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 The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Fagott asked the weeping head menacingly. ‘Never again!’ croaked the head. ‘For God’s sake, don’t torture him!’ a woman’s voice from a box seat suddenly rose above the clamour, and the magician turned in the direction of that voice. ‘So, what then, citizens, shall we forgive him?’ Fagott asked, addressing the audience. ‘Forgive him, forgive him!’ separate voices, mostly women’s, spoke first, then merged into one chorus with the men’s. ‘What are your orders, Messire?’ Fagott asked the masked man. ‘Well, now,’ the latter replied pensively, ‘they’re people like any other people . . . They love money, but that has always been so . . . Mankind loves money, whatever it’s made of—leather, paper, bronze, gold. Well, they’re light-minded . . . well, what of it . . . mercy sometimes knocks at their hearts . . . ordinary people . . . In general, reminiscent of the former ones . . . only the housing problem has corrupted them . . .’ And he ordered loudly: ‘Put the head on.’ The cat, aiming accurately, planted the head on the neck, and it sat exactly in its place, as if it had never gone anywhere. Above all, there was not even any scar left on the neck. The cat brushed Bengalsky’s tailcoat and shirt-front with his paws, and all traces of blood disappeared from them. Fagott got the sitting Bengalsky to his feet, stuck a packet of money into his coat pocket, and sent him from the stage with the words: ‘Buzz off, it’s more fun without you!’ Staggering and looking around senselessly, the master of ceremonies had plodded no farther than the fire post when he felt sick. He cried out pitifully: ‘My head, my head! . . .’ Among those who rushed to him was Rimsky. The master of ceremonies wept, snatched at something in the air with his hands, and muttered: ‘Give me my head, give me back my head . . . Take my apartment, take my paintings, only give me back my head! . . .’ A messenger ran for a doctor. They tried to lie Bengalsky down on a sofa in the dressing room, but he began to struggle, became violent. They had to call an ambulance.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  For each awfulness in life, however, I seemed to have been given an offsetting stroke of luck. One of these occurred in my freshman year. I was taking an upper-division psychology course in personality theory, and the professor was demonstrating different ways to assess personality and cognitive structure. He held up Rorschach cards before the class and asked us to write down our responses. Years of staring up into the clouds and tracing their patterns finally paid off. My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches’ brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses. It was a large class, and everyone’s answers were passed forward and handed to the professor. He read aloud from a sort of random selection; midway through I heard a recital of somewhat odd associations, and I realized to my great horror that they were mine. Some of them were humorous, but a few of them were simply bizarre. Or so they seemed to me. Most of the class was laughing, and I stared at my feet in mortification. When the professor had finished reading my intensely scribbled sheets, he asked if the person who had written those particular responses would please stay behind to talk with him for a while. I was convinced that, being a psychologist, he could see straight into my psychotic underpinnings. I was terrified. Looking back on it, what I suspect he actually saw was someone who was very intense, quite determined, serious, and probably rather troubled. At the time, being acutely aware of just how disturbed I really was, I assumed that the extent of my problems was equally obvious to him. He asked me to walk back to his office with him, and, while I was conjuring up images of being admitted to a psychiatric ward, he said that in all of his years of teaching he had never encountered such “imaginative” responses to the Rorschach. He was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre and original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  During this same period of increasingly feverish behavior at work, my marriage was falling apart. I separated from my husband, ostensibly because I wanted children and he didn’t—which was true and important—but it was far more complicated than that. I was increasingly restless, irritable, and I craved excitement; all of a sudden, I found myself rebelling against the very things I most loved about my husband: his kindness, stability, warmth, and love. I impulsively reached out for a new life. I found an exceedingly modern apartment in Santa Monica, although I hated modern architecture; I bought modern Finnish furniture, although I loved warm and old-fashioned things. Everything I acquired was cool, modern, angular, and, I suppose, strangely soothing and relatively uninvasive of my increasingly chaotic mind and jangled senses. There was, at least, a spectacular—and spectacularly expensive—view of the ocean. Spending a lot of money that you don’t have—or, as the formal diagnostic criteria so quaintly put it, “engaging in unrestrained buying sprees”—is a classic part of mania. When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

• From Action (2014)

  Another thing I never want to do again: It took one new-at-the-time boyfriend, Graham, a while to feel comfortable in what he felt were esoteric new positions, like anything approaching the non-horizontal and firmly face-forward. One night, a lapse in his demureness involving a new rearrangement of positioning (prostrate; prostate) surprised me. At the time, I thought the most abhorrent interior design of our Holiday Inn room was a painting of a pond in which the lilies were literally gilded. I stared at it, lying on my stomach, as I linked its subject to the idea of having anal sex versus vaginal. I scoffed at myself and got back to enjoying the grip of the very specific pleasure-pain that comes only with taking it up the ass. I looked at the sheets after. Behold: Nightmare. I bugged out and covered the bed, dashing to the bathroom, scarlet all over. Graham was immaculately gracious; he knocked on the door of the bathroom as I showered in scalding water and my own woe: “Take all the time you need—but, look, it makes sense that this happened, given what we were doing, and I’m not grossed out at all.” I had to concede his point. I walked outside in a towel, evading his face for entirely different reasons than I had moments before. The lily had been not only un-gilded, for sure, but left to rot in a compost heap. He tried to salvage what he could of my pride. “I don’t think you’re gross,” he continued, and the precision of his kindness there is as follows: He knew there was no persuading me the situation wasn’t objectively putrid, but he wanted to convey that he still liked me and didn’t want me to seethe inwardly over an inadvertent by-product of having great sex, which is to say, the occasional Nightmare. Sweetly, he got to assuage MY anxieties about something that was, in essence, a microscopic (if colonoscopic) deal. See how even the most self-aggrandizingly “open-minded” sex-havers can find, to their grim surprise, that maybe they’re not as cool and carefree about the smashing together of anatomies as they envisioned themselves? This is why, when you shack up (or Holiday Inn up) with a slow-mover like Graham, it’s crucial to be kind, patient, and uncondescending. Your partner might, after all, end up as gallant as you had always prided yourself on being when you find, instead, that you’ve shit the bed. The Case for Celibacy

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  The next evening, I show up at the salon already in a cold sweat. I anxiously ramble to the young, bored technician that I'm newly single and I understand this is what men want now but back in the day when I was last single women wore their bushes with pride. By the time I am using one hand to hold the skin in my pubic area taut for her so she can get every last hair and the other hand to bite down on to distract myself from the pain, I am so miserable and embarrassed that I can't imagine sinking any lower. Then, she tells me to roll over and hold open my butt cheeks and I realize this is actually a bottomless well of mortification and physical torture. She keeps promising that there's just a little more to go, all while repeatedly pressing and ripping and asking robotically if I am doing OK. "Define OK," I say. "Just tell me to stop if you can't take it anymore," she says impatiently. Finally, she adds the words I have been waiting for: "OK, all done. It won't be as bad next time. There was just so much to remove today." She emphasizes the words "so much" to fully drive my humiliation home, holding aloft the hairy, sticky ball of sugaring paste in her hand like it might bite her. […] "I'm curious," I say. "Am I the worst client you've ever had?" She shakes her head. "Not the worst," she says. "Some people ask me to stop and then walk out, so you did OK." "You know, I've given birth three times. Vaginally. So I'm no stranger to pain," I say, because now I can't stop trying to prove to her that I am not only not weak but also that I'm self-aware.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Eventually Christina and I became friends. A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write “how they identified” on it, then pin it to their lapel. Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote “Lover of Babe.” (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab.) As she told me this story, I cringed all over—for the students, mostly, but also because I was remembering how, when I was Christina’s student, we had all wanted her to come out in a more public and coherent fashion, and how frustrated we were that she wouldn’t. (Actually, I wasn’t all that frustrated; I’ve always sympathized with those who refuse to engage with terms or forums that feel like more of a compromise or distortion than an unbidden expression. But I understood why others were frustrated, and I sympathized with them, too.) Her students’ frustration with her reticence about her personal life did not diminish their desire for her, however—sentiments such as “Christina Crosby’s leather pants make me wet” appeared regularly on the cement paths all over campus. Likely her reticence but fed the fire. (Christina admitted to me later that she knew about the chalkings, and that they had pleased her very much.) But as the times changed, Christina changed. She got together with a younger, more activist scholar who is more vocal about queer issues, about being queer. Like most academic feminists, Christina now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies. Perhaps most moving to me, she is now writing autobiography—something she never would have dreamed of doing back when she was my mentor.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Renate and I sat on a built-in bench along a brick wall, our legs squeezed behind a narrow coffee table. Anaïs placed a purple cushion on the ledge of the stone fireplace and sat with us. “I’m afraid to ask,” she said. “Do you have a $50,000 check for me?” “Do you want the check or the story first?” Renate said. “Is it a good story?” “Yes, I would say it’s a very good story,” Renate answered, taking the approach we’d discussed. “Go ahead then,” Anaïs said. Renate dramatized how we’d waited for Alan Rosen, imagining every possible scenario: he’d been in a traffic accident, he’d had a heart attack, he’d changed his mind when he saw the part of Malibu Renate lived in. And then we learned the awful truth: Alan Rosen wasn’t the millionaire producer he’d claimed to be. He was an Arizona millionaire’s gardener. Anaïs was outraged. “He cheated us! That’s against the law!” “What law?” Renate said, “There’s no law against swindling people of their dreams.” Anaïs laughed. Encouraged, Renate went on, “You have to admit it makes a good surrealist ending. You convinced me to live for an illusion to get your movie made, and we got robbed of that illusion by an illusory producer. The Vedantists are right; everything in life is just illusion.” I asked Anaïs, “What will you do now without the money to go to Paris?” “Oh my goodness, we have so much catching up to do. It calls for tea.” She prepared Lipton’s for us in her sleek new kitchen and began, “I thought with our movie deal I’d be able to dismount the trrapeze.” Renate shot me a mortified look. I knew that, like me, she felt responsible for losing the $50,000 and Anaïs’s chance for freedom. CHAPTER 24 Greenwich Village, New York, 1965 ANAÏS ON THE AIRPLANE, ANAÏS REHEARSED in her diary how to tell Hugo she was moving to Paris: I’m not leaving you, Hugo, and I would never leave you for another man. I’m moving to Paris to live my dream of being a writer. I’m sure, as a fellow artist, you can understand that. This is what she did say to Hugo, before hastening to add, “I’m not going to ask you for any money. I just want a quiet divorce. I’ll get started in Paris with the proceeds from the movie rights I wrote you about.” Hugo was silent. He refused to look at her. “Please say something,” she pleaded. “Please say that you’ll give me a divorce and we will remain the best of friends.”

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  ance of Judaism. Gressmann's contribution was to pay greater attention to the Pharisaic-Rabbinic tradition. His reworking of Bousset did not result in a change of the overall theme; but by incorporating a quantity of material which had been carefully worked through, he improved the book so that it won its place as a 'standard work' (pp. v-vi). Subsequent works have supple mented and taken further the accomplishment of Bousset-Gressmann. Of primary importance is Billerbeck's commentary. G. F. Moore, in his 'distinguished work on Judaism in the first Christian centuries', which was based on the sayings of the Tannaim, established many connections between Judaism and Christianity (p. vi). Three pages later Moore is again cited as the author of one of the works which 'supplements' Bousset-Gressmann (p. ix). One can only conclude that Lohse did not understand Moore's intention or his book at all. Moore did not attempt to establish connections between Judaism and Christianity, but to present a composite and con structive view of Judaism in its own terms. Further, his work was directly antithetical to that ofBousset. To describe it as a 'supplement' is to mislead the reader into thinking that Bousset's work has been accepted by experts in Rabbinics as being basically along the right lines, needing only further citations, and erroneously to suggest that the path of Wissenschaft is flowing smoothly - from Bousset's description of Judaism in the Hellenistic world on the basis of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, through the additional working out of Bousset's view in the Rabbinic sources by Gressmann and Billerbeck, to Moore's establishment of that same view on the basis of Tannaitic sayings and the comparison of the one standard view of Judaism with Christianity. No history of scholarship could be further from the truth. If there is knowledge of this world after death, Moore is turning over in his grave. 78

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

  [image "Crat√®re √† oreillettes attique √† figures rouges, vers 500-490 av J.-C. Face A: Ganym√®de Artwork Location: Louvre, Paris, France Permission for usage must be provided in writing from Scala. Crat√®re √† oreillettes attique √† figures rouges, vers 500-490 av J.-C. Face B: Zeus Artwork Location: Louvre, Paris, France Permission for usage must be provided in writing from Scala." file=image_rsrcC2M.jpg] 3. Red-figure bell krater, c.500–490 BCE: Zeus pursues the beautiful young Ganymede with a spear. Ganymede clutches a hoop and a cock, customary presents in Athens from an older suitor to his younger potential lover. Neither Greeks nor Romans saw this same-sex activity as a lifelong identity. It was a life-cycle stage; such relationships proceeded alongside opposite-sex exploits by the active partner. A separate concept of a lifelong same-sex sexual identity certainly existed; such a person was termed in Greek a kinaidos, mercilessly mocked as a traitor to masculinity in the comedy of Aristophanes, in a fashion reminiscent of twentieth-century mockery of effeminate men.[24] Illogically, both identities ran alongside a literary tradition of the heroic same-sex coupling of equals, such as that of Achilles and Patroklos in the Iliad, and the undoubted existence of military units of same-sex lovers in certain poleis: most famously the ‘Theban Band’ eventually defeated by Alexander the Great at the battle of Chaeronea. By comparison, and predictably, Greek and Roman literary interest in any variant of same-sex activities among women was belated and limited.[25] All this is in sharp contrast to the general deep negativity to same-sex relationships in Judaism (though in parallel fashion, Jewish attention was mostly on men and not women). At its root is an interpretation of passages in the laws of Leviticus (18.22, 20.13) which in later Judaism, and then in Christianity, were interpreted as strong condemnations of all male same-sex activity, right up to the point of punishing it by death. An increasing number of modern scholars point out that this centuries-long assumption ignored the actual grammatical construction of the Hebrew text, whose original meaning seems to have been more narrowly focused: Leviticus was outlawing same-sex intercourse involving married men, alongside a range of other activities defined as sexual deviance in relation to marriage.[26] The Levitical laws reflected Judaism’s strong rhetorical bond between faithfulness to God and the marriage of man and woman. Nevertheless, all same-sex activities were eventually caught up in a general condemnation of all sexual activity not contained in marriage for producing children to fulfil God’s promise of fruitfulness to the patriarchs. It is possible that the negativity directed against male same-sex coupling (otherwise very unusual in west Asian cultures) was a reaction to male prostitution in temples of gods other than the God of Israel, but there is little actual evidence of that. In the Hebrew Bible, bestiality receives more severe and more frequent condemnations than same-sex activities; maybe Judaeans experienced bestiality more and found it more socially problematic?[27]

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

  Boniface’s election as pope occurred at Castel Nuovo, near Naples, Dec. 24, 1294, the conclave having convened the day before. The election was not popular, and a few days later, when a report reached Naples that Boniface was dead, the people celebrated the event with great jubilation. The pontiff was accompanied on his way to Rome by Charles II. of Naples.4 The coronation was celebrated amid festivities of unusual splendor. On his way to the Lateran, Boniface rode on a white palfrey, a crown on his head, and robed in full pontificals. Two sovereigns walked by his side, the kings of Naples and Hungary. The Orsini, the Colonna, the Savelli, the Conti and representatives of other noble Roman families followed in a body . The procession had difficulty in forcing its way through the kneeling crowds of spectators. But, as if an omen of the coming misfortunes of the new pope, a furious storm burst over the city while the solemnities were in progress and extinguished every lamp and torch in the church. The following day the pope dined in the Lateran, the two kings waiting behind his chair. While these brilliant ceremonies were going on, Peter of Murrhone was a fugitive. Not willing to risk the possible rivalry of an anti-pope, Boniface confined his unfortunate predecessor in prison, where he soon died. The cause of his death was a matter of uncertainty. The Coelestine party ascribed it to Boniface, and exhibited a nail which they declared the unscrupulous pope had ordered driven into Coelestine’s head. With Boniface VIII. began the decline of the papacy. He found it at the height of its power. He died leaving it humbled and in subjection to France. He sought to rule in the proud, dominating spirit of Gregory VII. and Innocent III.; but he was arrogant without being strong, bold without being sagacious, high-spirited without possessing the wisdom to discern the signs of the times.5 The times had changed. Boniface made no allowance for the new spirit of nationality which had been developed during the crusading campaigns in the East, and which entered into conflict with the old theocratic ideal of Rome. France, now in possession of the remaining lands of the counts of Toulouse, was in no mood to listen to the dictation of the power across the Alps. Striving to maintain the fictitious theory of papal rights, and fighting against the spirit of the new age, Boniface lost the prestige the Apostolic See had enjoyed for two centuries, and died of mortification over the indignities heaped upon him by France.

• From Between Us

  Chao, “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting through the Cultural Notion of Training,” Child Development 65, no. 4 (1994): 1111–19 for a critical discussion. 193 ​ not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity: The philosopher Owen Flanagan, reflecting on diversity in morality, similarly suggests that mere tolerance for different moralities does not always suffice. Whether we can think “different strokes for different folks . . . depends on whether the confrontation is notional, in history books, anthropology books, table top in National Geographic magazine, or whether the confrontation of different values is real and occurs right here in River City, among neighbors, coinhabitants of a place, a village, a metropolis, or a nation state” (Owen J. Flanagan, The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility [New York: Oxford University Press, 2017], 150). 193 ​ she should have been “justifiably angry”: Lutz, Unnatural Emotions , 167. 193 ​ The Inuit were mortified: Briggs, Never in Anger. 194 ​ as a human species, we need kindness: Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019). 194 ​ “Empathy is the mental superpower . . .”: Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World , 4. Note that the notion that empathy as a force to keep societies together is contentious. In his book Against Empathy , psychologist Paul Bloom argues against relying on empathy, because empathy shines the spotlight on a limited number of people, and usually those who are close to us or like us; he argues for rational compassion instead. 195 ​ “. . . conjures an authentic inner world”: Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World , 78. 195 ​ neither directly read . . . nor simply “catch”: See, e.g., Gendron, Crivelli, and Barrett, “Universality Reconsidered: Diversity in Making Meaning of Facial Expressions”; A. Fischer and U. Hess, “Mimicking Emotions,” Current Opinion in Psychology 17 (2017): 151–55, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.008; Parkinson, Heart to Heart . 195 ​ Projecting your own feelings: Beatty ( Emotional Worlds , 267, reprinted with permission by Cambridge University Press) makes a similar point: “If personal experience is useful in understanding others, its usefulness surely depends on relevance, closeness of fit; and relevance, in turn, depends on the historical particularities—in a word, the story. Yet, imagining or placing oneself in someone else’s shoes may certainly provide a good start for empathy.” Together with several colleagues, Zaki ( The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World ) used virtual reality to conjure up “an authentic inner world.” Participants wearing goggles are literally transposed to the world of a person who becomes homeless. They experience being evicted from their home, then landing on a bus ride that accommodates other homeless people like themselves.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Linda Valins, who suffers from vaginismus herself, wrote an interesting book on the subject, When a Woman’s Body Says No to Sex2, but it is important to understand that women whose vaginas tighten up when they are about to be penetrated vaginally are not necessarily saying no to sex. I believe they are saying no to penetration in particular. Some of these women are still able to have very enjoyable sex. Penetration is like the color pink, or riding horses, or anything else in life: some people just don’t like it. I sometimes like vaginal penetration, but only if I’m very turned on. I have never felt the need for penetration during sex. It’s not that I abhor it, but it does nothing for me. I don’t get turned on by it. I don’t feel anything much, and so it happens only because my partner wants to do it. For orgasms I need my clitoris touched. The vagina can take it or leave it. But Some of Us Really Love It! Plenty of women (myself included) cannot imagine satisfying sex that doesn’t involve penetration. It wasn’t always this way for me, however; I spent at least five years during my twenties having sex with little or no penetration. What happened to make me start wanting it? There was no obvious cause or event; I believe I simply began to relax around sexual issues. As I began to enjoy sex more and more, my PC muscle, with no conscious effort on my part, became very toned. As I worked on myself, I lost the psychological and emotional charge I once had around intercourse, and I became interested in penetration just because it seemed like it could be fun. Virginity: The Arduous Process of Losing It Virginity is such a loaded concept in our society. It is supposed to be a major event when you lose it, and yet I haven’t met many women whose experience was enjoyable. Most of us have the same incredulous reaction to an event that is supposed to be one of the most momentous of our lives: You mean that’s it? It was the first time for both of us, and we were really inept. It was one of those experiences that is funny in retrospect but deeply mortifying at the time. When I was seventeen, I met this guy who was much older. He wouldn’t have intercourse with me until I was eighteen. On my eighteenth birthday he brought a condom out (I’d been asking to have sex), and we did it. I didn’t feel anything. It didn’t hurt, it was just boring. I lay there thinking, oh my god, this is it?! I was so disappointed.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this St. Martin’s Press ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This book is dedicated to (and couldn’t exist without) Nicolas. Prologue Moe could fight injustice like a cornered tiger on one condition: as long as he didn’t have to speak. A lawyer by training, Moe was whip smart and had a reputation for being genuinely respectful. Despite his mild-mannered appearance—diminutive, skinny, and balding, with two perfect circles of wire-rimmed glasses perched above a trim little mustache—his commitment to social causes like the rights of the elderly or the protection of vulnerable women was fierce. His experience spanned the globe—at this point in his career, he had already worked in three different countries on three different continents. As part of his idealistic crusade for justice, however, he often found himself in the most unidealistic of settings: meetings. It was at these meetings, in community centers and church basements with folding chairs and a lingering smell of old coffee, where Moe’s story played out. He told it like this: “The other day I was at a meeting and one of the organizers turned to me and said, ‘You know, Moe, when it’s just you and me you talk totally fine, but you’re so quiet at meetings. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you open your mouth.’” Moe was mortified. He knew, deep down, that his colleague spoke the truth. Moe was always attentive, always pleasant, but it was true—he never said a word. And now it was confirmed to Moe that his silence was obvious—that he couldn’t simply hide in plain sight. “It’s not that I don’t want to say anything; I just don’t know how to say it,” Moe said. “Everyone else seems to feel so comfortable, so confident. But as soon as I work up the courage to speak, the topic has changed. That happens all the time.” Not knowing what to say doesn’t happen only to Moe. It happens to so many of us, particularly in today’s world of cryptic, how-do-I-answer-this text messages and gotta-be-right Instagram captions.

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

  The Emperor, a stranger to German thought and speech,374 declared after the first hearing: "This man will never make a heretic of me." He doubted the authorship of the famous books ascribed to him.375 At the second hearing he was horrified at the disparagement of general Councils, as if a German monk could be wiser than the whole Catholic Church. The Spaniards and Italians were no doubt of the same opinion; they may have been repelled also by his lowly appearance and want of refined manners. Some of the Spaniards pursued him with hisses as he left the room. The papal legates reported that he raised his hands after the manner of the German soldiers rejoicing over a clever stroke, and represented him as a vulgar fellow fond of good wine.376 They praised the Emperor as a truly Christian and Catholic prince who assured them the next day of his determination to treat Luther as a heretic. The Venetian ambassador, otherwise impartial, judged that Luther disappointed expectations, and showed neither much learning, nor much prudence, nor was he blameless in life.377 But the German delegates received a different impression. When Luther left the Bishop’s palace greatly exhausted, the old Duke Erik of Brunswick sent him a silver tankard of Eimbeck beer, after having first drunk of it himself to remove suspicion. Luther said, "As Duke Erik has remembered me to-day, may the Lord Jesus remember him in his last agony." The Duke thought of it on his deathbed, and found comfort in the words of the gospel: "Whosoever shall give unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, he shall in no wise lose his reward." The Elector Frederick expressed to Spalatin the same evening his delight with Luther’s conduct: "How excellently did Father Martin speak both in Latin and German before the Emperor and the Estates! He was bold enough, if not too much so."378 The cautious Elector would have been still better pleased if Luther had been more moderate, and not attacked the Councils. Persons of distinction called on him in his lodgings till late at night, and cheered him. Among these was the young Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who afterwards embraced the cause of the Reformation with zeal and energy, but did it much harm by his bigamy. After a frivolous jest, which Luther smilingly rebuked, he wished him God’s blessing.379

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Throughout my twenties, I meditated weekly at the Russian & Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street on the impossibly ancient body of the woman whom I thought of as the ghost of the baths. (If you went to these baths on women-only days in the ’90s, you will know who I mean.) I meditated on her labia, which drooped far below her pale pubic hair, her butt cheeks dangling off the bone like two deflated balloons. And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look. I tried to learn everything there was to know about the aging female body by staring at hers. (Now I realize I should say “the elderly female body,” but in my youth, as in the culture at large, the space between “aging” and “elderly” women is often collapsed, treated as illegible or irrelevant.) In my day job as a graduate student, however, I expressed only offense at Allen Ginsberg’s descriptions of female genitalia in his poems, as in “the hang of pearplum / fat tissue / I had abhorred” and “the one hole that repelled me 1937 on.” I still don’t see the need to broadcast misogynistic repulsion, even in service of fagdom, but I do understand being repelled. Genitalia of all stripes are often slimy and pendulous and repulsive. That’s part of their charm. I realize now that such moments in Ginsberg have a different shine when held in the bowl alongside his go-for-broke encounter with the naked body of his mother, the mad Naomi, in his great “Kaddish”: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb— Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu. When I read this passage now, I feel only moved and inspired. “What, even, smell of asshole?”—this is the sound of Ginsberg cajoling himself as far out onto the ledge as he can go, even if it means pressing into the speculative, the fictive. Beyond the “Monster of the Beginning Womb” to the mother’s anus, which he leans into and sniffs. Not in service of abjection, but in pursuit of the limits of generosity. She needs a lover—am I that name? The result of all this pushing? “Later revolted a little, not much.” O glorious deflation without dismissal!