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.

Page 170 of 212 · 20 per page

• 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)

  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 The Case for God (2009)

  84 He will become, Yahweh promises, “the light to the nations, so that my salvation will reach to the ends of the earth.” 85 Second Isaiah’s predictions were fulfilled. When Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered the Babylonian empire, he gave all deportees the option of returning to their homelands. Most of the Jewish exiles had acclimatized to life in the Diaspora and decided to stay in Babylonia, but in 530 a party of Jews made the decision to return home, and ten years later, after many trials and tribulations, they rebuilt the temple. 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.

• 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)

  And still I was sober—despite the maryjane, the pills, the beer, the whiskey; still alertly conscious, feeling at times a parodoxically turbulent calmness, perhaps like the stillness of a stormcloud waiting for a bolt of lightning to release the pent-up rain. Torrents of expectation and alarm rage inside me at the prospect of Mardi Gras, now only two days away. The queens would be bitchy like petulant children to each other that day in the bars because the vice patrol had made them cut their hair, they looked so much like women and thats against the law If Youre Not—and so, Dejectedly, with short hair, they must face The World; and feeling their female stances somewhat compromised—unfairly—by that short, short hair, theyre arguing rhetorically over which queen would have which of us at her pad that night. Betti (who was Benny in Nebraska) said I was her new husband, and Vicki and Salli (Victor and Steve, respectively, in Atlanta) grabbed Sonny and Jocko and said: “Well, honey, these are our husbands.” And as the queens began to dish each other, myself and the two other “husbands” felt ourselves so Goddamned absurdly Masculine—because, remember, queens always say they want Men—and we kept on studiedly digging a cute young girl nearby—because youre supposed to want real girls only... for “love.” But, oh, oh, soon Sonny has drifted away, looking for the two momentarily lost scores hes been going around with; and Jocko left—and Im standing outside on the street. I saw a tiny rag-doll Miss Ange waving at me asking was I looking for A Pad To Sleep? She had short hair. And I began to laugh so uncontrollably, right there on the street, that she swished away in understandable indignation. Suddenly I felt vastly repentant—and very, very sad. Very sad, sitting in the Coffee House at the French Market, sitting thinking strangely obsessively of the lady-tourists dragging their husbands depressingly along Royal Street (Roo Rowyall), hunting for gay antiques and pralines that are Clean, and feeling, myself, Hugely Bitter that they wouldnt give a royal damn if they knew that only minutes earlier the plainclothes had warned me—as they were warning all the others on the streets (the jails being crowded)—if I was still in town, theyd bust me for novisiblelegalmeansofsupport. Sunday. The parades canceled. It snowed today in New Orleans for the first time in more than 20 years, I wrote my mother. A little boy—his features Youngly real in the icy white glare—rushed excitedly into the street from somewhere to gather the mysterious snow, his face turned questioningly to the Sky. And the snow fell in white plumes. Like a million tiny diamonds it covered the cemetery in back of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And everyone, even Us, looked pink and real in the white light. And if it had snowed longer, it might have killed some of the cockroaches. For a few hours, this rotten city was purified. Someone even threw a snowball!

• From City of Night (1963)

  There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk—the words coming often in gasps—his eyes burning—at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact.... He hangs around in one place only a few minutes; if he doesnt score immediately, he’ll leave, go to another bar; come back—and when he is sitting down, he constantly drums his fingers to the frenzied music—and even when the music is slow, the frantic drumming persists, as though the sounds he hears are coming from within; veiling his eyes—lowered lids—or looking down at the bar—as if he doesn’t want to see too Clearly; creating circles on the surface of the bar with the water from the glass, then erasing them abruptly with his hand.... By midnight, he is usually drunk. After being around him a few times, I began to avoid him; stifled by the knowledge of the sad, sad loss of Youth, of the terrible hints that life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once—the attitudes of youth lingering after the youth itself was gone, played out With Skipper, this loss was concentrated, emphasized because life had given him nothing but physical beauty, an ephemeral beauty relying on Youth.... That sense of loss had seized me acutely one day when, sitting with him and two scores, I watched him remove from his wallet a set of photographs, about six of them, all of him in different poses, showing him—almost nude, much younger—a glowing youngman of about 20. “Thats me!” he had said, almost challengingly, as he passed the photographs to the two scores. And he carried, too, mysteriously, some frayed clippings, in an envelope, an envelope which, once, I saw him replace with a newer one, with great tenderness: the frayed clippings becoming older and older—the envelope, new. There were hints, in his conversations, of closed doors behind him, doors which had opened temptingly and Slammed! with great finality; hints of painful resignation. Behind the sullen look with which he nailed the people who bought him was the unmistakable awareness that he was on the brink of facing his doom: of facing Death.... And Death for Skipper was the loss of Youth.... The years that would follow the knowledge of his premature death would be played out by him like a ghost.... Watching him rush out of a bar once, Chuck had said: “Man, that stud walks more miles in a day than I do all mammy-screwin week long!” And Darling Dolly Dane had added, sighing deeply: “Yeah, baby, but he always ends up where he started from....” Perhaps realizing this, Skipper constantly veiled his eyes.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Midrash would become a new ritual evoking the divine and would always retain connotations of dedication, emotional involvement, and expectant inquiry. 91 Scientific Religion I n 1610, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) lamented the state of the world, which he thought was entering its final phase. A deeply conservative man, Donne was a casualty of the Reformation. Born into a devout Catholic family, he had abjured his faith after his brother had died in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest and had become bitterly hostile to the new Catholicism. He was profoundly disturbed by the recent scientific discoveries that seemed wantonly to have destroyed the old cosmic vision of perfection and harmony. These were hard times. Europe was in the throes of economic recession and the social unrest attendant on modernization, and yet in the midst of this confusion, the “new Philosophy” * called “all in doubt.” ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation. 1 It was as though the universe had suffered a massive earthquake. New stars had been sighted in the firmament, and others had disappeared. The heavens no longer enjoyed their “Sphericall … round proportion embracing all,” and planets were said to wander in “Eccentrique parts” that violated the “pure forme” that men had observed for so long. 2 When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth? Donne was not alone in his pessimism. That same year Henry IV of Navarre, who had seemed the only monarch capable of stemming the tide of denominational violence that was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe, had been assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This was immediately recognized as a tragic turning point and had the same kind of impact in seventeenth-century Europe as did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in twentieth-century America. 3 Henry had been determined to contain the religious passions that were becoming murderously divisive in France and had followed a policy of strict neutrality. He had granted civil liberties to French Protestants, and when the parlement expelled the Jesuits, Henry had reinstated them. His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed. By 1600, England was drifting into a civil war and the principalities of Germany were struggling to achieve independence from the Holy Roman Empire and form nation-states. Sweden supported the Protestant princes, and the Austrian Hapsburgs the Catholics. In 1618, this strife escalated into the full-scale Thirty Years’ War, which killed 35 percent of the population of central Europe, which was reduced to a charnel house. Religion was clearly incapable of bringing the warring parties together. The more Roman Catholic zealots gloried in the slaughter of Protestants and the more Protestants exultantly burned Catholic strongholds to the ground, the more people of moderation and goodwill despaired of a solution. But not everybody shared Donne’s misgivings about the “new Philosophy.”

• 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. 7 8 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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But everyone knew they werent true. Lance propositioning anyone! Thats Ridiculous! Ive known him for years—better than anyone else—and Lance just doesnt proposition anyone. Well, anyway,” he sighed sadly, “he didnt then—but I wouldnt know Now. Everyone changes so.... Look at me.” (Sigh....) “You want? to go? to eat, babe?...” 5 This is the house of Lance O’Hara — the house of Esmeralda Drake the Third .... In the hills, serene. The smile on Lance’s face seems serene too: belying the existence of a ghost, tapping along the house with a cane .... Most of the morning, Lance was on the telephone. “Yes, it’s me—Lance! Im having a party.... As early as you like.... Here, in my house—you know where I live....” And most of the morning, and into the afternoon, the telephone rang as if itself aware of the party. Since yesterday at Arrowhead, Lance had not mentioned Dean—except once, last night, when, in bed with me (as he tried, I knew, to stifle with sex the screaming memories), he had called me by his name. But each time he answers the telephone today, the smile freezes, he closes his eyes, breathes deeply to contain the welling panic. He stands moments over the telephone, his hand uncertainly over the receiver. The “Hello,” coming finally, becomes a wrongly answered question.... Chick, naturally, was the first to come. “Baby, I didnt know you even knew Lance!” he said, winking at me knowingly—and then he swept toward Lance, embracing him with genuine affection. “Lance, baby, oh! I could cry to see you looking so Great. What a grand idea to have a party! Remember the Old Times? Remember when we were dancing in the Movies together?... Party every night. Never went to bed except to party some more....” And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So the motley chorus has invaded the stage. But looking at Lance, strangely sparkling now, the Furies are forced to abandon their dour prophecies. Only momentarily. They wait, They know. They have been alerted by life itself. Like criminals returning to the scene of the crime, the whisperers know they have returned to the scene of the beginning of the fall. Jamey burst in, in a very brief striped bikini. “I went to the beach,” he explained breathlessly. “I just heard about the party, and I was told it was going to be very informal—so voilà!” —striking a bathingbeauty pose. He catches sight of Lance and rushes toward him. “Well, Lance, welcome back—it hasnt been the same without you.

• 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?”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or story looking forward to a terrifying future war did not appear in some European country. 92 The “next great war” loomed as a fearful but unavoidable ordeal, from which the nation would emerge with renewed strength and vigor. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) poignantly expressed the modern predicament. In “The Darkling Thrush,” dated December 31, 1900, he expressed the bleak desolation of the human spirit excluded from traditional ways of arriving at a sense of life’s meaning. He described the “sharp features” of the wintry landscape as “the century’s corpse;” it seemed to Hardy that “every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly, an aged thrush—”frail, gaunt and small”—began to sing, flinging his soul upon the growing gloom. As he listened to this “full hearted evensong,” Hardy could only reflect, with a calm, sad acceptance: So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around , That I could think there trembl’d through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. 93 Science and Religion I t is often said that the modern period began in the year 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in the hope of finding a new sea route to India and discovered the Americas instead. This voyage would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass and the latest insights in astronomy. The people of Western Europe were on the brink of a new world that would give them unprecedented control over their environment, and Christian Spain was in the vanguard of this change. Columbus’s patrons were the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Spain was in the process of becoming a modern, centralized state. This was an age of transition. Columbus himself was certainly conversant with the new scientific ideas that were eagerly discussed in the Spanish universities, but he was still rooted in the older religious universe. A devout Christian, he had been born into a family of converted Jews and retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism. He also regarded himself as a latter-day Crusader: once he reached India, he intended to establish a military base for the recovery of Jerusalem. 1 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but the traditional myths of religion still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations. On January 2, 1492, Columbus had been present at the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, by the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  That night at Islington he had learned the truth at last - had heard that drunken man’s shout, seen Kitty’s terrible, terrified response, and understood. He had driven her home - I did not know what had passed between them then, for neither of them seemed at all inclined to discuss any part of that dreadful evening - he had driven her home, but that tender gesture of his, to place his cloak about her trembling shoulders and see her safely to her door, had been his last. Now he could not be easy with her - perhaps because he knew for sure that he had lost her; more probably, because the idea of our love he found distasteful. And so he stayed away.Had we remained very long at Mrs Dendy’s house, I think our friends there would have noticed Walter’s absence, and quizzed us over it; but at the end of September came the biggest change of all. We said good-bye to our landlady and Ginevra Road, and moved.We had talked vaguely of moving since the start of our fame; but we had always put the crucial moment off - it seemed foolish to leave a place in which we had been, and were still, so happy. Mrs Dendy’s had become our home. It was the house in which we had first kissed, first declared our love; it was, I thought, our honeymoon house - and for all that it was so cramped and plain, for all that our costumes now took up more space in the bedroom than our bed, I was terribly loath to leave it.But Kitty said it looked queer, us still sharing a room, and a bed, when we had the money to live somewhere ten times the size; and she had a house agent look about for rooms for us, somewhere more seemly.It was to Stamford Hill that we moved, in the end - Stamford Hill, far across the river, in a bit of London I hardly knew (and thought, privately, a little dull). We had a farewell supper at Ginevra Road, with everyone saying how sorry they were to see us go - Mrs Dendy herself even wept a little, and said her house would never be the same.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He’d come home from work strangely disheartened one winter evening. We asked him what was wrong. ‘Did you see the sky today?’ he said. He’d been walking through a London park on his way back from a press-call. It was deserted but for a small boy playing by a frozen boating lake. ‘I said, “Look up, look at that. Remember you saw that. You’ll never see it again.”’ Above them both was a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun-dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun’s light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire. But the boy didn’t seem interested at all. Dad was baffled. ‘Maybe he thought you were one of those strange men,’ we sniggered, rolling our eyes, and he looked embarrassed and faintly cross. But he was so very sad about the boy who didn’t see. Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother’s shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course. Henri Cartier-Bresson called the taking of a good photograph a decisive moment. ‘Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera,’ he said. ‘The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone for ever.’ I thought of one of these moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a woollen beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. The man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught midhop exactly at the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man’s face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She told him dont bother getting a room, give the extra bread to her, honey, and: “I know a swinging head in an apartment house right around here,” Darling Dolly told the score, who was pretty juiced anyhow. So they go up to the head, and the score is thinking this is really getting Saturday-night kicks: gone sex! with a cute queen! in a head! And she took off his pants cooing and his shorts cooing and ran out with both pants and shorts—and wallet “And look!” she said now, pulling out the wallet, which was green, green like a tree. “So Ive got to go to your pad in case he comes back looking for me.” “Without pants?” Destiny asked, and adds: “And why my pad? why not yours?” Darling Dolly explains it’s too far and too early. Miss Destiny tilted her head, consulting her gay fairy. “Miss Thing says dont give you the key,” Miss Destiny said, “but then Miss Thing aint nevuh been busted—so here—” Darling Dolly dashed out with the key. Miss Destiny sighed Darling Dolly was positively Too Much, and I noticed Chuck going out, widehat over his eyes, with the flashy fruit... Lola is still sitting very much alone glowering at her madeup face in the mirror behind the bar.... And Miss Destiny continues typically as if nothing had interrupted her story: “And then, before I knew it, Duke was dead.... He was a truckdriver, and sometimes we were so poor we couldnt even make it: I had to hustle in drag in order to keep us going—of course, he didnt know this—” And then remembering The Wealth and the country estate: “Well, you see his family disinherited him, they couldnt stand me.” And then remembering the way his family Idolized her: “Well, you see they loved me at first, until they Found Out—” (Now Duke the Aristocrat is Duke the Truckdriver, disinherited but oh so in love with Miss Destiny, and on a cold murky damp foggy day his truck turns over on the highway, the brakes screech shrilly, the wheels are turning round, round, round.... The sirens wail: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-uh.

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

  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. Of course we stood to make a great deal of money. But getting rich had never factored in my decisions, and it mattered even less to the Buttfaces. So when I brought it up at the next meeting and told them what Chuck had said, I didn’t ask for another debate. I just put it to a vote. Hayes was for. Johnson was against. Strasser, too. “It’ll spoil the culture,” he kept saying, over and over. Woodell was on the fence. If there was one thing we all agreed on, however, it was the lack of barriers. Nothing stood in the way of going public. Sales were extraordinary, word of mouth was positive, legal disputes were behind us. We had debt, but for the moment it was manageable. At the start of the 1977 Christmas season, as the brightly colored lights appeared on the houses in my neighborhood, I recall thinking during one of my nightly runs: Everything is about to change. It’s just a matter of time. And then came the letter. AN UNIMPOSING LITTLE thing. Standard white envelope. Embossed return address. U.S. Customs Service, Washington, DC. I opened it and my hands started to shake. It was a bill. For $25 million.

• From Educated (2018)

  We trapped mice to feed it, but sometimes it didn’t eat them, and we couldn’t clear away the carcasses. The smell of death was strong and foul, a punch to the gut. The owl grew restless. When it began to refuse food, we opened the back door and let it escape. It wasn’t fully healed, but Dad said its chances were better with the mountain than with us. It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong. —I WANTED TO TELL SOMEONE I’d failed the exam, but something stopped me from calling Tyler. It might have been shame. Or it might have been that Tyler was preparing to be a father. He’d met his wife, Stefanie, at Purdue, and they’d married quickly. She didn’t know anything about our family. To me, it felt as though he preferred his new life—his new family—to his old one. I called home. Dad answered. Mother was delivering a baby, which she was doing more and more now the migraines had stopped. “When will Mother be home?” I said. “Don’t know,” said Dad. “Might as well ask the Lord as me, as He’s the one deciding.” He chuckled, then asked, “How’s school?” Dad and I hadn’t spoken since he’d screamed at me about the VCR. I could tell he was trying to be supportive, but I didn’t think I could admit to him that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying. “Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.” “It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now. “If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.” I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something. —IN MARCH, THERE WAS ANOTHER exam in Western Civ. This time I made flash cards. I spent hours memorizing odd spellings, many of them French (France, I now understood, was a part of Europe). Jacques-Louis David and François Boucher: I couldn’t say them but I could spell them. My lecture notes were nonsensical, so I asked Vanessa if I could look at hers. She looked at me skeptically, and for a moment I wondered if she’d noticed me cheating off her exam. She said she wouldn’t give me her notes but that we could study together, so after class I followed her to her dorm room.

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

  He wanted to stick around, and how could I argue? I told him I understood. But I was cast low. I left the bar and went for a long walk on the beach. Game over, I told myself. The last thing I wanted was to pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn’t see traveling around the world alone, either. Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop. The next day I gave my two weeks’ notice at the boiler room. “Too bad, Buck,” one of the bosses said, “you had a real future as a salesman.” “God forbid,” I muttered. That afternoon, at a travel agency down the block, I purchased an open plane ticket, good for one year on any airline going anywhere. A sort of Eurail Pass in the sky. On Thanksgiving Day, 1962, I hoisted my backpack and shook Carter’s hand. “Buck,” he said, “don’t take any wooden nickels.” THE CAPTAIN ADDRESSED the passengers in rapid-fire Japanese, and I started to sweat. I looked out the window at the blazing red circle on the wing. Mom Hatfield was right, I thought. We were just at war with these people. Corregidor, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking—and now I was going there on some sort of business venture? Crazy Idea? Maybe I was, in fact , crazy. If so, it was too late to seek professional help. The plane was screeching down the runway, roaring above Hawaii’s cornstarch beaches. I looked down at the massive volcanoes growing smaller and smaller. No turning back. Since it was Thanksgiving, the in-flight meal was turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Since we were bound for Japan, there was also raw tuna, miso soup, and hot sake. I ate it all, while reading the paperbacks I’d stuffed into my backpack. The Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch . I identified with Holden Caulfield, the teenage introvert seeking his place in the world, but Burroughs went right over my head. The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. Too rich for my blood. I passed out. When I woke we were in a steep, rapid descent. Below us lay a startlingly bright Tokyo. The Ginza in particular was like a Christmas tree. Driving to my hotel, however, I saw only darkness. Vast sections of the city were total liquid black. “War,” the cabdriver said. “Many building still bomb.” American B-29s. Superfortresses. Over a span of several nights in the summer of 1944, waves of them dropped 750,000 pounds of bombs, most filled with gasoline and flammable jelly. One of the world’s oldest cities, Tokyo was made largely of wood, so the bombs set off a hurricane of fire. Some three hundred thousand people were burned alive, instantly, four times the number who died in Hiroshima.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Many were dismayed by Heidegger’s apparent refusal to condemn National Socialism after the war. But his ideas were extremely evocative and influenced a generation of Christian theologians. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) insisted that God must be de-objectified and that the scriptures did not convey factual information but could be understood only if Christians involved themselves existentially with their faith. “To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves … with an objective event,” he explained, “but rather to make the cross our own.”55 Europeans had lost the sense that their doctrines were mere gestures toward transcendence. Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is “not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. … Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but … existentially.”56 Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were “stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes.”57 A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as “an object of thought or speculation” but as an existential demand, a “power that constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good.”58 Like Heidegger, Bultmann understood that the sense of the divine was not something to be comprehended once and for all; it came to us repetitively, by constant attention to the demands of the moment. He was not speaking of an exotic mystical experience. Having lived through the Nazi years, Bultmann knew how frequently, in such circumstances, men and women are confronted by an internal requirement that seems to come from outside themselves and which they cannot reject without denying what is most authentic to them. God was, therefore, an absolute claim that drew people beyond self-interest and egotism into transcendence. Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was born in Prussia and served as an army chaplain in the trenches during the First World War, after which he suffered two major breakdowns. Later he became a professor of theology at the University of Frankfurt but was expelled by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated to the United States. He saw the modern God as an idolatry that human beings must leave behind. The concept of a “Personal God,” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless, a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.59