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 Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The pious narrative of Alypius’s earlier life that we get in the sixth book of the Confessions is mostly irrelevant. It tells us only that he came of a good family, better than Augustine’s, and had the prospects of a good career in public life through the law. He made his way up the ladder as an attorney at Carthage, Rome, and Milan. Like Augustine, he abandoned a promising career in the world while he and Augustine were in Italy; he, too, voyaged back to Africa in 388; and he spent the rest of his life living in Tagaste. When Augustine went away to Hippo and was ordained, Alypius stayed on, and, though younger than Augustine, became bishop of Tagaste while Augustine was still a junior cleric at Hippo. At the crucial conference with the Donatists in 411 he was always the legal eagle, the man of procedure and accuracy, never rising to Augustine’s theological level but watching fact and process carefully. While Augustine confined his travels to Africa, and mainly to the route back and forth from Hippo to Carthage, Alypius was more adventurous. His business took him to meet people Augustine only shared letters with, including Jerome in the Holy Land and many in Italy. Particularly in the fraught years of 418–23, Alypius was the man on the case for the African church, going back and forth to the court at Ravenna, making sure that post-Donatist and anti-Pelagian initiatives did not misfire. Hostile contemporaries accused him of going beyond what was proper as well, delivering eighty horses to highly placed dignitaries at the court at Ravenna in order to assure their favor to his causes.192 In an earlier time, in 397 or a little before, when he and Augustine found themselves in a public debate up-country in Numidian Thubursicu, the Donatist bishop of that place, Fortunius, whipped out a book to prove that overseas bishops had written friendly letters to the African Donatus, a telling sign of “communion” with the rest of the world if true. Alypius was the one to notice that the book favored the Arian heretics and was thus suspect.193 We hear of Alypius last in 428, and do not know whether he outlived Augustine. He was not seen at his friend’s deathbed (if Possidius has not simply forgotten to mention him). So far, so good. But a few odd things strike us about Alypius. First, the tensions between Augustine and his friend. A quarrel in 411 over the visit of two wealthy and devout Italians pushed them apart. We will see how threatened Alypius felt as he stood that day in Augustine’s church, and Augustine’s letter to Alypius afterwards shows the resentment and unhappiness Alypius felt.194 Strikingly absent is the warmth and freshness, even if stylized, of the letters exchanged with Severus.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In 413 another revolt broke out. Heraclian now was the military leader in Africa who led troops against imperial forces until he, too, was broken and killed. In the months that followed, another purge ran through the province, and it finally carried off among its victims Marcellinus, Augustine’s friend and partner. The devout layman who had come to Africa to do the government’s bidding and in so doing rescued and enthroned Augustine’s church was suddenly and brutally taken out and executed, just when Augustine thought that diplomatic efforts had succeeded in sparing him.443 Augustine took that killing as a direct hit. It told him indeed just who was boss, told him that churchmen served at the pleasure of the most powerful military force and were well advised to align themselves with it. Augustine went back to Hippo to recover his bearings and stayed away from Carthage longer than he had in quite some time, perhaps three years in all. Ambrose had challenged the emperor Theodosius and succeeded after the emperor ordered a massacre in the circus at Thessalonica;444 Augustine never challenged any imperial authority. After his return to Carthage in 416, he showed that he knew where authority lay, and in his last years chose to curry favor not with the wealthy aristocrats he had sought out in the 390s and 400s, but now with the hard men, the military and political enforcers Rome sent to Africa: men like Boniface, Darius, Macedonius.445 In his last years, Augustine resembles nothing so much as one of those pious churchmen of Francoist times, leader of a state-promoted church, followed prudently by many, despised quietly by some, and opposed fiercely by a remnant quite sure of its own fidelity to a truer church. Boniface was the strongest figure the Roman government had seen in Africa, and for a long time, he and Augustine were as close as either could have hoped. At one point, the devout general went so far as to indicate that he was thinking of entering a monastery, and Augustine and Alypius made an arduous and uncharacteristic journey up into the Numidian country to meet with him at Tubunae and talk him out of his particular form of devotion. He was more urgently needed to stay in command and defend the province from unspecified depredations from the desert south. But not long after, Boniface had been widowed, gone away to Italy on a visit, and returned with a new bride, herself a Christian but of the wrong sort (Arian)—in other words, probably a “barbarian.” The man had even taken concubines; few besides Augustine would be surprised. Getting it right ecclesiastically was vital to Augustine, and he could not control himself. In a lengthy letter, he berated his erstwhile friend for his personal failures and bemoaned the military misfortunes now being experienced at the hands of African barbarians (Afri barbari).446

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I eat: french fries with gravy. Liver with greasy heaps of onions. Dried strawberries smudged with gorgonzola cheese, crackers slathered with fig jam. Stepping on the scale, I hear my doctor admonish that I’ll gain fifty pounds if I don’t slow down, but I couldn’t care less. How proud I feel shoving that giant globe of a belly through the subway turnstile. But the more heft I have, the more elusive Warren seems to become, the more transparent, retreating into a void I stare into, studying him while he reads, repeatedly poking my head into his office the weekends he works. Maybe he’s having an affair, Mother says. That’s how some guys react to fatherhood. Mother! I say. Warren’s not like that. Has he started drinking more? she asks, adding, His daddy could sure put it away. Not everybody’s a sot, I say. More than two drinks and Warren gets pukey. One night he leaves a message not to hold dinner, he won’t be home till ten. The car pulls into the garage, and he finds me sitting on the back steps. Where were you? I say, reaching for the stair railing to pull myself up, belly first. He unfolds from the hatchback, arms laden with books. School, he says. What school? I say. For what? (Had we really not discussed this? Surely we did, but I don’t recall it that way.) I told you I was starting school for my master’s. It’s paid for through work. I thought next fall, after the baby came, I say. You shouldn’t be out here without a coat, he says. Don’t you think it’s bad timing? I say. You’re one to talk, he says, gesturing to my belly . Can you at least not take summer classes? The baby’ll come in June. He sighs. Maybe this year. But I want to get it over with. During the week, he leaves at eight in the morning, and three nights a week, he gets in after ten. Weekends, he always seems to be working on papers or that literary magazine he cofounded. Lying next to him, my body swells as if hooked to a bicycle pump, and with each inch of girth, he floats further, and I began slowly to shift my gaze away from his back. I start to stare inward to the pearlescent mystery I’m carrying. Some nights I tell myself the birth will bring Warren back to me. (And maybe—in his version of events—he’d report that I’d studied baby books with a Talmudic intensity, hardly reading anymore the poetry he was devoted to. The bigger I got, the lower my IQ, I swear. It’s not politic to say so, but hey. Maybe Warren was telling himself the birth would bring me back to him.) One day, as I meticulously fold and refold minuscule T-shirts and onesies in the trance of the deeply unprepared, the phone rings.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I took my first sip from the shot glass, and Lory did the same. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead and say what you have to say. I’m listening.” “I’m not sure I know what to say,” she said, exchanging her shot glass for the cup of tea. “I can’t say I was surprised when Mom told me about you and Ross. You two got married so young, and I know what a drag it can be to be married to an immature, overly emotional person.” Lory had never thought much of Ross and always kept her distance from him. Losing him as a brother-in-law would be no great loss for her. I think he reminded her of her first husband. They had similar carefree traits and just happened to have become friends during the time of her divorce. That made Ross suspect to Lory, and he never outgrew her bias. “Ever since you bought your house, you’ve been under a lot of pressure,” she said. “And renovating the kitchen so quickly was a mistake. Borrowing the money to make that happen only caused you more financial pressure.” She took another sip of tea. “A new house, new car, new kitchen—no wonder you had to work so much.” She didn’t say any of this with harshness, but more as a resigned observation. I had to admit, there was a thread of truth in what she said. We’d spent a lot of money in the previous two years, and how to manage our finances was a source of strain for Ross and me. Still, I resented her conclusion that money was at the heart of my woes. “It would be easy to compare our failed marriages, but you may wish to remember that you don’t have all the information,” I said, pleased by my boldness. She was falling into the easy trap of comparing my situation to what she’d gone through almost ten years earlier, making judgments and assumptions along the way. “I’m not doing my job to keep the wolves at bay, Lory. I enjoy what I do for a living. My work is more than just a paycheck to me.” She shook her head. “Which is exactly what I’m afraid of,” she said. “This whole work scene has gone to your head. I’m sure you’re good at what you do, but is it worth risking your life?” Her eyes got all watery, and she looked at me with a combination of warmth and fear that I had never seen before. “Lindy,” she continued, her voice soft and sibilant, “you’ve never done anything wrong in your whole life. Ever. You’ve always been a good girl. You’ve got a great reputation. Everyone looks up to you.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  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. You’ve never been fat in your life, I say. I’ll bet he’s still wearing his poison ring. One of the ways my sister and I stay convinced that Harold’s gay is the hinged ring he carries valium in. He wears those cheap ass gold chains—she raises her voice in Harold’s direction— that’re turning his chest green . In the doorway across from me, Warren comes to mime hanging up the phone, and I raise my index finger to indicate I’ll be a sec. Why don’t I put the phone down? She’s ranting about the losers in the damn sobriety group Tex goes to. She says, His daddy told him I didn’t want him, which was a goddamn lie. Who does that to a baby? He might not have been an alcoholic without that. I thought you and Harold were gonna go to some meetings with him?

• 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” T hrough 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 Martin Luther (2016)

  The letter, brilliantly formulated so as to stress their loyalty, reveals that their position was in fact closer to Karlstadt’s, since they too were purifying their churches of images and beginning to raise questions about the Real Presence in the sacrament. They bluntly informed Luther that in Zurich, Basle, and even in Strasbourg, most biblically informed people shared Karlstadt’s views. 44 Indeed, it seems that many found Karlstadt’s explanation of the sacrament and his belief in the spiritual presence of Christ to be the more persuasive. Karlstadt’s maturing theology was clearly marked by his experiences at Wittenberg, where the communal reformation had fired his enthusiasm. This vision was popular elsewhere, too, particularly in southern Germany, because it entailed social reform with a renewal of morals, reorganized poor relief, and popular lay involvement. It was very different from Luther’s ideal of a top-down Reformation. Some also disliked Luther’s attempt to impose his views on others by appealing to their personal loyalty. “I am very upset by the dissension between Karlstadt and yourself,” Otto Brunfels wrote, “for I favour you both, and I do not love you in such a way that I cannot also embrace Karlstadt most sincerely.” 45 The grammarian Valentin Ickelsamer complained of Luther’s writings, “what are these booklets against the spirit of Allstedt…but a cunning attempt to provoke the princes against good Karlstadt?” 46 Outside Wittenberg, the spectacle of the two reformers in discord was seen as disastrous for the Reformation’s image, and while Karlstadt had been careful to hold back from attacking his former colleague, Luther had taken to publicly accusing Karlstadt of being possessed by the Devil. 47 Yet Karlstadt never set himself up as a rival to Luther; had he done so, the story of the Reformation might well have been different. Luther seemed well aware of just how much was at risk, and it is an indication of his concern that he replied to the letter of the Strasbourg preachers not with a manuscript missive, but with a printed public letter, which he duly dispatched via their messenger. 48 The delay in his response, caused by printing his letter, had far-reaching consequences. The Strasbourgers had written to Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich at the same time; Zwingli now also denied the Real Presence in the sacrament, and his handwritten letter arrived before Luther’s printed reply. Martin Bucer, previously inclined to Luther, was persuaded by Zwingli’s views “with hand and foot,” as a delighted Capito reported. 49 In his response, Luther mused unwisely, “I confess, that if Dr. Karlstadt or someone else had been able to instruct me five years ago, that there was nothing but bread and wine in the sacrament, he would have done me a great service.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  10 Bound He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, “Yes, they have more money.” —Ernest Hemingway, “Snows of Kilimanjaro” W hen two hearts beat as one, there are in-laws to bond with, or, in my family’s case, outlaws. But for our first years Warren and I never go to Texas, not once. (Later, I’ll resent this like hell, but I don’t recall arguing about it much.) Daddy’s dying in the house I grew up in, while Mother begrudgingly nurses him. Yet Warren’s sense of duty to his own family is a virtue I so hope will tether him to me that I try to take on his obligation as my own. Plus if I didn’t go with him, we’d wind up with separate holidays, and I have some daytime soap-opera notion of what it means to be wifely. Besides, Lecia and Mother visit us a few times per year in the way Warren’s far-flung siblings never would, and I fly home to see Daddy plenty alone. Yet for every conceivable holiday—from Easter lamb to Christmas ham—our tin-can car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn’t meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it’s all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can’t recount one damn thing we did. The estate sits spitting distance from New York, and those first years, I show up with clippings of art I want to look at or friends’ bands I plan to hear. We never—not once—go into the city. One doesn’t venture outside estate walls. Even the clawed furniture seems dug in to the deep nap of ancient rugs. But that doesn’t explain the lethargy that overcomes me there, the anesthetic effect of luxury. Instead of jogging, we read by the pool or walk down to feed carrots to the donkeys. The paper is meticulously studied, also The New Yorker . I sometimes poke around the attic or unused bedrooms, opening the ancient chests of drawers to catch whiffs of cedar or lavender sachet. It’s a readerly tribe, and I can slouch in a leather chair drinking with a book in my lap for hours as well they can—my one affinity. But no sense of connection ever evolves into closeness. Outside each other’s company, Warren’s parents refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Whitbread, so I’d never presume first names. Only once does Mr. Whitbread ring our house. It’s Warren’s birthday, and I answer as Mr.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Named Andreas after his father, the two-year-old boy was unusually old for a baptism. He had been born when Karlstadt was banished from Saxony, and his mother, who had stayed behind, had not had him baptized—perhaps because Karlstadt was questioning infant baptism at this time, perhaps because she herself was sympathetic to Anabaptist ideas, which had spread after the Peasants’ War, that only adult believers should be baptized. Luther relished the irony of Karlstadt’s change of heart, remarking: “Who would have thought a year ago that those who called baptism a ‘dog’s bath’ would ask for baptism from their enemies?” 3 The celebration at Segrehna was an attempt at reconciliation between the two men, now tied to each other anew by the bonds of godparenthood. And it seems that Karlstadt’s family exploited the occasion to the full. A few days later, Luther interceded with the Elector on behalf of Karlstadt’s wife’s uncle, the miller at Segrehna, while another of her relatives lodged in Luther’s house for several months while she recovered from the plague. In November, Karlstadt himself wrote from Berkwitz, to say that he had lost seven horses, had little livestock left, and would have to sell up. Could Luther ask the Elector to let him move to Kemberg? Luther frequently interceded for others with the Elector, but there is something odd in his punctilious insistence on doing everything Karlstadt requested—asking the Elector repeatedly to allow him to live in Kemberg, and mediating for his relatives—as if he was proving his devotion despite a hidden antipathy. 4 Luther was able to keep an eye on Karlstadt but could not control those beyond the orbit of Wittenberg. One by one, many of his former supporters went over to the sacramentarian position of denying that Christ was physically present in the Eucharist. The loss of Oecolampadius had been bad enough; but then Nikolaus Gerbel, who had been Luther’s loyal lieutenant in Strasbourg, wrote that Martin Bucer had also adopted a version of the Swiss position. Bucer and the Strasbourg preachers tried to maintain unity with Luther and, realizing that discussions by letter were unlikely to succeed, they instead sent an envoy to hold long discussions with him. There was no agreement, however, and even Gerbel concluded that the sacramentarians, not the papists, were now the main enemy. 5 As he had no stomach for such a fight, Gerbel wished to dedicate himself to academic work. 6 In Augsburg, the leading preacher Urbanus Rhegius, once a Lutheran loyalist, also seemed to be open to some of Karlstadt’s arguments.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The capitulations gave special privileges to Russian and British merchants on Iranian soil, exempted them from the law of the land, and fixed tariff concessions for their goods. This was deeply resented. It enabled the Europeans to penetrate Iranian territory, and the consular courts which tried their offenses were often so lenient that a serious crime could go virtually unpunished. The capitulations were also detrimental to local industry, as low-priced Western manufactured goods displaced Iranian crafts. Some goods did benefit from Western trade: cotton, opium, and carpets were exported to Europe. But the silk industry was destroyed when one European firm imported diseased silk worms; the international price of silver, which made up Iranian currency, fell dramatically; and during the 1850s, European economic influence intensified in Iran, as the powers began to demand concessions for particular activities. To improve communications between England and India during the late 1850s, the British got the concessions for all telegraph lines in Iran. In 1847, the British subject Baron Julius de Reuter (1816–99) gained exclusive rights to railway and streetcar construction in Iran, all mineral extraction, all new irrigation works, a national bank, and various industrial projects. This concession had been promoted by Prime Minister Mirza Hosain Khan, who was in favor of reform but probably thought that the shahs were so incompetent that it was better to allow the British to modernize the country. He had miscalculated; a group of concerned officials and ulema, led by the shah’s wife, protested vociferously against the Reuter concession and Mirza Khan was forced to resign. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, both Britain and Russia had won heavy economic concessions in Iran which, in some areas, amounted to political control. Merchants who could see the benefits of modernization, but understandably feared this growth of foreign influence, began to campaign against the regime. 56 They were supported by the ulema, who were in a far stronger position than the ulema of Egypt. The Usuli victory at the end of the eighteenth century had given the mujtahids a powerful weapon, since, in principle, even the shah was bound by their rulings. They were not cowed and marginalized by the Qajars, who needed their support. The ulema had a secure financial base and were centered in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala in Ottoman Iraq, beyond the reach of the Qajars. In Iran, the royal capital of Tehran was quite distinct from the Shii shrine city of Qum. There was thus an effective separation of religion and politics. Unlike Muhammad Ali, the Qajar shahs had no modern army and no central bureaucracy capable of enforcing their will on the ulema in such matters as education, law, and the administration of religiously endowed land and properties (awqaf), which remained the preserve of the ulema. In the early years of the nineteenth century, however, the clergy, faithful to Shii tradition, kept out of politics.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Even Mosellanus remarked on Luther’s tendency to refute his opponent “a little too uncaringly and more bitingly” than was appropriate for a theologian, probably because he had come to learning late in life—a comment that may betray how much of an intellectual outsider Luther still was, and how unformed his public persona. He did not know how to look the part: Johannes Rubius described seeing him in the main square at Leipzig, clutching a posy of flowers, as if he were awaiting a lover or clutching a victory wreath. 38 When the debate finally ended in mid-July, Luther and Karlstadt quietly slipped out of town while Eck stayed on to relish his triumph, before leisurely returning to Ingolstadt. His only error of judgment had been to pen a letter commenting on Leipzig’s “women of pleasure,” which, once it had been passed from hand to hand, suggested to his enemies that his acquaintance with the ladies of Leipzig was not platonic. The universities of Paris and Erfurt were meant to judge the outcome of the debate, and all publication on the proceedings was banned until they reached their decision. Unsurprisingly, both universities dragged their feet, Erfurt finally declining to give a decision at all. Paris did not reach a judgment until April 1521, when it commented not on the debate itself but on the heretical nature of all of Luther’s writings. 39 By then it was an irrelevance. Both Eck and Luther had long since resorted to print to get their side of the story across. Luther republished his positions as he had set them out before the debate, prefacing them with his account of the proceedings. He published the sermon he had preached at the castle during it on Matthew 16:13–19, which included the verse “on this rock I will build my church”; the preface again insinuated that Eck was motivated by envy: “Envy can attack the truth but will never again be victorious.” 40 In August, he published a commentary on his Leipzig theses, prefaced with a long letter to Spalatin in which he summarized the debate. It sold out by early September. Finally in December an unofficial protocol of the debate was published in Erfurt by Luther’s supporters, and quickly reprinted. 41 Humanists from Leipzig and Wittenberg—the Hebrew scholar Johannes Cellarius, Johannes Hessius Montanus, and Rubius—all wrote rival accounts, attacking one another and their respective universities. The tone of the exchanges became yet more shrill as the post-debate squabbling continued, and began to move from a humanist spat toward a much wider discussion of religious truth, with Cellarius finally proclaiming “that Martin loves the gospel truth more than do all his adversaries together.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But this involved strain, tension, and paradox. The people as a whole had still to decide the terms on which they were to enter the modern world, and many of the less privileged colonists were prepared to contest the cultural hegemony of the aristocratic Enlightenment elite. After they had vanquished the British, ordinary Americans had yet to determine what the revolution had meant for them. Were they to adopt the cool, civilized, polite rationalism of the Founders, or would they opt for a much rougher and more populist Protestant identity? The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders. 67 During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich. 68 But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard. The success of the revolution had given many Americans a sense of empowerment; it had shown them that established authority was fallible and by no means invincible. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. The Jeffersonians believed that ordinary folk should also enjoy the freedom and autonomy preached by the philosophes. In the new newspapers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and other specialists were ridiculed. Nobody should have to give total credence to these so-called “experts.” The law, medicine, and religion should all be a matter of common sense and within the reach of everyone. 69 This sentiment was especially rife on the frontiers, where people felt slighted by the republican government. By 1790, some 40 percent of Americans lived in territory that had only been settled by white colonists some thirty years earlier. The frontiersmen felt resentful of the ruling elite, who did not share their hardships, but who taxed them as harshly as the British, and bought land for investment in the territories without any intention of leaving the comforts and refined civilization of the eastern seaboard.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  —1it was down inside me like a rock. Granted, I didn't hate him anymore, and I'd lost some of the outrage and passion, but the need for revenge kept eating at me. At night I sometimes drank too much. I'd remember getting shot and yelling out for a medic and then waiting and waiting and waiting, passing out once, then waking up and screaming some more, and how the screaming seemed to make new pain, the awful stink of myself, the sweat and fear, Bobby Jorgenson's clumsy fingers when he finally got around to working on me. I kept going over it all, every detail. I remembered the soft, fluid heat of my own blood. Shock, I thought, and I tried to tell him that, but my tongue wouldn't make the connection. I wanted to yell, "You jerk, it's shock—I'm dying!" but all I could do was whinny and squeal. I remembered that, and the hospital, and the nurses. I even remembered the rage. But I couldn't feel it anymore. In the end, all I felt was that coldness down inside my chest. Number one: the guy had almost killed me. Number two: there had to be consequences. That afternoon I asked Mitchell Sanders to give me a hand. "No pain," I said. "Basic psychology, that's all. Mess with his head a little." "Negative," Sanders said. "Spook the fucker." Sanders shook his head. "Man, you're sick." "All I want is—" "Sick." Quietly, Sanders looked at me for a second and then walked away. I had to get Azar in on it. He didn't have Mitchell Sanders's intelligence, but he had a keener sense of justice. After I explained the plan, Azar gave me a long white smile. "Tonight?" he said. "Just don't get carried away." "Me?" Still smiling, Azar flicked an eyebrow and started snapping his fingers. It was a tic of his. Whenever things got tense, whenever there was a prospect for action, he'd do that snapping thing. Nobody cared for him, including myself. "Understand?" I said. Azar winked. "Roger-dodger. Only a game, right?"

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was published in Wittenberg, Augsburg, and Strasbourg. The opening brief letter of dedication spoke of the “hatred and envy” directed against the Wittenbergers. 5. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 49–50; 59–64. 6. Ibid., 55; 42–66; Bubenheimer, Consonantia 26–33. Sider, Karlstadt, 8–9: His was the second-highest income of the sixty-four clerics in Wittenberg. He earned 127 fl per year; Barge, Karlstadt, II, 530. He pressed Spalatin for one rich soon-to-be-vacant benefice, and then even tried facilitating a petition from his students; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 88–89. When Henning Göde died, Luther lobbied Spalatin to get Karlstadt named provost in his place; WB 2, 370, Jan. 22, 1521, only to rescind this “foolish” suggestion the following week; WB 2, 372, Jan. 29, 1521. Karlstadt then asked Spalatin on February 3 more modestly for one of the vacant benefices of Göde, so he could employ a secretary. 7. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 57; Sider, Karlstadt, 14. 8. Sider, Karlstadt, 8–10; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 9–31; Bubenheimer, “Gelassenheit und Ablösung,” 258. 9. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 72–85. 10. LW 31, 9; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 87, n.56: Karlstadt, Thesis 60: “Corruit hoc quod Augustinus contra hereticos loquitur excessive”; Luther, Thesis 1: “Dicere, quot Augustinus contra haereticos excessive loquatur, est dicere, Augustinum fere ubique mentitum esse.” 11. WB 1, May 18, 1517, 99:8, “Theologia nostra et S. Augustinus” 45, Sept. 4, 1517; in the letter to Lang of November 11, 1517, however, he reverts to “me” and “mine”: WB 1, 52; 64, March 21, 1518, “studium nostrum”; “iniuria homini a nostris illata,” 155:35 (in which he includes the students); WB 1 74, May 9, 1518, esp. 170:20–29; WS 1, preface to the complete edition of the Theologia deutsch, 1518, “uns Wittenbergischen Theologen,” 378:24. 12. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 75; 104–7. 13. They also shared an attachment to Staupitz. In 1519, Karlstadt had dedicated his treatise on Augstine’s De spiritu et littera to none other than Luther’s mentor Staupitz [VD 16 A 4237]; while the debt Luther owed Karlstadt was clear when he dedicated his “In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas” of early 1519 to Petrus Lupinus and Karlstadt, WS 2, 437. 14. They were Johann Dölsch of Wittenberg; Bernhard Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden from Augsburg; Willibald Pirckheimer and Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg; and Johannes Egranus of Zwickau. See Bubenheimer, Consonantia, 186. Eck had been permitted to add names to the bull, and he included several he suspected of being his opponents. 15. Freunde in the German of this period can mean kin. It begins by wishing them peace, joy, and a strong faith—a very personal opening from a man who usually chose his dedicatees carefully to advance his interests. 16. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 28–30; Missiue von der aller hochsten tugent gelassenhait, [Augsburg] [1520], [Grimm and Wirsung] [VD 16 B 6170], fos. A i (v), A i (v), A ii (r), A ii (v); A iii (v). 17. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 38, 139, 138; Karlstadt, Missiue, fo. B iii (v); Karlstadt, Was gesagt ist, fos.

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

  ἀμφισβητέω : impf. ἠμφισβήτουν or ἤμφεσβ--: fut. τήσω: aor. ἦμ- φισβήτησα or ἠμφεσβ-:---ῶ558., fut. of med. form τήσομαι Plat. Theaet. 171 B: aor. ἠμφισβητήθην or ἠμφεσβ-. On the single or double augm., with regard to which the best Mss. of the same author vary, v. Veitch. Gr. V.s.v. Att. prose Verb, used twice in lon. form ἀμφισβατέω, by Hdt., cf. Inscr. Prien. in C. 1. 2905 B. 6, Mityl. ibid. 2166. 20. (From /BA, v. Baivw.) Literally, to go asunder, stand apart, and so to disagree with, 6 ἕτερος τῶν λόγων τῷ πρότερον λεχθέντι dup. Hdt. 9. 74. b. absol. to disagree, dispute, debate, wrangle, argue, Lat. altercari, Id. 4.14, and Att.; περί τινος Andoc. 4. 38, Isocr. 44 Ὁ, Plat. Prot. 337 A, C.1. 73.5, al.; ὑπέρ τινος Antipho 124. 15; πρός τινα Id. 120. fin. :—ot ἀμφισβητοῦντες the disputants, the opponents, in a lawsuit, Dem. 1175. 11, Arist. Rhet. 1. 1, 6, al. 2.c. dat. pers. to dispute or argue with a person, τινι Plat. Phaedr. 263 A, al.; τινί περί Twos Id. Polit. 268 A, Isae. 44. 8, etc. 8. c. gen. rei, to dis- pute for or about a thing, τοῦ σίτου ἀμφ. ἡμῖν with us about it, Dem. 884. 26: hence to lay claim to, τῶν οὐδὲν ὑμῖν προσηκόντων Id. 165. IL; τῆς ἀρχῆς Id. 1000. 3; τῆς πολιτείας Arist. Pol. 3. 8, 7, cf. 3. 12, 7; τρία τὰ ἀμφισβητοῦντα τῆς ἰσότητος three things which make a difference in.., Ib. 4. 8,9; τῆς μεσότητος ἀμφισβητεῖ τὰ ἄκρα Id. Eth. N. 4. 4, 4.:1---80 also, ἀμφ. πρός τι Id. Pol. 3. 13,11. Ῥ. as Att. law- term, to lay claim to the property of a deceased person or the guardian- ship of a heiress, τοῦ κλήρου ἀμφ. Dem. 1051. 22., 1092. 3; cf. Isae. 44. 8, sq., A. B. 256.13. 4. c. acc. rei, to dispute a point, be at issue upon it, ἐν τουτὶ ἀμφισβητοῦμεν Plat. Gorg. 472 D; οὐκ ἀληθῆ ἀμφ. Id, Menex. 242 D :—so also c. dat. rei, v. sub ἀμφισβητητέον. 5. c. acc. et inf. to argue or maintain that .., ἀμφ. εἶναί τι Id. Gorg. 452 C, cf. Dem. 833. 6, etc.; so, dup. ὅτὲ ἐστι Te Plat. Symp. 215 B; and with a negat. to dispute its being so, argue or maintain that it is not, ἀμφ. μὴ εἶναι ἡδέα τὰ ἡδέα Id. Phileb. 13 B; ἠμφεσβήτει μὴ ἀληθῆ λέγειν ἐμέ Dem. 347.83 so also, ἀμφ. ὡς οὔκ ἐστί τι Plat. Rep. 476 Ὁ, al.; dup. περὶ τούτων, ws οὐ .. Arist. Pol. 3. 16, Io. 6. in Aeschin. 48. 1, there is a play on the word, σὺ δὲ ἀμφισβητῶν ἀνὴρ εἶναι,---καὶ γὰρ ἂν ἀμφισβήταιμι, ὡς ἀνὴρ €t,—you claiming the char- acter of a man,—and indeed I should be inclined to dispute the claim. ΤΙ. Pass. to be the subject of dispute, to be in question, ἀμφισβητεῖταί τι Plat. Rep. 581 E, etc.; or impers., ἀμφισβητεῖται περί τι Id. Soph. 225 B; περί τινος Id. Rep. 457 Ε; ἀμφισβητεῖται μὴ εἶναί τι it is questioned, disputed, Id. Polit. 276 Β ; 6 πολίτης ἀμφ. is a de- batable term, Arist. Pol. 3. 1,2 :---τὰ ἀμφισβητούμενα, = ἀμφισβητή- ματα, Thuc. 6. το., 7. 18, Isocr. 44 C, Plat. Legg. 641 D, etc.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Let it ride," he said. "The kid messed up bad, for sure, but you have to take into account how green he was. Brand-new, remember? Thing 1s, he's doing a lot better now. I mean, listen, the guy knows his shit. Say what you want, but he kept Morty Phillips alive." "And that makes it okay?" Sanders shrugged. "People change. Situations change. I hate to say this, man, but you're out of touch. Jorgenson—he's with us now." "And I'm not?" Sanders looked at me for a moment. "No," he said. "I guess you're not." Stiffly, like a stranger, Sanders moved across the hootch and lay down with a magazine and pretended to read. I felt something shift inside me. It was anger, partly, but it was also a sense of pure and total loss: I didn't fit anymore. They were soldiers, I wasn't. In a few days they'd saddle up and head back into the bush, and I'd stand up on the helipad to watch them march away, and then after they were gone I'd spend the day loading resupply choppers until it was time to catch a movie or play cards or drink myself to sleep. A funny thing, but I felt betrayed. For a long while I just stared at Mitchell Sanders. "Loyalty," I said. "Such a pal." In the morning I ran into Bobby Jorgenson. I was loading Hueys up on the helipad, and when the last bird took off, while I was putting on my shirt, I looked over and saw him leaning against my jeep, waiting for me. It was a surprise. He seemed smaller than I remembered, a little squirrel of a guy, short and stumpy-looking. He nodded nervously. "Well," he said. At first I just looked down at his boots. Those boots: I remembered them from when I got shot. Out along the Song Tra Bong, a bullet inside me, all that pain, but for some reason what stuck to my memory was the unblemished leather of his fine new boots, factory fresh, no scuffs or dust or red clay. The boots were one of those vivid details you can't forget. Like a pebble or a blade of grass, you just stare and think, Dear Christ, there's the last thing on earth I'll ever see. Jorgenson blinked and tried to smile. Oddly, I almost felt sympathy for him. "Look," he said, "can we talk?" I didn't move. I didn't say a word. Jorgenson's tongue flicked out, moving along the edge of his mustache, then slipped away. "Listen, man, I fucked up," he said. "What else can I say? I'm sorry. When you got hit, I kept telling myself to move, move, but I couldn't do it, like I was full of drugs or something. You ever feel like that? Like you can't even move?" "No," I said, "I never did." "But can't you at least—" "Excuses?"

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  he was touring seemed dead. Through the windows, as if in a stop-motion photograph, the place looked as if it had been hit by nerve gas, everything still and lifeless, even the people. The town could not talk, and would not listen. "How'd you like to hear about the war?" he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might've said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he'd give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew. Pass out samples, maybe. Smiling at this, he clamped the steering wheel slightly right of center, which produced a smooth clockwise motion against the curve of the road. The Chevy seemed to know its own way. The sun was lower now. Five fifty-five, he decided—six o'clock, tops. Along an unused railway spur, four workmen labored in the shadowy red heat, setting up a platform and steel launchers for the evening fireworks. They were dressed alike in khaki trousers, work shirts, visored caps, and brown boots. Their faces were dark and smudgy. "Want to hear about the Silver Star I almost won?" Norman Bowker whispered, but none of the workmen looked up. Later they would blow color into the sky. The lake would sparkle with reds and blues and greens, like a mirror, and the picnickers would make low sounds of appreciation. "Well, see, it never stopped raining," he would've said. "The muck was everywhere, you couldn't get away from it." He would have paused a second. Then he would have told about the night they bivouacked in a field along the Song Tra Bong. A big swampy field beside the river. There was a ville nearby, fifty meters downstream, and right away a dozen old mama- sans ran out and started yelling. A crazy scene, he would've said. The mama-sans just stood there in the rain, soaking wet, yapping away about how this field was bad news. Number ten, they said. Evil ground. Not a good spot for good Gls. Finally Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had to get out his pistol and fire off a few rounds just to shoo them away. By then it was almost dark. So they set up a perimeter, ate chow, then crawled under their ponchos and tried to settle in for the night. But the rain kept getting worse. And by midnight the field turned into soup.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Just this deep, oozy soup," he would've said. "Like sewage or something. Thick and mushy. You couldn't sleep. You couldn't even lie down, not for long, because you'd start to sink under the soup. Real clammy. You could feel the crud coming up inside your boots and pants." Here, Norman Bowker would have squinted against the low sun. He would have kept his voice cool, no self-pity. "But the worst part," he would've said quietly, "was the smell. Partly it was the river—a dead-fish smell—but it was something else, too. Finally somebody figured it out. What this was, it was a shit field. The village toilet. No indoor plumbing, right? So they used the field. I mean, we were camped in a goddamn shit field." He imagined Sally Kramer closing her eyes. If she were here with him, in the car, she would've said, "Stop it. I don't like that word." "That's what it was." "All right, but you don't have to use that word." "Fine. What should we call it?" She would have glared at him. "I don't know. Just stop it." Clearly, he thought, this was not a story for Sally Kramer. She was Sally Gustafson now. No doubt Max would've liked it, the irony in particular, but Max had become a pure idea, which was its own irony. It was just too bad. If his father were here, riding shotgun around the lake, the old man might have glanced over for a second, understanding perfectly well that it was not a question of offensive language but of fact. His father would have sighed and folded his arms and waited. "A shit field," Norman Bowker would have said. "And later that night I could've won the Silver Star for valor." "Right," his father would've murmured, "I hear you." The Chevy rolled smoothly across a viaduct and up the narrow tar road. To the right was open lake. To the left, across the road, most of the lawns were scorched dry like October corn. Hopelessly, round and round, a rotating sprinkler scattered lake water on Dr. Mason's vegetable garden. Already the prairie had been baked dry, but in August it would get worse. The lake would turn green with algae, and the golf course would burn up, and the dragonflies would crack open for want of good water. The big Chevy curved past Centennial Beach and the A&W root beer stand. It was his eighth revolution around the lake. He followed the road past the handsome houses with their docks and wooden shingles. Back to Slater Park, across the causeway, around to Sunset Park, as though riding on tracks. The two little boys were still trudging along on their seven-mile hike.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  —really hate—is all those whiner-vets. Guys sniveling about how they didn't get any parades. Such absolute crap. I mean, who in his right mind wants a parade? Or getting his back clapped by a bunch of patriotic idiots who don't know jack about what it feels like to kill people or get shot at or sleep in the rain or watch your buddy go down underneath the mud? Who needs it? Anyhow, I'm basically A-Okay. Home free!! So why not come down for a visit sometime and we'll chase pussy and shoot the breeze and tell each other old war lies? A good long bull session, you know? I felt it coming, and near the end of the letter it came. He explained that he had read my first book, Jf 7 Die in a Combat Zone, which he liked except for the "bleeding-heart political parts." For half a page he talked about how much the book had meant to him, how it brought back all kinds of memories, the villes and paddies and rivers, and how he recognized most of the characters, including himself, even though almost all of the names were changed. Then Bowker came straight out with it: What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can't get his act together and just drives around town all day and can't think of any damn place to go and doesn't know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he can’t ... If you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) I'd write it myself except I can't ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can't figure out what exactly to say. Something about the field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there— you can tell it. Norman Bowker's letter hit me hard. For years I'd felt a certain smugness about how easily I had made the shift from war to peace. A nice smooth glide—no flashbacks or midnight sweats. The war was over, after all. And the thing to do was go on. So I took pride in sliding gracefully from Vietnam to graduate school, from Quang Ngai to Harvard, from one world to another. In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I had seen and done.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (You make him stop, I said, staring into my computer.) The burden of the move quite literally broke the Brit’s back—a slipped disk flattened him. After months of hauling his dinner to him on a tray, I wanted to bubble-wrap him and stick stamps on his forehead. (So much for in sickness and in health.) We scheduled back surgery in London, Dev and I letting a summer place while he healed. But by then I was already wondering if we could get the deposit back on the reception hall, envisioning the dress I’d bought boxed up with mothballs. (If I’d been thinking like an adult instead of a gradeschooler with a Cinderella costume, I’d never have permitted anybody to give up a fancy job and house in Notting Hill.) I broke things off, but his departure tore open an old wound. Once he’s gone, I begin to sense—as I shove my cart through the supermarket amid the Republican families on Sunday—a giant S on my chest for Spinster. Dev’s preoccupied with friends and rap records. Despite Patti and friends, the old lack of close family makes me fumingly mad at God, who, it may seem nutty to say, is real to me after years of prayer, not like the Easter Bunny or anything. All pain still makes me mad at God. Running into Big John, who steers me into overhauling how I pray, strikes me as grace. We make best pals playing racquetball at my health club—a joke, given he’s six-five and a former Olympic contender for the water polo team. With our handicapping, I only have to score a single point to win. As a young man, John had been torn between a career as an athlete and the Jesuit seminary, but he’d drunk his way out of both businesses. On getting sober, he’d started a swim club to pursue his dream of coaching Olympic-caliber competitors. A lumbering guy with curly brown hair and eyes the color of pool chlorine, he pursues that Olympic vision waking and sleeping. When we meet, he’s sober longer than I am, and—due to his own heartbreak—he’s reconsidering whether he’s called to be a Jesuit. To discern the answer, he undertakes a lay version of the Exercises, emerging nine months later like a creature dipped in fine metal, heartbreak cured. Right after, his coaching career takes off like gangbusters. His swimmers start taking national prizes, and four are pulling down Olympic-level times. One gold-medals in Sydney. In short, following Ignatius jacked up both his mood and his productivity, and—competitive bitch that I am—this spiked my interest. Still, I waffle when a nun outlines the time commitment—classes, spiritual direction, hours of prayer, journals. Also, while I wasn’t—for longer than I care to admit—boinking anybody, I didn’t want to scare off any future prospects. Imagine saying to your date that you can’t give up any nay-nay till your Franciscan spiritual advisor gives the thumbs up.