Resentment

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 Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “Oh, but Sophie’s such a good friend,” my mother said, squatting to our level and taking both our hands. “She’s all prepared to show you around and explain how everything works, and she’s been looking forward to your arrival. The two of you will be sharing a room, and soon you’ll enjoy each other’s company.” I didn’t want to share a room with Sophie, and I didn’t want to be a beautiful Synanon girl. I stared at Sophie, doubtful. It seemed she wanted to be me. I had not considered it possible to be given a good friend. I decided that I hated her.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  In my mind, Ray belonged in Synanon, and leaving the community meant leaving him behind too. Other times I worried that my mother stayed because she was afraid she would not be allowed to leave. Not only did I focus on Theresa’s flaws, but I also began to observe the demonstrators in a much more cynical manner. Feeling less intimidated, I started to view their arbitrary rules and punishments with contempt. Having resettled into our normal routines after the move, games increased to a daily event. To whip us back into shape, we were required to participate in a mini stew, a game of twenty-four hours’ duration. The stew started after breakfast, and we were off to a fierce start of attacks and counterattacks, which frittered away into jealous squabbles between some of the girls about who had stolen whose friend. Next came talks between couples who wanted to break up, each person backed by his or her best friends. “I don’t want to go out with you!” one girl yelled at her boyfriend. “Why?” he demanded. She leaned forward, lips peeled away from her teeth. “Look, sucker, I never wanted to be your girlfriend in the first place.” This remark brought on a backlash from the humiliated boyfriend’s friends. “You fucking slut! He’s glad to be rid of your stupid pussy. He was doing you a favor!” “Yeah. You dumb bitch, you’re too stupid to know what you have!” “Oh, you think you’re good with girls, asshole? Have you ever had a girlfriend, dick-face?” The rest of us, who were a few years younger, sat out the amorous savagery, neither sufficiently experienced nor much caring to participate. Hours dragged by as the demonstrators took turns watching over us and encouraging us to keep going. “Play! Keep playing! This is a stew.” By midnight some of the kids had nodded off, spent, with nothing more to say. At some point I also drifted off and awoke to a demonstrator vigorously shaking me. “It’s not time to sleep! We’re still playing. You must participate!” The penetrating glow of fluorescent light, stark and hellish, illuminated my droopy-eyed schoolmates. My eyes felt grainy and scratchy with sleep. “Fuck. I’m tired,” I muttered. The demonstrator pushed her face close to mine. A black fury swirled in the depths of her eyes, the bags under them swollen to half-moons from lack of sleep. “You wake up and play. Do you hear me?” I sat up straighter, blinking rapidly. I didn’t know what was going on. Someone talked about a roommate not keeping her side of the room tidy. The child being attacked stared with glazed eyes, expressionless. The rest of my circle was almost comatose. “Hey, I’m talking to you, asshole!” an attacker shouted, trying to bring the level back up. I rubbed at my eyes and looked at the girl on the hot seat, waiting for her reply. She hadn’t moved or even blinked. “Are you listening?” The demonstrator shook her.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  μνησϊκἄκέω, fo remember wrongs done one, remember past injuries, Hadt. 8. 29, Ar. Lys. 590, Dem. 258, 12; esp. in party politics, Lys. 151. 5, etc.; οὐ py. to bear no malice, pass an act of amnesty, Ar. Pl. 1146, Thuc. 4. 74, Xen. Hell. 2. 4, 43, and Oratt., cf. esp. Dem. 685. 7 :— Construct., c. gen. rei, Antipho 115. 26; c. dat. pers., Thuc. 8. 73, Andoc. 12. 40, Lys. 184. 2; c. dat. pers. et gen. rei, μ. τινι Tivos to bear one a grudge for a thing, ap. Andoc. 11.5, Xen. An. 2. 4, 13 also, py. περί τινος Isocr. 299 Β, ee: II. c. ace. rei, τὴν ἡλικίαν pv. to remind one of the ills of age, Ar. Nub. 999. μνησικάκημα, τό, = μνησικακία, Eust. Opusc. 117. 48. μνησϊκἄκητικός, 4, όν, -- μνησίκακος, Arr. Epict. 4.5, 12. μνησϊκᾶἄκία, ἡ, the remembrance of wrongs, Plut. 2.860 A. μνησί-κἄκος, ov, remembering wrongs, bearing malice, revengeful, Cratin. Tay. 3, Arist. Eth. N. 4.3, 30, Rhet. 2. 4, 17. μνήσιος, ov, of memory (formed like κτήσιος), Theognost. Can. 58. 4. μνησῖ-πήμων, ov, gen. ovos, reminding of misery; μν. πόνος the pain~ Jul memory of woe, Aesch. Ag. 180. μνησιστέφἄνος, ov, mindful of crowns, ἀγών Pind. ap. Eust. Opuse. 56.422; μνησί-τοκοξ, ov, mindful of birth, fruitful, dub. in Hipp. 593. 3; Coraés (Plut. 3. p. 8) reads κνησίτοκος, making abortive. μνησῖ-χάρη, ἡ, (χαίρω) gaiety, Hesych. μνήσκομαι, for μιμνήσκομαι, Anacr. 69. 4; cf. ὑπομνήσκω. μνηστεία, 77, a wooing, courting, Plut. Cato Mi. 30, Luc. D. Deor. 20. 14: metaph. of great events, ἔτι ἐν py. εἶναι to be still suitors for the poet's favour, Plat. Menex. 239 C. μνήστειρα, Dor. μνάστ--, 4, fem. of μνηστήρ, a bride, Anth. P. 5. 276. 11. as Adj. mindful of, ᾿ΑφροδίταΞ μνάστειραν ὀπώραν Pind. I. 2.8; cf. μνηστήρ I. μνηστέον. verb. Adj. of μνάομαι, one must mention, τινός Dion. H. de Rhet. 2. 5, Eust. Μνησαρέτη was the real courtship, wooing, in pl., ἄλλης γυναικὸς ἐκπόνει μνήστευσις ---- μοῖρα. μνηστεύματα set about wooing another wife, Eur. Hel. 1514; ὦ κακὰ py. oh baneful sporsals, Id. Phoen. 580. μνήστευσις, 7, espousal, A. B. 107. μνηστευτικός, 7, dv, of or for courtship or espousal, Gloss.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  πικρία, 7, bitterness, 1. of taste, Arist. Plant. 2. 10, 1, Theophr. H. Ps 6), τον 75 Elut..2, 897 A,, Lxxi (Jer) m5.) τὰ; δέοι), 2. of temper, τὴν ἀπὸ THs ψυχῆς π. Dem. 580. 1, cf. 795. 7., 1482. 21, etc. ; ἡ ἐπί τινι π. Polyb. 15. 4, 11; πρός Twa Plut. Cor. 15; λόγος π. ἔχων μεμιγμένην χάριτι Id, Lyc. το. πικρίδιος, a, ov, somewhat bitter, σῦκα Ath. 78 A. πικρίζω, to be or taste bitter, Strab. 498, Clem. Al. 893. 2. proverbs, εἰς τὸν τετρημένον πίθον ἀντλεῖν of the task of | , , πικρίς --- πίμπλημι. πικρίϑ, (50s, ἡ, a bitter herb, perh. succory, endive, Arist. H. A. ο. 6, 8, Theophr. H. P. 7. 11, 4. πικρό-γἄμος, ov, miserably married, Od. 1. 260., 4. 346., 17. 137. πικρό-γλωσσοξ, ον, of sharp or bitter tongue, apat Aesch. Theb. 787. πικρο-θάνατος, ov, with bitter death, Byz. πικρό-θῦμος, ov, of bitter spirit, Manass. Chron. 3615. Byz. ΠΤ ταρπός, ov, bearing bitter fruit, Aesch. Theb. 693, Manass. Chron. 4317. πικρολογία, ἡ, bitterness of language, Arist. Virt. et Vit. 6, 3. πικρο-λόγος, ov, speaking bitter things, γλῶσσα Epigr. Gr. praef. 288 C. 4. ἘΠ Noros, ov, of the bitter lotus, σπέρμα Galen. πικρο-ποιός, Ov, causing bitterness, Eust. 820. 49, etc. πικρό-ποτοξ, ov, bitter to drink, Manass. Chron. 3989.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Our calorie-restricted meals were a back-to-basics homage to the original “Fatathon” of communal weight loss, conceived as an incentive and encouragement for Chuck to follow his own doctor-ordered diet. It was much easier for him if the whole community became involved in his program, which was limited to a strict eight hundred calories a day. During the Fatathon blitz, there was tremendous pressure from the community for the overweight to shed pounds fast. Some members who were already lean grumbled about the mandatory health program. The complainers were verbally blasted into compliance, forced to winnow away pounds as well. In back-to-basics, all of this came back, the diet requirements trickling down to the children in the form of toast without butter, meal portions cut sometimes by half and the abolishment of snacks.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  About once a week Warren asks for the laundered mittens, and I pretend to rummage around before wandering away, giving in to my failure as a laundress—read: mother. The other couples in the center look so blithe. They plead academic poverty but drive swanky foreign cars and live sweatered in cashmere. They take family vacations in beachy climes with grandparents who plunk seashells into buckets their toddler grandchildren tote while the couple slips off to the local bookstore or bakery to canoodle over steaming coffee. Our nearest grandparents are assiduously hands-off. Though Mrs. Whitbread had cranked out six kids like linked hot dogs, Warren’s upbringing was almost Victorian in its chill. By his testament, he’d been presented from time to time like a petit four, scrubbed up and bathrobed before bedtime for kisses. Otherwise, he’d been banished to a gulag nursery guarded by some icy servant. During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one. As for Mr. Whitbread, he seemed to eye Dev’s festive ramblings as he might have a cockroach’s. He once made the boy cry by calling him—beyond my earshot, of course—an ignorant little crud. Dev’s teary response, which Warren reported—You’re a big fat man with a red nose—proved Dev had enough Texan in him to take the patriarch in a verbal tussle. Other couples in our orbit had such easeful abundance inside their families. One took a pensione in Rome owned by somebody’s aunt who’s married to Lord Suck-on-This of the foreign service. Another woman’s uncle gave her a house down payment. It’s the most amazing piece of luck... It’s not luck! I want to scream. You’re rich! You’re rich, and your parents are rich. Of course the Whitbreads were, too, and none of them ever had a cavity that ached in the mouth like a rotted cypress stump for weeks on end. Nor did they have to scrounge nursery furniture from a garage sale. The only clothes Dev gets are handed down from my sister’s kid. That Lecia sends her son’s outgrown slick leather jackets and that fancy loafers come free never strikes me as fortune. Nor does my subsidized rent. Nor the fancy Harvard doctors Dev has through Warren’s job. Nor the Minks’ ongoing calls and letters. I have a gaze that blanks out luck any time I face it, like a black box over the eyes of a porn star. Whap and thunk. I compose my Christmas list for my in-laws, who always give exactly what you ask for—nothing more, nothing less. This year I’ve asked for a crockpot, but I secretly long for a Smith & Wesson. The machine jams.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Hippos are their theme animal, Mother and Harold’s. In the months since I’ve moved Daddy into the home, the old house has sprouted hippos all over. Money I’ve sent to help out has partly been used for the bloated, nappy furniture they laze on—also for redoing the bath, where Mother painted another cartoonlike mural of twin hippos, which I fear echoes the two of them nude together. Mother dials the phone while telling Harold to put some britches on. The silky polyester shirt he slides into has zigzag lightning bolts. Once the buttons are fastened, the front puckers. In our apartment in Cambridge, the phone squeals, and I holler to my husband, who’s typing in the next room, That’s her. Don’t answer it, he says. I know he’s right. The meetings I’ve been dipping into for children of alcoholics—at the urging of Tex—suggest I stay out of Mother’s orbit when she’s loaded. I started consulting Tex when she and Harold took off on this tear a few months back. But rather than steer clear of her like they all say, I’m morbidly compelled to connect with her. Pray about it, those religious morons suggest, for they fancy some bearded giant staring down from a cloud is gonna zap me into shape. But a god I don’t believe in can’t wave a wand over my mother to stop her drinking. Or wipe away thirty years of fret that therapy has just tamped down. Harold says I’m smoking hot, like a skillet, Mother says. Lucky you, I say. Y’all going out tonight? she wants to know. Hardly, I said. Warren’s working on an essay. I’m ghostwriting an article about the stock market for that business review. I’m on deadline—huge pressure. Actually, I’m not working on squat. I’ve been swilling chardonnay on the tiny porch—a back stair landing off our colonial—while headphones pump Mozart’s Requiem into my head over and over. However sorry for myself Mozart’s howling angels can make me, I want Mother to feel sorrier. This is part of our elaborate economy circa 1984. I send her money, and she lets me blame her for everything wrong with my life. She also intermittently berates me for becoming a corporate drudge. On the phone, she asks what we’re doing home on a Saturday night. You’re both sticks-in-the-mud, she tells me. Or is it stick-in-the-muds? We’re working, Mother. We’re not out drinking ourselves to death. Don’t start on me, she says. I was talking about Daddy, I say. But I hadn’t been talking about Daddy. I’d been trying to land a small barb through the thick fog around her. Since you moved your daddy out, Mother says, I feel like a teenager again. Is your blood pressure any better? I ask, hearing in the background the music from Flashdance start up. I’m so fat, she says, I’m scared to take my damn blood pressure.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  There wasn’t much interaction between Asian Americans and African Americans until the 1970s. As the two groups began interacting, tensions rose and led to events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The riots began on April 29 after a jury acquitted four officers of using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. Looting, arson, and killings resulted, and more than twenty-three hundred Korean-owned businesses were burned down or looted. This incident created deep tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans, as each blamed the other. These tensions flared again in the Baltimore riots in 2015 following the arrest and death of Freddie Gray. More than forty-two Korean American businesses were looted, burned, or damaged, and many business owners had no insurance or were underinsured. The damage done against the livelihood of Korean Americans was grave, and the tension between Korean Americans and African Americans is still evident.10 As of now there has not been much dialogue or intentional conversation between Korean Americans and African Americans. They view each other with suspicion. We are busy having conversations with other conversation partners but have neglected this very important discussion. Dialogue needs to be opened if the two groups want to move forward and have a better relationship with each other and with the wider community. In addition to the evidence from the world of the need for reconciliation, in 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 Paul challenges us to embrace this vision and ministry. What is our core motivation for reconciliation? “Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Cor 5:14-15 ). This extravagant love, which was revealed in the life, message, and death of Jesus, and which was poured out for all peoples, compels us to pursue a ministry of reconciliation. We do this as we live for him who died for all and was resurrected for all. We now see people in a new way, shaped by the love and reconciling work of God. Our fellow believers are new creations, and our ministry is to take this reconciling message to the world. God has reconciled humanity to Godself in Jesus Christ, and God reconciles people to each other. Notice the movements in this story. First God reconciles us to Godself. Then God reconciles us with each other and gives us the ministry of reconciliation. The order is important, as it frames our theology of reconciliation as well as our purpose and posture in reconciliation. God makes us ambassadors of his reconciliation. Through our love, forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation, we reveal the righteousness and hope of God. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  His head went back. The sensation mounted a spectrum without terminal. He opened his mouth and tried to scream with airless lungs. His face locked on a smile; the immobility was agony. “ Now what the hell you call yourself doing?” His calf, beyond unengulfable oceans, shook. One arm beat about his head. And a voice, a woman’s voice, pricked him with jewels of what was so much more than pleasure he could not define it. He sobbed (without voice), while she cried out in the darkness: CATHERINE FROM THE ALTAR: I could be crass and simply begin by saying: that I am sitting here on this stained napkin, my legs spread, a cross in one hand, a cock in the other, and still I have time to think, means (by definition, no?) you’ve failed. But I beg the point. Who can satisfy me? You, or you, or you? None of you comes at me with that complete, unbridled lust to which I would quite happily give myself up. I have seen more of it through a ship’s porthole hours ago than any of you can demonstrate. The rest of you arrive with variations of pride, resentment—Oh, Jonathan, that you blame on your obsession with me whatever imbalances mar your creation as proof of my culpability: for shame! That may be enough to keep a stiff dick or a sloppy box. I do, however, demand more than that, even without broaching the swamp of love that already you have so dishonestly touched your toe to—let’s be honest—not to prepare for the truth you had to tell, but to mask that other you have so unfairly left for me. Seven times between noon and midnight? Frankly, Captain—and I am sure more than one of you has had the thought trickle through—if the devil can’t accomplish that with ease, he isn’t much of a man. Had you set your task, Jonathan, as the rounded and rich rendering of the interface between the actual and the ideal, I would be bound, however reluctantly, to accept any amount of moral slippage. But what am I—what are any of us—to do with such concise and conscious striving after the false note, the mawkish, and the thin? No, the lack of interest you have shown in your satisfaction since sunset is indicative of something more. A new age? Perhaps it signals an inchoate uncertainty whether or not you really want to give up this present one. After all, it’s been quite good to you. It has granted you all these previous joys. Are you willing to relinquish them for the fifty-fifty possibility of pain or pleasure? As well as a certainty of the unpleasantness bound to accompany the adjustment period? What is required here, someplace between the kisses and the bites, the whips, the thrusting loins, the tensed buttocks, is one consciousness that will move freely to its own total engulfment in pleasure.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I’m starting to feel all clean inside, she says. How does that happen? I want to know, for I keep having dreams that I’m getting sneakily drunk and trying to hide it from people in my group. I’m making amends to people I’ve screwed over, she says. Like I shoplifted a bunch of stuff from this deli, and so I brought the guy thirty bucks. Korean guy. He was really nice about it. The snowy roads make us fishtail now and then, and traffic has started to drag. See, I resent this shit, I say, pressing on the horn, adding, Even the fucking traffic feels orchestrated to fuck me up. Dev needs to eat. You need to get home before dinner curfew or you’re grounded. It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh? I laugh, saying, Making amends to other people isn’t high on my list right now. I’m still too pissed at everybody. Think of all the ways you’ve let yourself down, resentments against yourself, she says, and she looks at me from down her turned-up nose. I say, I’m too much of an asshole even to contemplate looking at that carnage. Listen to how you let your own mind talk to you, she says. You’d fight anybody to the ground who said that shit to you. Just as traffic starts to ease up, the car’s engine light goes on. A mile or so later, steam starts pouring from the hood. I steer to the far lane, cars whooshing past in snow. Dev wakes up blinking and crimson-cheeked in his down jacket, really hungry. Stepping out of the car, I land ankle-deep in slush and start swearing under my breath. But no sooner do I pop the hood than a vehicle pulls alongside. Joe and Sam happen to be driving a borrowed tow truck that has—another stroke of fortune—jugs of blue engine coolant. From a paper bag on the dash, Joe’s massive mitt draws out a glazed donut for Dev. He says, Here you go, tough guy. We all stand on the side of the road in the blue dusk, Dev snug in big Joe’s arm and gnawing the pastry as Sam doctors the radiator. For an instant, I can feel the gratitude seep up from my damp footsoles—one of my first pure instances of it. Back in the car, I announce it to Chris. Say thanks, then, she says. I just did. Joe wouldn’t even let me pay for the antifreeze. I meant, she says, say thanks to your higher power. I look at her round girlish face. She still has a few snowflakes in her dark lashes. Thanks, H.P., I say, but it actually shames me, for some reason, to say such a dumb thing. (A year later, Chris would flee the house to stick up a bank with a machine gun. She’d cop heroin and overdose in a park.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The Whitbread family tree sports nary a divorce, and it shames Warren to break the news. Once he does, the channels between the family and me snap so totally shut, I don’t hear the fallout. While my clan views the split as a done deal, Mother can’t feature me without Warren’s solidity. The boat I row (financially speaking) is fully loaded and taking water, but so’s Warren’s. Warren loans me our sole vehicle pretty much on demand, but it galls me to ask him. Facing walls of ice at my drive’s end, I try to tell myself that not having a car to shovel out is a bonus, but climbing over slippery, filthy edifices to reach a bus stop, Dev’s mittened hand in mine, I curse the oyster-gray sky and the fat flakes that Dev never tires of catching on his tongue. The bus to Dev’s after-school takes a full hour each way, and pulling him in a red wagon to and from the grocery store leaves me feeling stranded as a polar explorer. (People who’ve never seen a credit-union employee roll her eyes when you request a two-thousand-dollar car note will say, Just borrow.) In Syracuse, I find another circle of identical shit-brown chairs occupied by sober strangers, and I call Joan the Bone to complain about the mildewy carpet and the chilblains I get wearing wet boots in the unheated room. She says, Uh-huh. Are they sober? While Joan’s never more than a phone call away, she can’t be my polestar at such a remove. Before I moved, we’d agreed I’d have to find a local contender. You’re irreplaceable, I tell her on the phone. I am, aren’t I? she says, nudging me by phone to court Patti—a former English teacher who helps run an outpatient rehab—a petite woman with a blond bob and the energy of a fire truck. She has enough outlaw in her to start, at one point, dating a biker in our acquaintance, and while I see her heart-shaped face at public lectures and bookstores, I also catch sight of her at a stoplight on the back of a Harley-Davidson, staring from the helmet’s visor like a road warrior. Over coffee, she worries that she doesn’t have the time to counsel me, what with her hellacious job and raising two kids alone while caring for an aged mother. But she takes my calls and listens to me whine. (Still does, seventeen years later.) When Dev has bronchitis and his codeine cough syrup looks tasty one night, it’s Patti who squirrels the bottle away in her glove box and drives by after work every evening to dispense his single teaspoon.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  The more perceptive among you by now have intuited (if only by the lack of space devoted to her) that Catherine is the passionate concern. Our first encounter focused on a recognition of death. At this writing, she is the only character whose fate I do not know. Bull, Nazi, Nig, Kim, Sambo, Dove, Benny, Gunner, Kirsten, you nameless beast in the cellar, and you too, we must hunt her, for she is terribly powerful. Captain, it is your addition to our entourage that steels me to face her. You bring an implication of mythic chaos with which to tempt her. She must be destroyed. She has spied on the devil, and now employs what she has learned to indulge freedoms that absolutely threaten us. Her scarcity in this narrative is the first sign of her power. You have no doubt deduced the standing competition between us. I have presented only an encounter during which, I think you will agree, she lost and I was a generous winner. There are very few of those. That there is no example I personally can bear to present where victory went otherwise, even to service that vaunted symmetry which I hold inviable:—there is the major indicator of her strength: That, as an obsession, she can so mar my intended effect of grace, gusto, and compression, simply by not showing up! It is her aesthetic and ethical elusiveness that make her the subject of the hunt. She is no figurine gratuite marked up to pay for the resonances of this tale. Her import is all I have not told you, am unable to tell you. Blame on her the distortions you have already noted in what I have tried to display. If you have any outrage left for that, then perhaps you will feel a little of what I feel for her. Yes, my view is distorted, but do not think it is small, or without compassion. Were it, believe me, it would generate no such obsession. She has spied on the devil. But so have you. So have we all, and indulged the irony of recognition, which, on a greater scale, is her only crime. Oh, she enjoys the theatre (perhaps gluts herself upon it), museums, has an entire life of the mind I have only implied. She reads of the destruction of young women in novels such as these and takes pleasure in it. She finds it amusing when innocent young men are executed for the unspeakable. But I need not go into her facility in the management of property, politics, or the division of money. Many of us have lain with her, not all against our will as did the poor monster mad in the cellar; most of us, not surprisingly have fared better than he. Notice I have spared you the evocation of sympathy for him as spur to our revenge. But, Captain, if you are compassionate . . .

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He notes, first, that “Galilee emerges as an area transformed by the presence of Roman cities and influenced by Roman institutions and ideals. Sepphoris … provides a particularly good example of how the process of urbanization affected a mixed population, both in the city itself and in its dependent villages…. It is no longer possible to think of Jesus as a simple peasant from Nazareth (dare one say ‘a good old country boy’?) nor to describe the disciples as ‘hillbillies from Galilee’” (14). All of that is as correct as its opposition of peasantry and urbanization is inadequate. But once again, Longstaff at least recognizes that, “while [his] essay argues that the influence of Roman urbanization was all-pervasive, it should not be understood to romanticize urban culture. While urban culture offers many advantages, there are disadvantages as well. Urbanization often brings with it a measure of oppression. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is frequently widened. Those who thrive in the city often do so at the expense of those in the dependent villages who do not” (14). Although words such as often and frequently mute somewhat the systemic or structural injustice of peasant-city relationships, that at least warns against moving from the rural romanticism of Renan to the urban romanticism of Batey. Three final comments on peasants and cities. From Robert Redfield: “There were no peasants before the first cities. And those surviving primitive peoples who do not live in terms of the city are not peasants” (31). From George Foster: “The primary criterion for defining peasant society is structural—the relationship between the village and the city (or the state)” (8). From Moses Finley: “The peasant was an integral element in the ancient city” (1977:322). It is necessary, once and for all, to stop confusing isolated with rural with peasant and to start taking the term peasant as it is used in cross-cultural anthropology. Otherwise exegetes who use cross-cultural anthropology and archeologists who do not will simply talk past one another forever. Peasants and cities go hand in hand. They are the necessarily twin sides of an oppressive or exploitative system . Sepphoris and Tiberias All of the more advanced agrarian societies resembled a tree or plant with a system of feeder roots spreading over a vast area, tapping the surplus and moving it, by stages, to the ultimate consumers, the urban population. At the outer limits of this system were thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of small peasant villages, each typically containing a few hundred residents…. On the one hand there was a steady flow of goods from the peasant villages to the urban centers. In return, the villages received certain services of a political, cultural, religious, educational, and commercial nature…. Thus these relationships which developed between the villages and the urban centers were essentially symbiotic in character, but with definite overtones of parasitism….

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  After, I snap Dev in his car seat and drive Chris home. She’s nineteen, six months clean, with lush dark hair and the pink cheeks of a cheerleader. In the car, she talks about heroin as a devious lover. Her voice is smoky as a lounge singer’s, a real Billie Holiday rasp. I look in the rearview. She ran Dev around so hard in the quad earlier, he’s slumped over in his car seat. So I ask Chris how sobriety’s treating her. This is the cusp of my starting to ask after other people—a change from pouting alone on the porch before. I’m starting to feel all clean inside, she says. How does that happen? I want to know, for I keep having dreams that I’m getting sneakily drunk and trying to hide it from people in my group. I’m making amends to people I’ve screwed over, she says. Like I shoplifted a bunch of stuff from this deli, and so I brought the guy thirty bucks. Korean guy. He was really nice about it. The snowy roads make us fishtail now and then, and traffic has started to drag. See, I resent this shit, I say, pressing on the horn, adding, Even the fucking traffic feels orchestrated to fuck me up. Dev needs to eat. You need to get home before dinner curfew or you’re grounded. It’s funny, she says, how everybody else is traffic, huh? I laugh, saying, Making amends to other people isn’t high on my list right now. I’m still too pissed at everybody. Think of all the ways you’ve let yourself down, resentments against yourself, she says, and she looks at me from down her turned-up nose. I say, I’m too much of an asshole even to contemplate looking at that carnage. Listen to how you let your own mind talk to you, she says. You’d fight anybody to the ground who said that shit to you. Just as traffic starts to ease up, the car’s engine light goes on. A mile or so later, steam starts pouring from the hood. I steer to the far lane, cars whooshing past in snow. Dev wakes up blinking and crimson-cheeked in his down jacket, really hungry. Stepping out of the car, I land ankle-deep in slush and start swearing under my breath. But no sooner do I pop the hood than a vehicle pulls alongside. Joe and Sam happen to be driving a borrowed tow truck that has—another stroke of fortune—jugs of blue engine coolant. From a paper bag on the dash, Joe’s massive mitt draws out a glazed donut for Dev. He says, Here you go, tough guy. We all stand on the side of the road in the blue dusk, Dev snug in big Joe’s arm and gnawing the pastry as Sam doctors the radiator. For an instant, I can feel the gratitude seep up from my damp footsoles—one of my first pure instances of it. Back in the car, I announce it to Chris.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Fisher hammered away most directly and colorfully at the idea that the Revolution had broken the progressive thread of American history. The pre-Revolutionary period had in truth, he said, been full of arcadian gaiety and bucolic virtue; the people had lived “a glorious life of enjoyment.” “It was merry England transported across the Atlantic, and more merry, light, and joyous than England had ever thought of being.” Then came the Revolution, which ushered in the money-grubbing culture of a “sullen and depressed” polyglot populace that had no notion of how to amuse itself and furthermore was dominated by elements of the lower classes which in the colonial period had been firmly controlled by the aristocracy. The Revolution, far from having been the “spontaneous, unanimous uprising, all righteousness, perfection, and infallibility” that Americans had been taught to think true, had actually been an unpleasant affair, as full of atrocities, mistakes, and absurdities as any other such upheaval. And the history of the loyalists proved it. The terror they had been forced to endure at the hands of the Revolutionary mobs was doubly revealing, Fisher claimed in detailing their sufferings. It illustrated, first, the essential violence and brutality of the Revolutionary movement, and it marked “the rise of the ignorant classes into power and the steady deterioration in the character and manners of public men.”16 Conceptually, the loyalists were essential to Fisher’s story, and it is not surprising that his most effective piece of writing is an essay in which he reviewed the role of the loyalists in the historiography of the Revolution.17 It was with them that his sympathies lay. Their plight offered him intellectual control over the social dislocations of his own time, for in his identification with them he found a means of removing himself from the present and associating himself with an original, authentic American tradition from which the present had departed. So too Ellis, an inner émigré, felt a deep kinship with the loyalists. They had simply been conservatives, and none the worse for that. For the Revolutionary movement, Ellis made clear, had been born in the lawlessness of the radicals and the destructiveness and terrorism of the mobs. As leading conservatives, the loyalists had been “intelligent and excellent persons, who dearly loved their country”; they had been subjected to the worst kinds of abuse simply because they hesitated to join a rebellion. Of what had the loyalists in fact been guilty?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He was an illiterate peasant, but with an oral brilliance that few of those trained in literate and scribal disciplines can ever attain. When today we read his words in fixed and frozen texts we must recognize that the oral memory of his first audiences could have retained, at best, only the striking image, the startling analogy, the forceful conjunction, and, for example, the plot summary of a parable that might have taken an hour or more to tell and perform. I give several examples of what the here-and-now Kingdom of God meant for Jesus, from each of the major genres in which that oral memory preserved, developed, but also created such traditions. Tearing the Family Apart If the supreme value for the twentieth-century American imagination is individualism , based on economics and property, that for the first-century Mediterranean imagination can be called, to the contrary, groupism , based on kinship and gender. And there were really only two groups—the familial and the political, kinship and politics—to be considered. But we have, precisely against both those groups, biting aphorisms and dialogues from the historical Jesus. There is, first of all, an almost savage attack on family values, and it happens very, very often. Here are four quite different examples. Each has different versions available, but I give only one version for each example. The first one is from the Gospel of Thomas 55, the second from Mark 3:31–35, the third from the Q Gospel in Luke 11:27–28 but with no Matthean parallel, and the final one from the Q Gospel in Luke 12:51–53 rather than in Matthew 10:34–36. (1) Jesus said, “Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters…will not be worthy of me.” (2) Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him…. And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (3) A woman from the crowd spoke up and said to him, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” But he said, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (4) “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” The family is a group to which one is irrevocably assigned, but in those first two units, that given grouping is negated in favor of another one open to all who wish to join it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Whazzat? his look says. Is the water too hot? I say. It’s body temperature, just like you said. Don’t yell in front of him, I say. I’m not yelling, he says, I’m trying to take care of my son without you hounding me. Dev’s arm flies by his face again, and he startles as if thinking, There it goes again! You really adore him, I say. Warren looks at me. Of course, I do, he says, he’s my son. (Was this tone matter-of-fact or territorial? Did I—in my postpartum weariness—impose the most negative slant? Toward me, he tightened every line, which opposed the shining face he brought to the baby.) I’m leaving you a warm towel here, I say. It’s got a little hood. For God’s sake. Well, you have to keep his head warm. Goddamn it, Mare. Just go upstairs. On the stairwell, I overhear another of Warren’s compositions: I really like my mother. I wouldn’t have another. My father is a very special guy. Dev makes a chortling noise.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  For Scotsmen, this pride was reinforced by the treatment they received in England, where their very considerable successes remained in inverse proportion to their popularity. One day, Ossian, Burns, and Highland tours might help to wipe out even memories of Bute. Meanwhile, in spite of their own “Breetish” Coffee House, life in London was not always easy for visitors from north of the Tweed. “Get home to your crowdie, and be d—d to you! Ha’ye got your parritch yet? When will you get a sheeps-head or a haggis, you ill-far’d lown? Did you ever see meat in Scotland, saving oatmeal hasty pudding? Keep out of his way, Thomas, or you’ll get the itch!”29 The young Scotsman thus recounting his London reception added that there was little real malice behind such common jibes. But Boswell’s blood boiled with indignation when he heard shouts of “No Scots, No Scots! Out with them!” at Covent Garden. Yet only a few months later, he may be found addressing a memorandum to himself to “be retenu to avoid Scotch sarcasting jocularity,” and describing a fellow countryman as “a hearty, honest fellow, knowing and active, but Scotch to the very backbone.”30 The deepest result of this complicated involvement in British society was that the provincial’s view of the world was discontinuous. Two forces, two magnets, affected his efforts to find adequate standards and styles: the values associated with the simplicity and purity (real or imagined) of nativism, and those to be found in cosmopolitan sophistication. Those who could take entire satisfaction in either could maintain a consistent position. But for provincials, exposed to both, an exclusive, singular conception of either kind was too narrow. It meant a rootlessness, an alienation either from the higher sources of culture or from the familiar local environment that had formed the personality. Few whose perceptions surpassed local boundaries rested content with a simple, consistent image of themselves or of the world. Provincial culture, in eighteenth-century Scotland as in colonial America, was formed in the mingling of these visions. The effect of this situation on cultural growth in the two regions cannot, of course, be measured. Undoubtedly, provincialism sometimes served to inhibit creative effort. But we suggest that there existed important factors which more than balanced the deleterious effects. The complexity of the provincial’s image of the world and of himself made demands upon him unlike those felt by the equivalent Englishman. It tended to shake the mind from the roots of habit and tradition. It led men to the interstices of common thought where were found new views and new approaches to the old. It cannot account for the existence of men of genius, but to take it into consideration may help us understand the conditions which fostered in such men the originality and creative imagination that we associate with the highest achievements of the enlightenment in Scotland and America. 8 Peopling the Peripheries

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  17 No Mom Is an Island I was always waiting, always there. Know anyone else who can say that. —Franz Wright, “Alcohol” Through the baby monitor comes a single raspy cough. It barely pierces the heavy sleep that wraps my skull in sodden layers of papier-mâché. Static follows, then a tinny whimper. I fold one pillow over my head. Another gets tucked in my concavities. The husband’s long body unrolls. The white noise machine he’s installed to block out all disturbance makes the brain-sucking racket of a dentist’s drain. It vacuums all consciousness from my head. Sleep. Till a doubled cough punctures my head like two shots from a nail gun. I blink my eyes open to the room, immaculately black as he likes it, but for the faint luminosity of the upraised clock hands (2:50) and the tiny red snake eye of the monitor. I fix on it to stop my mind’s inward roiling vertigo an instant —a marble looping around a barrel. My head is grinding out bad news: That bruise on your shin is bone cancer.... But one glance at the husband’s profile, and I flash on my only happy thought for weeks, the smooth moonstone of an idea. If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow—the kind that cartoon characters whip from their sleeves— I could muster the strength to rear up and whack him vigorously about the head. My mouth creaks toward a smile at the prospect, since his sleep has been unbroken now for almost a year. I gaze at him from under the pillow like a rattler under a rock. A swerving comet’s tail of silence issues from the monitor. I let my eyes seal shut, then inwardly tumble back down the black tunnel of oblivion that’s my one aspiration. During my teetotaling pregnancy, when my hormonal stupor must’ve helped me sober up cold turkey, I envisioned these night wakings as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Hearing baby gurgle and coo, I’d leap up to float—smiling and moonlit and brimming with breast milk—in frothy gown to the crib in the next room, Three gasping coughs in rapid succession, rat-a-tat-tat. I blink at the clock hands (2:58). Silence. I’ll get up, my husband says. His muscular arm starts to feel around the night table for his glasses. To which a sane woman with classes to teach tomorrow would’ve said, Thanks, hon, as she sank back into slumbering meadows. He offers again, and again I say no, which is not—as I mean him to think it is—concern for his obligations. Nor is it maternal love for my blond and improbably blue-eyed toddler, just old enough to be lurching around the coffee table, chortling with every stumpy step. I tell the husband I’ve got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  He’ll also remember the claim of Philosophy David (who’s working a security job while trying to start a novel) that a doctor made him keep the bandana on his head else it might explode. Several afternoons a week we spend with this company. Let go, they urge me. Let go. I have no idea what this letting go means beyond surrounding myself with sober women—I mostly talk to women—and grouchily taking their suggestions. But each sober day seems to widen the chasm between Warren and me. The halfway house is another hiding place from our troubles. With our therapist, I sit across the room and rail. Rather than scrutinize my own absence—first via booze, now via recovery—I devote each session to old grievances. How Warren went running during Daddy’s funeral, took his paternity leave when Dev and I were still in the hospital, left every single late- night feeding for me to handle alone. Not that these complaints don’t have weight, but I nurse my grudges like foundlings. For his part, he succinctly itemizes the shrewish railings I’ve unleashed on him. Eventually, he says, I can’t undo the past, Mare. What about now? Surely you’re not gonna be one of those women, the doctor says, who gets her husband’s attention and then bails out just when there’s a chance to get a marriage she wants? But I am. I say, I just don’t trust that he cares for me the way I want. What you want, nobody can give you, he says. Intimacy exercises that involve backrubs and kissing, I flatly refuse to do. There’s a door slammed shut in me that I’ve barred. And Warren says—on the topic of our nonexistent sex life—One day you’re gonna reach for me, and I won’t be there. (From today’s vantage, my withdrawal and coldness seem so corrosive and mean, I want to shake my young self.) Prayer isn’t patching up the marriage yet, though applied to small problems from time to time, it sometimes yields up a feasible idea. Stranded without child care once, I figure out after a prayer—it comes to me—that I could slip Chris, an ex-hooker from the house, a few bucks to hang out in the quad with Dev for a spell, which seems safe enough for an hour or so. After, I snap Dev in his car seat and drive Chris home. She’s nineteen, six months clean, with lush dark hair and the pink cheeks of a cheerleader. In the car, she talks about heroin as a devious lover. Her voice is smoky as a lounge singer’s, a real Billie Holiday rasp. I look in the rearview. She ran Dev around so hard in the quad earlier, he’s slumped over in his car seat. So I ask Chris how sobriety’s treating her. This is the cusp of my starting to ask after other people—a change from pouting alone on the porch before.