridge to cross but about building a bridge together. “Turn toward each other’s desires,” says Gottman. “Keep a comfortable distance,” says Perel. Are you wondering who’s right? They both are—depending, I think, on how you conceptualize “desire.” Remember back in chapter 3, the distinction between wanting and liking? For Perel, desire is wanting. Longing. Seeking. Craving. The discrepancy-reducing pursuit of a goal, to put it in romantic terms.13

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I told you I was starting school for my master’s. It’s paid for through work. I thought next fall, after the baby came, I say. You shouldn’t be out here without a coat, he says. Don’t you think it’s bad timing? I say. You’re one to talk, he says, gesturing to my belly. Can you at least not take summer classes? The baby’ll come in June. He sighs. Maybe this year. But I want to get it over with. During the week, he leaves at eight in the morning, and three nights a week, he gets in after ten. Weekends, he always seems to be working on papers or that literary magazine he cofounded. Lying next to him, my body swells as if hooked to a bicycle pump, and with each inch of girth, he floats further, and I began slowly to shift my gaze away from his back. I start to stare inward to the pearlescent mystery I’m carrying. Some nights I tell myself the birth will bring Warren back to me. (And maybe—in his version of events—he’d report that I’d studied baby books with a Talmudic intensity, hardly reading anymore the poetry he was devoted to. The bigger I got, the lower my IQ, I swear. It’s not politic to say so, but hey. Maybe Warren was telling himself the birth would bring me back to him.) One day, as I meticulously fold and refold minuscule T-shirts and onesies in the trance of the deeply unprepared, the phone rings. And a woman’s voice says the sentence I’ve been waiting to hear for so long, I’m almost deaf to it. So obsessed am I with the upcoming birth that she has to repeat it several times. I said that we’d like to publish your book of poems. Okay, I say, having become a farm animal at this point. With the phone to my ear, I slide the top off a box of chocolates my sister sent and start poking them in search of caramel. What do you mean, Okay? the editor says. We’d like to publish your book next year. That’s good, I say, poking as one piece gushes white goop, so I pass over it. You don’t sound very excited, she says. I’m having a baby, I say dreamily. And truly the notion of a book has grown misty. Right this second? Soon, I say. At that instant, my fingernail punctures chocolate and hits caramel. What does she need from me? The names of anybody dumb enough to blurb it. A dust-jacket photo laying around. I chew my caramel, satisfied as a brood sow in a mud wallow. Neither good nor ill can reach me. 15Journey of the MagiWho is there? I. Who is I? Thou. And that is the awakening—the Thou and the I. —Paul Valéry

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  PERCHED ATOP AN impossibly high ridge that itself sits like a lone island amid a sea of greenery stretching to the horizon lies what is called the Wartburg.* Begun in 1067 by a Thuringian count known as Ludwig der Springer,* the Wartburg was already by Luther’s time a fabled site. For Luther, the Wartburg would be something like an ark floating above the surface of the world. The time Luther spent there would soon become legendary, and the Wartburg itself a byword for Luther’s exile.* But most people today when gazing up at the Wartburg remember that it was the place where Luther did the one thing that would more than anything symbolize all else that he did when he translated the New Testament into German, forever releasing from its Latin prison the simple song of freedom itself, which would fly around the world and never again be hidden away. But when Luther first arrived, he had no plans to do any such thing. Here at the Wartburg, he was alone and unknown. Apart from the castellan Berlepsch himself, no one in the castle knew who their fellow occupant was. Berlepsch settled him in a very small apartment—containing a humble and sparsely furnished living room and a tiny bedroom—that was sometimes used as a temporary prison for errant knights. It was next to Berlepsch’s own quarters in the outer castle, far from anyone else, where Luther would escape notice by the others in the castle. A small set of stairs led from Berlepsch’s quarters to Luther’s, and each night these were pulled up via a chain and secured with a lock. For the first period of his time at the Wartburg, Luther was cut off from all human contact save Berlepsch and the two noble lads serving as pages who brought him his meals. What they were told about this mysterious man, we don’t know. But we do know that as far as anyone was concerned, save the handful in on this historic stunt, the celebrated and vilified monk known as Martin Luther no longer existed. From the moment he stepped over the threshold of the castle, he was to be known exclusively as Junker* George. He must henceforth look and act like the other knights residing in the castle and therefore now began to grow out his tonsure with all alacrity. He also grew a beard and cast aside his rough-hewn cassock for the stylish accoutrements of a noble knight. He would sport a fashionable doublet and hose, as well as a linen shirt, all of which was punctuated by a handsome codpiece. Whenever he was ready to leave the confines of his room, no one must know his real identity. [image file=image_rsrc6KZ.jpg] Cranach’s 1522 woodcut portrait of Luther in his “Junker George” phase.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Katharine von Bora—known as Kathie—was also of noble birth, but Luther dismissed her as a match for himself, saying that he was not interested in marrying and that she was somehow “too proud.” She initially lived with the family of Philip Reichenbach, a distinguished lawyer who the next year became Wittenberg’s city clerk. But Kathie also spent much time at the Cranachs’, which was her prime residence in Wittenberg at that time, and eventually went to live there. The Cranachs’ home was so distinguished that for a time during this period they hosted the exiled king of Sweden, Christian II, who was the emperor’s brother-in-law. The king honored Kathie with a golden ring, which kings in those days handed out like lapel pins. Kathie von Bora also spent time in the Melanchthon household, and it is likely that she there came to meet the young nobleman Jerome Baumgärtner, who had studied in Wittenberg under Melanchthon and who returned to visit a short time after Kathie’s arrival. The two of them rather quickly fell in love, and Kathie was well regarded in his circle of Wittenberg friends, so much so that they dubbed her Katherine of Siena, one assumes for her piety. Baumgärtner remained in Wittenberg for two months, at the end of which time it was assumed he would propose to Kathie. But first he must depart for a time, which he did. However, that time stretched past what everyone expected, causing not a little wonderment at the state of Baumgärtner’s mind. Had some unknown event or obstacle been raised against his desire to marry Kathie? The summer gave way to fall, and still there was no word from him. Winter came and spring too and then a second summer. Luther esteemed Baumgärtner greatly and wrote to him in October 1524, “If you want to hold on to your Kathie von Bora, then hurry before she is given to someone else, which is already imminent. She has not yet gotten over her love for you. I would surely be delighted at your union. Live well!” Luther in this letter is alluding to another man—Dr. Kaspar Glatz—an older gentleman who was now pressing his suit with Kathie. It is also possible that Luther was pressing the man’s suit for him, because he was always eagerly playing matchmaker with the nuns whose liberty he had encouraged. Glatz was a doctor of theology who also went by the Latin Humanist name Glacius. He had become rector of the University of Wittenberg in 1524, and we gather had expressed interest in the lively and intelligent Kathie, even though she expected the now long-lost Baumgärtner to return and marry her at any moment.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I’ve done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery. On the road that day, I did the same, only with better material, and—no doubt skimming past the sex stuff—I let those elegant sentences issue from my mouth like mystery from a well rubbed magic lamp. She was rapt. She gasped. She asked me to read parts over. By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn, my voice was a croak. In the room, I got puking drunk for the third night in a row. Hair of the dog, Mother said. The first screwdriver had smoothed me right out. However expert I was at drugs, I remained an amateur imbiber, yet drink was all I had that night to blind me to the presence growing slurry in the next bed. Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who’d divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump, and as the dolls’ faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe. I had to sit up and breathe deep and make my stinging eyes wide so all the shimmery-edged versions dispersed, and she once again lay in filmy underpants and a huge T-shirt with jagged writing on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE. She said, You can’t go now. I’m not done with you yet. Sob sob sob. She had on one of the derby hats she’d bought each of us in Houston the day we left—pimp hats, they were, trailing long peacock feathers in their brims.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Instead, there is instability and lack of self-esteem: the opinion of the West has come to matter too desperately. People like Husain had understood religion and the centrality of God but had lost touch with the modern world. People who were in touch with modernity had lost the sense of God. From this instability would spring the political activism which characterizes modern fundamentalism, which is also in retreat from God. The Jews of Europe had also been affected by hostile criticism of their faith. In Germany, Jewish philosophers developed what they called “the Science of Judaism,” which rewrote Jewish history in Hegelian terms to counter the charge that Judaism was a servile, alienating faith. The first to attempt this reinterpretation of the history of Israel was Solomon Formstecher (1808–89). In The Religion of the Spirit (1841), he described God as a world Soul, immanent in all things. This Spirit did not depend upon the world, however, as Hegel had argued. Formstecher insisted that it lay beyond the reach of reason, reverting to the old distinction between God’s essence and his activities. Where Hegel had decried the use of representational language, Formstecher argued that symbolism was the only appropriate vehicle for God-talk, since he lay beyond the reach of philosophical concepts. Nevertheless, Judaism had been the first religion to arrive at an advanced conception of the divine and would shortly show the whole world what a truly spiritual religion was like.

• From A History of God (1993)

  People longed for a more direct experience of God. In Safed this yearning acquired an almost erotic intensity. Kabbalists used to wander through the hills of Palestine and lie on the graves of the great Talmudists, seeking, as it were, to absorb their vision into their own troubled lives. They used to stay awake all night, sleepless as frustrated lovers, singing love songs to God and calling him fond names. They found that the mythology and disciplines of Kabbalah broke down their reserves and touched the pain in their souls in a way that metaphysics or the study of Talmud no longer could. But because their condition was so different from that of Moses of Leon, the author of The Zohar, the Spanish exiles needed to adapt his vision so that it could speak to their particular circumstances. They came up with an extraordinarily imaginative solution which equated absolute homelessness with absolute Godliness. The exile of the Jews symbolized the radical dislocation at the heart of all existence. Not only was the whole of creation no longer in its proper place, but God was in exile from himself. The new Kabbalah of Safed achieved almost overnight popularity and became a mass movement that not only inspired the Sephardim but also gave new hope to the Ashkenazim of Europe, who had discovered that they had no abiding city in Christendom. This extraordinary success shows that the strange and—to an outsider—bewildering myths of Safed had the power to speak to the condition of the Jews. It was the last Jewish movement to be accepted by almost everybody and wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry. The special disciplines of Kabbalah were only for an initiated elite, but its ideas—and its conception of God—became a standard expression of Jewish piety.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi. Since Aristotle, however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral philosophy, but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi, but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others. Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues from the East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi’s Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remember their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal wisdom within them by means of the imagination. Suhrawardi’s immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequently his philosophy linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination ( Hiqmat al-Ishraq ), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and natural science, but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total reality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami’s extremism could be dangerous. He taught that Jana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfill them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced ’ fana and baqa , therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian would call “deification.” Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a return to man’s primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the “separation” of which Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a nontheistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under the expert guidance of a Sufi master ( pir ) like himself, al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original sense of God’s immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam’s loins. It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person’s being: Now I have known, O Lord, What lies within my heart; In secret, from the world apart, My tongue hath talked with my Adored. So in a manner we United are, and One; Yet otherwise disunion is our estate eternally. Though from my gaze profound Deep awe hath hid Thy Face, In wondrous and ecstatic Grace I feel Thee touch my inmost ground. 33 The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration. Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Certainly the Schalbes and the group around Johannes Braun appear to have shaped Luther’s devotional attitudes. 37 That piety may have incorporated a strong feminine side: St. Anna and Mary became important figures in Luther’s devotional universe, and the myths and stories surrounding his time in Eisenach hint at a motherless lad far from home and in search of tenderness. One tradition has it that the widow Ursula Cotta took him in because she liked his singing and sympathized with his reluctance to beg; another story tells of how he was left alone suffering with fever while the rest of the household was in church, and had to crawl to the kitchen on hands and knees to get the water he needed. 38 Apocryphal though the stories may be, perhaps they reflect the psychological reality that Luther both needed and found a connection to his mother in Eisenach. — F ROM Eisenach, Luther moved on to university at Erfurt in 1501, the institution that his revered older friend Johannes Braun had attended. Although farther away from home than the rival University of Leipzig, it was closer to Eisenach and his maternal family. Luther may have lodged at the student house of St. George—choosing another institution named for the patron saint of Mansfeld—or he may have joined the Amplonian College near St. Michael’s Church, Heaven’s Gate, the biggest of the student bursas, or residential colleges. These institutions followed a strict quasi-monastic regimen: Students had to be in bed at 8 P.M., rose at 4 A.M., and Luther would have shared a room. Many students seem to have found their way around the rules, however, for as Luther acidly remembered, “Erfurt is a whorehouse and beerhouse; these two lessons are what students got from that gymnasium.” 39 Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources. Yet although he was influenced by these intellectual trends, Luther apparently developed no contacts to leading humanists at Erfurt, such as Eobanus Hessus and Conrad Mutian, in contrast to two of his later friends, Georg Spalatin and Johannes Lang, who were both part of Mutian’s circle. And although the humanist Crotus Rubeanus later described Luther as his good friend and remembered how he and Luther were united by an enthusiasm for study, there is perhaps something extravagant about his claims to friendship as he avers that “my soul has always remained yours.” 40 After all, he was writing in 1519, after Luther had become famous. Luther started out as a rather average student, coming thirtieth in his cohort of fifty-seven baccalaureates.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama , “the Cloud” or “The Blindness” 48 to emphasize his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself . It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing. Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man ( insan i-kamil ) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine. This introspective, imaginative mysticism was a search for the ground of being in the depths of the self. It deprived the mystic of the certainties that characterize the more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each man and woman had had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about God to which all must subscribe; since this God transcended the category of personality, predictions about his behavior and inclinations were impossible. Any consequent chauvinism about one’s own faith at the expense of other people’s was obviously unacceptable, since no one religion had the whole truth about God. Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive attitude toward other religions which could be found in the Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance: My heart is capable of every form. A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols, A pasture for gazelles, the votary’s Kabah The tables of the Torah, the Koran. Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn His camels, still the one true faith is mine. 49 The man of God was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of God. Ibn al-Arabi often used the phrase “the God created by the faiths” ( Khalq al-haqq fi’litiqad); it could be pejorative if it referred to the “god” that men and women created in a particular religion and considered identical with God himself. This only bred intolerance and fanaticism.