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 Summer Sisters (1998)

  Her mother blamed it on the new school. Just because it’s an expensive school doesn’t mean you don’t need paper on the toilet seat to protect yourself . She assured her mother she’d been careful. And the doctor swore this wasn’t something she’d caught from a toilet seat. But Tawny didn’t believe him. “Thank God your father’s job comes with health insurance,” Tawny said. “Do you know what these antibiotics cost?” She didn’t want to know. The Countess sent flowers with a card that read, Darling Child, Get well! It was signed with the names of her five dogs. Nathan offered Orlando. Orlando had magical powers. He would make her better. But if he didn’t and she died, he’d be really pissed. “You know what pissed means?” he asked her. “Yes,” she said, “I know.” His first taste of freedom had changed Nathan. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he’d announced. “Just because I’m in a chair doesn’t mean you can push me around!” His wheelchair jokes drove Tawny up the wall. “We never should have let you go to camp,” she told him. “Too late. I’ve already been.” He pressed for more freedom, for privacy, respect. He’d even shouted at Vix one night when she’d come into the bathroom without knocking. “Out … right now! Only guys allowed.” “Okay, sorry …” She was glad he was struggling for independence but that didn’t make living with him any easier. In her feverish dreams Bru came to her every day, kissing her so passionately he set her body on fire. In her dreams he didn’t speak at all, which was just as well since the one time she’d seen him all summer, as she was coming out of the Porta Potti at the Ag Fair and he was waiting his turn to go in, he’d looked right at her and said, When you gotta go, you gotta go . She’d been mortified at the idea of him knowing she’d just used the toilet and hadn’t been able to respond. Later, he’d come up behind her while she was lined up for the Tilt-A-Whirl. He’d tapped her shoulder and when she turned he shoved a giant panda bear at her. “Keep him warm for me … okay?” Then he was gone. Caitlin couldn’t believe it. “You are the luckiest person in the entire world!” She slept with her arms around the bear every night, one fuzzy leg between hers, igniting her Power. Since she’d fallen ill, Caitlin came to see her every day. She stood a kachina doll on the shelf above Vix’s bed. “If your medicine doesn’t ward off evil spirits, this will.” Then she sat at Vix’s bedside holding her hand. “You know what I told you before school started … about having another life at school?” Vix nodded. “Well, I never would … that is, I didn’t mean … to hurt you or anything. I would never hurt you. Never. Compared to you my school friends mean nothing to me.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. One thing I haven’t told you about my famous short story “Arnold” is that besides sending it off every few months to my father’s agent, I also sent it off to an important magazine editor. He sent it back with the following note: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.” Now, needless to say, I was mortified. But the note ended up only helping me because it didn’t stop me. Still, I sat down with great trepidation when I began to write the story of my father’s illness, because of the mistake this editor said I had made, which I had made. And I tried very hard not to make it again. So first I wrote down everything that happened to us, and then I took out the parts that felt self-indulgent. I wasn’t writing the book with my thumb stuck out, trying to hitchhike into history: I just wanted to write a book for my father that might also help someone going through a similar situation. Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business. I got to write books about my father and my best friend, and they got to read them before they died. Can you imagine? I wrote for an audience of two whom I loved and respected, who loved and respected me. So I wrote for them as carefully and soulfully as I could—which is, needless to say, how I wish I could write all the time. Finding Your VoiceI heard a tape once in which an actor talked about trying to find God in the modern world and how, left to our own devices, we seek instead all the worldly things—possessions, money, looks, and power—because we think they will bring us fulfillment. But this turns out to be a joke, because they are just props, and when we check out of this life, we have to give them all back to the great propmaster in the sky. “They’re just on loan,” he said. “They’re not ours.” This tape changed how I felt about my students emulating their favorite writers. It helped me see that it is natural to take on someone else’s style, that it’s a prop that you use for a while until you have to give it back. And it just might take you to the thing that is not on loan, the thing that is real and true: your own voice. I often ask my students to scribble down in class the reason they want to write, why they are in my class, what is propelling them to do this sometimes-excruciating, sometimes-boring work.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She read the labels on the clothes and turned over dishes and vases to study the markings on the bottom. She had no qualms about telling a saleslady that a dress marked at twenty-five cents was worth only a dime, and she usually got it at that price. Mom took us thrift-store shopping for weeks before that Christmas, giving us each a dollar to spend on presents. I got a red glass bud vase for Mom, an onyx ashtray for Dad, a model-car kit for Brian, a book about elves for Lori, and a stuffed tiger with a loose ear that Mom helped me sew back in place for Maureen. On Christmas morning, Mom took us down to a gas station that sold Christmas trees. She selected a tall, dark, but slightly dried-out Douglas fir. “This poor old tree isn’t going to sell by the end of the day, and it needs someone to love it,” she told the man and offered him three dollars. The man looked at the tree and looked at Mom and looked at us kids. My dress had buttons missing. Holes were appearing along the seams of Maureen’s T-shirt. “Lady, this one’s been marked down to a buck,” he said. We carried the tree home and decorated it with Grandma’s antique ornaments: ornate colored balls, fragile glass partridges, and lights with long tubes of bubbling water. I couldn’t wait to open my presents, but Mom insisted that we celebrate Christmas in the Catholic fashion, getting to the gifts only after we’d attended midnight mass. Dad, knowing that all the bars and liquor stores would be closed on Christmas, had stocked up in advance. He’d popped open the first Budweiser before breakfast, and by the time midnight mass rolled around, he was having trouble standing up. I suggested that maybe this once, Mom should let Dad off the hook about going to mass, but she said stopping by God’s house for a quick hello was especially important at times like this, so Dad staggered and lurched into the church with us. During the sermon, the priest discussed the miracle of Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. “Virgin, my ass!” Dad shouted. “Mary was a sweet Jewish broad who got herself knocked up!” The service came to a dead halt. Everyone was staring. The choir had swiveled around in unison and were gaping openmouthed. Even the priest was speechless. Dad had a satisfied grin on his face. “And Jesus H. Christ is the world’s best-loved bastard!” The ushers grimly escorted us to the street. On the way home, Dad put his arm around my shoulder for support. “Baby girl, if your boyfriend ever gets into your panties and you find yourself in a family way, swear that it was Immaculate Conception and start mouthing off about miracles,” he said.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  can push me around!” His wheelchair jokes drove Tawny up the wall. “We never should have let you go to camp,” she told him. “Too late. I’ve already been.” He pressed for more freedom, for privacy, respect. He’d even shouted at Vix one night when she’d come into the bathroom without knocking. “Out ... right now! Only guys allowed.” “Okay, sorry ...” She was glad he was struggling for independence but that didn’t make living with him any easier. In her feverish dreams Bru came to her every day, kissing her so passionately he set her body on fire. In her dreams he didn’t speak at all, which was just as well since the one time she’d seen him all summer, as she was coming out of the Porta Potti at the Ag Fair and he was waiting his turn to go in, he’d looked right at her and said, When you gotta go, you gotta go. She’d been mortified at the idea of him knowing she’d just used the toilet and hadn’t been able to respond. Later, he’d come up behind her while she was lined up for the Tilt-A- Whirl. He’d tapped her shoulder and when she turned he shoved a giant panda bear at her. “Keep him warm for me ... okay?” Then he was gone. Caitlin couldn’t believe it. “You are the luckiest person in the entire world!” She slept with her arms around the bear every night, one fuzzy leg between hers, igniting her Power. Since she’d fallen ill, Caitlin came to see her every day. She stood a kachina doll on the shelf above Vix’s bed. “If your medicine doesn’t ward off evil spirits, this will.” Then she sat at Vix’s bedside holding her hand. “You know what I told you before school started ... about having another life at school?” Vix nodded. “Well, I never would ... that is, I didn’t mean ... to hurt you or anything. I would never hurt you. Never. Compared to you my school friends mean nothing to me. Less than nothing.” “You’re not the reason I got sick, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. One thing I haven’t told you about my famous short story “Arnold” is that besides sending it off every few months to my father’s agent, I also sent it off to an important magazine editor. He sent it back with the following note: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.” Now, needless to say, I was mortified. But the note ended up only helping me because it didn’t stop me. Still, I sat down with great trepidation when I began to write the story of my father’s illness, because of the mistake this editor said I had made, which I had made. And I tried very hard not to make it again. So first I wrote down everything that happened to us, and then I took out the parts that felt self-indulgent. I wasn’t writing the book with my thumb stuck out, trying to hitchhike into history: I just wanted to write a book for my father that might also help someone going through a similar situation. Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business. I got to write books about my father and my best friend, and they got to read them before they died. Can you imagine? I wrote for an audience of two whom I loved and respected, who loved and respected me. So I wrote for them as carefully and soulfully as I could—which is, needless to say, how I wish I could write all the time. Finding Your VoiceI heard a tape once in which an actor talked about trying to find God in the modern world and how, left to our own devices, we seek instead all the worldly things—possessions, money, looks, and power—because we think they will bring us fulfillment. But this turns out to be a joke, because they are just props, and when we check out of this life, we have to give them all back to the great propmaster in the sky. “They’re just on loan,” he said. “They’re not ours.” This tape changed how I felt about my students emulating their favorite writers. It helped me see that it is natural to take on someone else’s style, that it’s a prop that you use for a while until you have to give it back. And it just might take you to the thing that is not on loan, the thing that is real and true: your own voice. I often ask my students to scribble down in class the reason they want to write, why they are in my class, what is propelling them to do this sometimes-excruciating, sometimes-boring work.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  ONE MORNING THREE years after I’d moved to New York, I was getting ready for class and listening to the radio. The announcer reported a terrible traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike. A van had broken down, spilling clothes and furniture all over the road and creating a big backup. The police were trying to clear the highway, but a dog had jumped out of the van and was running up and down the turnpike as a couple of officers chased after him. The announcer got a lot of mileage out of the story, going on about the rubes with their clunker of a vehicle and yapping dog who were making thousands of New York commuters late for work. That night the psychologist told me I had a phone call. “Jeannettie-kins!” It was Mom. “Guess what?” she asked in a voice brimming with excitement. “Your daddy and I have moved to New York!” The first thing I thought about was the van that had broken down on the turnpike that morning. When I asked Mom about it, she admitted that yes, she and Dad had a teensy bit of technical difficulty with the van. It had popped a belt on some big, crowded highway, and Tinkle, who was sick and tired of being cooped up, you know how that goes, had gotten loose. The police had shown up, and Dad got into an argument with them, and they threatened to arrest him, and gosh it was quite the drama. “How did you know?” she asked. “It was on the radio.” “On the radio?” Mom asked. She couldn’t believe it. “With everything going on in the world these days, an old van popping a belt is news?” But there was genuine glee in her voice. “We only just got here, and we’re already famous!” After talking to Mom, I looked around my room. It was the maid’s room off the kitchen, and it was tiny, with one narrow window and a bathroom that doubled as a closet. But it was mine. I had a room now, and I had a life, too, and there was no place in either one for Mom and Dad. Still, the next day I went up to Lori’s apartment to see them. Everyone was there. Mom and Dad hugged me. Dad pulled a pint of whiskey out of a paper bag while Mom described their various adventures on the trip. They had gone sightseeing earlier that day, and taken their first ride on the subway, which Dad called a goddamn

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Before 1972 the yen-to-dollar rate had been pegged, constant, unvarying. One dollar was always worth 360 yen, and vice versa. You could count on that rate, every day, as sure as you could count on the sun rising. President Nixon, however, felt the yen was undervalued. He feared America was “sending all its gold to Japan,” so he cut the yen loose, let it float, and now the yen-to-dollar rate was like the weather. Every day different. Consequently, no one doing business in Japan could possibly plan for tomorrow. The head of Sony famously complained: “It’s like playing golf and your handicap changes on every hole.” At the same time, Japanese labor costs were on the rise. Combined with a fluctuating yen, this made life treacherous for any company doing the bulk of its production in Japan. No longer could I envision a future in which most of our shoes were made there. We needed new factories, in new countries, fast. To me, Taiwan seemed the next logical step. Taiwanese officials, sensing Japan’s collapse, were rapidly mobilizing to fill the coming void. They were building factories at warp speed. And yet the factories weren’t yet capable of handling our workload. Plus, their quality control was poor. Until Taiwan was ready, we’d need to find a bridge, something to hold us over. I considered Puerto Rico. We were already making some shoes there. Alas, they weren’t very good. Also, Johnson had been down there to scout factories, in 1973, and he’d reported that they weren’t much better than the dilapidated ones he saw all over New England. So we talked about some sort of hybrid solution: taking raw materials from Puerto Rico and sending them to New England for lasting and bottoming. Toward the end of 1974, that impossibly long year, this became our plan. And I was well prepared to implement it. I’d done my homework. I’d been making trips to the East Coast, to lay the groundwork, to look at various factories we might lease. I’d gone twice—first with Cale, then with Johnson. The first time, the clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Then confiscated it. When Cale tried to smooth it over, offering up his credit card, the clerk said he wouldn’t accept Cale’s card, either, because Cale was with me. Guilt by association. Talk about your deadbeats. I couldn’t bring myself to look Cale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman, I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He’d known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much. I was mortified. He was always there at the big moments, the triumphant moments, but this humiliating little moment, I feared, would define me in his eyes.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  It was pretty late in a summer evening when we reached the town, in our slow conveyance, though drawn by six at length. As we passed through the greatest streets that led to our inn, the noise, of the coaches, the hurry, the crowds of foot passengers, in short, the new scenery of the shops and houses, at once pleased and amazed me. But guess at my mortification and surprise when we came to the inn, and our things were landed and delivered to us, when my fellow traveller and protectress, Esther Davis, who had used me with the utmost tenderness during the journey, and prepared me by no preceedings signs for the stunning blow I was to receive, when I say, my only dependence and friend, in this strange place, all of a sudden assumed a strange and cool air towards me, as if she dreaded my becoming a burden to her. Instead, then, of proffering me the continuance of her assistance and good offices, which I relied upon, and never more wanted, she thought herself, it seems, abundantly acquitted of her engagements to me, by having brought me safe to my journey’s end, and seeing nothing in her procedure towards me but what natural and in order, began to embrace me by the way of taking leave, whilst I was so confounded, so struck, that I had not spirit or sense enough so much as to mention my hopes or expectations from her experience, and knowledge of the place she had brought me to. Whilst I stood thus stupid and mute, which she doubtless attributed to nothing more than a concern at parting, this idea procured me perhaps a slight alleviation of it, in the following harangue: “That now we were got safe to London, and that she was obliged to go to her place, she advised me by all means to get into one as soon as possible; that I need not fear getting one; there were more places than parish-churches; that she advised me to go to an intelligence office; that if she heard of any thing stirring, she would find me out and let me know; that in the meantime, I should take a private lodging, and acquaint her where to send to me; that she wished me good luck, and hoped I should always have the grace to keep myself honest, and not bringing a disgrace on my parentage.” With this; she took her leave of me, and left me, as it were, on my own hands, full as lightly as I had been put into hers.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  I made up then to this important personage, without lifting up my eyes or observing any of the people round me, who were attending there on the same errand as myself, and dropping her curtsies nine deep, just made a shift to stammer out my business to her. Madam heard me out, with all the gravity and brow of a petty minister of State, and seeing at one glance over my figure what I was, made me no answer, but to ask me the preliminary shilling, on receipt of which she told me places for women too slight built for hard work: but that she would look over her book, and see what was to be done for me, desiring me to stay a little, till she had dispatched some other customers. On this I drew back a little, most heartily mortified at a declaration which carried with it a killing uncertainly, that my circumstances could not well endure. Presently, assuming more courage, and seeking some diversion from my uneasy thoughts, I ventured to lift up my head a little, and sent my eyes on a course round the room, where they met full tilt with those of a lady (for such my extreme innocence pronounced her) sitting in a corner of the room, dressed in a velvet mantle (in the midst of summer), with her bonnet off; squat, fat, red-faced, and at least fifty. She looked as if she would devour me with her eyes, staring at me from head to foot, without the least regard to the confusion and blushes her eyeing me so fixedly put me to, and which were to her, no doubt, the strongest recommendation and marks of my being fit for her purpose. After a little time, in which my air, person and whole figure had undergone a strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming, drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanced and spoke to me with the greatest demureness: “Sweet-heart, do you want a place? “Yes, and please you,” (with a curtsey down to the ground).

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  So we talked about some sort of hybrid solution: taking raw materials from Puerto Rico and sending them to New England for lasting and bottoming. Toward the end of 1974, that impossibly long year, this became our plan. And I was well prepared to implement it. I’d done my homework. I’d been making trips to the East Coast, to lay the groundwork, to look at various factories we might lease. I’d gone twice—first with Cale, then with Johnson. The first time, the clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Then confiscated it. When Cale tried to smooth it over, offering up his credit card, the clerk said he wouldn’t accept Cale’s card, either, because Cale was with me. Guilt by association. Talk about your deadbeats. I couldn’t bring myself to look Cale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman, I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He’d known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much. I was mortified. He was always there at the big moments, the triumphant moments, but this humiliating little moment, I feared, would define me in his eyes. Then, when we got to the factory, the owner laughed in my face. He said he wouldn’t consider doing business with some fly-by-night company he’d never heard of— let alone from Oregon . On the second trip I met up with Johnson in Boston. I picked him up at Footwear News, where he’d been scouting potential suppliers, and together we drove to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see an ancient, shuttered factory. Built around the time of the American Revolution, the factory was a ruin. It had once housed the Exeter Boot and Shoe Company, but now it housed rats. As we pried open the doors and swatted away cobwebs the size of fishing nets, all sorts of creatures scurried past our feet and flew past our ears. Worse, there were gaping holes in the floor; one wrong step could mean a trip to the earth’s core. The owner led us up to the third floor, which was usable. He said he could rent us this floor, with an option to buy the whole place. He also said we’d need help getting the factory properly cleaned and staffed, and he gave us the name of a local guy who could help. Bill Giampietro. We met Giampietro the next day at an Exeter tavern. Within minutes I could see this was our man. A true shoe dog. He was fifty, thereabouts, but his hair had no gray. It seemed painted with black polish. He had a thick Boston accent, and besides shoes the only subject he ever broached was his beloved wife and kids. He was first-generation American—his parents came from Italy, where his father (of course) had been a cobbler.

• From The Art of Memoir

  –In 1968, he shot himself with a Smith and Wesson pistol. The most skillful writers either package facts so they hold this kind of psychological interest, or the data get palmed off in carnal scenes the reader can imagine and engage with on a physical level. In these books, you often don’t notice you’re being fed a string of facts. They’re sprinkled into other writing like pepper—there when you need them, but otherwise invisible. My own first drafts start with information, then I try to herd that information out of my head into a remembered or living scene. I often interview myself about how I came to an opinion. Then, rather than present an abstract judgment (“She was a thief”), I try to re- create how I came to that opinion. “She was a thief” becomes “I stared into the computer’s big green eye, inside which sat the web site where my diamond bracelet was being sold, Lydia’s email contact in the corner.” Some data, you may think you need to blurt out—the year, for instance. But saying, “On the news that summer, I watched the president resign before helicopters on the White House lawn” says “Nixon administration” to the reader in a slightly more fetching way. One cheap way writers try to strap on character is with T-shirt slogans and brand-name clothing. I encourage my students to work a little harder than this. Try to find something singular and dramatic a person does, instead of just gluing on a label that limits meaning to present-day fashion and won’t make sense fifty years hence. Take data about a speaker’s age and size. “Standing under the orange hoop, I was the only freshman who could lift one ape-long arm and brush net.” This says age and size and basketball prowess while being evocative. “I tried to hunch inside the new letter jacket, but my bony wrists stuck out.” This adds an element of psychology— self-consciousness. Rather than simply describing his father’s physique in Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt dispenses data about the price on his father’s head and then occupies a child’s mind pondering his father’s actual noggin being paid for.

• From The Art of Memoir

  narrator’s terrified, puzzled, heartbroken, outraged psyche. The landscape he reports on never stops shape-shifting. So blurry and hallucinatory is his crazy-quilt collage, you’d no more look to him for facts than a court would privilege an eyewitness on ’shrooms at the time. Listen to how he appropriates the bureaucratic natter about why we were there—and ends with a scary truth about why he was: [You’d] hear some overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah. “All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.” Which wasn’t at all true of me. I was there to watch. We emerge from his sentence about Dingdong and Doodah into the presence of a young grunt hungry for murder, and from that into Herr’s dark vigilance—I was there to watch—which comes with a backwash of being mortified. “You want to look and you don’t want to look.” This moral struggle shapes that inner enemy I keep squawking about. Like Hemingway before him, Herr had gone to war in part to satisfy his young man’s thirst for adventure—an obscene wish, he later felt. His desire to be there implicated him, as if Vietnam were a giant snuff film he supported by buying a ticket to it. Seeing the dead was like looking at “all the porn in the world.” I could’ve looked till my lamps went out and still wouldn’t have accepted the connection between a detached leg and the rest of the body or the poses and positions that always happened . . . making them lie anywhere and any way it left them, hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscuously on top of other dead or up in the trees like terminal acrobats. Look what I can do. He undercuts the drama of the scene with that black humor common among some vets—the dead like acrobats, saying, Look what I can do. The moral certainty he craves always eludes him, for lies and mystery cover every scene. Spooky is a word he uses, a phrase coming from a pop song of the day. A soldier enigmatically says, “Spooky understands.” And Herr’s able to make us feel both the

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  What, one ventures to wonder, what would not be the idea's realization, if its mere abstract shape has just exalted, has just so profoundly moved one? The accursed reverie is vivified, and its existence is a crime. Fortunately for herself, Madame de Lorsange executed it in such secrecy that she was sheltered from all pursuit and with her husband she buried all traces of the frightful deed which precipitated him into the tomb. Once again become free, and a countess, Madame de Lorsange returned to her former habits; but, believing herself to have some figure in the world, she put somewhat less of the indecent in her deportment. 'Twas no longer a kept girl, 'twas a rich widow who gave pretty suppers at which the Court and the City were only too happy to be included; in a word, we have here a correct woman who, all the same, would to bed for two hundred louis, and who gave herself for five hundred a month.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Word arrived that the Royal Scotman had run into trouble with the port authorities in Valencia, where Hubbard had hoped to make a permanent base. He furiously abandoned the expedition and ordered the Avon River to make haste to Valencia before the Royal Scotman was forcibly expelled from the Spanish harbor. The crew was bitterly disappointed that they would miss uncovering the space station. “ If there’s time, we’ll come back,” Hubbard promised. After making amends with the port captain in Valencia, Hubbard threw a party to report on the Mission into Time. He was loud and affected, in what Eltringham privately called his “ full pantomime mode.” Such moments made her cringe. She hid in the back of the crowd. She genuinely revered Hubbard, but when he was strutting in front of his acolytes, he could become comically self-important, a parody of himself. His eyes rolled, his body language was inappropriate and weird, and his hands flew around meaninglessly in odd directions. Sometimes he spoke with a British accent or a Scottish brogue. In her opinion, his performance was ridiculous, but also disturbing. If the man she regarded as a savior was a “nut case,” what did that say about his teachings? What did it say about her, that she idolized him while at the same time harboring these illicit feelings of shame? No one else seemed to share these warring perceptions. She felt very much alone. Hubbard regaled the crowd with the story of his romance with the temple priestess in Sardinia when he was a Carthaginian sailor. “ The girl would say, ‘Hey, how are YOU?’ and all the other guys didn’t stand a chance for a while. If you’ve got enough war vessels and you’re making enough dough, girls usually say this.” He said he had recently remembered a secret passageway into the temple. “Missions were sent ashore to survey and map the area to see if they couldn’t discover this old secret entrance to the temple.” If they found it, that would prove the truthfulness of his past-life recollections, what he called the “whole track memory.” “And now,” he said, “I’m going to call on Hana Eltringham to tell you whether or not it was a positive result.” Mortified, Eltringham stood in front of her colleagues and ratified Hubbard’s findings. “ We did find the tunnel,” she said, mentioning a ditch that the missionaires had found, which had a tile base. “So that was totally proven and accurate.” THE ANTICIPATION SURROUNDING the release of OT III was intense, so when Hubbard finally made it available to a select group of Sea Org members, in March 1968 aboard the Royal Scotman in Valencia, a thrill radiated through the entire crew. The saga of Hubbard’s research in Tangier and Las Palmas led them to think that this was the breakthrough that would lead to the salvation of the planet. They—the Sea Org—would be the vanguard of this movement, newly empowered by the revelations that Hubbard promised.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  For her impertinence in complaining about Gillham’s treatment, Taylor was sentenced to RPF. Her new baby daughter, Vanessa, was taken away and placed in the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to- wall cribs, with one nanny for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever, taken outside. When she got the news, Taylor cried, “You can’t do that now!” She was thinking of Travolta. He had just called her the day before, saying that he was arriving on an Air France flight after his appearance at a film festival in Deauville, where he was promoting Saturday Night Fever. Despite his triumph, Travolta appeared depressed and withdrawn. During the filming of Saturday Night Fever his girlfriend, Diana Hyland, had died in his arms. She was two decades older than he—she played his mother in a made-for-TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble—and had already had a double mastectomy when they met. Their romance was doomed when her cancer recurred. Taylor had helped Travolta through that period of grief, but now his mother, the most important figure in his life, had also developed cancer. Travolta asked Taylor if she would pick him up at the airport. She promised him, “Wild horses wouldn’t keep me from being there!” The church officials now told Taylor that someone else would meet Travolta. Taylor knew the star would feel surprised and betrayed. He had come to rely on her, both as an unpaid assistant and for emotional support. He would immediately suspect that something terrible had happened and worry about her. Taylor was mortified to think that she would be the cause of his discomfort. The RPF had moved out of the basement up to the top floor of the old V-shaped building that formerly housed the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Nearly two hundred people were crammed by the dozen into old patient rooms in bunks stacked three high. Because of the overcrowding, Taylor was given a soggy mattress on the roof. It was cold. She could hear the traffic on Sunset Boulevard only a block away. She had a view of the Hollywood Hills and the endless lights of the wakeful city, which was throbbing all around her. So many young people like her had been pulled into the matrix of Hollywood glamour and fame, even if they would never enjoy it themselves. And now, here she was, in the heart of it—isolated, trapped, humiliated, an unnoticed speck on a rooftop. Who could believe that a person could be so lost in the middle of so much life?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Six months later, May 26, 1481, Rome received the news of the death of Mohammed II., which Sixtus celebrated by special services in the church, Maria del Popolo,767 and the Turks abandoned the Italian coast. Again, in the interest of his nephew, Jerome, Sixtus took Forli, thereby giving offence to Ferrara. He joined Venice in a war against that city, and all Italy became involved. Later, the warlike pontiff again saw his league broken up and Venice and Ferrara making peace, irrespective of his counsels. He vented his mortification by putting the queen of the Adriatic under the interdict. In Rome, the bloody pope fanned the feud between the Colonna and the Orsini, and almost succeeded in blotting out the name of the Colonna by assassination and judicial murder. Sixtus has the distinction of having extended the efficacy of indulgences to souls in purgatory. He was most zealous in distributing briefs of indulgence.768 The Spanish Inquisition received his solemn sanction in 1478. Himself a Franciscan, he augmented the privileges of the Franciscan order in a bull which that order calls its great ocean—mare magnum. He canonized the official biographer of Francis d’Assisi, Bonaventura. He issued two bulls with reference to the worship of Mary and the doctrine of the immaculate conception, but he declared her sinlessness from the instant of conception a matter undecided by the Roman Church and the Apostolic see—nondum ab ecclesia romana et apostolica sede decisum.769 In all matters of ritual and outward religion, he was of all men most punctilious. The chronicler, Volterra, abounds in notices of his acts of devotion. Asa patron of art, his name has a high place. He supported Platina with four assistants in cataloguing the archives of the Vatican in three volumes. Such was Sixtus IV., the unblushing promoter of the interests of his relatives, many of them as worthless as they were insolent, the disturber of the peace of Italy, revengeful, and yet the liberal patron of the arts. The enlightened diarist of Rome, Infessura,770 calls the day of the pontiff’s decease that most happy day, the day on which God liberated Christendom from the hand of an impious and iniquitous ruler, who had before him no fear of God nor love of the Christian world nor any charity whatsoever, but was actuated by avarice, the love of vain show and pomp, most cruel and given to sodomy.771 During his reign, were born in obscure places in Saxony and Switzerland two men who were to strike a mighty blow at the papal rule, themselves also of peasant lineage and the coming leaders of the new spiritual movement. § 53. Innocent VIII. 1484–1492. Under Innocent VIII. matters in Rome were, if anything, worse than under his predecessor, Sixtus IV. Innocent was an easy-going man without ideals, incapable of conceiving or carrying out high plans. He was chiefly notable for his open avowal of an illegitimate family and his bull against witchcraft. At Sixtus’ death, wild confusion reigned in Rome.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Urban IV., 1261–1264, was consecrated at Viterbo and did not enter Rome during his pontificate. He was a shoemaker’s son and the first Frenchman for one hundred and sixty years to occupy the papal throne. With him the papacy came under French control, where it remained, with brief intervals, for more than a century. Urban displayed his strong national partisanship by his appointment of seven French cardinals in a conclave of seventeen. The French influence was greatly strengthened by his invitation to Charles of Anjou, youngest brother of Louis IX. of France, to occupy the Sicilian throne, claiming the right to do so on the basis of the inherent authority of the papacy and on the ground that Sicily was a papal fief. For centuries the house of Anjou, with Naples as its capital, was destined to be a disturbing element in the affairs, not only of Italy, but of all Europe.281 It stood for a new alliance in the history of the papacy as their ancestors, the Normans, had done in the age of Hildebrand. Called as supporter and ward of the papacy, Charles of Anjou became dictator of its policy and master of the political situation in Italy. Clement IV., 1265–1268, one of the French cardinals appointed by Urban, had a family before he entered a Carthusian convent and upon a clerical career. He preached a crusade against Manfred, who had dared to usurp the Sicilian throne, and crowned Charles of Anjou in Rome, 1266. Charles promised to pay yearly tribute to the Apostolic see. A month later, Feb. 26, 1266, the possession of the crown of Sicily was decided by the arbitrament of arms on the battlefield of Benevento, where Manfred fell. On the youthful Conradin, grandson of Frederick II., the hopes of the proud German house now hung. His title to the imperial throne was contested from the first. William of Holland had been succeeded, by the rival emperors, the rich Duke Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III., elected in 1257 by four of the electors, and Alfonso of Castile, elected by the remaining three.282 Conradin marched to Italy to assert his rights, 1267, was met by the papal ban, and, although received by popular enthusiasm even in Rome, he was no match for the tried skill of Charles of Anjou. His fortunes were shattered on the battlefield of Tagliacozzo, Aug. 23, 1268. Taken prisoner, he was given a mock trial. The Bolognese lawyer, Guido of Suzarra, made an ineffective plea that the young prince had come to Italy, not as a robber but to claim his inheritance. The majority of the judges were against the death penalty, but the spirit of Charles knew no clemency, and at his instance Conradin was executed at Naples, Oct. 29, 1268. The last words that fell from his lips, as he kneeled for the fatal stroke, were words of attachment to his mother, "O mother, what pain of heart do I make for you!"

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Protevangelium much elaborates Mary’s own virginity in bearing Jesus; her midwife exclaims ‘A virgin has given birth – something impossible for her to do!’ The midwife’s friend Salome, a feminine equivalent of a doubting Thomas, is suitably punished for scepticism that a virgin could thus have given birth, in view of Mary’s still virginal appearance and the absence of normal postnatal physical mess. When Salome attempts a manual gynaecological investigation of the mother, her offending hands miraculously catch fire; an angel then equally miraculously heals her for her instant penitence. The Protevangelium has previously described Mary spending her childhood in the Jerusalem Temple from the age of three to the onset of marriageable or childbearing age at twelve: an appropriate home for a sinless human being, isolating her from the profane world’s temptations, and providing her with suitable specialist cuisine provided by an angel. Mary’s unusual upbringing was a theme much elaborated by Christian narratives over the next two centuries, as they discussed female virginity with ever-greater intensity. [19]

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In the center of the room, an enormous ice carving of a letter H kindly provided by Tavern on the Green melted slowly into a bed of crushed ice and seaweed. Behind it, two uniformed oyster shuckers from the Grand Central Oyster Bar, dispatched at the last minute after a late-night request heavy with implicit threat and promise, opened littleneck clams, Wellfleet oysters, and sea urchins from a not-characteristically-so-generous seafood company. Cooks from a cross-section of New York restaurants struggled to keep up with the hungry partygoers, arranging tiny sculpted portions of intricately garnished food on paper plates and decorating them with squeeze bottles, tiny heaps of frizzled vegetables, and truffle chips, while their chefs looked nervously on in their best embroidered finery with pained rictuses of smiles stitched across their faces. A charcuterie and provisions company had come through with twin towers of Armagnac-soaked foie gras-stuffed prunes, pate assortments, galantines, and sausages, and a cook seared tiny packages of feuille de brie pastry filled with duck rillettes on a hot plate. Rob Holland, dressed as Santa Claus (though without wig or beard), posed for photographs with giggly female Hitchcock staffers and their mothers. He was drunk and smelled of old lady. "And what do you want, little girl?" he managed to say, as yet another blushing assistant from the ad sales department squirmed sweatily on his lap. Jesus, she had her legs apart on his thigh, was rubbing herself on his red polyester-clad upper leg while her pink-blotched mom snapped a photo. This was the final straw, Rob was thinking. Free food, fine. Reservations at the last second, sure. Sending over some hors d'oeuvres for his cocktail parties, kiss the ring. Reasonable. Hook him up with a Viking range or a Sub-Zero at cost (or better), all right, why not? It sucked, but this is the business we chose. And he is the all-powerful one who must be pleased at all costs. How this latest outrage would forestall what was clearly shaping up to be the inevitable, however, Rob didn't know. He'd agreed to do it when the despotic entrepreneur had last been in Saint Germain for dinner. Hovering cheerfully at the table after the last course had been served, fussing and flattering Hitchcock for the benefit of his guests (two future victims, no doubt), Rob had been too surprised, too horrified, too pressed against the wall to give what should have been a flat "no" followed probably by two kicks in the groin. He'd found himself saying, to his surprise, that yes, yes he'd be delighted to play Santa at the annual Hitchcock Christmas party.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The first is a tale of petty clerical misogyny still enshrined in stone at Durham Cathedral. After 1081 its new reforming Norman Bishop, William de Saint-Calais, expelled the existing married cathedral clergy with their families and replaced them with Benedictine monks, splendidly rebuilding the whole precinct for the new male celibate community. Those visiting the Cathedral’s Romanesque glories are likely to enter through its monumental north porch; once inside the Cathedral door, they may then observe a line that the monks laid in marble into the church floor across the nave and aisles. This marks the point beyond which women could not pass: now half the population of the diocese were no longer welcome in their mother church. [62] Durham Cathedral’s new ban on women received unexpected support from one of the most revered of Anglo-Saxon saints, the Cathedral’s patron St Cuthbert. He had been dead for nearly half a millennium and was now buried behind the church’s high altar, but a twelfth-century chronicler reports that the great man made a surprise intervention from beyond the grave. One day the Cathedral was visited by a noblewoman travelling in the retinue of the Queen of Scotland; she had decided to go sight-seeing in the magnificent new church. That night the senior monk charged with looking after the building had a vision: a visit from a very angry St Cuthbert, who did not mince his words about this female pollution of his beloved Cathedral: ‘Get that bitch out of here!’ roared the apparition. The poor lady was so mortified on hearing of the saintly wrath that she went off to be a nun at Elstow near Bedford. [63]