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 Wild (2012)

  I needed to make time. I was already behind what I considered my schedule, but I could not force myself to leave the small verdant patch of live oaks that surrounded Golden Oak Springs that day. In addition to the raw patches of flesh, my muscles and bones ached from hiking, and my feet were dotted with an ever-increasing number of blisters. I sat in the dirt examining them, knowing there was little I could do to prevent the blisters from going from bad to worse. I ran my finger delicately over them and then up to the black bruise the size of a silver dollar that bloomed on my ankle—not a PCT injury, but rather evidence of my pre-PCT idiocy. It was because of this bruise that I’d opted not to call Paul when I’d been so lonely at that motel back in Mojave; this bruise at the center of the story I knew he’d hear hiding in my voice. How I’d intended to stay away from Joe in the two days I spent in Portland before catching my flight to LA, but hadn’t. How I’d ended up shooting heroin with him in spite of the fact that I hadn’t touched it since that time he’d come to visit me in Minneapolis six months before. “My turn,” I’d said urgently after watching him shoot up back in Portland. The PCT suddenly seeming so far in my future, though it was only forty-eight hours away. “Give me your ankle,” Joe had said when he couldn’t find a vein in my arm. I spent the day at Golden Oak Springs with my compass in hand, reading Staying Found. I found north, south, east, and west. I walked jubilantly without my pack down a jeep road that came up to the springs to see what I could see. It was spectacular to walk without my pack on, even in the state my feet were in, sore as my muscles were. I felt not only upright, but lifted, as if two elastic bands were attached to my shoulders from above. Each step was a leap, light as air. When I reached an overlook, I stopped and gazed across the expanse. It was only more desert mountains, beautiful and austere, and more rows of white angular wind turbines in the distance. I returned to my camp, set up my stove, and attempted to make myself a hot meal, my first on the trail, but I couldn’t get my stove to sustain a flame, no matter what I tried. I pulled the little instruction book out, read the troubleshooting section, and learned that I’d filled the stove’s canister with the wrong kind of gas. I’d filled it with unleaded fuel instead of the special white gas that it was meant to have, and now the generator was clogged, its tiny pan blackened with soot by my efforts.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  “What picture shall I give you for this generation?” asked Jesus. “It’s like a bunch of children sitting in the town square, and singing songs to each other. This is how it goes: ‘You didn’t dance when we played the flute; You didn’t cry when we sang the dirge!’ “What do I mean? When John appeared, he didn’t have any normal food or drink—and people said ‘What’s gotten into him, then? Some demon?’ Then along comes the son of man, eating and drinking normally, and people say, ‘Ooh, look at him—guzzling and boozing, hanging around with tax-collectors and other riffraff.’ But, you know, wisdom is as wisdom does—and wisdom will be vindicated!” (Matt. 11:2–19) It must have broken Jesus’s heart to have to send the message back, but send it back he did. Yes, he said, the work he was doing really was the breaking in of God’s kingdom. But no, sadly, it wasn’t working out the way they would have liked. And when, days or weeks later, they brought him news that Antipas had had John beheaded on the whim of his alluring stepdaughter, I suspect that Jesus’s sorrowful reaction (Matt. 14:13) was as much about this irony—the fact that he hadn’t been able to do anything to rescue John—as about his natural sorrow at his cousin’s death, or his natural recognition that he himself might well be the next in line for the same treatment. Here again the shadow of the cross looms over the story of the kingdom. So what was Jesus doing? What sense did it make then, and what sense might it make now, to see him as in some way inaugurating “heaven’s rule,” or “God’s kingdom”? Why didn’t it mean setting John free from prison? How might what he was doing and saying be seen, by any stretch of the imagination, as putting into practice a program that said, “This is what it looks like when God’s in charge”? That’s the question that must have been on many minds and hearts in revolution-hungry Galilee. Here was someone talking about God becoming king; well, they’d had a few of those before, so what was new? What was different? What did this man have to offer? Could they trust him? Was he a loyal Jew, obedient to God and his law, or was he leading Israel astray?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The Temple had come to symbolize the nationalist movement that had led many Jews to revolt against pagan oppression in the past and would lead them to do so once more. As we see graphically throughout the history of Israel, and not least in the first century, the Temple was the sign that Israel’s God, the world’s creator, was with his people and would defend them against all comers. Battle and Temple had gone together for a thousand years, from David himself through to Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. And Jesus had come as the Prince of Peace. “If only you’d known,” he sobbed out through his tears, “on this day—even you!—what peace meant. But now it’s hidden, and you can’t see it.” Enemies will come, he said. “They won’t leave one single stone on another, because you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you” (Luke 19:42–44). Israel’s God was coming back at last, and they couldn’t see it. Why not? Because they were looking in entirely the wrong direction. The Temple, and the city of which the Temple was the focal point, had come to symbolize violent national revolution. Instead of being the light of the world, the city on the hill that should let its light shine out to the nations, it was determined to keep the light for itself. The Temple was not just redundant; not just a place of economic oppression. It had become a symbol of Israel’s violent ambition, a sign that Israel’s ancient vocation had been turned inside out. In Luke’s gospel, the scene of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem balances the scene near the start in which Jesus goes to Nazareth and risks his neck by declaring God’s blessing on the pagan nations. Then it was the synagogue; now it’s the Temple. It also balances the scene even earlier, when the twelve-year-old Jesus stays back in Jerusalem, to his parents’ alarm, at the end of a Passover celebration—and is finally discovered sitting in the Temple with the teachers, listening to them, quizzing them in turn, and explaining that he had to be getting involved with his father’s work (2:49). Now here he is, back again, involved up to the neck in his father’s work, astonishing the Jerusalem authorities for a different reason. This is the climax of his father’s work, and that work is now focused on Jesus himself, not the Temple. If Jesus is acting out a vision—astonishing, risky, and one might say crazy—in which he is behaving as if he is the Temple, redefining sacred space around himself, something equally strange and risky is taking place in the realm of time . Time Fulfilled Time!

• From Another Country (1962)

  And he turned his head and looked at her. She did not look at him; and she said nothing; said nothing for a block or more. The theater came closer and closer. Cass and Eric were standing under the marquee, and they waved. “What I don’t understand,” she said, slowly, “is how you can talk about love when you don’t want to know what’s happening. And that’s not my fault. How can you say you loved Rufus when there was so much about him you didn’t want to know? How can I believe you love me?” And, with a curious helplessness, she took his arm. “How can you love somebody you don’t know anything about? You don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know what life is like for me.” “But I’m willing,” he said, “to spend the rest of my life finding out.” She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, Vivaldo. You may spend the rest of your life finding out—but it won’t be because you’re willing.” And then, with ferocity, “And it won’t be me you’ll be finding out about. Oh, Lord.” She dropped his arm. She gave him a strange side glance; he could not read it, it seemed both pitying and cold. “I’m sorry to have hurt your feelings, I’m not trying to kill you. I know you’re not responsible for—for the world. And, listen: I don’t blame you for not being willing. I’m not willing, nobody’s willing. Nobody’s willing to pay their dues.” Then she moved forward, smiling, to greet Eric and Cass. “Hello, kids,” she said—and Vivaldo watched her, that urchin grin, those flashing eyes—“how you been making it?” She tapped Eric lightly on the cheek. “They tell me you’re beginning to enjoy New York almost as much as you enjoyed Paris. How about that? We’re not so bad over here, now, are we?” Eric blushed, and humorously pursued his lips. “I’d enjoy it a whole lot more if you’d put your rivers and bridges in the middle of the city instead of having them all pushed off on the edges this way. You can’t breathe in this city in the summertime; it’s frightening.” He looked at Vivaldo. “I don’t know how you barbarians stand it.” “If it wasn’t for us barbarians,” said Vivaldo, “you mandarins would be in one hell of a fix.” He kissed Cass on the forehead, and struck Eric lightly on the back of the neck. “It’s good to see you, anyway.” “We’ve got good news,” said Cass, “though I guess I really ought to let Eric tell it.” “Well, we’re not absolutely certain that it’s good news,” said Eric.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I returned to college, and after a term of heart searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969. Writing Through the Narrow Gate, some twelve years later, was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past, and I learned a great deal. Most important, I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print. As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I never could have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence: I had indeed “begun the world.” But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with “the world,” although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavors, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that in superficial ways, my present life is light-years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house, and money. I travel, have a lot of fun, and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking, and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion, and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But he knew what she meant. Her words had taken his mind away—for a moment—from his cruel visions of Ida and Ellis. (“You told me you hadn’t seen him since that party.” “Well. I did go to see him once, just to tell him about the jam session.” “Why did you have to see him, why didn’t you just call?” “I wasn’t sure he’d remember me from just over the phone. And then I didn’t tell you because I knew how you’d behave.” “I don’t care what you say, baby, I know what he’s after, he just wants to get inside your drawers.” “Oh, Vivaldo. You think I don’t know how to handle little snots like that?” And she gave him a look, which he did not know how to answer, which almost stated Look how I handled you.) But now he thought of himself at fifteen or sixteen—swimming in the Coney Island surf, or in the pool in his neighborhood; playing handball in the playground, sometimes with his father; lying in the gutter after a street fight, vomiting, praying that no enemy would take this occasion to kick his brains in. He remembered the fear of those days, fear of everything, covered with a mocking, staccato style, defended with the bullets of dirty words. Everything was for the first time; at fifteen or sixteen; and what was her name? Zelda. Could that possibly be right? On the roof, in the summertime, under the dirty city stars. All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it. Where was Zelda now? She might easily have been transformed into the matron with fleshy, spreading buttocks and metallically unlikely blonde hair who teetered on high heels just before them now. She, too, somewhere, some day, had looked on and touched everything for the first time and felt the summer air on her breasts like a blessing and been entered and had the blood run out, for the first time. And what was Cass thinking? “Oh, no,” she said, slowly, “I certainly don’t mean that I want to be that miserable girl again. I was just remembering how different it was then—how different from now.” He put one arm around her thin shoulders. “You sound sad, Cass. Tell me what’s the matter.” He guided her into a dark, cool cocktail lounge. The waiter led them to a small table for two, took their orders, and disappeared. Cass looked down at the tabletop and played with the salted peanuts in the red plastic dish. “Well, that’s why I called you—to talk to you. But it’s not so easy. I’m not sure I know what’s the matter.” The waiter returned and set their drinks down before them. “That’s not true. I guess I do know what’s the matter.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The story I told the holes was this one: The first time I got a fever, only months after my father left for the mainland, I wet the bed twice in one night. My mouth was hot and oven-doored, baking my tongue brittle when I tried to speak. After days of staying home with me, of swapping my bedsheets for towels and saran-wrapping my pillow to keep me from clawing out the foam, my mother called Ama. I knew she didn’t want to call, but she hadn’t been to work in a week and we were running out of grocery bags for me to vomit into. I couldn’t hear what she’d said to Ama, but after she hung up and knotted up the plastic bag of my vomit, she swiped the slime off my chin and said, I have to go to work. Feet don’t scour themselves of fungus. I knew she wanted me to contradict her, to tell her to stay home with me, but instead I said I wanted to see Ama. My mother stood in the doorway with the bag of vomit flopping in her arms. A leak opened in the corner of the bag and my belly drained out of it, a stew splattering her toes. She stepped through it, came to my bedside. Said I didn’t know what I wanted. But what I wanted was both of them beside me, their arms impersonating a bridge above me, but that would mean I was the river below them, siding with the water that had almost drowned my mother. Ama took a seven-hour bus, heading north to us with crates of Coca-Cola and a bag of ginger that required two seats. In our kitchen, Ama boiled Coca-Cola with slices of ginger wading inside, a Cantonese cure she learned from the other women at the factory. She held my mouth open and poured in the ginger-cola, wouldn’t let go until I swallowed. Her fingers corseting my throat. My mother watched in the doorway, waiting to intervene, but Ama left the next day. She’d sewn me a charm to put inside my pillowcase, a stuffed gourd of felt and cotton balls. My mother threw it away every morning, but I stole it out of the trash and slept with my mouth around it, a gourd I’d ripen into my daughter. Ben told me to keep going, that the holes were opening, listening through their throats. But the story was too long for me to speak: My throat would run out like a ribbon. Inside the house, I wrote what I remembered, folded it into squares, and fed it to the 口 . _ TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Ama told me this story during my fever. I didn’t remember anything she said until days after she left, when my mother said I should delete all recollections of Ama before they invaded my neighboring memories. But this is a story I don’t want to forget.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And Vivaldo smiled to himself suddenly, a smile as sad as his tears, thinking of shooting matches and other contests on rooftops and basements and in locker-rooms and cars half his lifetime ago. And he had dreamed of it since, though it was only now that he remembered the dreams that he had dreamed. Feeling very cold now, inwardly cold, with Harold’s hand on his cock and Harold’s head on his chest, and knowing that: yes, something could happen, he recalled his fantasies—of the male mouth, male hands, the male organ, the male ass. Sometimes, a boy—who always rather reminded him of his younger brother, Stevie, and perhaps this was the prohibition, as, in others, it might be the key—passed him, and he watched the boy’s face and watched his ass, and he felt something, wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his young behind. So he knew that it was there, and he probably wasn’t frightened of it any more; but it was, possibly, too expensive for him, it did not matter enough. So he said to Harold, gently, “Understand me, man, I’m not putting you down. But my time with boys was a long time ago. I’ve been busy with girls. I’m sorry.” “And nothing can happen now?” “I’d rather not. I’m sorry.” Harold smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Then, “Can I lie here with you, like this, just the same?” Vivaldo held him and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the sky was a great brass bowl above him. Harold lay near him, one hand on Vivaldo’s leg, asleep. Belle and Lorenzo lay wrapped in the blanket, like two dirty children. He stood up, moving too close to the edge, getting a dreadful glimpse of the waiting, baking streets. His mouth felt like Mississippi in the days when cotton was king. He hurried down the stairs into the streets, hurrying home to Ida. She would say, “My God, Vivaldo, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling this house all night long to let you know I had to go and sit in with some fellows in Jersey City. I keep telling you we better get an answering service, but you never hear anything I say!”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For a start, this was an emphatically royal action, a claim to be Israel’s true king. But Zechariah’s prophecy also makes it clear that this king will come as a man of peace. As we have just seen, Jesus redefined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of “us” against “them,” of the forces of light fighting with literal weapons against the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the arrival of this peaceable king will mean the establishment of his worldwide rule; as in the Psalms and Isaiah, Israel’s true king will be the king of the whole world, “from sea to sea.” The result will be the establishment of God’s covenant with his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting (think once more of Egypt, of the Exodus, of Passover) in prisoners being set free. And, as often in Zechariah and in other prophecies of the time, if this great event were to happen, it could only mean that Israel’s God was at last coming back. His glorious Presence was once again to appear. All this, I suggest, Jesus’s followers and the watching people of Jerusalem would have taken in right away, with no particular mental effort. Their minds were already in tune with the various elements and with the controlling drama within which they made sense. And if that’s what it all meant for them, it can hardly have meant any less for Jesus himself. So when Jesus came into the Temple and performed another dramatic action, driving out the money changers and the dealers selling animals for sacrifice, this too would have been seen within a web of prophetic allusion and symbolism. Jeremiah, after all, had famously smashed a pot at the same place (Jer. 19), symbolizing the coming judgment. But what was Jesus intending to communicate? What did he mean by his action? Like many others, I have become convinced that Jesus’s dramatic action was a way of declaring that the Temple was under God’s judgment and would, before too long, be destroyed forever. That is certainly how the gospel writers saw it. Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow the incident with a string of discussions that all turn on the question of whether Jesus has the right to do this kind of thing, what he means by it, what sort of a revolution he has in mind, and so on, all of which lead readers into the long discourse in which Jesus solemnly declares that the Temple is to be destroyed within a generation (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). John, who describes Jesus’s action in the Temple much earlier in his gospel, has Jesus saying something cryptic about the Temple being destroyed and then rebuilt in three days—a saying that then turns up in the other gospels, in garbled form, when Jesus is on trial before the chief priests (John 2:19; Matt.

• From Wild (2012)

  By the time Paul and I decided to file our divorce papers, I’d broken in my new name enough that I wrote it without hesitation on the blank line. It was the other lines that gave me pause, the endless lines demanding signatures that would dissolve our marriage. Those were the ones I completed with far more trepidation. I didn’t exactly want to get divorced. I didn’t exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I’d never been. The day we signed our divorce papers, it was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls, enchanting the city. We sat across a table from a woman named Val who was an acquaintance of ours and also, as it happened, licensed as a notary public. We watched the snow from a wide window in her office downtown, making little jokes when we could. I’d met Val only a few times before; I knew glimmers of things about her that jumbled together in my mind. She was cute, blunt, and impossibly tiny; at least a decade older than us. Her hair was an inch long and bleached blonde except for a longer hank of it that was dyed pink and swooped down like a little wing over her eyes. Silver earrings rimmed her ears and a throng of multicolored tattoos etched her arms like sleeves. This, and yet she had an actual job in an actual office downtown with a big wide window and a notary public license to boot. We chose her to officiate our divorce because we wanted it to be easy. We wanted it to be cool. We wanted to believe that we were still gentle, good people in the world. That everything we’d said to each other six years before had been true. What was it we said? we’d asked each other a few weeks before, half drunk in my apartment, where we’d decided once and for all that we were going through with this. “Here it is,” I’d yelled after riffling through some papers and finding the wedding vows we’d written ourselves, three faded pages stapled together. We’d given them a title: The Day the Daisies Bloomed. “The Day the Daisies Bloomed!” I hooted, and we laughed so hard at ourselves, at the people we used to be. And then I set the vows back on top of the pile where I’d found them, unable to read on.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  These themes are, if you like, the particular dust storms that the great high-pressure system of Israel’s history picked up along the way, gathering momentum with every passing decade. Memories of King David and his famous victories over the surrounding pagan nations were kept alive, as prophets promised a coming day when a king from David’s family would bring justice, peace, and prosperity to the whole world. (Had the Roman poet Virgil been reading Isaiah 11? Probably not, but the coincidence of themes is striking.) Memories of King Solomon building the Temple in Jerusalem were kept alive by those who defended, cleansed, restored, or beautified the Temple, a process that was still going on in Jesus’s day under the patronage of the Herod family. The coming king would defeat the wicked, oppressive nations and would build, or rebuild, God’s Temple! Hitler and the Messiah! Down with the one! Bring on the other! For “Hitler,” then, also read “Babylon.” Other disasters had come crashing down on the Israelites. But easily the worst was when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC , decimated the royal family, smashed the Temple to bits, and carried away its treasures, dragging off most of the population into an exile from which few would ever return. It was like Egypt all over again: enslavement in a foreign land. “By the rivers of Babylon,” wrote one of their poets, “there we sat down and there we wept” (Ps. 137:1). And it was memories of Jerusalem, of “Zion,” that made the tears bitter. They had lived at the fault line in world history and geography, and the earthquake had swallowed them up alive. And now here comes the extraordinary bit, the part of the story many miss out, the twist in the tale responsible for the fact that, by the time the high-pressure system of Jewish history reached the first century, it was already dangerously close to storm force. Though many Jews had, remarkably enough, been brought back from Babylon and by the end of the sixth century had even rebuilt the Temple, there remained a strong sense that this was not yet the real “new Exodus” for which they longed. Babylon itself had fallen, overthrown by a rival empire (Persia); but the phenomenon of which Egypt a thousand years before had been one classic example, and Babylon the most recent, was continuing. New wicked empires had arisen, and Israel was still enslaved to them. And there grew up a sense that a new Exodus, a real “return from exile,” was still to be awaited, had not yet happened.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter—a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset. In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard, Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time I assumed that I had finished with religion forever, yet in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that—I now believe—was what I was seeking all those years ago, when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent, and set off to find God. 2 T. S. ELIOT, Ash-Wednesday, I Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Others stories are heavy in a different way, with the sorrowful realization that Israel as a whole simply isn’t interested in Jesus’s kingdom vision, indeed is violently rejecting it, because violence has become its way of life. Then the sequence of four moves, ending with the crucial one, comes again, but this time in the form of the rejected prophets and the rejected son. The rejected prophets correspond to the seed that falls on the wrong kind of soil, while the son corresponds to the seed that produces a large harvest: “Listen to another parable,” Jesus went on. “Once upon a time there was a householder who planted a vineyard, built a wall for it, dug out a winepress in it, and built a tower. Then he rented it out to tenant farmers and went away on a journey. “When harvest time arrived, he sent his slaves to the farmers to collect his produce. The farmers seized his slaves; they beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than before, and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They’ll respect my son,” he said. “But the farmers saw the son. “‘This fellow’s the heir!’ they said among themselves. ‘Come on, let’s kill him, and then we can take over the property!’ “So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. “Now then: when the vineyard-owner returns, what will he do to those farmers?” “He’ll kill them brutally, the wretches!” they said. “And he’ll lease the vineyard to other farmers who’ll give him the produce at the right time.” “Did you never read what the Bible says?” said Jesus to them: ‘The stone the builders threw away Is now atop the corner; It’s from the Lord, all this, they say And we looked on in wonder.’ “So then let me tell you this: God’s kingdom is going to be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the goods. Anyone who falls on this stone will be smashed to pieces, and anyone it falls on will be crushed.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew he was talking about them. They tried to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowds, who regarded him as a prophet. (Matt. 21:33–46) The crowds understood that one all right, without any further explanation. So did the chief priests and the Pharisees, who rightly saw that the story had been told against them. “Don’t Miss It”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the one the Bible was talking about when it says, ‘See, I’m sending my messenger ahead of you And he will clear your path before you.’ “I’m telling you the truth: John the Baptist is the greatest mother’s son there ever was. But even the least significant person in heaven’s kingdom is greater than he is. From the time of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been forcing its way in—and the men of force are trying to grab it! All the prophets and the law, you see, made their prophecies up to the time of John. In fact, if you’ll believe it, he is Elijah, the one who was to come. If you’ve got ears, then listen! “What picture shall I give you for this generation?” asked Jesus. “It’s like a bunch of children sitting in the town square, and singing songs to each other. This is how it goes: ‘You didn’t dance when we played the flute; You didn’t cry when we sang the dirge!’ “What do I mean? When John appeared, he didn’t have any normal food or drink—and people said ‘What’s gotten into him, then? Some demon?’ Then along comes the son of man, eating and drinking normally, and people say, ‘Ooh, look at him—guzzling and boozing, hanging around with tax-collectors and other riffraff.’ But, you know, wisdom is as wisdom does—and wisdom will be vindicated!” (Matt. 11:2–19) It must have broken Jesus’s heart to have to send the message back, but send it back he did. Yes, he said, the work he was doing really was the breaking in of God’s kingdom. But no, sadly, it wasn’t working out the way they would have liked. And when, days or weeks later, they brought him news that Antipas had had John beheaded on the whim of his alluring stepdaughter, I suspect that Jesus’s sorrowful reaction (Matt. 14:13) was as much about this irony—the fact that he hadn’t been able to do anything to rescue John—as about his natural sorrow at his cousin’s death, or his natural recognition that he himself might well be the next in line for the same treatment. Here again the shadow of the cross looms over the story of the kingdom. So what was Jesus doing? What sense did it make then, and what sense might it make now, to see him as in some way inaugurating “heaven’s rule,” or “God’s kingdom”? Why didn’t it mean setting John free from prison? How might what he was doing and saying be seen, by any stretch of the imagination, as putting into practice a program that said, “This is what it looks like when God’s in charge”? That’s the question that must have been on many minds and hearts in revolution-hungry Galilee. Here was someone talking about God becoming king; well, they’d had a few of those before, so what was new?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  How could women who had spent thirty or forty years in the religious life and been even more indelibly shaped by the old system than I change overnight? No, I told myself as I watched them file back to their seats, their eyes cast down and their gaze directed inward, it was no good looking back with nostalgia. When the world outside seemed baffling, I sometimes felt homesick for a way of life that, with all its shortcomings, was at least familiar, just as I had instinctively relaxed when I had walked into the convent yesterday. I could only move forward, however difficult that might seem. “Karen, my dear, how very nice to see you.” I looked up from my breakfast, which I was enjoying in the elegant parlor. How odd it was to be waited on in this way, as I had so often waited on visitors, bringing in coffee, toast, and eggs, while a few hundred yards away the community were eating cornflakes, bread, and margarine. There were some advantages to secular life, I reflected, helping myself to more marmalade but hastily suppressing my involuntary smile of enjoyment when Mother Frances came into the room. She looked somewhat less imposing in her new habit, but she had recently been promoted to become one of the provincial councillors. “But I’m interrupting your breakfast.” Mother Frances gestured toward the hot buttered toast. “Not at all, Reverend Mother.” Instantly I became the young nun again, unable to swallow a single mouthful while my former superior stood waiting to speak to me. “Well, you’re looking very well,” she went on, settling herself in one of the oak carvers at the head of the table. “Are you well?” “Not really, Reverend Mother.” I knew that I was supposed to say that everything was fine, but I suddenly pictured Rebecca’s stricken face. “I’m finding it very hard—almost impossible—to adapt. And it seems to be making me ill.” I briefly gave her the headlines: the fainting, the panic attacks, and the psychiatrist. “Oh really, Sister—Karen, I mean.” She corrected herself, laughing lightly but without amusement. “I really had hoped that you would grow out of all that nonsense! It’s high time, surely. You must be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” “Twenty-five,” I replied, though I couldn’t really see what my age had to do with it. “Well, there you are, then. Far too old for these childish displays.” “But how do I adjust?” Perhaps she should understand the problem so that she could advise other nuns who were thinking of leaving. “I trained to become a nun for five solid years. You know what it was like. You call it ‘formation’ now, I believe, and that’s what it is. It’s a training that shapes you at a very deep level. And I just can’t stop being a nun. I need a new training—one that is equally intensive—to turn me into a secular.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of Metropolitan on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits PAUSE , but finds that instead of pausing Metropolitan, Metropolitan continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame—so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote PAUSE button in the scene I offered him—it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents. One other woman, a paralegal at a small firm in a building with a statue of Edward Coke in front, gave me a long and interesting answer to my question one evening, when we were working late assembling the documents in a huge real estate sale-and-leaseback agreement. Her name was Arlette. We walked around and around a conference table, piling one copy of some ancillary agreement on top of another in a soothing rhythm, and eventually I asked her for her thoughts on what she would do with a PAUSE button that stopped life rather than videotapes. Let me try to record what she said exactly—I took a few notes at the time. “Well,” she said, “I think first I would just sit and think for a while and try to comprehend the fact that I was the only person around who was able to move. Then I’d plan out the little revengeful things I could do. I’d bring it to work, definitely. I could put some of those Dennison colored dots on Stephen Milrose’s evil face, one by one. While he is sitting there at Tuesday Conference, making his nasty little comments, shooting everyone down, ridiculing people for no reason, I’d pick a word, some harmless word that he says a lot, like for instance ‘backside.’ Every time he said that some deal or some client was going to ‘turn around and bite us in the backside,’ I’d hit the PAUSE button and stick a yellow dot on his face. I would love to do that! They would add up, too!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For Tootsie was also leaving - leaving for France, for a part in a Parisian revue; and her room was being taken by a comedian who whistled. The Professor had developed the beginnings of a palsy - there was talk that he might end up in a home for old artistes. Sims and Percy were doing well, and planned to take our rooms when we had left them; but Percy had found a sweetheart, too, and the girl made quarrels between them - I learned later that they split the act, and found spots as minstrels in rival troupes. It’s the way of theatrical houses, I suppose, to break up and re-fashion themselves; but I was almost sadder, on my last day at Ginevra Road, than I had been on leaving Whitstable. I sat in the parlour - my portrait was upon the wall, now, along with all the others - and thought how much had changed since I had sat there first, a little less than thirteen months before; and for a moment I wondered if all the changes had been good ones, and wished that I could be plain Nancy Astley again, whom Kitty Butler loved with an ordinary love she was not afraid to show to all the world. The street to which we moved was very new, and very quiet. Our neighbours, I think, were city men; their wives stayed at home all day, and their children had nurses, who wheeled them, puffing, up and down the garden steps in great iron perambulators. We had the top two floors of a house close to the station; our landlady and her husband lived beneath us, but they were not connected to the business, and we rarely saw them. Our rooms were smart, we were the first to rent them: the furniture was all of polished wood, and velvet and brocade, and was far finer than anything either of us was used to - so that we sat upon the chairs and sofas rather gingerly. There were three bedrooms, and one of them was mine - which meant only, of course, that I kept my dresses in its closet, my brushes and combs upon its wash-hand stand, and my nightgown beneath the pillow of its bed: this was for the sake of the girl who came to clean for us, three days a week. My nights were really spent in Kitty’s chamber, the great front bedroom with its great high bed that the house-builders had meant for a husband and wife. It made me smile to lie in it. ‘We are married,’ I would say to Kitty. ‘Why, we don’t have to lie here at all, if we don’t wish to!

• From Wild (2012)

  By the time I arrived in the town of Mojave, California, on the night before I began hiking the PCT, I’d shot out of Minnesota for the last time. I’d even told my mother that, not that she could hear. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t going to be around to tend her grave anymore. Which meant that no one would. I finally had no choice but to leave her grave to go back to the weeds and blown-down tree branches and fallen pinecones. To snow and whatever the ants and deer and black bears and ground wasps wanted to do with her. I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me. The next day I left Minnesota forever. I was going to hike the PCT. It was the first week of June. I drove to Portland in my 1979 Chevy Luv pickup truck loaded with a dozen boxes filled with dehydrated food and backpacking supplies. I’d spent the previous weeks compiling them, addressing each box to myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. I left my truck and the boxes with my friend Lisa in Portland—she’d be mailing the boxes to me throughout the summer—and boarded a plane to Los Angeles, then caught a ride to Mojave with the brother of a friend. We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree. “You can stop here,” I said to the man who’d driven me from LA, gesturing to an old-style neon sign that said WHITE’S MOTEL with the word TELEVISION blazing yellow above it and VACANCY in pink beneath. By the worn look of the building, I guessed it was the cheapest place in town. Perfect for me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When you’re ready, give me a call.” This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea, and indeed, in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds, because when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me ? That was what Dr. Brentwood Smyth wanted to know, and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky with “its peculiar tint of yellow green,” at the thin clouds, the moon, and the stars: I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now even impervious to the literature that I thought I had loved. An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the postulantship when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: “Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.” I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in apologetics. “Yes, Sister, very nice.” Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. “This is a very good piece of work.” “But Mother,” I suddenly found myself saying, “it isn’t true, is it?” Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. “No, Sister,” she said wearily, “it isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., which delighted so many of my fellow students at St. Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit. Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay forever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay.