Realization

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 St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Fourteen Book VII—Faith and Reason Scope: Augustine’s reading of the Platonist philosophers enables him to come to some conclusions about intellectual problems that he has been wrestling with for years. In this lecture, we will discuss what Augustine has learned about the nature of evil and about the goodness of creation. At the end of this book, Augustine knows that Christianity is true, but he still does not make the decision to be baptized. The end of the book is a powerful meditation on the limits of reason, on the necessity for faith, and on the relationship between faith and reason. In this lecture, we will discuss what Augustine has to say about these issues. Outline I. With the new insights that Augustine has gained from his reading of the Platonists, he is ready to seek new approaches to two questions that he had been wrestling with since he was 18. A. What is the nature of God? B. What is the nature of evil? II. With a faith that is based on the fact that the Platonists gave reasons for things that the Bible simply states to be true, Augustine turns to Scripture. A. He considers Exodus 3:14: “I am who am.” B. Augustine has been trying to figure out what sort of a being God is, but he has been asking the wrong question. C. God is not a being but, rather, being itself; God simply is. D. Augustine tells the readers that all doubt vanished from him when he recognized that God is being itself. III. Augustine describes his understanding of a neo-Platonic view of the universe. A. It is a hierarchy of being with God at the top and inanimate objects at the bottom. B. Humans are somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 43

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had learned that London life was even stranger and more various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret element, and claimed by it as a member. I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side. There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five hundred men there. How many of them were like the gentleman whose parts I had just fingered? Even as I wondered it I saw one fellow gaze my way, deliberately - and then another. Perhaps there had been many such looks since I had returned to the world as a boy; but I had never noticed them or grasped their import. Now, however, I grasped it very well - and I trembled again, as I did so, with satisfaction and spite. I had first donned trousers to avoid men’s eyes; to feel myself the object of these men’s gazes, however, these men who thought I was like them, like that — well, that was not to be pestered; it was to be, in some queer way, revenged. For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and to learn the ways and gestures of the world into which I had stumbled. Walking and watching, indeed, are that world’s keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there is a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, a purposeful stepping to an alley or a rooming-house ... At first, as I have said, I took no part in these exchanges, but only studied others at them, and received a thousand questing glances on my own account — some of which I held, rather teasingly, but most of which I turned aside, after a second, with a show of carelessness. But then, one afternoon, I was approached once again by a gentleman who, it seemed to me, bore some slight resemblance to Walter. He wanted my hand upon him, merely, and to have a string of lewd endearments whispered in his ears as I dubbed him off - it didn’t seem like much. If I hesitated, I don’t believe he saw. I named my terms - a sovereign, again - and led him to the nook where I had served his predecessor.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘On the very next morning the man went down to the cattle-stall and called for his companion. The carter came up to him and told him that his fellow had already left town. He had gone at dawn. Of course the young pilgrim was suspicious, having in mind the dream of the night before. So he went at once to the west gate of the town and there, just as he had been informed in his dream, he found the cart-load of dung ready to manure the land. Then he cried out “Harrow!” and “Vengeance!” He told the townsmen that the body of his friend and companion lay buried here, having been foully murdered. He called out for justice. He demanded that the authorities of the town take action. “There has been a murder! The corpse of my friend lies here!” What do I need to say? The people tipped the cart on to its side and there, among the shit, was the body of the dead man.’ Chanticleer ruffled his feathers, with a little shiver of disgust, before going on. ‘Oh God in heaven, You are just and true. See how You have revealed the truth. “Murder will out.” That is the saying. Murder is so abominable a crime that God will not allow it to be concealed. It may take a year, or two, or three, but eventually it will be revealed and seen for what it is. The authorities took

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He looks startled. “Tell me it’s not true.” I flick at the grey falling into my eyes. Then I think better of it, and let it drop back to cover them. “It’s not like that,” he says. “You know we are good together. We inspire each other. Greatness comes when we are together.” I think about this. He is right, of course. We were great together. Some days I woke up playful. I wanted to laugh and flirt and be a love story. The very next day I couldn’t stand being looked at or spoken to. Nick let me be. He spoke to me on the days I wanted to be spoken to. He left me alone when I shot eye daggers at him. We coexisted fluently and effortlessly. With him I can have companionship and love, and never have who I am questioned. We were great together. Until Isaac taught me something new. I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to be questioned. I needed it. I didn’t know I needed someone to dig into my heart and figure out why on some days I wanted to play, and why on others I craved solitude. I didn’t even like it when he did it. It’s a painful thing to look inside yourself and see the whys and the hows of your clockwork. You are a lot uglier than you think, plenty more selfish than you are ever likely to admit. So, you ignore what’s inside of you. Thinking if you don’t acknowledge it, it’s not really there. Until someone unlikely comes along and cracks you. They see every dark corner, and they get it. And they tell you it’s okay to have dark corners, instead of making you feel ashamed of them. Isaac wasn’t afraid of my ugly. He rolled through the highs and lows with me. There was no judgment in his love. And all of a sudden there were fewer lows and more highs. Nick loved me enough to leave me alone. Isaac knew me better than I knew me. I said I wanted to be left alone, he knew better. I said I wanted white, he knew better. He brightened me. He enlightened me. Because Isaac was my soulmate. Not Nick. Nick was just some great love. Isaac knew how to heal my soul. “We were good together,” I say to Nick. “But I’m not her anymore.” “I don’t understand,” he says. “You’re not who?” “Exactly.” “Brenna, you’re not making sense.” “Do I ever?” He pauses. I shake my head. “I don’t make sense to you. That’s why you left me.” “I’ll try harder.” “I have cancer. You can try as hard as you want, but I have cancer and I’m not going to be here in a year.”

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  2. The passage, which said that people consider views from mountains more than their own souls, led to a kind of conversion for Petrarch, for that day he read no further. D. In 1298, Augustine was officially designated as one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church; one of the others was Ambrose, who baptized Augustine in Milan. E. Numerous works of art narrated the life of Saint Augustine, although they had Possidius’s Life of Augustine, as well as Confessions, as their source. 1. One famous example is the 14th-century tomb of Augustine in Pavia, carved with scenes from the saint’s life. 2. The most famous is the narrative cycle of frescoes painted circa 1450 in the Church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano (between Florence and Siena) by the great Florentine artist Benozzo Gozzoli. II. We want to focus on the use that Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) made of Augustine’s Confessions. A. The Divine Comedy is the story of the pilgrim Dante’s trip to the Christian afterlife. B. It is presented as a journey of the pilgrim Dante toward spiritual enlightenment. C. It is safe to say that without the Confessions, there would be no Divine Comedy. 1. Dante learns from Augustine the retrospective structure of his poem. 2. He writes the poem after he has “completed” the journey. 3. He writes about an earlier time from a later perspective. 4. Unlike other heroes in the epic tradition, Dante’s hero in the Commedia is himself. D. Although Augustine’s influence can be seen throughout the Commedia, it is easiest to see in Dante’s treatment of the sin of lust. 1. Dante superimposes the story of Augustine’s conversion on the story of his sinners’ lustful fall. 2. Dante incorporates the very language of Augustine’s conversion in his depiction of this scene. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 75

• From The Case for God (2009)

  36 Rousseau had no time for Christianity, whose God, he felt, had become a mere projection of human desires. He was looking for the “God” that transcended the old doctrines, a deity that would be discovered by kenosis, compassion, and the humble contemplation of the majesty of the universe. Rousseau nurtured the revolutionary passion that would make the French Enlightenment more radical and political. This would not be the case in America. Unlike the French Revolution, the American War of Independence against Britain (1775–83) had no antireligious dimension. Its leaders—George Washington (1732–99), John Adams (1725–1826), Jefferson, and Franklin—experienced the revolution as a secular, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, was a modernizing Enlightenment document based on Locke’s notion of human rights and appealing to the modern ideals of autonomy, independence, and equality in the name of the God of Nature. The vast majority of the colonists could not relate to the Deism of their leaders and developed a form of revolutionary Calvinism that enabled them to join the struggle. 37 When their leaders spoke of liberty, they thought of Saint Paul’s freedom of the Sons of God; 38 they recalled the heroic struggle of their Puritan forebears against tyrannical Anglicanism in old England; and some believed that as a result of the revolution, Jesus would shortly establish the Kingdom of God in America. 39 This Christian ideology was a Calvinist version of Adams’s belief that the settlement of America was part of God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity 40 and the conviction of Thomas Paine (1737–1809) that “we have it in our power to begin the world again.” 41 Unlike Europeans, Americans did not regard religion as oppressive but found it a liberating force that was enabling them to respond creatively to the challenge of modernity and come to the Enlightenment ideals in their own way. In France, however, religion was part of the ancien régime that needed to be swept away. There was even an incipient atheism that denied God’s existence. In 1729, Jean Meslier, an exemplary parish priest, died weary of life, leaving his few meager possessions to his parishioners. Among his papers, they discovered the manuscript of his Memoire in which he declared that Christianity was a hoax. He had never dared to say this openly during his lifetime, but now he had nothing to fear. Religion was simply a device to subdue the masses. The gospels were full of internal contradictions, and their texts were corrupt. The miracles, visions, and prophecies that were supposed to “prove” divine revelation were themselves incredible, and the doctrines of the church manifestly absurd. So too were the “proofs” of Descartes and Newton.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The modern mind was solitary, autonomous, and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence and separate from all other beings. From this irreducible nub of certainty, Descartes went on to prove the existence of God and the reality of the external world. Because the material universe was lifeless, godless, and inert, it could tell us nothing about God. The only animate thing in the entire cosmos was the thinking self, and it was here that we should look for incontrovertible proof. Descartes was clearly influenced by Augustine and Anselm. Doubt reveals the imperfection of the thinker, because when we doubt we become acutely aware that something is missing. But the experience of imperfection presupposes a prior notion of perfection, because it is a relative term, comprehensible only in terms of its absolute. It was impossible that a finite being could by its own efforts conceive the idea of perfection, so it must follow “that it had been placed in me by a Nature which was really more perfect than mine could be, and which even had within itself all the perfections of which I could form any idea—that is to say, to put it in a word, which was God.” 16 How else could we know that we doubted and desired—that we lacked something and were not, therefore, perfect—if we did not have within ourselves an innate idea that enabled us to recognize the defects of our own nature? Most medieval theologians had rejected Anselm’s ontological proof because, despite its apophatic dynamic, he had called God a “thing” (aliquid) that must “exist.” But now Descartes claimed that God was a “clear and distinct” idea in the human mind and was entirely happy to apply the word “existence” to God. Where Thomas had said that God was not a “sort of thing,” Descartes found no difficulty in calling God a being, albeit the “first and a sovereign Being.” 17 Like Anselm, he saw existence as one of the perfections. “For it is not within my power to think of God without existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection) though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.” 18 This truth was as clear as—if not clearer than—Pythagoras’s theorem of the right- angled triangle. “Consequently it is at least as certain that God, who is a Being so perfect, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can possibly be.” 19 God was absolutely necessary to Descartes’ philosophy and his science, because without God he had no confidence in the reality of the external world. 20 Because we could not trust our senses, the existence of material things was “very dubious and uncertain.”

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  a Jewish Pharisee who persecuted the Christians for what he considered to be their blasphemous claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Something happened to convert him, though, from being a persecutor of the Christian faith to being its greatest apostle. Paul indicates that he had a visionary experience of Jesus after his death, which convinced him that Jesus had been raised from the dead. That changed everything. If Jesus was really raised from the dead, he was obviously not the one cursed by God, but the chosen one of God. And that must mean that his death was according to the plan of God, which in turn must have meant that Christ did not die for his own sins (because he was the one most favored by God), but for the sins of others. 1. It is important to realize that before Christianity, there were no Jews who expected the Messiah to die for the sins of others. The Jewish Messiah was to be a great and powerful figure who overthrew the enemies of God and established God’s rule on Earth. He was not to be a weak and defenseless person executed for crimes against the state. 2. Christians like Paul, however, transformed the idea of the Messiah. Because Jesus was the Messiah and because he had suffered, it must be that the Messiah was supposed to suffer. 3. Such Christian converts found support for their views in passages in the Jewish Scriptures—not the ones that talk explicitly about the Messiah (where there is no talk of suffering and death), but ones that talk about someone else, a righteous man, who suffers for others. These passages were taken, then, to refer to the Messiah, even though they had never been read that way before (for example, Isaiah 53; Psalm 22). D. Once Paul came to think that Jesus’s death and Resurrection were the keys to salvation, he had to rethink his understanding of his own Jewish religion: If Christ is the way of salvation, what about the salvation God had already provided his people through the Law? 1. Paul came to think that the Jewish Law was misunderstood if it was taken to be a way to maintain a right relationship with God. 2. The Jewish Law can tell a person how to live, but it does not provide anyone with the power to do what it demands. It is itself good, then, but it is not able to bring salvation, only condemnation. 3. Everyone is under the cosmic power of sin in this evil world, and as such, no one is able to fulfill the righteous demands of the Law. 4. Christ, though, broke the cosmic powers of sin and death (evidence: he overcame death!). Those who believe in his death and Resurrection can be made right with God (= justified)—not by keeping the Jewish Law, but by having faith in the one who triumphed over evil.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  What black women's literature from the 1930s through 1950s illustrates is the changing ideological, political, and literary/ sociocultural milieu-the very shifting landscape of the politics and paradigms-governing "the politics of silence." While this era is distinct with its own stylistics, literary conventions, and thematic preoccupations, its engagement with and refusal to be silenced in the face of racial injustice, coupled with its acknowledgment of the gender/sexual terrain, allow it to serve as a consequential bridge-a space with larger epistemological and ontological impact-to post-196os black women's literature. The black women writers of this era gesture toward racial, gender, and sexual liberation and contest the interlocking systematic oppression of black women and the community. They anticipate, then, the post-196os and second-wave feminist doctrine that "the personal is political." Additionally, these writers make clear that the political (who is enfranchised, has access to fundamental rights and full civic, economic, and social subjectivity) is also deeply personal and inextricably bound to one's race, gender, class, ethnicity and/or nation(ality). What, then, created space for African American women writers to explore the complexities of their intersectionality and diverse experiences as black women with range, depth, and substance? What enabled them to contest limited representations and the matrix of domination, both contributing to and perpetuating black women's oppression, marginalization, and exclusion? And what allowed them to challenge and redefine the politics governing their multiple identities in strikingly new, daring, and consequential ways? Indubitably, it was the political movements ensuing and developing out of the civil rights struggles of the 195os and 196os. The civil rights movement, with its focus on renegotiating the marginalized and segregated social space to which African Americans had been consigned, centered itself around ending social segregation, as well as the political and economic disfranchisement of blacks. Challenging the American social disorder that produced and rested on oppositional constructions, the civil rights movement demanded equal rights for all people, specifically African Americans, who had long been relegated to second-class citizenship. Galvanizing individuals around sociopolitical activism and nonviolent action, it raised the racial, class, and political consciousness of Americans. This new awareness made a space for African American women to move forward in their quest for equality and liberation from American social injustice.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  29 Mark was written in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the late 90s. The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Like Paul, the evangelists searched the scriptures to find any mention of a christos— be it a king, prophet, or priest—who had been “anointed” in the past by God for a special mission and was now seen to be a coded prediction of Jesus. They believed that Jesus’s life and death had been foretold in the four servant songs, and some even thought that he was the Word and Wisdom of God, who had descended to earth in human form. This was not simply a clever exercise in public relations. Jews had long realized that all religious discourse was basically interpretive. They had always looked for new meaning in the ancient texts during a crisis, and the basic methodology of Christian pesher (“deciphering”) exegesis, which had also been practiced by the Qumran sectarians, was not unlike Greek “bricolage” or rabbinical midrash. Above all, it was a spiritual exercise. Luke has shown the way it may have worked in his story of a numinous encounter on the road to Emmaus. 30 Three days after Jesus’s crucifixion, two of his disciples had been walking sadly from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus and had fallen in with a stranger who asked them why they were so despondent. They explained what had happened to Jesus, the man they thought had been the messiah. The stranger gently rebuked them: Did they not realize that the scriptures had foretold that the christos would suffer before attaining his glory? Starting with Moses, he began to expound “the full message” of the prophets, and later the disciples recalled how their hearts had “burned” within them when he had “opened” the scriptures to them in this way. When they arrived at their destination, they begged the stranger to dine with them, and it was only when he blessed the bread that they realized it was Jesus himself, but that their “eyes had been held” from recognizing him. Like the rabbis, the Christians gathered “in twos and threes” to decipher the old texts. As they conversed together, the scriptures would “open” and bring them fresh insight. This illumination might last only a moment—just as Jesus had vanished as soon as the disciples had recognized him—but the act of bringing hitherto unconnected texts together to form an unexpected harmony gave them intimations of the coincidentia oppositorum that had characterized the temple experience. Apparent contradictions locked together in the luminous “wholeness” of shalom . The stranger had a crucial role. In Luke’s congregation Jews and gentiles were discovering that, like Abraham at Mamre, when they reached out to the “other,” they experienced the divine.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The evolutionary hypothesis shattered so many fundamental preconceptions that initially few could absorb it in its entirety. Even Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had made a significant contribution to Darwin’s work, could not accept the lack of a controlling Intelligence. 40 The American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), a convinced evolutionist as well as a dedicated Christian, used the evolutionary hypothesis in his study of plant life but could not accept the absence of an overall divine plan. 41 Darwinian theory not only undermined the design-based theology that had become the mainstay of Western Christian belief, but repudiated central principles of the Enlightenment. Darwin, however, had no desire to destroy religion. His faith ebbed and flowed over the years, especially after the tragic death of his daughter Annie, but his chief problem with Christianity was not natural selection; rather, it was the doctrine of eternal damnation— a reaction, doubtless, to hellfire sermons. He told Asa Gray that it was absurd to doubt that “a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist,” adding, “I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, that agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” 42 But as a result of his researches, God was no longer the only scientific explanation of the universe. Not only was there no scientific proof for God; natural selection had shown that such proof was impossible. If Christians wanted to believe that the evolutionary process was somehow supervised by God—and many did—this would henceforth be a matter of personal choice. Darwin’s discoveries accelerated the already growing tendency to exclude theology from scientific discussion. By the end of the 1860s, most scientists were still Christians, but qua scientists they had stopped talking about God. As the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878) said, scientific truth demanded stringent, physical evidence; it must enable us to “explain, to predict, and in some cases to control the phenomena of nature.” 43 Wholly dependent on concrete, measurable fact, science now rejected any hypothesis that was not based on the human experience of the natural world and could not, therefore, be tested . One of the first people to understand how this would impact natural theology was Charles Hodge, Princeton professor of theology, who wrote the first sustained religious attack on Darwinism in 1874.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  The mode of execution itself was a problem for Paul. According to the book of Deuteronomy, “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” In other words, Jesus, however great a preacher he was, or however many good deeds he did, was under God’s curse, because he was hanged on a tree, had been crucified. That may have been what caused Paul to persecute the Christians. They were claiming something that would have been blasphemous, namely that the person whom God cursed was the one that God held in special favor. Although we aren’t sure whether that’s exactly why Paul persecuted the Christians, it may have been why. And as a good Pharisaic Jew, he obviously persecuted Christians trying to make them recant of their faith. However, something happened to convert Paul, to change him from being the persecutor of the Christian faith to being its greatest apostle. Again, he doesn’t give us as much information as we would like, but he does indicate on a couple of different occasions that he had some kind of visionary experience of Jesus after his death, which convinced him that Jesus had been raised from the dead. He had been persecuting Christians. According to the book of Acts, the way it worked was that he was on the road to Damascus, and Jesus appeared to him in a vision. That may be actually what Paul himself would have said. He doesn’t actually talk about going on the road to Damascus and having this vision of Jesus, but he does talk in two passages about having a visionary experience of Jesus that converted him. Since he saw that Jesus was alive after he knew that Jesus had died, that convinced him that God had raised Jesus from the dead. You find this spelled out especially in Galatians chapter 1, and in | Corinthians chapter 15, where Paul talks about this visionary experience. Once Paul became convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead, that changed everything for him. He had thought that Jesus was God’s cursed, but it turns out that Jesus was the one God had raised from the dead. Paul, as a Pharisee, would already have been an apocalyptic Jew, thinking that he was living at the end of the age, before the resurrection of the dead that would bring in the good kingdom. If he thought that he was living at the end aa of the age, and then he came to think that somebody had been raised from the dead, what would his immediate conclusion be? We must be at the very end. Thus, Paul thought he was living at the end of time. The resurrection had started, and Jesus, as Paul puts it was the “first fruits” of the resurrection, meaning that the rest of the resurrection was going to happen very soon, and that the end of the age was imminent.

• From Educated (2018)

  I hesitated for a moment over the keyboard—struck by a premonition that this was information I might regret knowing—then typed “Ruby Ridge” into the browser. According to Wikipedia, Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly standoff between Randy Weaver and a number of Federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. The name Randy Weaver was familiar, and even as I read it I heard it falling from my father’s lips. Then the story as it had lived in my imagination for thirteen years began replaying in my mind: the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done. I scrolled past the backstory to the first shooting. Federal agents had surrounded the Weaver cabin. The mission was surveillance only, and the Weavers were unaware of the agents until a dog began to bark. Believing the dog had sensed a wild animal, Randy’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, charged into the woods. The agents shot the dog, and Sammy, who was carrying a gun, opened fire. The resulting conflict left two dead: a federal agent and Sammy, who was retreating, running up the hill toward the cabin, when he was shot in the back. I read on. The next day, Randy Weaver was shot, also in the back, while trying to visit his son’s body. The corpse was in the shed, and Randy was lifting the latch on the door, when a sniper took aim at his spine and missed. His wife, Vicki, moved toward the door to help her husband and again the sniper opened fire. The bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly as she held their ten-month-old daughter. For nine days the family huddled in the cabin with their mother’s body, until finally negotiators ended the standoff and Randy Weaver was arrested. I read this last line several times before I understood it. Randy Weaver was alive? Did Dad know? I kept reading. The nation had been outraged. Articles had appeared in nearly every major newspaper blasting the government’s callous disregard for life. The Department of Justice had opened an investigation, and the Senate had held hearings. Both had recommended reforms to the rules of engagement, particularly concerning the use of deadly force. The Weavers had filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million but settled out of court when the government offered Vicki’s three daughters $1 million each. Randy Weaver was awarded $100,000 and all charges, except two related to court appearances, were dropped. Randy Weaver had been interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows. If it was a cover-up, it was a very bad one. There had been media coverage, official inquiries, oversight. Wasn’t that the measure of a democracy?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Did you think, if you wore a silken cock, it meant you never had a cunt at the seam of your drawers?’ Her face was very close to my own; she would not let me turn my eyes from hers. She said: ‘You’re like me: you have shown it, you are showing it now! It is your own sex for which you really hunger! You thought, perhaps, to stifle your own appetites: but you have only made them swell the more! And that is why you won’t raise a row - why you still stay, and be my tart, as I desire.’ She gave my hair a cruel twist. ‘Admit that it is as I say!’ ‘It is!’ For it was, it was! What she said was the truth: she had found out all my secrets; she had shown me to myself. Not just with the fierce words of that moment, but with all - the kisses, the caresses, the fuck on the chair - that had made her say them; and I was glad! I had loved Kitty - I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. Now, this lady had torn it from me - had laid me bare, as surely as if she had ripped the shrieking flesh from my white bones. She pressed against me still; and even as her breath came warm against my cheek, I felt my lusts rise up to meet her own, and knew myself in thrall. After all, there are moments in our lives that change us, that discontent us with our pasts and offer us new futures. That night at the Canterbury Palace, when Kitty had cast her rose at me, and sent my admiration for her tumbling over into love - that had been one such moment. This was another; perhaps, indeed, it had already passed - perhaps it was the second when I was guided into the dark heart of that waiting carriage that was the real start of my new life. Either way, I knew I could not go back to the old one, now. The djinn was out of the bottle at last; and I had settled on pleasure. I never thought to ask what happened to the beggar in the tale, once the five hundred days came to an end. Chapter 13 D iana’s wider circle of friends, I believe, thought our union a fantastic one. I would sometimes see them look between us, then overhear their murmurs - ‘Diana’s caprice,’ they called me, as if I were an enthusiasm for a wonderful food, that a sensitive palate would tire of. Diana herself, however, once having found me, seemed only increasingly disinclined to let me go.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  The reflections between the two of you are that penetrating and widespread. It turns out that you weren’t the only one listening to your new friend’s prom story. Hasson’s team invited ten other people to have their brains scanned while listening to the very same audio-recording of her story that you heard. Whereas you listened attentively to everything she said, others didn’t so much. Those differences showed up clearly when you were each asked to recount her story afterward. By tallying up the matches between her original, impromptu prom story and each listener’s retelling of it, Hasson’s team rank-ordered the whole set of listeners by how well they understood the story. Those differences in comprehension reflect the success or failure of communication—how thoroughly information from her brain was transferred to your brain, and to the brains of the other listeners. Strikingly, Hasson’s team discovered that the degree of success in communication predicted the degree of brain coupling between speaker and listener, and did so in surprising ways. Most of the time, across most brain areas, listeners’ brains mirrored the speaker’s brain after a short time lag, around one to three seconds later. It only makes sense, after all, that the speaker leads this dance, since the story is hers and she chooses her words before you and the others hear them. In other cases, though, this neural pas de deux between speaker and listener showed hardly any lag at all—the respective changes in brain activity were virtually synchronized. Your particular case was different, however. Recall that you were the one who grasped your new friend’s story better than anybody. You hung on every word and picked up every detail of it, even the seemingly inconsequential ones. Your more complete grasp of her story went hand in hand with something truly remarkable: Your brain activity actually anticipated her brain activity by a few seconds in several cortical areas. Excellent communication, it thus seems, doesn’t simply involve following along very closely. It also involves forecasting. Once you were in sync and on the same page with your new friend, enjoying her and her story, you could even anticipate what she’d say next, or how she’d say it. Your brain could anticipate her brain’s next move. Brain coupling, Hasson argues, is the means by which we understand each other. He goes even further to claim that communication—a true meeting of the minds—is a single act, performed by two brains. Considering the positivity resonance of love, what I find most fascinating about these findings is that a key brain area that showed coupling in Hasson’s speaker-listener study was the insula, an area linked with conscious feeling states. Evidence for synchrony in two people’s insulae suggests that in good communication, two individuals come to feel a single, shared emotion as well, one that is distributed across their two brains. Indeed, in other work, Hasson and colleagues have shown that people’s brains come particularly into sync during emotional moments.

• From Educated (2018)

  Women stood, naked or half naked, and chained, while men circled them. The projector clacked. The next image was a photograph, black and white and blurred with age. Faded and overexposed, the image is iconic. In it a man sits, stripped above the waist, exposing for the camera a map of raised, crisscrossing scars. The flesh hardly looks like flesh, from what has been done to it. I saw many more images in the coming weeks. I’d heard of the Great Depression years before when I’d played Annie, but the slides of men in hats and long coats lined up in front of soup kitchens were new to me. When Dr. Kimball lectured on World War II, the screen showed rows of fighter planes interspersed with the skeletal remains of bombed cities. There were faces mixed in—FDR, Hitler, Stalin. Then World War II faded with the lights of the projector. The next time I entered the auditorium there were new faces on the screen and they were black. There hadn’t been a black face on that screen—at least none that I remembered—since the lectures on slavery. I’d forgotten about them, these other Americans who were foreign to me. I had not tried to imagine the end of slavery: surely the call of justice had been heard by all, and the issue had been resolved. This was my state of mind when Dr. Kimball began to lecture on something called the civil rights movement. A date appeared on the screen: 1963. I figured there’d been a mistake. I recalled that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued in 1863. I couldn’t account for that hundred years, so I assumed it was a typo. I copied the date into my notes with a question mark, but as more photographs flashed across the screen, it became clear which century the professor meant. The photos were black and white but their subjects were modern—vibrant, well defined. They were not dry stills from another era; they captured movement. Marches. Police. Firefighters turning hoses on young men. Dr. Kimball recited names I’d never heard. He began with Rosa Parks. An image appeared of a policeman pressing a woman’s finger into an ink sponge. Dr. Kimball said she’d taken a seat on a bus. I understood him as saying she had stolen the seat, although it seemed an odd thing to steal. Her image was replaced by another, of a black boy in a white shirt, tie and round-brimmed hat. I didn’t hear his story. I was still wondering at Rosa Parks, and how someone could steal a bus seat. Then the image was of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, “They pulled his body from the river.” There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew.

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

  What would happen to the culture of Oregon Track, for instance, if it was subject to shareholder votes or corporate raider demands? We’d gotten a little taste of that scenario with the small group of debenture holders. Scaling up and letting in thousands of shareholders—it would be a thousand times worse. Above all, I couldn’t bear the thought of one titan buying up shares, becoming a behemoth on the board. “I don’t want to lose control,” I said to Chuck. “That’s my greatest fear.” “Well… there might be a way to go public without losing any control,” he said. “What?” “You could issue two classes of stock—class A and class B. The public would get class Bs, which would carry one vote per share. The founders and inner circle, and your convertible debenture holders, would get class As, which would entitle them to name three-quarters of the board of directors. In other words, you raise enormous sums of money, turbocharge your growth, but ensure that you keep control.” I looked at him, dumbstruck. “Can we really do that?” “It’s not easy. But the New York Times and the Washington Post and a couple of others have done it. I think you can do it.” Maybe it wasn’t satori, or kensho , but it was instant enlightenment. In a flash. The breakthrough I’d been seeking for years. “Chuck,” I said, “that sounds like… the answer.” At the next Buttface I explained the concept of class A and class B, and everyone had the same reaction. At long last. But I cautioned the Buttfaces: Whether or not this was the solution, we needed to do something, right now, fix our cash flow problem once and for all, because our window was closing. I could suddenly see a recession on the horizon. Six months, a year at the max. If we waited, tried to go public then, the market would give us far less than we were worth. I asked for a show of hands. Going public… all in favor? It was unanimous. The moment we resolved our longstanding cold war with our competitors and the Feds, we would initiate a public offering. THE SPRING FLOWERS were up by the time our lawyers and government officials had settled on a number: $9 million. It still sounded way too high, but everyone told me to pay it. Take the deal, they kept saying. I spent an hour staring out my window, mulling. The flowers and the calendar said it was spring, but that day the clouds were eye-level, dishwater gray, and the wind was cold. I groaned. I grabbed the phone and dialed Werschkul, who had taken the role of lead negotiator. “Let’s do it.” I told Carole Fields to cut the check. She brought it to me for my signature. We looked at each other and of course we were both thinking about the time I’d written that check for $1 million, which I couldn’t cover.

• From Educated (2018)

  About three weeks after the fire, Mother announced that the skin around the edges of the burn had begun to grow back, and that she had hope for even the worst patches. By then Luke was sitting up, and a week later, when the first cold spell hit, he could stand for a minute or two on crutches. Before long, he was thumping around the house, thin as a string bean, swallowing buckets of food to regain the weight he’d lost. By then, the twine was a family fable. “A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather strap with a steel buckle. “Not Luke,” Richard said. “He prefers twine, you know how fashionable he is.” Luke grinned. “Beauty’s everything,” he said. —FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS I never thought of that day, not in any probing way. The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first was the belt. Luke, I would think. You wild dog. I wonder, do you still wear twine? Now, at age twenty-nine, I sit down to write, to reconstruct the incident from the echoes and shouts of a tired memory. I scratch it out. When I get to the end, I pause. There’s an inconsistency, a ghost in this story. I read it. I read it again. And there it is. Who put out the fire? A long-dormant voice says, Dad did. But Luke was alone when I found him. If Dad had been with Luke on the mountain, he would have brought him to the house, would have treated the burn. Dad was away on a job somewhere, that’s why Luke had had to get himself down the mountain. Why his leg had been treated by a ten-year-old. Why it had ended up in a garbage can. I decide to ask Richard. He’s older than I, and has a sharper memory. Besides, last I heard, Luke no longer has a telephone. I call. The first thing Richard remembers is the twine, which, true to his nature, he refers to as a “baling implement.” Next he remembers the spilled gasoline. I ask how Luke managed to put out the fire and get himself down the mountain, given that he was in shock when I found him. Dad was with him, Richard says flatly. Right. Then why wasn’t Dad at the house? Richard says, Because Luke had run through the weeds and set the mountain afire. You remember that summer. Dry, scorching. You can’t go starting forest fires in farm country during a dry summer. So Dad put Luke in the truck and told him to drive to the house, to Mother. Only Mother was gone. Right. I think it over for a few days, then sit back down to write.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  At a more sensible hour I stumble into town in search of coffee. The park has been ravaged in the night. Great handfuls of bedding plants have been pulled out of the ground by drunken lads on a rampage; all the sapling limes along the path are wrenched and snapped in half. I look down at a heap of crushed and wilting marigolds, and wonder if I might replant them. But the roots look dry, the leaves already curled, so I walk on to the café, sit down at a table by the window with a newspaper and a coffee. There’s an article about climate change. An unprecedented summer melt in the Arctic. The Northwest Passage is open. Permafrost is melting. Ecosystems failing. Horrible news, and wildly important, but I can’t concentrate on the paper: I keep looking up because outside the window is a line of people. It’s not a line like a ticket queue or an airport line, or any line I’ve seen before. A woman with perfectly straight bobbed grey hair and close-pursed lips grips a binder of loose papers. The man next to her holds one too. They’re staring into the middle distance and no one is saying a word. I don’t see the panic beneath the silence for a while, but then the panic is all I can see. When she passes my table I ask Dagmara the barista if she knows what is going on. She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I just asked one of them. It’s a bank. The Northern Rock. They are taking their money out because it is going bankrupt.’ I frown at the unmoving line. Something about it reminds me of Mabel mantling her wings over food. Mine. Mine mine mine. I’ve never seen a bank run before. It’s something from the Wild West or a grey, blowsy print of Weimar Berlin. When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is, and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, banking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives. Distant wars and small trees wrenched in two. I look at the line of people and all their fierce possessiveness and all their hidden terror at the thought that their bulwarks against death might be lost. Money. Security. Knots and lines. The ends of things. And it is sitting there with a cooling coffee that I think seriously for the first time about what I am doing. What I am going to do with the hawk. Kill things. Make death.

• From Educated (2018)

  I listened to it over and over while staring out at the north cloister. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds I scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays I was writing. I wondered about them when I should have been reading. From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one. I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our minds . Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse. “Which ones?” she asked. “All of them.” I said. —I ATTENDED A SEMINAR on Wednesday afternoons, where I noticed two women, Katrina and Sophie, who nearly always sat together. I never spoke to them until one afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, when they asked if I’d like to get a coffee. I’d never “gotten a coffee” before—I’d never even tasted coffee, because it is forbidden by the church—but I followed them across the street and into a café. The cashier was impatient so I chose at random. She passed me a doll-sized cup with a tablespoon of mud-colored liquid in it, and I looked longingly at the foamy mugs Katrina and Sophie carried to our table. They debated concepts from the lecture; I debated whether to drink my coffee. They used complex phrases with ease. Some of them, like “the second wave,” I’d heard before even if I didn’t know what they meant; others, like “the hegemonic masculinity,” I couldn’t get my tongue around let alone my mind. I’d taken several sips of the grainy, acrid fluid before I understood that they were talking about feminism. I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument. It also signaled that I had lost. I left the café and went to the library.