Mortification

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 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  471 Oscar Wilde Lecture 72 Having made a sensation with his novel, Wilde turned to the writing of plays. Of these the most notorious is Salome, written in French and fi rst published in France in 1893. In the following summer, a London production of the play with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the licenser of plays. B orn in Dublin and educated—after early schooling in Ireland— at Oxford, Wilde distinguished himself for his dandi fi ed dress, fl amboyant behavior, contempt for conventional morality, and command of classical literature. After publishing a volume of poems and a novel and writing several plays about London society, as well as one about Salome, he wrote his wittiest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened in London in the winter of 1895. In this play, Wilde puts his own special twist on a theme long established in English literature: the theme of the foundling. Though Jack Worthing is a foundling with no idea who his parents are, he’s fabulously rich and, by the middle of the play, freshly engaged to the young woman he wants to marry. His only problem lies in his name, which is not Ernest—until a last-minute revelation shows that it really is Ernest, which makes his marriage possible and punningly demonstrates, at the very end of the play, “the vital Importance of Being Ernest.” But Wilde’s own end was anything but witty. Arrested, tried, and convicted for homosexual activity, he was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and not long after his release, he died a broken man. Lady Bracknell’s interrogation of Jack in the fi rst act of The Importance of Being Earnest shows how Wilde puts his own special twist on the well- established theme of the foundling. Interviewing Jack Worthing, who hopes to marry her daughter, Lady Bracknell is dismayed to learn that he is a foundling. He has no idea who his parents are. He knows only that he was found in a handbag left at London’s Victoria Station. In the classic version of the foundling story, a child of obscure parentage who has been humbly raised turns out to come from noble parents and is

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The first day of the third week, the lawyer came out of his office, stiffer than usual, his eyes lit up in a peculiar, stalking way. He was carrying one of my letters. He put it on my desk, right in front of me. “Look at it,” he said. I did. “Do you see that?” “What?” I asked. “This letter has three typing errors in it, one of which is, I think, a spelling error.” “I’m sorry.” “This isn’t the first time either. There have been others that I let go because it was your first few weeks. But this can’t go on. Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?” I looked at him, mortified. There had been a catastrophe hidden in the folds of my contentment for two weeks and he hadn’t even told me. It seemed unfair, although when I thought about it I could understand his reluctance, maybe even embarrassment, to draw my attention to something so stupidly unpleasant. “Type it again.” I did, but I was so badly shaken that I made even more mistakes. “You are wasting my time,” he said, and handed it to me once again. I typed it correctly the third time, but he sulked in his office for the rest of the day. This kind of thing kept occurring all week. Each time, the lawyer’s irritation and disbelief mounted. In addition, I sensed something else growing in him, an intimate tendril creeping from one of his darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me. I was very depressed about the situation. When I went home in the evening I couldn’t take a nap. I lay there looking at the gray weather poodle and fantasized about having a conversation with the lawyer that would clear up everything, explain to him that I was really trying to do my best. He seemed to think that I was making the mistakes on purpose. At the end of the week he began complaining about the way I answered the phone. “You’re like a machine,” he said. “You sound like you’re in the Twilight Zone. You don’t think when you respond to people.” When he asked me to come into his office at the end of the day, I thought he was going to fire me. The idea was a relief, but a numbing one. I sat down and he fixed me with a look that was speculative but benign, for him. He leaned back in his chair in a comfortable way, one hand dangling sideways from his wrist. To my surprise, he began talking to me about my problems, as he saw them. “I sense that you are a very nice but complex person, with wild mood swings that you keep hidden. You just shut up the house and act like there’s nobody home.” “That’s true,” I said. “I do that.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  It is hard to suppress a mixed reaction to the story. In the Life of Mary all the features of the subgenre, both attractive and disturbing, are refined to the highest degree. The blunt, unquestioning grace offered to the sinner finds its most poignant expression in Mary’s encounter with the mother of God. Because this is an allegory of sin and repentance, the scale of Mary’s depravity is a measure of the infinite grace she can receive. At the same time, in Mary’s story the toll of such forgiveness is plain to see. Mortification, self-abasement, death unto this world—such are the adjuncts of redemption. The penitent prostitute is walled into a cell, she surrenders her beauty, she sobs eternally. In Mary’s case, she suffers hauntingly until her evils have evaporated along with her body. She becomes a phantasm, a pure, pitiful creature whose body has been wasted to virtual nothingness. The body, its existence in the world, its participation in the mysterious cycles of regeneration, offer no truth, no pleasure, no redemption. In structure and in spirit, the Life of Mary is the quintessential antiromance. CONCLUSION: MYTHICAL IMPERIALISM IN LATE ANTIQUITYIn the eighth century, a mischievous Byzantine author wrote a hagiographical romance that begins where the novel of Achilles Tatius ends. Clitophon and Leucippe—whose name has been apathetically disguised as “Gleucippe”—are married and living in Emesa. Gleucippe is infertile, and Clitophon is a wife-beater. She regularly beseeches Artemis (her savior in the romance) to allow her to have a child, without issue. Not until she converts to Christianity does she bear a son, Galaktion, who will become the chaste, Christian hero of the story. The saint’s life proves that hagiographers, even at this date, simply could not live without the imaginary world created by the authors of romance. The grotesque story of Gleucippe and Clitophon is probably the least subliminal instance of what Frye called “mythical imperialism.” The invention of the penitent prostitutes was only one campaign in a massive cultural conquest that sprawled across the entire continent of ancient literature. But this new archetype, born from the warm embers of imperial romance, reflects an especially meaningful encounter in the transition to a Christian culture. The stories of the penitent prostitutes, as a subgenre, mirror the coming of age of Christianity as a dominant public ideology. The woman’s body was a potent symbol, a shorthand for the order of society. At the deepest level, the redemption of a prostitute’s corrupted flesh stood for the ability of the church to absorb society and through baptism to cleanse it. The prostitute’s sins are only an exaggerated and especially condensed symbol of the sins of the world. The prostitute is everyman.74

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Because this evolutionary process has been far too recent to have resulted in the fixation of genes for adult lactase production, many people on the planet are lactose intolerant. Recent genomic studies of this phenomenon have discovered strong evidence of natural selection for mutations at several sites upstream of the lactase gene in a region that is known to be involved in the regulation of lactase enzyme expression. This source of natural selection has not been strong enough, or universal enough, to result in the complete fixation of this genetic novelty in all human populations. There are still many populations on the planet—especially east Asian and many African populations that have not had a history of dairy culture—who have not evolved to produce lactase as adults. cultural ideas about beauty: Similar ideas have previously been discussed by Charles Darwin (1872), Jared Diamond (1992), and Jerry Coyne (2009, 235). strong natural selection for darker skin: Jablonski (2006); Jablonski and Chapin (2010). Diamond (1992) questions whether skin color has any adaptive basis and hypothesizes that all variations in human skin color are the result of arbitrary social and sexual selection. cultural preference for this kind of female body shape: Cultural top-down effects may also influence the evolutionary future of human beings. The distribution of underarm and pubic hair strongly indicates that body odors produced by an interaction of secreted pheromones, sweat, and the microbiota of the skin have coevolved as sexual communications. Many of us can identify the body odors of specific individuals and have experienced the particular attraction to the body odors of our partners. Yet the culture of hygiene—that is, frequent washing of the body with soap and application of deodorants to eliminate body odors and the removal of body hair—likely influences what body odors people think are culturally acceptable and sexually attractive. Furthermore, hygienic cultural concern about the risk posed by the bacteria lurking in human bodies, body parts, body cavities, and bodily fluids can also influence people’s sexual behavior. Ultimately, the culture of hygiene could disrupt millions of years of human intersexual chemical communication and aesthetic coevolution. Mate choices by generations of people practicing modern hygiene could contribute to the loss of human pheromone specificity and sensitivity. The culture of hygiene could eliminate an entire sensory dimension of human sexual beauty. Of course, people would still smell; body odors would just cease to be beautiful. cultural mating preferences: Bailey and Moore (2012). Chapter 9: Pleasure Happenswoman’s sexual pleasure is a nonlinear, exponential increase: A mathematician colleague, Michael Frame, expressed mystification with my logic. It is true that two numbers—1 and 9—cannot by themselves imply any correlation other than a straight line, a linear relationship. But I am asking us to think poetically about numbers in a way that I imagine was instinctive for the Greeks. The strongest association for the number 9 is, I think, as 32, which implies a pleasure difference that is squared, more expansive rather than merely larger.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I do not know of any other contemporary scientific debate in which one side has actually been branded as wicked! Not even cold fusion! Clearly, this is not an everyday scientific debate. In a striking reprise of St. George Mivart’s moralizing tone, Grafen’s outsized response indicates the intellectual magnitude of what is at stake. Darwin’s really dangerous idea—aesthetic evolution—is so threatening to adaptationism that it must be branded as wicked. Nearly one hundred years after Wallace advocated his pure form of Darwinism, Grafen deploys the same Wallacean insistence to try to win the debate again. Grafen’s reasoning struck a chord. Although personal comfort is not a scientifically justifiable criterion, many people, including scientists, do want to believe that the world is filled with “rhyme and reason.” So, even though Grafen merely demonstrated that there were conditions under which the handicap principle could work, he so discredited the Fisherian theory that most evolutionary biologists concluded that the handicap principle not only could work but would work—all the time. If belief in the alternative hypothesis is “wicked,” there’s little choice to make. Adaptive mate choice has dominated the scientific discourse ever since. In comparing the intellectual styles of Zahavi and Fisher, Grafen wrote that “Fisher’s idea is too clever by half” but that “Zahavi’s upward struggle from fact will triumph.” This distinction between cleverness and fact also lent itself to a narrative in which the proponents of arbitrary Fisherian mate choice were cast as pointy-headed mathematicians with no appreciation of the natural world, while adaptationist advocates of the handicap principle were seen as salt-of-the-earth natural historians. Matt Ridley brought this distinction to vivid life in his 1993 book, The Red Queen: The split between Fisher and Good-genes began to emerge in the 1970s once the fact of female choice had been established to the satisfaction of most. Those of a theoretical or mathematical bent—the pale, eccentric types umbilically attached to their computers—became Fisherians. Field biologists and naturalists—bearded, besweatered, and booted—gradually found themselves to be Good-geners. Ironically, I find that I have been written out of the historical narrative of my own discipline. I have spent cumulative years of my life in tropical forests on multiple continents studying avian courtship displays. I have been as “bearded, besweatered, and booted” as any field biologist. Yet I have also been an ardent and inquisitive “Fisherian” since the mid-1980s. According to the Grafen and Ridley narrative, I do not exist. Neither does Darwin, a naturalist who certainly put in his time in the field. Odder still, neither does Grafen, who is primarily a mathematician. Unfortunately, Ridley’s scenario also eliminates from consideration all female field biologists and naturalists. (Sorry, Jane Goodall and Rosemary Grant!) Of course, the function of this kind of intellectual fable is to obscure the actual complexity of the issues, to use rhetoric to claim the higher ground by portraying adaptationists as romantic figures with deeper personal connections to nature and to knowledge.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I had a secretary, a very mediocre fellow, whom I retained because he knew all the routines of the chancellery, but who provoked me by his stubborn, snarling self-sufficiency: he refused to try new methods, and had a mania for arguing endlessly over trivial details. This fool irritated me one day more than usual; I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget that howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which the blood spurted. I had Hermogenes sent for at once, to give the first care, and the oculist Capito was then consulted. But in vain; the eye was gone. Some days later the man resumed his work, a bandage across his face. I sent for him and asked him humbly to fix the amount of compensation which was his due. He replied with a wry smile that he asked of me only one thing, another right eye. He ended, however, by accepting a pension. I have kept him in my service; his presence serves me as a warning, and a punishment, perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year. Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups. A certain number of errors had been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomentors of trouble for their own advantage. The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by a superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts), mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.

• From Untrue (2018)

  On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada, in 2016). Sometimes this starts out in my mind as a replay of an awkward conversation, one of those where someone’s asked me a perfectly innocent question—“So how do you two know each other?”—and unwittingly forced me to choose between giving a deceptive answer and providing what I know will be too much information. If I tell the truth—“He’s my boyfriend”—to people who know me and my husband, it’s inevitably going to cause embarrassment—the kind of embarrassment that comes with suddenly being made to acknowledge the existence of something awkward, something abnormal, something that makes people feel icky. Deceptive answers—“Oh, he used to work in the office upstairs from mine”—are easy and comfortable. Jenkins told me she spends one night a week with her boyfriend, Ray, and the six other nights with her husband, Jonathan. The three of them are very good with shared Google calendars. Part of being successfully polyamorous, Jenkins told me, is being organized. She and her husband had decided from the outset of their marriage that they wanted to be non-monogamous. But Jenkins, a stickler for accuracy, wasn’t sure, initially, that she wanted to use the term “polyamory.” Then she fell in love with her boyfriend, and it became the right label: poly meaning “many,” and amore meaning “love.” Loving more than one. With her commitment to philosophy being part of the real world, and her commitment to non-monogamy, Jenkins had considered writing about her personal life in a philosophical way for some time, but she’d sensed she should wait until she had tenure, which she figured would help buffer her to some extent from any negative attention she might garner. Jenkins is an unlikely lightning rod. She describes herself as “an approval junkie” and “Hermione Granger-ish, never in trouble” and says she is “the world’s worst rebel. I always just wanted straight As.” She didn’t know she was drawing a line in the sand until the hate began. Her book came out in early 2017, “Just in time for Valentine’s Day,” she joked when I asked. It was no love fest. The name calling and demeaning, the criticisms and threats, began almost immediately.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Hrdy’s assertion that female primates were sexually strategic and acted with agency left her open to criticism. One colleague writing in the Quarterly Review of Biology equated her hypothesis that female primates benefited from mating with multiple males with “parapsychology.” Others made it more personal, accusing her of projecting. “So, Sarah, put another way, you’re saying you’re horny, right?” one colleague inquired. (Hrdy called this “one of the more mortifying moments of my life.”) But her work also opened the floodgates for more research that challenged the status quo. It was soon observed and eventually widely accepted that males of many mammal species committed infanticide to force females into estrus, and that females bred not passively but strategically, and often, and frequently with multiple males. From female macaques in captivity who craved sexual variety so much that they grew listless and depressed if keepers didn’t cycle in new males every three years; to ostensibly “monogamous” female gibbons who copulated with other males when their partners were out of sight; to female chimps who risked their lives attempting to join new troops in order to copulate with novel males—there was good reason, primatologists including Meredith Small, Alison Jolly, Barbara Smuts, and Jeanne Altmann argued, to reexamine with a critical eye the presumed “universal” sex differences in sexual and reproductive strategy based on Bateman’s principle. Females had a lot more agency than previously supposed. Under a variety of circumstances they did mate multiply and they did benefit from it.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I stood there for another twenty minutes, trying to convince her to come inside, but she kept saying “no.” She wouldn’t get out of the car. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” I ran inside and found Bongani. “Where have you been?” he said. “I’m here! But my date’s in the car and she won’t come in.” “What do you mean she won’t come in?” “I don’t know what’s going on. Please help me.” We went back out to the parking lot. I took Bongani over to the car, and the second he saw her he lost it. “Jesus in Heaven! This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You said she was beautiful, Trevor, but this is insane.” In an instant he completely forgot about helping me with Babiki. He turned and ran back inside and called to the guys. “Guys! You gotta come see this! Trevor got a date! And she’s beautiful! Guys! Come out here!” Twenty guys came running out into the parking lot. They clustered around the car. “Yo, she’s so hot!” “Dude, this girl came with Trevor?” Guys were gawking at her like she was an animal at the zoo. They were asking to take pictures with her. They were calling back to more people inside. “This is insane! Look at Trevor’s date! No, no, no, you gotta come and see!” I was mortified. I’d spent four years of high school carefully avoiding any kind of romantic humiliation whatsoever, and now, on the night of the matric dance, the night of all nights, my humiliation had turned into a circus bigger than the event itself: Trevor the undatable clown thought he was going to have the most beautiful girl at the dance, but he’s crashing and burning so let’s all go outside and watch. Babiki sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, refusing to budge. I was outside the car, pacing, stressed out. A friend of mine had a bottle of brandy that he’d smuggled into the dance. “Here,” he said, “have some of this.” Nothing mattered at that point, so I started drinking. I’d fucked up. The girl didn’t like me. The night was done. Most of the guys eventually wandered back inside. I was sitting on the pavement, taking swigs from the brandy bottle, getting buzzed. At some point Bongani went back over to the car to try one last time to convince Babiki to come in. After a minute his head popped up over the car with this confused look. “Yo, Trevor,” he said, “your date does not speak English.” “What?” “Your date. She does not speak any English.” “That’s not possible.” I got up and walked over to the car. I asked her a question in English and she gave me a blank stare. Bongani looked at me. “How did you not know that your date does not speak English?” “I…I don’t know.” “Have you never spoken to her?” “Of course I have—or, wait…have I?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I was useful. My mother picked me up every day. We would usually stop at the A&P before we went home to get a loaf of white French bread, beer and kielbasa sausage for my father. When we got home I would go upstairs to my room, take off my shirt and blouse, and throw them on the floor. I would get into my bed of jumbled blankets in my underwear and panty hose and listen to my father yelling at my mother until I fell asleep. I woke up when Donna pounded on my door and yelled, “Dinner!” I would go down with her then and sit at the table. We would all watch the news on TV as we ate. My mother would have a shrunken, abstracted look on her face. My father would hunch over his plate like an animal at its dish. After dinner, I would go upstairs and listen to records and write in my diary or play Parcheesi with Donna until it was time to get ready for bed. I’d go to sleep at night looking at the skirt and blouse I would wear the next day. I’d wake up looking at my ceramic weather poodle, which was supposed to turn pink, blue or green, depending on the weather, but had only turned gray and stayed gray. I would hear my father in the bathroom, the tumble of radio patter, the water, the clink of a glass being set down, the creak and click as he closed the medicine cabinet. Donna would be standing outside my door, waiting for him to finish, muttering “shit” or something. Looking back on it, I don’t know why that time was such a contented one, but it was. The first day of the third week, the lawyer came out of his office, stiffer than usual, his eyes lit up in a peculiar, stalking way. He was carrying one of my letters. He put it on my desk, right in front of me. “Look at it,” he said. I did. “Do you see that?” “What?” I asked. “This letter has three typing errors in it, one of which is, I think, a spelling error.” “I’m sorry.” “This isn’t the first time either. There have been others that I let go because it was your first few weeks. But this can’t go on. Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?” I looked at him, mortified. There had been a catastrophe hidden in the folds of my contentment for two weeks and he hadn’t even told me. It seemed unfair, although when I thought about it I could understand his reluctance, maybe even embarrassment, to draw my attention to something so stupidly unpleasant. “Type it again.” I did, but I was so badly shaken that I made even more mistakes. “You are wasting my time,” he said, and handed it to me once again.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The first day of the third week, the lawyer came out of his office, stiffer than usual, his eyes lit up in a peculiar, stalking way. He was carrying one of my letters. He put it on my desk, right in front of me. “Look at it,” he said. I did. “Do you see that?” “What?” I asked. “This letter has three typing errors in it, one of which is, I think, a spelling error.” “I’m sorry.” “This isn’t the first time either. There have been others that I let go because it was your first few weeks. But this can’t go on. Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?” I looked at him, mortified. There had been a catastrophe hidden in the folds of my contentment for two weeks and he hadn’t even told me. It seemed unfair, although when I thought about it I could understand his reluctance, maybe even embarrassment, to draw my attention to something so stupidly unpleasant. “Type it again.” I did, but I was so badly shaken that I made even more mistakes. “You are wasting my time,” he said, and handed it to me once again. I typed it correctly the third time, but he sulked in his office for the rest of the day. This kind of thing kept occurring all week. Each time, the lawyer’s irritation and disbelief mounted. In addition, I sensed something else growing in him, an intimate tendril creeping from one of his darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me. I was very depressed about the situation. When I went home in the evening I couldn’t take a nap. I lay there looking at the gray weather poodle and fantasized about having a conversation with the lawyer that would clear up everything, explain to him that I was really trying to do my best. He seemed to think that I was making the mistakes on purpose. At the end of the week he began complaining about the way I answered the phone. “You’re like a machine,” he said. “You sound like you’re in the Twilight Zone. You don’t think when you respond to people.” When he asked me to come into his office at the end of the day, I thought he was going to fire me. The idea was a relief, but a numbing one. I sat down and he fixed me with a look that was speculative but benign, for him. He leaned back in his chair in a comfortable way, one hand dangling sideways from his wrist. To my surprise, he began talking to me about my problems, as he saw them. “I sense that you are a very nice but complex person, with wild mood swings that you keep hidden. You just shut up the house and act like there’s nobody home.” “That’s true,” I said. “I do that.”

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  11Lecture 1—Prophets of Reform before Protestantism õIn May of 1498, he and two of his closest allies were marched out to the scaffolding in downtown Florence and stripped of their clerical robes. The executioners shaved their heads and the backs of their hands, a symbolic act of real degradation. Then, the friars were hanged. õTheir executioners used gunpowder to stoke a huge bonfire around the gallows and burned their bodies to ashes. They tossed the ashes in the river so that no sign would be left of the heretic and his allies— although some of Savonarola’s most devoted followers collected a few ashes from the water. õFrom the perspective of the 21 st century, the deaths of Savonarola and Pico can be hard to comprehend. How could an eccentric preacher and a philosopher become so dangerous that they deserved such brutal fates? But this is the last great lesson of their story: The world of ideas is inseparable from the realities of power. SUGGESTED READING Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Martines, Fire in the City. Ozment, The Age of Reform. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhy is it so hard to define religion? Do you find one definition more persuasive than others? äWho posed a more dangerous threat to the church’s status quo: Savonarola or Pico della Mirandola? äDo you see the attitudes of Savonarola and Pico among Christians today? 12 LECTURE 2 LUTHER AND THE DAWN OF PROTESTANTISM T he Reformation was a set of debates, as well as violent wars, over how to reform or change Christianity. It was a fight about the authority of the church, the authority of the individual, and how both of those relate to the authority of secular government. It was a fight over the authority of church tradition as opposed to the authority of the Bible and personal religious experience. And it was a debate between those who wanted to resolve these fights by following the rules of the Roman Catholic Church and slowly pushing for change, and those who got fed up and wanted out.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I stood there for another twenty minutes, trying to convince her to come inside, but she kept saying “no.” She wouldn’t get out of the car. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” I ran inside and found Bongani. “Where have you been?” he said. “I’m here! But my date’s in the car and she won’t come in.” “What do you mean she won’t come in?” “I don’t know what’s going on. Please help me.” We went back out to the parking lot. I took Bongani over to the car, and the second he saw her he lost it. “Jesus in Heaven! This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You said she was beautiful, Trevor, but this is insane.” In an instant he completely forgot about helping me with Babiki. He turned and ran back inside and called to the guys. “Guys! You gotta come see this! Trevor got a date! And she’s beautiful! Guys! Come out here!” Twenty guys came running out into the parking lot. They clustered around the car. “Yo, she’s so hot!” “Dude, this girl came with Trevor?” Guys were gawking at her like she was an animal at the zoo. They were asking to take pictures with her. They were calling back to more people inside. “This is insane! Look at Trevor’s date! No, no, no, you gotta come and see!” I was mortified. I’d spent four years of high school carefully avoiding any kind of romantic humiliation whatsoever, and now, on the night of the matric dance, the night of all nights, my humiliation had turned into a circus bigger than the event itself: Trevor the undatable clown thought he was going to have the most beautiful girl at the dance, but he’s crashing and burning so let’s all go outside and watch. Babiki sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, refusing to budge. I was outside the car, pacing, stressed out. A friend of mine had a bottle of brandy that he’d smuggled into the dance. “Here,” he said, “have some of this.” Nothing mattered at that point, so I started drinking. I’d fucked up. The girl didn’t like me. The night was done. Most of the guys eventually wandered back inside. I was sitting on the pavement, taking swigs from the brandy bottle, getting buzzed. At some point Bongani went back over to the car to try one last time to convince Babiki to come in. After a minute his head popped up over the car with this confused look. “Yo, Trevor,” he said, “your date does not speak English.” “What?” “Your date. She does not speak any English.” “That’s not possible.” I got up and walked over to the car. I asked her a question in English and she gave me a blank stare. Bongani looked at me. “How did you not know that your date does not speak English?” “I…I don’t know.” “Have you never spoken to her?” “Of course I have—or, wait…have I?”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Bolt shrugged. “It’s kind of hazy. I’m really just the most experienced guy in set-up, but they sort of treat me like gang boss, too.” Duffy nodded. “The company will argue about which side you’re on in order to delay the elections and use the time to intimidate people. I think you already know which side you’re on, but you have to make it real clear. If you work hard to bring the union in, itll make our argument easier that you should be in.” Bolt shook Duffy’s hand. “Do you think we’re gonna win?” Duffy smiled and nodded. “Yeah. But itll take a fight. We got strong people in each department. If we had mote like Jess, we’d win it hands down. I trust Jess. She’s proved she’s for the union 100 percent.” Everything happened in slow motion. When I heard Duffy say she I turned in horror, my jaw dropped. Frankie slapped her forehead with her palm 224 = Leslie Feinberg and shook her head. The guys looked from Duffy to me and back again. I stormed out of the VFW post and headed for my motorcycle. “Jess, wait!” I heard Duffy shouting. He caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I yanked it away. “Thanks a lot, Duffy.” Seeing tears in his eyes made it worse. “I’m so sorry, Jess. It just jumped out. I didn’t mean it.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you meant to do. ’m out of this job now.” He shook his head. “We'll work it out, Jess. You could stay. I'll talk to the guys.” I laughed bitterly. “You don’t get it, do your Which bathroom you think ’'m going to use on Monday, Duffy?” Duffy put his hand on my arm. I glared at him. “Jess, Pd never do anything to hurt you. You know that.” I pushed his hand off my arm. “Well, you did.” I turned and walked away. “Jess, wait up!” It was Frankie. “Jess, I know you're mad. That was really fucked up. But it was a mistake. He’s really upset.” “Leave me alone, Frankie. You don’t understand, either.” Frankie look stunned. “What’s your fuckin’ problem with me? Are you really gonna cut another butch loose just because you can’t deal with who turns me on?” I wished someone had muzzled me because I was so worked up I couldn’t control my mouth. “What makes you think you're still a butch?” I asked her sarcastically. Her smile was cruel and defensive. “What makes you think you're still a butch?” she countered. I spun around and stormed off. Part of me was hoping that Frankie or Duffy wouldn’t let me go. But they did. Stone Butch Blues 225 THE LEAF WAS BIG AND WET and glowed with the oranges and reds of autumn. I found it stuck to the seat of my Harley on Saturday morning. It made me sad when the leaves began to fall. I wanted another beginning, another chance,

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The dance was being held at some venue in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with, and at some point I got completely turned around and had no idea where I was. I drove around for an hour in the dark, going left, going right, doubling back. I was on my cellphone the whole time, desperately calling people, trying to figure out where I was, trying to get directions. Babiki sat next to me in stony silence the whole time, clearly not feeling me or this night at all. I was crashing hard. I was late. I didn’t know where I was going. I was the worst date she’d ever had in her life. I finally figured out where I was and we made it to the dance, nearly two hours late. I parked, jumped out, and ran around to get her door. When I opened it, she just sat there. “Are you ready?” I said. “Let’s go in.” “No.” “No? What...what do you mean, ‘no’?” “No.” “Okay...but why?” “No.” “But we need to go inside. The dance is inside.” “No.” I stood there for another twenty minutes, trying to convince her to come inside, but she kept saying “no.” She wouldn’t get out of the car. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” I ran inside and found Bongani. “Where have you been?” he said. “I’m here! But my date’s in the car and she won’t come in.” “What do you mean she won’t come in?” “I don’t know what’s going on. Please help me.” We went back out to the parking lot. I took Bongani over to the car, and the second he saw her he lost it. “Jesus in Heaven! This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You said she was beautiful, Trevor, but this is insane.” In an instant he completely forgot about helping me with Babiki. He turned and ran back inside and called to the guys. “Guys! You gotta come see this! Trevor got a date! And she’s beautiful! Guys! Come out here!” Twenty guys came running out into the parking lot. They clustered around the car. “Yo, she’s so hot!” “Dude, this girl came with Trevor?” Guys were gawking at her like she was an animal at the zoo. They were asking to take pictures with her. They were calling back to more people inside. “This is insane! Look at Trevor’s date! No, no, no, you gotta come and see!” I was mortified. I’d spent four years of high school carefully avoiding any kind of romantic humiliation whatsoever, and now, on the night of the matric dance, the night of all nights, my humiliation had turned into a circus bigger than the event itself: Trevor the undatable clown thought he was going to have the most beautiful girl at the dance, but he’s crashing and burning so let’s all go outside and watch.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Chuck had lain with the girl, as he himself admitted. It made no difference whether she had also been with two other boys or a hundred, Chuck had lain with her and by that act he had become responsible for what might happen to her afterward. He had no right to refuse the responsibility just because it was hard. He had played at being a man; now the time had come to be a man. Mr. Bolger must have gagged on his own counsel. He was generous but proud, too proud to utter without mortification these arguments designed to win him The Flood for a daughter-in-law. But he accepted the cost of his principles and kept his feelings to himself. Huff and Psycho also wanted Chuck to marry Tina, but their reasons were simpler than Mr. Bolger’s. If he didn’t marry her, they would both go to Walla Walla with him. This seemed unnecessary and unfair. All Chuck had to do was bite the bullet for a few years and then dump her. Chuck wouldn’t do that. He did not explain his reasons to Huff and Psycho, or even to his father, but at night, when he felt most embattled and alone, he explained them to me. He had to work at putting them into words, and always seemed a little surprised to hear them. So was I. Basically, Chuck would not marry Tina Flood because he believed himself to be otherwise engaged. Sure, he liked to fool around, but way down deep he was saving himself for his wife. He had a clear picture of her, and when he finally met her he was going to marry her and stay married forever. The wife for whom Chuck was saving himself was a television wife, cute, sassy, and pious. Their life together would be a heartwarming series with lots of affectionate banter. It would also have some religious content; the husband Chuck was saving for his wife was a man just dying to see the error of his ways, and to mend them. To put liquor, gambling, and fornication behind him forever, along with the bad companions of his reckless youth. Once married, children, and plenty of them. Sobriety. Fidelity. Grace at dinner and a full pew on Sundays. He wanted a good life. The good life he had in mind for himself was just as conventional as the one I had in mind for myself, though without its epic pretensions. And Chuck still had faith in his, whereas I was losing mine. I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen to me. My life was a mess, and because I understood the problem as one of bad luck I could imagine no remedy but good luck, which I didn’t seem to have. Chuck held on to his dream as if it were already actual. He was even prepared to go to prison for it. Tina Flood and the baby she carried were not real to him.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Pathfinders, forever ready!” But ready for what? They were ready, and that was all. But they knew nothing about the ghetto and all its wretchedness. Or rather, yes, they thought about it once a year when, at Purim, they organized a lunch for all its ragged kids and then took them along to the movies. From this party, they came home later with a full load of funny stories about the voracious appetites and the filth and the brutal manners of the ghetto kids. Besides, it was true that these kids stole from their own parents and took things from the girl guide chiefs who did social work among them, and that they generally spent on that one day, on firecrackers and sweets, all the money that they had managed to collect, instead of saving it up for useful purchases; true, too, that their parents were careless and that the clothes given to the kids were in rags only a few weeks later. All this was true, but there was nothing there to laugh about. As for the rich kids, their annual couscous dinner for the poor, at Purim, followed by the movie party, allowed them to ignore the problem that was at the root of the matter. On the way home, Ginou was resolutely silent while Mina unloaded all her criticisms on me: “You acted again, all evening, like a mortician’s assistant! Can’t you be natural? Like all the rest of us?” I felt like telling her to go jump into the lagoon, but she had trained me, by now, to suffer in silence. Besides, Ginou was listening, and I would have been incapable of explaining to either of them what I really felt. So I protested lamely: yes, I had had plenty of fun, after my fashion, but I was quite incapable of showing it any more than I had. Mina, as intolerant as ever, refused to believe me and insisted that I was a liar and a clumsy one at that. Mina’s father’s house was in an outer suburb and we had to stop, on the way there, at Ginou’s home. Generally, we agreed tacitly to bring Mina home first and then come back together alone, the two of us. But Ginou now protested that it was late and that she was tired. I didn’t insist and stayed alone with Mina. The one who had originally been our go-between now explained to me that I was not following the right path to win Ginou for good. Ginou would prefer it if I were less complicated, more cheerful, in fact a bit more like the rest of our crowd. I had no desire to argue, so I let Mina chatter away. Finally, my silence seemed to be catching and, when we reached her home, we had both been speechless for some time. On her doorstep, as she shook my hand, Mina gave vent to one of her extraordinary intuitions:

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Once, on a visit with Alice, I forgot to put my teacup in the saucer, and it left a ring mark on her mahogany table, which mortified me. Even though I was young, these visits felt high stakes, like BD might actually want to get to know me after hearing Alice’s glowing reports (if only I hadn’t damaged her fancy furniture). But as it turns out, those visits were kept secret from BD, who had forbidden his mother to have any contact with her only granddaughter. So that explained the hush-hush, don’t-talk-aboutthat-guy vibe I’d been picking up on my whole life. Pieces of the real story kept coming. Eventually, I learned that my biological father hit the road not long after my mother told him she was pregnant with his baby. From that point on he spoke through lawyers who made it clear to my frightened and heartbroken young mother that he wanted nothing to do with us—especially me. At the age of 18, even though it felt risky, I decided to write Phyllis a letter. I didn’t want much from her—just a photo of my father so my brain could fill in at least that one blank: Did I look like him? On my maternal side, the women in my family all have dark shiny hair, olive skin, and big boobs. My hair and complexion are right out of an ’80s Def Leppard video. And the boobs? Let’s just say they skipped a generation. As fate would have it, Phyllis died before receiving my letter. Even though I’d never known her, Phyllis’s loss unleashed so many untapped feelings. Sorrow for experiences I didn’t get to have with her and resentment that BD kept me from my grandmother. Finally, I snapped. Raging at my mom, I yelled, “If he doesn’t want to know me, then he’ll have to tell me why himself!” I’m sure the last thing she wanted was to come face-to-face with an ex who abandoned her during her pregnancy. Yet in my fury, she could see that there was no getting around his shadowy presence anymore. So my mother conceded and reached out to him directly. Thankfully, BD’s wife was very supportive of the idea and paved the way for our connection. As my parents and I reached the end of BD’s driveway on Broken Road, I had my first of many subsequent panic attacks. I was about to meet the man whose absence had shaped and determined my life, and I had no clue how it was going to go. What if I flipped out and told him off? What if he did that to me? All my internalized rejection and grief swelled to the surface until I could barely breathe. Sensing my distress, Dad reassured me, as he always did. “It will be OK,” he said, putting his hand on mine. “And if you don’t want to do this, we can just turn the car around and go home.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  See Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828,” 903; Charles Hammond, “View of General Jackson’s Domestic Relations,” Truth’s Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Advocate, 5; “Dana vs. Mrs. Jackson,” Richmond Enquirer, May 4, 1827; and “Dana vs. Mrs. Jackson,” New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette, May 21, 1827. On Dana, see James D. Daniels, “Amos Kendall: Kentucky Journalist, 1815–1829,” Filson Historical Quarterly (1978): 46–65, esp. 55–56. And for Rachel’s log cabin immorality, see “Mrs. Jackson,” Richmond Enquirer, May 4, 1827. Jackson himself was attacked as a mulatto, when a rumor was spread that his mother was a British camp follower who had shacked up with a black man. The story focused on Jackson’s questionable pedigree, what “stock or race” Jackson had sprung from. See “Rank Villainy and Obscenity,” Charleston [SC] Mercury, August 22, 1828. 65. For the washerwoman reference and the snide comment on her “healthy tanned complexion,” see Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and the Election of 1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 189; for her pronunciation, see “British Scandal,” Salem Gazette, April 15, 1828; for her favorite song, “Possum Up a Gum Tree,” see “Mrs. Jackson,” New Bedford [MA] Mercury, December 5, 1828; and for attacks hastening her death, see “Mrs. Jackson,” [Portland, ME] Eastern Argus Semi-Weekly, February 24, 1829. 66. See “The Game of Brag,” Richmond Enquirer, February 29, 1840. For the talkative country politician, see George Watterston, Wanderer in Washington (Washington, DC, 1827), 3. For Jackson as the “Knight of New Orleans,” see “Toasts at a Celebration in Florida,” Orange County Patriot, or the Spirit of Seventy-Six, March 14, 1815. For Jackson as the savior of his country, see John Eaton, Letters of Wyoming to the People of the United States, on the Presidential Election, and in Favor of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia, 1824), 12. And for Jackson as the “Matchless hero! Incomparable man! . . . The records of chivalry, the pages of history do not furnish a more exalted character than that!,” see William P. Van Ness, A Concise Narrative of General Jackson’s First Invasion of Florida, and of His Immortal Defense of New-Orleans; with Remarks. By Aristides (Albany, NY, 1827), 29–30. Also see “Mr.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5Near the intersection of two carriage roads (one, well-kept, running north-south in between our “old” and “new” parks, and the other, muddy and rutty, leading, if you turned west, to Batovo) at a spot where aspens crowded on both sides of a dip, I would be sure to find in the third week of June great blue-black nymphalids striped with pure white, gliding and wheeling low above the rich clay which matched the tint of their undersides when they settled and closed their wings. Those were the dung-loving males of what the old Aurelians used to call the Poplar Admirable, or, more exactly, they belonged to its Bucovinan subspecies. As a boy of nine, not knowing that race, I noticed how much our North Russian specimens differed from the Central European form figured in Hofmann, and rashly wrote to Kuznetsov, one of the greatest Russian, or indeed world, lepidopterists of all time, naming my new subspecies “Limenitis populi rossica.” A long month later he returned my description and aquarelle of “rossica Nabokov” with only two words scribbled on the back of my letter: “bucovinensis Hormuzaki.” How I hated Hormuzaki! And how hurt I was when in one of Kuznetsov’s later papers I found a gruff reference to “schoolboys who keep naming minute varieties of the Poplar Nymph!” Undaunted, however, by the populi flop, I “discovered” the following year a “new” moth. That summer I had been collecting assiduously on moonless nights, in a glade of the park, by spreading a bedsheet over the grass and its annoyed glowworms, and casting upon it the light of an acytelene lamp (which, six years later, was to shine on Tamara). Into that arena of radiance, moths would come drifting out of the solid blackness around me, and it was in that manner, upon that magic sheet, that I took a beautiful Plusia (now Phytometra) which, as I saw at once, differed from its closest ally by its mauve-and-maroon (instead of golden-brown) forewings, and narrower bractea mark and was not recognizably figured in any of my books. I sent its description and picture to Richard South, for publication in The Entomologist. He did not know it either, but with the utmost kindness checked it in the British Museum collection—and found it had been described long ago as Plusia excelsa by Kretschmar. I received the sad news, which was most sympathetically worded (“… should be congratulated for obtaining … very rare Volgan thing … admirable figure …”) with the utmost stoicism; but many years later, by a pretty fluke (I know I should not point out these plums to people), I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.