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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Maria had set him there, with a dog’s head of papier mâché fixed to each side of his collar, to represent the hound that stood on guard at the gate of Hades. The marble floor of the hall, as I have said, we had scattered with roses: it was terribly hard to cross it, in bare feet, with my ringing head and my hand at my cheek. Before I had reached the staircase, I heard a step behind me, and a bang. I turned to see Zena there: Diana had sent her from the room in my wake, then had the door shut on us. She gazed at me, then came to put a hand upon my arm: ‘Oh, miss ...’ And I - who had saved her from Diana’s wildness only, as it seemed to me then, to have that wildness turned upon myself — I shook her from me. ‘Don’t you touch me!’ I cried. Then I ran from her, to my own room, and closed the door. And sat there wretched, in the darkness, nursing my oozing cheek. Below me, after a few more minutes of silence, there came the sound of the piano; and then came laughter, and then shouts. They were carrying on their revelling, without me! I could not credit it. The sport with Zena, the insults, the blow and the bleeding nose - these seemed only to have made the marvellous party more gay and marvellous still. If only Diana had sent her guests home. If only I had placed my head beneath my pillow, and forgotten them. If only I had not grown miserable, and peevish, and vengeful, at the sound of their fun. If only Zena had not forgiven me my harshness in the hall — had not come creeping to my door, to ask me, was I very hurt, and was there anything that she could do, to comfort me. When I heard her knock, I flinched: I was sure it must be Diana, seeking me out to torture me or — perhaps, who knew? — to caress me. When I saw that it was Zena, I stared. ‘Miss,’ she said. She had a candle in her hand, and its flame dipped and fluttered, sending shadows dancing crazily about the walls. ‘I couldn’t go up, knowing you was here all bruised and bleeding - and all, oh! all on my account! I sighed. ‘Come in,’ I said, ‘and close the door.’ And when she had done that, and stepped nearer to me, I put my head in my hands and groaned. ‘Oh Zena,’ I said, ‘what a night! What a night!’ She set down her candle. ‘I’ve got a cloth,’ she said, ‘with a little bit of ice in it.

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

  A huge untreated source of such neglect comes from depression, which is estimated to affect 10–12 percent of postpartum moms, yet is similarly harmful when it plagues fathers or other infant caregivers. Widely viewed as a disorder of the positive emotional system, depression smothers the sparks of positivity and positivity resonance like a heavy, wet blanket thrown over a waning campfire. It flattens people’s emotional experiences. Do you know the feeling of the lead apron the dental assistant drapes over you before an X-ray? Well, imagine all your clothes were made of that leaded material. How sluggish would that make you? How unmotivated to move? Your biggest wish when feeling depressed can be just to curl up alone in your bed. Sleep may be the only relief in sight. Now imagine caring for a newborn in this depressed state. Sure, you’d muster up the energy to change diapers and provide necessary feedings. But studies show that what a depressed caregiver does not do well is synchronize. Depression itself slows down your body movements and speech output. For the infant in your care, this translates into less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability. When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity—be it anger or indifference. Depression, then, not only impairs your ability to experience and express your own positive emotions but also impairs your ability to connect with the preverbal being in your care. With the two key scaffolds of positivity and connection missing, positivity resonance—so badly needed for both of you—simply can’t emerge. The damages done to the developing child have been duly cataloged by developmental scientists. The list includes long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond, first, in their use of symbols and other early forms of cognitive reasoning that undergird successful academic performance, and next, in their abilities to take other people’s perspectives and empathize, skills vital to developing supportive social relationships. More generally, behavioral synchrony between infant and caregiver sets the stage for children’s development of self-regulation, which gives them tools for controlling and channeling their emotions, attention, and behaviors, tools vital to success in all domains of life.

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

  There is considerable debate about | Peter, whether Simon Peter actually wrote the book or not. We know about Simon Peter from the Gospels of the New Testament, where he appears as a lower-class, illiterate peasant who lived in Galilee, and whose native tongue would have been Aramaic. | Peter, as it’s called, is a letter allegedly written by Peter, written in good Greek. Evidently, whoever penned this letter was well-trained and well- educated. It doesn’t appear that it was actually composed by a lower-class, uneducated peasant whose primary language was Aramaic. Therefore, some scholars suspect that even | Peter is pseudonymous, or may actually have been a work that was written by Peter, or possibly dictated by Peter to somebody who was proficient in Greek, who then modified the style accordingly, to make it more acceptable. In any event, whoever wrote the book of | Peter was writing to Christians in the context of intense suffering. The term “suffering” occurs more frequently in this little five-chapter book than in any other book of the entire New Testament. Therefore, I wanted to look at some aspects of | Peter as an apology. The book was written near the end of the first century— whoever wrote it— to a group of Christians who were experiencing some kind of severe persecution. We can get this from the pages of the book itself. In chapter 4, verses 12 and following, the author says: Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you, but rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. [This is somebody expecting that Jesus will soon return from heaven, in judgment on the earth.] People are suffering now, but it’s only for a short time, until he comes back. People should rejoice at the suffering, because it’s the same suffering that Christ himself experienced. [Verse 15:] But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or even as a mischief maker. Yet 0A fe) if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name. Clearly, people are suffering some kind of Christian persecution, and the author is urging them not to suffer for doing anything wrong, but if you suffer from being a Christian then, well and good. You should bear with the suffering, because it will end soon, and by suffering, you are imitating Christ.

• From City of Night (1963)

  A couple—“just in from L.A.”—drink wine to celebrate “two years on the wagon.” They offered me a drink from the bottle, and I celebrated with them. Behind us, a lame squirrel looked on quizzically, hobbled among the pigeons on the grass. A shabby, fat middle-aged woman said to her crony: “What good is A Beautiful Body?—it aint got me nothin,” as she shifted the hills of her spent flesh. A tramp tells me: “You don gotta worry, boy—youre still Young, still got good hustlin in you—it’s when you get my age—...” I stop listening, concentrate on a romance sprouting in tatters nearby. (An old man has called to an old woman: “Hey, hon, cummon over—I got somethin forya.” She is sitting with him now, as he produces a bottle of cheap wine—and they invade Heaven together, momentarily before the harsh hangover....) As I move away, one harpy in an overcoat grits her teeth and says to no one: “Moody woulda killed him if he’dda kep screwing with me—I mean to tell you, he woulduv.” A youngman lies on a bench, asleep, the sun directly in his eyes. Vagrants bunched like birds over a worm: young vagrants playing “rummy”—which means dice or poker. Their eyes trained to remain on the dice while still watching out for the cops. Trying to defeat Time.... As the dice tumble to the walk, a woman, huddled over in a wined-up terror, whines from the wasteland of her memories: “My daddee was—... My daddee was—...” Seeing me stare at her, she sighs: “You believe me, dont you?” I nod yes. I begin to feel a hint of what, in expiation, I must find in this city. Through the night-sheltered park (as, in the breezy night, shadows grapple with each other on the gray walks), a queen completely painted like a woman, wearing a woman’s blouse and slacks, parades languidly but still unsurely—past the park-socialist shouting feverishly: “Jesus Christ—not Karl Marx—was the first socialist!”—and the tourist bus, full of middle-aged middle-classed ladies, roars away from the blasphemy as wellfed faces look back through the windows at the park in horrified Disbelief. Hunting eyes outline the ledges of the park. Malehustlers assume that necessary tough veneer of hoods. After two in the morning, cars still go around the block to choose a paid partner from the stagline. New in town (and in the waning summerdays, other faces have become familiar and stridently desperate), I splashed on the scene, going from morning to morning—in and out of the different cars that stopped after circling the block.... In and out of the different bars (Tommy’s where the bartender will pimp for you after hes made it with you; The Cavern, into a pit of malebodies crushed dancing).... Back and forth on the streets (Dearborn, Rush)—back to the park, the beach.... And these are some of the faces with which I’ll try to blot out the guilt-ridden memory of Neil:

• From City of Night (1963)

  Oh Destiny, Miss Destiny! I dont know whats become of you, nor where you are—but that story Chuck just told me, as you yourself should be the first one to admit, is oh Too Much to believe! CITY OF NIGHT FROM FACE TO FACE, FROM ROOM to room, from bed to bed, the shape of the world I had chosen emerged—clearly but without definable meaning. Each morning the pale sun rose in the imitation-blue sky of Los Angeles, and the endless resurrection of each new day began. Like the palmtrees that lined the streets of the city, the world seemed to be shrugging indifferently. For me then there followed a period of untrammeled anarchy as I felt my life stretching toward some kind of symbolic night, as the number of people I went with multiplied daily. With those many people—only in those moments when I was desired—the moments before we became strangers again after the intimacy—I felt an electric happiness, as if the relentless flow of life had stopped, poised on the very pinpoint of youth; and for those moments, youth was suspended unmoving. Now I began to feel that world demanding even further anarchy. Often I remembered the man I had met that first afternoon in Los Angeles, when, with his money already in my hands, I had suddenly found myself unable to steal from him. It was something that remained unfinished: a test prepared by that chosen world which I had failed.... The man’s face dimly mysteriously haunted me. There was still, too, the narcissistic obsession with myself—those racked interludes in the mirror—the desperate strange craving to be a world within myself. And I felt somehow, then, that only the mirror could really judge me for whatever I must be judged. As the weeks passed, under that hazily smeared sky, I would stand often in the midst of the masked turbulence of Pershing Square, watching it fascinated. At the same time, I felt an overwhelming sadness as intense as if I were the only person in the world who had ever felt it for this life: awed by the terrifying spectacle of this outcast boiling world. And so the park became the focal point of my life, those long, long afternoons. Like a lord surveying his kingdom, Sergeant Morgan marches through the park in the afternoons, nodding condescendingly at the familiar faces of the perennial park pensioners pinned to the benches.... I see him stomping along the sidewalk now, imperiously flanked by two younger cops. They walk like soldiers, in perfect step, the two on each side like younger, if slimmer, imitations of the fat one in the middle, marching as if to the cadenced rhythm of a drum heard only by them. I had seen the fat cop often—but he hadnt stopped me. Now, watching the determined march, I think: Hes after someone. As they approached me—and they were looking straight ahead—the fat one turns sharply, toward me. “Come on, you!” he barked. Boom! Boom! Boom!

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  The fifty guineas promised me by Mr. H...., at his parting with me, having been duly paid me, all my clothes and moveables chested up, which were at least of two hundred pounds value, I had them conveyed into a coach, where I soon followed them, after taking a civil leave of the landlord and his family, with whom I had never lived in a degree of familiarity enough to regret the removal; but still, the very circumstance of its being a removal, drew tears from me. I left, too, a letter of thanks for Mr. H...., from whom I concluded myself, as I really was, irretrievably separated. My maid I had discharged the day before, not only because I had her of Mr. H...., but that I suspected her of having some how or other been the occasion of his discovering me, in revenge, perhaps, for my not having trusted her with him. We soon got to my lodgings, which, though not so handsomely furnished, nor so showy as those I left, were to the full as convenient, and at half price, though on the first floor. My trunks were safely landed, and stowed in my apartments, where my neighbour, and now gouvernante, Mrs. Cole, was ready with my landlord to receive me, to whom she took care to set me out in the most favourable light, that of one from whom there was the clearest reason to expect the regular payment of his rent: all the cardinal virtues attributed to me, would not have had half the weight of that recommendation alone. I was now settled in lodgings of my own, abandoned to my own conduct, and turned loose upon the town, to sink or swim, as I could manage with the current of it; and what were the consequences, together with the number of adventures which befell me in the exercise of my new profession, will compose the mater of another letter: for surely it is high time to put a period! to this. I am, MADAM, Yours, etc., etc., etc. THE END OF THE FIRST LETTER LETTER THE SECOND Madam, If I have delayed the sequel of my history, it has been purely to allow myself a little breathing time not without some hopes, that, instead of pressing me to a continuation, you would have acquitted me of the task of pursuing a confession, in the course of which my self-esteem has so many wounds to sustain.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Me cubro los ojos, exasperada. —Está bien —le digo—. Eso es todo para lo que llamé, así que no molestes a papá si ya lo sabe. Los llamaré... más tarde. —Está bien. —Sopla humo—. Bueno, cuídate y llamaré dentro de una semana más o menos. Te invito a cenar o algo así. Mi cuerpo tiembla con una risa amarga que contengo. No es gracioso. Es triste, realmente. Pero cuelga sin esperar a que le diga “adiós”, y dejo escapar un suspiro, lanzando mi teléfono sobre la cama. Ni mi padre ni mi madrastra son malas personas, aunque tampoco ninguno me llamó el día de mi cumpleaños. Nunca fui golpeada, matada de hambre o abusada verbalmente. Solo un poco olvidada, supongo. Lucharon por algo bueno en la vida, por lo que era demasiado pedir que dejaran que la responsabilidad o la preocupación por sus hijos interfirieran con el pequeño placer que lograban reunir con sus noches de cerveza y bingo. Después que Cam se fue y consiguió su propio lugar, no tuve a nadie con quien hablar. No era nadie en ese remolque, y nunca más quería volver a sentirme sola. Recojo mi libreta de la cama y reanudo la tarea de mi clase de verano ese día. Mi libro de texto se abre frente a mí y pulso mi lápiz mecánico para obtener más ventaja. Suena un golpe en la puerta de la habitación, y levanto la cabeza, tensándome. —¿Entre? —digo, pero parece una pregunta. Cole no llamaría. Debe ser su padre. ¿Dejé la ropa en la secadora? ¿La estufa encendida? Repaso mi lista mental de verificación. La puerta se abre, y Pike se queda allí, sosteniendo la perilla, pero se mantiene plantado en el pasillo. —Voy a pedir pizza para la cena —me dice—. ¿Cole estará en casa pronto? Jugueteo con el lápiz en mis manos. —Uno de sus amigos fue promovido en la compañía de cable —le explico—, así que van a tener una fiesta en la granja de su padre. Estoy segura que llegará bastante tarde. Se queda allí un momento, su gran cuerpo llena toda la puerta. Mis ojos siguen moviéndose hacia los tatuajes en sus brazos, así que simplemente miro hacia abajo, pretendiendo estar absorta en mi trabajo. —¿No vas a ir? —presiona.

• 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.

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

  My condition was worsened by the sense that I hadn’t done very well—a sense Cousin Houser reluctantly confirmed. At the close of those difficult days, it was my nightly six-mile run that saved my life. And then it was my brief time with Matthew and Penny that preserved my sanity. I’d always try to find the time and energy to tell Matthew his bedtime story. Thomas Jefferson was toiling to write the Declaration of Independence, you see, struggling to find the words, when little Matt History brought him a new quill pen and the words seemed to magically flow... Matthew almost always laughed at my bedtime stories. He had a liquid laugh, which I loved to hear, because at other times he could be moody, sullen. Cause for concern. He’d been very late learning to talk, and now he was showing a worrisome rebellious streak. I blamed myself. If I were home more, I told myself, he’d be less rebellious. Bowerman spent quite a bit of time with Matthew, and he told me not to worry. I like his spirit, he said. The world needs more rebels. That spring, Penny and I had the added worry of how our little rebel would handle a sibling. She was pregnant again. Secretly, I wondered more about how we were going to handle it. By the end of 1973, I thought, it’s very possible I’ll have two kids and no job. AFTER TURNING OUT the light next to Matthew’s bed, I’d usually go and sit in the living room with Penny. We’d talk about the day. Which meant the looming trial. Growing up, Penny had watched several of her father’s trials, and it gave her an avid fondness for courtroom drama. She never missed a legal show on TV. Perry Mason was her favorite, and I sometimes called her Della Street, after Mason’s intrepid secretary. I kidded her about her enthusiasm, but I also fed off it. The final act of every evening was my phone call to my father. Time for my own bedtime story. By then he’d left the newspaper, and in his retirement he had loads of time to research old cases and precedents, to spin out arguments that might be useful to Cousin Houser. His involvement, plus his sense of fair play, plus his bedrock belief in the rightness of Blue Ribbon’s cause, was restorative. It was always the same. My father would ask about Matthew and Penny, and then I’d ask about Mom, and then he’d tell me what he’d found in the law books. I’d take careful notes on a yellow legal pad. Before signing off he’d always say that he liked our chances. We’re going to win, Buck. That magical pronoun, “we”— he’d always use it, and it would always make me feel better. It’s possible that we were never closer, maybe because our relationship had been reduced to its primal essence.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Released, Sylvia turned to face the jammed bar. Her eyes had misted, whether from the harshness of the burning liquor or from something else. And she held the glass out—high—in a toast to everyone here. I left the bar quickly, infinitely depressed. But in the other crowded bars, or on the streets, or walking through Jackson Square, I was obsessed by Sylvia’s face. And I went back to The Rocking Times. Intermittently, she was surrounded by the people she knew, the people whom, I was certain now, she had needfully searched out. She was laughing raucously; but her face was marked clearly by the impact of the liquor and the years-long, clawing desire to understand what everything in her, ancestrally, demanded she hate. Occasionally, someone would place a hand on her shoulder, cautioning her about the fervid, sudden drinking; someone else would coax her to let him take her home. But she pushed the hand away, rejected each suggestion that she should leave. “No!” she said harshly. “This is it!” Her face clouded, as if she were still sober enough not to be certain whether she wanted to go on. To indicate her instant decision, she gulned another drink. “Gonna sell this bar!” she shouted. “Leave New Orleans—never, never, never come back.” “Not even to see Us?” said Desdemona Duncan sadly. Sylvia raised a wrenched face toward her, touched the queen’s cheek tenderly, and began to cry in drunken, convulsed sobs. She slid off the stool and rushed out into the courtyard. I found her there, hidden in the shadows, sitting on the steps outside leading to the upper part of the building. Jocko sat next to her. The chilly night wind had dried her tears, and her face is glazed and unreal, as if a mask, worn successfully for years, had been washed away. The toughness is all gone, drained by the liquor and the tears. She covered her face, as if to shut out the vision of the bar, her bar. The cold wind brushed past us like the wing of a huge bird. About us in the courtyard, people milled in the light-speckled shadows. And we sat there on the steps with Sylvia—Jocko and I, silently. “Let me take you home, baby,” Jocko said. “Not yet,” she said. “Just stay here—both of you—just for a few minutes—with me.” Now she faced the courtyard, staring, listening raptly to the jumbled conversations, the shrieking of the queens rising above the sounds of the others.... And then Kathy was standing before us, looking down sadly at Sylvia. Sylvia reached for her hand; and Kathy said, “How are you feeling, honey?” “Kathy,” Sylvia stuttered drunkenly, “Kathy—honey—Im sorry.” “Dont be sorry,” Kathy said—and she waited. And I will wonder later if she knew it had to be to her that Sylvia must speak the words she will soon say. “You dont understand,” Sylvia insisted. “I do,” Kathy said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now it was beginning to get cooler. In Los Angeles, night comes like a blessing, even after the warmest afternoons. Soon, long shadows will protect the exiles, shelter them soothingly before the concealing night. And as it becomes later and the loneliness and the determination become hungrier, the frenziedness will increase. And even now, it’s beginning. Ollie, Holy Moses, preaching, shouting.... Shrieks of pain, muted pleas to God, going up unheeded or unheard.... The Negro woman has returned: Shes “Comin, Lawd!” again, as if He really gave a damn.... Jenny Lu strums her guitar to emphasize her scarlet past: “Sin!” (Plunk!) “The flesh!” (Plunk!) “Fornication!” (Plunk! Plunk!!) ... Two obvious scores stare at the youngmen. They are of that calculating breed who look at you like merchandise: “How big is it?... How long can I have it?... Youre asking too much—I’ll give you—...” Youngmen along the ledges.... Lonesomeness is alive.... The fixed eyes.... The youngman in the army shirt is still here, still waiting.... An old harpy mutters to no one remembered fragments from the jungle of her spent mind.... And the ghostpale woman is whispering to a ratty-looking teenage boy who smiles incredulously at what shes saying.... A couple of queens, in anticipation of the night, have now bravely stationed themselves along the walk. Catching sight of a cop coming around the corner, they shift their stances quickly to those as masculine as they can muster—but still a parody. But the cop stops short of them, talks gruffly to the youngman in the army shirt... Chuck has been staring steadily into the park which is seething with all the live lonesomeness.... “An here I am,” he echoes himself. “And afterwards?” I realized, startled, that I had spoken—that the question which had finally formed—the question which had been bothering me about Chuck throughout all the time I had known him, which had made his enviable easygoingness incomplete—had sprung involuntarily from my mouth. And having spoken that question, I look at him, and I feel suddenly sad.... Chuck as an old man! ... With the others, even when they spoke about the Bigtime, you could sense their stifling awareness of what their lives were stretching toward: the bandaged streets, the nightly dingy jails, the missions... the forgetfulness-inducing wine.... Life had dealt out their destinies unfairly, and they knew it even while they bragged. But with each frantic step, each futile gesture of revolt, they prepared themselves.... But Chuck? Chuck, sitting on this railing, always smiling—easygoing, easily the most likable.... Chuck. What of him? When he became an old man, would he look as coolly at the world then, still as if it were that wide-stretching uncomplicated plain?—when it lengthened into mutilated scenes of Missions and handouts?... He belongs on the range, I thought—on the frontier which disappeared long ago—existing now, ironically, only on those movie screens that had lured him as a child.... “And afterwards?” I had asked him.

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

  The novel begins in the post-World War I moment ("1919") and ends in the civil rights era ("1965"), while alluding through flashback to the antebellum and post-civil rights era."Z In the book's opening scene, the omniscient narrator, or narratorial consciousness, characterizes, in an elegiac voice, the status of the Bottom and the valley town of Medallion, Ohio-marking the Bottom's current constitution postgentrification and industrialization juxtaposed with its previous historical composition: its cultural insularity and genesis rooted in "[a] joke. A nigger joke." The Bottom's founding is based on a racialism, a racist history, and narrowly defined constructions of race (its name deriving from a joke played on an enslaved black man by "a good white farmer"), yet the Bottom transcends this irony in its progress. Conversely, however, it is practically defeated by its inability to continually evolve, and by a relatively stymied organic growth, and is eventually crippled by and victim to gentrification and industrialization: a reverse enactment, a reenactment of sorts, of the initial joke. Whereas the Bottom's genealogy is rooted, paradoxically, in the race-specific joke accounting for its existence, the community's partial, if not eventual demise, is at the hands of both the nondescript "they"-euphemistic white referents-and the black residents themselves (as evidenced in the tragic National Suicide Day march and mass deaths). Sula, as a product of this environment, is both informed by as well as cultivated within this communal context, yet is neither defined nor entirely restricted by it. She flouts the community's history and communal sanctions governing race, gender, and sexuality unapologetically with her deliberate transgressive behavior and subversion (and cultivation of an existence outside the strictures) of the classical black female script. Whereas most of the novel's other characters, in their affinity to racial/communal sanctions, embrace conformity and gender-specific regulations, Sula does not. Not only does she explore the "choices [...] available to women outside their own society's approval," but she experiences "the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community."13 In her deliberate nonconformity to bourgeois conventionality and sociocommunal circumscriptions for women, Sula subverts the script, while simultaneously destabilizing a fixed categorical blackness predicated on particular deployments of racialized and gendered (black female) respectability and performance. In her "alterity," she embodies other paradigms of black womanhood and black identity generally." "Something Else to Be": Sula and Transgressive Behavior

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

  People congratulated me on that ad as if we’d achieved something earth-shattering. I’d shrug. I wasn’t being modest. I still didn’t believe in the power of advertising. At all. A product, I thought, speaks for itself, or it doesn’t. In the end, it’s only quality that counts. I couldn’t imagine that any ad campaign would ever prove me wrong or change my mind. Our advertising people, of course, told me I was wrong, wrong, a thousand percent wrong. But again and again I’d ask them: Can you say definitively that people are buying Nikes because of your ad? Can you show it to me in black-and-white numbers? Silence. No, they’d say... we can’t say that definitively. So then it’s a little hard to get enthused, I’d say—isn’t it? Silence. I OFTEN WISHED I had more time to kick back and debate the niceties of advertising. Our semidaily crises were always bigger and more pressing than what slogan to print under a picture of our shoes. In the second half of 1977 the crisis was our debenture holders. They were suddenly clamoring for a way to cash in. By far the best way for them to do so would be a public offering, which, we tried to explain to them, was not an option. They didn’t want to hear that. I turned once more to Chuck Robinson. He’d served with distinction as lieutenant commander on a battleship in World War II. He’d built Saudi Arabia’s first steel mill. He’d helped negotiate the grain deal with the Soviets. Chuck knew business cold, better than anyone I’d ever met, and I’d been wanting his advice for quite some time. But over the last few years he’d been the number two man under Henry Kissinger at the State Department, and thereby “off-limits” to me, according to Jaqua. Now, with Jimmy Carter newly elected, Chuck was on Wall Street and available once again for consultations. I invited him out to Oregon. I’ll never forget his first day in our office. I caught him up on the developments of the last few years and thanked him for his invaluable counsel about Japanese trading companies. Then I showed him our financial statements. He flipped through them, started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Compositionally,” he said, “you are a Japanese trading company—90 percent debt!” “I know.” “You can’t live like this,” he said. “Well... I guess that’s why you’re here.” As the first order of business, I invited him to be on our board of directors. To my surprise, he agreed. Then I asked his opinion about going public. He said going public wasn’t an option. It was mandatory. I needed to solve this cash flow problem, he said, attack it, wrestle it to the ground, or else I could lose the company. Hearing his assessment was frightening, but necessary. For the first time ever I saw going public as inevitable, and I couldn’t help it, the realization made me sad.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But, usually, especially in the moments of needed respite from the compulsive fury of those days, as the city went through that period of initiation before Mardi Oras, I would return to The Rocking Times. And it was mainly to be with Sylvia that I went there. In the world of her bar, she treated each member on his own respective level. With the queens, she discussed their drag costumes for Mardi Gras, assuring them that such and such a color would be just right. With the masculine homosexuals—neither scores, hustlers, nor queens—she listened attentively as they confided to her their broken love affairs. With the hustlers, she often spoke roughly, using their own expressions.... And on all, at least verbally, she imposed her rigid, though largely unobserved, rules. Yet there were those other times when she would merely stare gloomily before her, as if she had shut her ears. At such times, within me, she augmented the churning unfocused guilt. Still, I sought her out. And when she wasnt at the bar—which was rare—I would feel acutely disappointed, personally cheated—almost angry at her as if she had stood me up. Today shes talking to Sonny—the blond youngman who had been wounded in the fight that afternoon before the Bourbon House. Only minutes earlier, he had walked in Proudly, Cockily—like a big-game hunter with a lion’s head—with two impressively suited scores. “Be cool,” I heard Sylvia warning him. “Those two are here every year. I see them pick up a green kid like you, each Mardi Gras—” Sonny winced noticeably at her designation of him. “—and they tell him theyre going to take him to Europe, and after Mardi Gras, they split—alone. Youll never see them again.” Sonny nodded impatiently. It is difficult for him to believe that he can be taken. Sylvia watched him with an ambiguous look as he returned to the two well-dressed scores, who have been staring resentfully at Sylvia as if aware that shes been warning Sonny about them. As usual, Sylvia is drinking Seven-Up. It was all I had ever seen her drink. Occasionally, though, I had noticed her stare longingly at the varicolored bottles of liquor behind the bar, then turn from them as if they threatened her in some powerful way. The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans: The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing, The desk clerk’s dressed in black. ... Sylvia studied two youngmen who had just walked into the bar. “Two more new ones,” she sighed. “Each year—new hustlers, new queens, new—...” she hesitated, “—new gay boys just out for kicks—and the ones that keep coming back.” And the juke-box sang lugubriously: Just take a walk down lonely street To Heartbreak Hotel.... “Kathy just passed out on the steps of the Maison Blanche!” a queen blurted at Sylvia. “Whos with her?”