Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  In “Dover Beach,” the British poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith as it receded, bringing “the eternal note of sadness in.” Human beings could only cling to one another for comfort, for the world that once seemed So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. 78 At its best, religion had helped people to build within themselves a haven of peace that enabled them to live creatively with the sorrow of life; but during the scientific age, that interiorized security had been exchanged for an unsustainable certainty. As their faith ebbed, many Victorians sensed the void that it left behind. When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this. 79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!” 80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” The tiny minority who were able to understand the implications of this unprecedented event were already finding that “some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.” 81 By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves. Like the Jewish Marranos, Europeans were beginning to experience religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and lifeless. The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to—absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And they put the make on Lance—whod been drinking anyway, and Lance hardly ever drinks. Well, something happened on the beach that day, someone whod just come in from Hollywood told Lance how Esmeralda Drake the Third was dying or something, and Lance started drinking. It surprised everyone—Lance never gave a damn, and like I say he never drinks—but maybe he was just expecting he could get more money from the poor old bastard before she’d die—or maybe it was something else—who knows?—and Esmeralda didnt die, then—though someone told me the other day she got run over by this car crossing Hollywood Boulevard, and all I can say is: If shes still cruising the Boulevard, at her age, well, baby, she couldnt expect otherwise.... Well, when Lance heard about Esmeralda in the hospital, he tries to leave—and all we kids talked him out of it. Lance was great fun to be with, he would make a party. So Lance stays, but hes getting drunk. And these two marines at the bar start insisting they want to make it with him. Well, babe, I dont blame them: Lance was Famous from here to New York!—he’d been Pierce Flint’s lover, and he had affairs with Bruce Storm and Kipp Rugged—all those big Movie Stars. So, anyway, Lance keeps saying no to those two marines, he wouldn’t stoop that low—and they were common. But, remember, he was drunk—high! high! High!... Hi, Teddy! (Isnt that funny?—Teddy thought I was saying ‘Hi’ to him.)... Anyhow, I kept saying, ‘Dont go, Lance, youve been drinking.’ But he wouldnt listen to me. So they went off together, all three—and Lance was just trying to get rid of them without a public scene, I can tell you—because Lance never showed any Interest in them, he never showed any Interest in anyone, really—or he never used to,” he adds wistfully, then quickly: “Not that I believe all those rumors about him. Of course, Randy got real bitchy about that, and he started spreading stories like how he was straight until Lance brought him out—and, babe, that Randy was born sitting in the mensroom with the door open, thats how straight he ever was!... Not that I blame him being annoyed at Lance; he was with him at Laguna— after all!.. . Anyway, from what I know—and I know it like it happened to me—those marines start putting the make on Lance— in the car!! —and, babe, drunk or sober, Lance doesnt go for that common stuff, he puts them off. They tried to force him to stay—and thats when Lance jumped out of the car, and they chased him—drunk themselves and hot after him and I dont blame them—and Lance didn’t know he was on a cliff, and he jumped. An accident. Thats all it was. He broke his arm. And, babe, those evil jealous faggots went wild spreading stories. But everyone knew they werent true. Lance propositioning anyone! Thats Ridiculous!

• From City of Night (1963)

  It seemed the windstorm lasted for days, weeks. But it must have been over, as usual, the next day, when Im standing next to my mother in the kitchen. (Strangely, I loved to sit and look at her as she fixed the food—or did the laundry: She washed our clothes outside in an aluminum tub, and I would watch her hanging up the clean sheets flapping in the wind. Later I would empty the water for her, and I stared intrigued as it made unpredictable patterns on the dirt....) I said: “If Winnie dies—” (She had of course already died, but I didnt want to say it; her body was still outside, and I kept going to see if miraculously she is breathing again.) “—if she dies, I wont be sad because shell go to Heaven and I’ll see her there.” My mother said: “Dogs dont go to Heaven, they havent got souls.” She didnt say that brutally. There is nothing brutal about my mother: only a crushing tenderness, as powerful as the hatred I would discover later in my father. “What will happen to Winnie, then?” I asked. “Shes dead, thats all,” my mother answers, “the body just disappears, becomes dirt” I stand by the window, thinking: It isn’t fair.... Then my brother, the younger of the two—I am the youngest in the family—had to bury Winnie. I was very religious then. I went to Mass regularly, to Confession. I prayed nightly. And I prayed now for my dead dog: God would make an exception. He would let her into Heaven. I stand watching my brother dig that hole in the backyard. He put the dead dog in and covered it I made a cross and brought flowers. Knelt. Made the sign of the cross: “Let her into Heaven....” In the days that followed—I dont know exactly how much later—we could smell the body rotting.... The day was a ferocious Texas summerday with the threat of rain: thunder—but no rain. The sky lit up through the cracked clouds, and lightning snapped at the world like a whip. My older brother said we hadnt buried Winnie deep enough. So he dug up the body, and I stand by him as he shovels the dirt in our backyard (littered with papers and bottles covering the weeds which occasionally we pulled, trying several times to grow grass—but it never grew). Finally the body appeared. I turned away quickly. I had seen the decaying face of death. My mother was right. Soon Winnie will blend into the dirt. There was no soul, the body would rot, and there would be Nothing left of Winnie. That is the incident of my early childhood that I remember most often. And that is why I say it begins in the wind. Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness. Before the death of Winnie, there are other memories of loss.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Reduced to a mere explanation—to what would later be called First Cause or Prime Mover—he became Deus otiosus, a “useless” or “superfluous” deity, and gradually faded from the consciousness of his people. In most mythologies, the High God is often depicted as a passive, helpless figure; unable to control events, he retreats to the periphery of the pantheon and finally fades away. Today some of the indigenous peoples—Pygmies, Aboriginal Australians, and Fuegians— also speak of a High God who created heaven and earth, but, they tell anthropologists, he has died or disappeared; he “no longer cares” and “has gone far away from us.” 40 No god can survive unless he or she is actualized by the practical activity of ritual, and people often turn against gods who fail to deliver. The High God is often mythologically deposed, sometimes violently, by a younger generation of more dynamic deities—gods of storm, grain, or war—who symbolized relevant, important realities. In Greek mythos, the High God Uranus (“Heaven”) was brutally castrated by his son Kronos. Later Kronos himself was overthrown by his own son Zeus, head of the younger gods who lived more accessibly on Mount Olympus. In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them. He has therefore become otiosus, an etiolated reality who for all intents and purposes has indeed died or “gone away.” In the ancient world, the High God myth was replaced by more relevant creation stories that were never regarded as factual. As one of the later hymns of the Rig Veda insists, nobody—not even the highest deva—could explain how something had issued from nothing. 41 A good creation myth did not describe an event in the distant past but told people something essential about the present. It reminded them that things often had to get worse before they got better, that creativity demanded self-sacrifice and heroic struggle, and that everybody had to work hard to preserve the energies of the cosmos and establish society on a sound foundation. A creation story was primarily therapeutic. People wanted to tap into the massive implosion of energy that had—somehow—brought the world we know into being, so they would recite a creation myth when they were in need of an infusion of sacred potency: during a political crisis, at a sickbed, or when they were building a new house.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Me pasa trescientos dólares, y tenemos un letrero que dice que no aceptamos billetes mayores de cincuenta, pero viendo la cantidad de dinero en su billetera, no me siento cómoda al decírselo. Tomo el dinero y le doy el cambio. Da golpecitos sobre el mostrador mientras espera, y me doy cuenta que está siguiendo el ritmo de The Distance por Cake que Danni colocó en el altavoz del lobby. —Oh, no haga eso —bromeo, dándole su cambio—. Alentará al dueño. Estoy intentado convencerla que su música está alejando a los clientes. Toma el dinero y me lanza una mirada. —La música de los noventa es la mejor. Es cuando las personas decían la verdad. Curvo la comisura de mis labios, sin querer discutir más. Claramente él bebió del mismo Kool-Aid que ella. —Gracias —dice, tomando las llaves. Le regreso su identificación, y lo observo alejarse. Afuera, reparte las llaves a las señoritas, y después de un momento, todos se dirigen a sus habitaciones. Estoy medio tentada a ir a la ventana y ver si va con una de ellas. O las cinco de ellas. Tengo mucha curiosidad. —¿Era un cliente? —pregunta Danni detrás de mí, y miró hacia atrás, viéndola caminar a la oficina. El departamento donde vive con su abuela está detrás de la oficina, así que es fácil pasar y revisar si se necesita algo. —Sí —le digo—. Pidió cinco habitaciones para la noche, y está viajando con al menos media docena de mujeres, así que diviértete con el turno nocturno. Se burla y camina, tomando el contrato. —¿Tyler Durden? —Lee su nombre, entrecerrando los ojos por encima de sus lentes. Asiento, jalando un cabello de su camisa de franela. Ella incluso se viste como en los noventa. —¿No tomaste su identificación? —Me hace una mueca—. Es un nombre falso. —Su identificación decía Tyler Durden —digo—. ¿Por qué piensas que es un nombre falso? —Tyler Durden es el personaje principal en Fight Club —dice, como si fuera una idiota—. La mejor película de los noventa, y uno de los mejores libros. Es desconcertante que no sepas eso, Jordan. Me río, moviendo la cabeza. Ella quizás sea un año mayor que yo, pero estamos a mundos de distancia en intereses. Fight Club. Mi sonrisa se desvanece, y bajo la mirada, regresando a la computadora. He visto la película, pero ese nombre no me sonaba. Y había visto recientemente la película también, con Pike… Trago. Siento un nudo en el pecho. Mierda. Había estado bastante bien las últimas semanas, girando mi atención a otra parte, para no pensar en él. Había sido tan difícil al inicio, pero no verlo todos los días lo había vuelto más fácil. Fue correcto haberme ido como lo hice.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When they turned their attention to religion, all three were liable to depart from the precision that characterized their discussion of science, so their critique was marred by wild generalizations. When he read Haeckel’s best seller The Riddle of the Universe, the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen said that he burned with shame to think that it had been written by a German scholar in the land of scholarship.77 Haeckel had, for example, argued that at the Council of Nicaea, the bishops had compiled the New Testament by simply picking the four gospels at random from a pile of forged documents—information he had acquired from an exceptionally scurrilous English pamphlet. He even got the date of Nicaea wrong. When he discussed science, Haeckel was careful, methodical, and accurate; none of these qualities was in evidence when he wrote about religion. Huxley had little time for this polemic, because he understood that no investigation of the physical world could provide evidence for or against God. He thought Draper a bore, Vogt a fool, and utterly despised Büchner’s best-selling Force and Matter, which argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything had derived from a single cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. Pascal had explained that “the heart has its reasons” for beliefs that were not accessible to our reasoning powers, and this also seems true of late-nineteenth-century unbelief. The proselytizing atheists did not exemplify the precision, objectivity, and impartial examination of the evidence that was now characteristic of the scientific rationalism they glorified. Nevertheless, their emotional diatribes attracted huge crowds. There had always been an intolerant strain in modernity; it had long seemed necessary to abjure recent orthodoxy as a condition for the creation of new truth. Atheism was still a minority passion, but people who nurtured subterranean doubts yet were not ready to let their faith go may have found this passionate critique vicariously cathartic. Others relinquished their faith with sorrow and felt no Promethean defiance, no heady liberation. In “Dover Beach,” the British poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith as it receded, bringing “the eternal note of sadness in.” Human beings could only cling to one another for comfort, for the world that once seemed So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.78 At its best, religion had helped people to build within themselves a haven of peace that enabled them to live creatively with the sorrow of life; but during the scientific age, that interiorized security had been exchanged for an unsustainable certainty. As their faith ebbed, many Victorians sensed the void that it left behind.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘In his youth Chaucer wrote about Ceyx and Alcion. Ceyx was lost at sea, and Alcion threw herself into the waves in grief. Since he has written about so many star-crossed lovers, so many noble women and their paramours, why repeat him now? If anyone should open that hefty volume of his, The Legend of Good Women, he will come across Lucretia, who was raped, and Thisbe, who died for love. He loves sad stories. You can read in that book of poor Dido, who fell upon her sword after the treachery of Aeneas, and of Phyllis, who hanged herself from the branches of a tree. You can follow the laments of Dianire and Hermyon, of Adriana and Isiphilee. It is, as I said, a very long book. You can read about the barren island in the middle of the sea, and how Leander drowned himself for love of Hero. What else is there? I could mention the tears of lovely Helen and the woes of false Cressida. I could relate the cruelty of wicked Queen Medea, who hanged her own children for revenge when Jason abandoned her. It is not all doom and gloom, though. Geoffrey Chaucer does manage to praise the faithfulness of Penelope and Alceste. ‘There is one story that he does not tell. He refuses to mention the wicked love of Canacee for her own brother. Well, incest is no fit matter. That is why he does not write about Tyro Appollonius and King Antioch. That cursed monarch took the virginity of his own daughter. Can you believe it? It is too horrible to talk about, especially that moment when he threw her down on the floor and began to -. Excuse me. Chaucer thought about including these stories, but then decided against them. I know that John Gower narrates them, but Gower is not known for his good taste. Chaucer would never sully his writings with such abominations. How do I know? I just know. I will follow his example, in any case, and say no more about them. ‘How shall I begin my own story? I will not repeat Chaucer. I have said that already. I don’t want to be compared to those braggarts who thought that they could rival the Muses and were turned into magpies for their insolence. I will become no bird. And I don’t really care if I fall far short of him. Better a dull dish than no dish at all. Let him stick to his poetry. I will use plain prose.’ So the Man of Law, with a solemn countenance, began the story that you are about to hear. The prologe of the Mannes Tale of Lawe

• From The Case for God (2009)

  60 For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself. 61 In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any mythos, it would remain incredible. Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself. It was experienced most acutely in the sexual act, when our reasoning powers are swamped by passion, God is forgotten, and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The return was difficult: the Second Temple failed to live up to the fabled glories of Solomon’s, and the returning exiles had to contend with opposition from their pagan neighbors as well as from those Israelites who had not been deported and found the new religious ideas of the Golah, the community of exiles, alien and exclusive. The Hebrew Bible was almost complete: preaching tolerance and respect for difference on the one hand and a strident chauvinism on the other, it was a difficult document to decipher, and it is not clear that at this stage it had any official religious significance or that it was used in the cult. A transitional figure was Ezra, a scribe in the Persian court who had “set his heart to investigate the Torah of Yahweh and to do and teach the law and ordinance in Israel.” 86 In about 398, the Persian king sent him to Jerusalem with a mandate to enforce the Torah of Moses as the law of the land. 87 The Persians were reviewing the legal systems of the subject peoples to make sure that they were compatible with imperial security, and Ezra had probably worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between Mosaic and Persian jurisprudence. When he arrived in Jerusalem, Ezra was horrified to find that instead of maintaining the separation that P had prescribed, some of the people had actually taken foreign wives. On New Year’s Day, Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and read it aloud, “translating and giving the sense, so that the people understood what was read,” while Levites, lower-ranking priests, circulated among the crowds, supplementing his commentary 88 . We cannot be sure of his text, but whatever it was, it reduced the people to tears. They had clearly never heard it before and were dismayed by these unfamiliar demands. Read “neat,” as it were, scripture could be daunting and alarming. “Do not weep!” Ezra insisted. It was the month of Sukkoth, and the law commanded Israelites to spend these weeks in special “booths” (sukkoth) in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the Sinai wilderness. Again, this was a novel instruction: the First Temple rituals had celebrated Sukkoth very differently. At once, the people rushed into the hills to pick branches of olive, myrtle, pine, and palm, and leafy shelters mushroomed all over the city. There was a festive atmosphere as the people assembled each evening to hear Ezra’s exposition. But later Ezra held a more somber assembly in the square in front of the new temple, during which the people stood shivering as the torrential winter rains deluged the city and they heard Ezra commanding them to send away their foreign wives.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself. It was experienced most acutely in the sexual act, when our reasoning powers are swamped by passion, God is forgotten, and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘You have always been kind to me,’ he replied. ‘But can I beg your pardon in advance? I would like to have a quiet word with your husband. Do you mind leaving us for a moment? These parish priests are slow and negligent in their duties, particularly those of confession and absolution. I am a preacher, as you know. Preaching is my profession. I am well versed in the words of Peter and of Paul. Like them, I fish for men’s souls. I render Christ Jesus His due. I spread abroad His message to the world.’ ‘Scold Thomas well then, my good sir. He deserves it. He gets as angry as a red ant, even though he has everything he could possibly want. Although I cover him at night and make him warm - although I give him a good cuddle - he still moans like the old boar in our sty. I don’t get any enjoyment out of him at all. There’s no pleasure in it.’ ‘Oh Thomas, Thomas,’ Friar John said. ‘Listen to me. This must be amended. This is the work of the devil himself. God forbad anger as a sin. I will have to have a word with you about this.’ ‘Before I leave you two alone,’ his wife added, ‘let me ask you something. What would you like for your dinner, good friar? I can prepare it while you talk.’ ‘Oh good woman, my wants are very simple. Just the merest taste of chicken’s liver, perhaps, and some soft white bread to go with it. And then perhaps a pig’s head? I don’t want you to kill a pig on my behalf, of course. That would be sinful. But a head would suit me. I am a man of small appetite, as you know. I am nourished by the Bible. I am so used to mortification and penance that my appetite is all but destroyed.’ He raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Do not be annoyed with me, good wife. I am taking you into my confidence. I am baring my soul to you. There are very few people I can trust these days.’ ‘There is one last thing I must tell you,’ she replied. ‘My little child died two weeks ago, just after you had left the town.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  He seems to realize that Im not so eager now to leave; and he seems to sense, too, my unfocused fears of the streets. Perhaps taking advantage of that, he pursues the subject. “Youve never loved anyone?” he asked me. I wanted to say something flippant that will make his question seem ridiculous, particularly at this carnival time. Instead, I answered hurriedly. “Not the way you mean.” But I think of my Mother—her love like a stifling perfume.... Yes, that was “love”—on both sides—a devouring potentially choking thing—like Sylvia’s love for her son—but love nonetheless.... The always-scorching memory of my Father, emerging—“loved”—out of the ashes of that early hatred.... Yet I know that this is not what Jeremy means. He had pushed my thoughts into an area I preferred to leave unexplored. I grasped for the least dangerous thought: Could I have really loved Barbara? (The stabbing unhappiness inside me when I saw her that last time—but hadnt we merely used each other, in some kind of mutual fear?) And my mind sprang forward: Dave.... (I try to picture his face when I first met him; but the face I remember is another one—the one which had stared at me in disbelief that afternoon when I had walked out, that look branded in my mind, recalled so clearly, so often....) And how much of what I had fled from had been fear for myself?—how much had been fear of hurting him?... Lance.... Pete: the feeling of hopelessness and pain and embarrassment and isolation that night when he had held my hand for so long in bed.... The man on the beach in Santa Monica (and I remember him, instead, as I had seen him earlier here in New Orleans).... Mr King’s loneliness—shared!—shared and acknowledged; and it had been that very awareness of his pain (as perhaps, too, it had been toward Dave) which had sent me from him. By fleeing impotently, hadnt I manifested what could be, perhaps, a shape of “love”?... “No,” I repeated emphatically, “Ive never loved any one.” And when I said that, I thought of this: That night in Chicago, walking along the lake, when I felt myself exploding with love—but it was something else, something that was closer to pity (as it had been in my feelings toward Mr King, the others, I now realized). Outside, there is a sudden change in the noises. Voices are shouting: “Let them go! Let them go!” Soon the shouting becomes a chant, the same three words: “Let! Them! Go!” The clapping of hands in rhythm to the commanding words. The sound of feet stamping. “The police, probably,” said Jeremy. “Probably trying to arrest someone—but that crowd isnt going to let them. It’s the crowd’s day of complete freedom, if anarchy is complete freedom. The police know it too. Theyre largely powerless—but still they put up a pretense. Their masks are the last to come off,” he said ambiguously....

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

  torii gate with you... She always wrote back right away. She always expressed her undying love. THAT CHRISTMAS, 1964, she returned. This time I picked her up at the airport. On the way to my house she told me that there had been a terrible row before she got on the plane. Her parents forbade her to come. They didn’t approve of me. “My father screamed,” she said. “What did he scream?” I asked. She imitated his voice. “You can’t meet a guy on Mount Fuji who’s going to amount to anything.” I winced. I knew I had two strikes against me, but I didn’t realize climbing Mount Fuji was one of them. What was so bad about climbing Mount Fuji? “How did you get away?” I asked. “My brother. He snuck me out of the house early this morning and drove me to the airport.” I wondered if she really loved me, or just saw me as a chance to rebel. DURING THE DAY, while I was busy working on Blue Ribbon stuff, Sarah would hang out with my mother. At night she and I would go downtown for dinner and drinks. On the weekend we skied Mount Hood. When it was time for her to return home, I was bereft again.Dear Sarah, I miss you. I love you. She wrote back right away. She missed me, too. She loved me, too. Then, with the winter rains, there was a slight cooling in her letters. They were less effusive. Or so I thought. Maybe it’s just my imagination, I told myself. But I had to know. I phoned her. It wasn’t my imagination. She said she’d given it a lot of thought and she wasn’t sure we were right for each other. She wasn’t sure I was sophisticated enough for her. “Sophisticated,” that was the word she used. Before I could protest, before I could negotiate, she hung up. I took out a piece of paper and typed her a long letter, begging her to reconsider. She wrote back right away. No sale. THE NEW SHIPMENT of shoes arrived from Onitsuka. I could hardly bring myself to care. I spent weeks in a fog. I hid in the basement. I hid in the servants’ quarters. I lay on my bed and stared at my blue ribbons. Though I didn’t tell them, my family knew. They didn’t ask for details. They didn’t need them, or want them. Except my sister Jeanne. While I was out one day she went into the servants’ quarters and into my desk and found Sarah’s letters. Later, when I came home and went down to the basement, Jeanne came and found me. She sat on the floor beside me and said she’d read the letters, all of them, carefully, concluding with the final rejection. I looked away. “You’re better off without her,” Jeanne said. My eyes filled with tears. I nodded thanks. Not knowing what to say, I asked Jeanne if she’d like to do some part-time work for Blue Ribbon. I was pretty far behind, and I could sure use some help. “Since you’re so interested in mail,” I said hoarsely, “maybe you’d enjoy doing some secretarial work. Dollar and a half an hour?” She chuckled. And thus my sister became the first-ever employee of Blue Ribbon.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Staring after Jocko, Sylvia said: “That guy’s made it on his muscles long after most of them would be through. He was an acrobat—once. Like everything else, the circus folded. Now he comes here each year to join another kind of circus.... He was the best hustler in New Orleans,” she said, almost proudly, “and he had iron rules he stuck by—thats why everyone liked him: never clipped anyone, treated everyone straight.... Now—well—maybe it’s changed.” Abruptly, as if to stop the wondering about why Jocko had to leave Miami, she said: “After Mardi Gras, this city clamps up. It dies, as if it’s seen too much during the Carnival, and then you can almost feel Lent in the air. You breathe it. It takes over the city. New Orleans goes into mourning. Thats when the plainclothesmen haunt the bars again for vagrants,” she warned. “And thats when Jocko leaves—at midnight. The next Mardi Gras, hes back.... And yet, each year since Ive been here, I wonder if that will be the last one—if he’ll never show up again....” As if now on an invisible trapeze, I thought suddenly. “In a few years he’ll be old,” Sylvia said, “and hes the kind that should stay Young. No brains. Just goodlooks—and an instinctive understanding of so many things. I guess no one can blame him for anything,” she said, as if to herself. “Something—something tossed him out!” she said fiercely. An intense silence. Then: “Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d fallen off the damn trapeze,” she said brutally. I looked at her, at the harsh, saddened face, and I realized how violently, at that moment, she hated the world of this bar she owned. As if she had materialized from the very smoke that clouded the bar, the most beautiful queen I have ever seen appeared. If it hadnt been for her clothes—maleclothes worn to imitate a woman’s—I would have thought her a real woman; and as a woman, she would have been one of the most beautiful, too. In her 20s, with a pale perfectly featured face—the face any woman would have envied on another—she had dark-lidded eyes and long, blond, almost-golden hair, which now is tightly bunched in back to conceal its length. She is lithe, slender. There is a ghostquality about her, perhaps because of the way even the feeble light plays on her hair, so that, appearing almost translucent, she seems incandescent. She surveyed the bar slowly, as if for the first time, with a smile which is unbearably, wistfully sad. In this bar of very real faces—the studied toughness of the malehustlers, the sedulous (but largely unsuccessful to practiced eyes) madeup attempts at femininity of the queens—this youngman, this queen, standing in the midst of it, appears as unreal as an angel: a monument to the utter perversity of her violated sex.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Winters in El Paso for me later would never again seem as bitter cold as they were then. Then I thought of El Paso as the coldest place in the world. We had an old iron stove with a round belly which heated up the whole house; and when we opened the small door to feed it more coal or wood, the glowing pieces inside created a miniature of Hell: the cinders crushed against the edges, smoking.... The metal flues that carried the smoke from the stove to the chimney collapsed occasionally and filled the house with soot. This happened especially during the windy days, and the wind would whoosh grimespecked down the chimney. At night my mother piled coats on us to keep us warm. Later, I would be sent out to ask one of our neighbors for a dime—“until my father comes home from work.” Being the youngest and most soulful looking in the family, then, I was the one who went.... Around that time my father plunged into my life with a vengeance. To expiate some guilt now for what I’ll tell you about him later, I’ll say that that strange, moody, angry man—my father—had once experienced a flashy grandeur in music. At the age of eight he had played a piano concert before the President of Mexico. Years later, still a youngman, he directed a symphony orchestra. Unaccountably, since I never really knew that man, he sank quickly lower and lower, and when I came along, when he was almost 50 years old, he found himself Trapped in the memories of that grandeur and in the reality of a series of jobs teaching music to sadly untalented children; selling pianos, sheet music—and soon even that bastard relationship to the world of music he loved was gone, and he became a caretaker for public parks. Then he worked in a hospital cleaning out trash. ( I remember him, already a defeated old man, getting up before dawn to face the unmusical reality of soiled bloody dressings.) He would cling to stacks and stacks of symphonic music which he had played, orchestrated—still working on them at night, drumming his fingers on the table feverishly: stacks of music now piled in the narrow hallway in that house, completely unwanted by anyone but himself, gathering dust which annoyed us, so that we wanted to put them outside in the leaky aluminum garage: but he clung to those precious dust-piling manuscripts—and to newspaper clippings of his once-glory—clung to them like a dream, now a nightmare.... And somehow I became the reluctant inheritor of his hatred for the world that had coldly knocked him down without even glancing back.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Im sure, in part, it’s all of these—but not exclusively,” Jeremy went on. “It sounds too much like a defense.... It could be, rather,” he continued slowly, “that theyre resigned to finding nothing but a momentary sex experience. Maybe it isnt that they dont want something more; maybe theyve just given up on finding anything beyond sex, and theyre even afraid to ask, ‘Can I see you again?’ Theyll look for someone else rather than possibly hearing the answer ‘No’—an answer just as frightened perhaps as their own question. So they resign themselves to the brief contacts. Now they look for the people who ‘dont care’.... And the reasons of the people on your side are just as mysterious as those of the ones who pay you... like me,” he added, and went on: “How much of it, for you, is being a part of this alluring defiant world without really joining it?—so you can say (and Im talking about ‘you’ only generally—Im actually talking about many people)—so you can say, ‘I do it only for the money involved’; or: ‘I dont do anything back in bed myself; my masculinity is still intact—and in the meantime I can go with as many men as I—... need ... to’?” Ordinarily, those words would have resounded as the score’s attempt to compensate for his previously indicated desire by questioning the very masculinity which had originally attracted him. Yet, coming from this man—somehow—perhaps because of the fact that hes paid me without that payment having been asked for or agreed upon—his words dont really register as the ordinary put-down after the battlefield of one-sided sex has been cleared by the leveling orgasms. For that reason, those words are doubly disturbing. And it was what Barbara had implied—and the memory of her saddens me beyond the fact that I had liked her so much: that she had tried to prove with me what she had told herself that I, and others, were trying to prove with her.... Yes, it was at least in part a mutual fear that had brought us together. Once again my thoughts had veered into a dangerous territory. To stop their direction—astonishing myself, yet responding commandingly to the burgeoning rashness, I reached impulsively for Jeremy’s hand and placed it on my leg. He left it there, without comment, almost as if he were unaware of my having done it. Or is he too pretending? Has he understood what my motion with his hand is meant to convey, what I was trying to indicate to him—that, at least in that direction, it was I who could make the rules. But he had understood: Whatever pang of victory I might have felt by executing that gesture, he erased swiftly by saying: “Wouldnt your masculinity be compromised much less if you tested your being ‘wanted’ with women instead of men?”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In the past, theologians found that extended dialogue with atheists helped them to refine their own ideas. An informed atheistic critique should be welcomed, because it can draw our attention to inadequate or idolatrous theological thinking. The written discussion of the atheistic philosopher J. J. C. Smart and his theist colleague J. J. Haldane is a model of courtesy, intellectual acumen, and integrity and shows how valuable such a debate can be—not least in making it clear that it is impossible to settle either the existence or nonexistence of God by rational arguments alone.2 A scientific critique of conventional “beliefs” can also be helpful in revealing the limitations of the literalistic mind-set that is currently blocking understanding. Instead of arguing that an ancient mythos is factual, perhaps it would be better to study the original meaning of the ancient cosmologies and apply it analogically to our own situation. Instead of clinging to a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis, it could be helpful to face up to the implications of the Darwinian vision of nature “red in tooth and claw.” This could become a meditation on the inescapable suffering of life, make us aware of the inadequacy of any neat theological solution, and give us a new appreciation of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, “Existence is suffering (dukkha)”—an insight that in nearly all faiths is indispensable for enlightenment.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Meto la caja en el asiento trasero, sobre otra y el auto es justo lo suficientemente grande para contener todo lo que traje. Todo cabe en dos maletas y tres cajas. El resto está almacenado. Y parece que tampoco voy a ir por ello pronto. La “casa” de mi padre no tiene más sitio para una mesa de dibujo que mi habitación aquí. —Gracias por todo —le digo, sabiendo que sabe exactamente lo que estoy haciendo—. Has sido realmente increíble. —¿Te vas? —Parece confundido. Cierro la puerta del auto y me giro hacia él, mi estómago da un vuelco mientras trago el nudo en mi garganta. —Con Cole fuera y nosotros separados, no es correcto que me quede —digo— . Nunca has tenido la obligación de ayudarme, pero lo hiciste y no puedo agradecértelo lo suficiente. Realmente aprecio todo. —Y luego no puedo evitar forzar una pequeña sonrisa por el bien de ambos—. Especialmente mis cintas de casete. Miro hacia sus ojos preocupados, el verde en los iris parecen oscurecerse y un dolor golpea mi pecho. Me giro, fingiendo asegurarme de que la puerta está cerrada para darme un segundo para recomponerme. —Mi papá me va a dejar quedarme en casa por un tiempo. —Me giro y le digo—: Estaré bien. —Pero... —Oh, olvidé mi bolso. —Paso los dedos por la parte superior de mi cabello y entro rápidamente en la casa, no dejando que termine mientras me alejo. No quiero discutir con él y tengo miedo de que si dice algo más, comenzaré a llorar. No quiero irme, pero sé que ya no tengo derecho a seguir aquí y tal vez irá al bar de vez en cuando para visitarme, ¿cierto? Tal vez lo veré más ahora que lo conozco y lo reconoceré. Por supuesto, también estoy molesta por lo de Cole. He hablado con él prácticamente todos los días durante los tres últimos años. Pero quiero estar lejos de él. Realmente no me gusta dejar a Pike. ¿Quién lo va a hacer conversar con la gente y ahora quién va a ponerle extracto de vainilla y canela que no sabe que le gusta en su café? Pestañeo para alejar el dolor en mis ojos, reprendiéndome. Estará bien. Sobrevivió treinta y ocho años sin mí, ¿cierto?

• From City of Night (1963)

  And thats where Miss Destiny the college co-ed is now, busted! —in the joint — again! —for masquerading —and this is not the first time she gets knocked over so she will be cooling it there for quite a while! And can you imagine the sight? Miss Destiny in bridal drag sitting crying in the paddywagon this is her wedding day? ...” Trudi claims Miss Destiny is living in Beverly Hills with the man who sponsored the wedding (though Trudi didnt go either, afraid theyd raid it, but they didnt, and she says she wishes now she’d been a beautiful bridesmaid like Destiny asked her, and it broke Destiny’s heart when Trudi said no but thats the beads). “And I hear the Destiny looked simply Fabulous in her gown and red hair,” says Trudi, “and, honey, it just goes to show you some more about those goddam beads—here the Destiny meets this rich daddy who wants to see a queen get married in drag to a butch stud-hustler, and the Destiny says does he have a winding staircase? and he does....” Well, anyway, Trudi says, so far as she knows, Miss Destiny is still living in Beverly Hills (Skipper says oh no, Bel Air, if she really made it Big) with the rich daddy and her stud husband. “The rich cholly,” says Skipper knowingly, “I bet he digs Destiny’s stud, not Destiny—but he gets kicks watching them make out, jack. You know, hes queer—” and Skipper goes on to tell me how hes tired of the small hustling and how hes ready to push back into the Bigtime—and Trudi says, “Don’t be nervous, babe, youll shake the beads.” And so, of Miss Destiny’s Wedding there are many versions. No one seems to have gone to it. But everyone has heard about it. Only one thing is certain. Miss Destiny is no longer around. And I wondered if somehow she had escaped her Evil Angel. And again for a period I avoided the park and the bars—and when I came back, Chuck of course was still around. And now we’re sitting in Pershing Square at the same place where I first met Miss Destiny.... (And Jenny Lu is in the park too, as if The Angel had got her number—woe- uh! ... and Holy Moses... and Saint Tex, who outstayed The Word and was reconverted by Saint Thunderbird to California... and the five white angelsisters with Christ still bleeding wax....) Suddenly Chuck said: “Oh, man, did you hear about Miss Destinée?—you remember her, that far-out queen with the redhair? Well, man, some queen was saying how she got this letter from Destinée.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves. 60 For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself. 61 In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any mythos , it would remain incredible. Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster. A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work. When he was ordained bishop of Hippo in 396, he became the subject of a vitriolic campaign of slander, was burdened by the administration of a viciously divided diocese, and was in poor health. That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself.