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 A Way of Being (1980)

  deep, they may also be able to unblock a flow of experiencing and permit it to run its uninhibited course. What is meant by these statements? I believe they will be clearer if I present an excerpt from a recorded interview with Mrs. Oak, a middle-aged woman in the later stages of therapy. She is exploring some of the complex feelings that have been troubling her. CLIENT I have the feeling it isn’t guilt. (Pause. She weeps.) Of course, I mean, I can’t verbalize it yet. (Then, with a rush of emotion.) It’s just being terribly hurt! THERAPIST Mm-hmm. It isn’t guilt except in the sense of being very much wounded somehow. CLIENT (Weeping.) It’s—you know, often I’ve been guilty of it myself, but in later years when I’ve heard parents say to their children, “Stop crying!” I’ve had a feeling, a hurt, as though, well, why should they tell them to stop crying? They feel sorry for themselves, and who can feel more adequately sorry for himself than the child? Well, that is sort of what I mean, as though I mean, I thought that they should let him cry. And . . . feel sorry for him too, maybe. In a rather objective kind of way. Well, that’s . . . something of the kind of thing I’ve been experiencing. I mean, now—just right now. And in—in— THERAPIST That catches a little more of the flavor of the feeling, that it’s almost as if you’re really weeping for yourself. CLIENT Yeah. And again, you see, there’s conflict. Our culture is such that . . . I mean, one doesn’t indulge in self-pity. But this isn’t—I mean, I feel it doesn’t quite have that connotation. It may have. THERAPIST You sort of think there is a cultural objection to feeling sorry about yourself. And yet you feel the feeling you’re experiencing isn’t quite what the culture objects to either. CLIENT And then of course, I’ve come to . . . to see and to feel that over this—see, I’ve covered it up. (Weeps.) But I’ve covered it up with so much bitterness, which in turn I had to cover up. (Weeping.) That’s what I want to get rid of! I almost don’t care if I hurt. THERAPIST (Softly, and with an empathic tenderness toward the hurt she is experiencing.) You feel that here at the basis of it as you experience it, is a feeling of real tears for yourself. But that you can’t show, mustn’t show, so that’s been covered by bitterness that you don’t like, that you’d like to be rid of. You almost feel you’d rather absorb the hurt than to—than to feel the bitterness. (Pause.) And what you seem to be saying quite strongly is, “I do hurt, and I’ve tried to cover it up.” CLIENT I didn’t know it.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  For that Christmas none save Mary might know of the bitterness that was in Stephen’s heart, least of all the impulsive, erratic Wanda. Wanda needed no second invitation to talk, and very soon her eyes were aglow with the fire of the born religious fanatic as she told of the little town in Poland, with its churches, its bells that were always chiming—the Mass bells beginning at early dawn, the Angelus bells, the Vesper bells—always calling, calling they were, said Wanda. Through the years of persecution and strife, of wars and the endless rumours of wars that had ravaged her most unhappy country, her people had clung to their ancient faith like true children of Mother Church, said Wanda. She herself had three brothers, and all of them priests; her parents had been very pious people, they were both dead now, had been dead for some years; and Wanda signed her breast with the Cross, having regard for the souls of her parents. Then she tried to explain the meaning of her faith, but this she did exceedingly badly, finding that words are not always easy when they must encompass the things of the spirit, the things that she herself knew by instinct; and then, too, these days her brain was not clear, thanks to brandy, even when she was quite sober. The details of her coming to Paris she omitted, but Stephen thought she could easily guess them, for Wanda declared with a curious pride that her brothers were men of stone and of iron. Saints they all were, according to Wanda, uncompromising, fierce and relentless, seeing only the straight and narrow path on each side of which yawned the fiery chasm. ‘I was not as they were, ah, no!’ she declared, ‘Nor was I as my father and mother; I was—I was . . .’She stopped speaking abruptly, gazing at Stephen with her burning eyes which said quite plainly: ‘You know what I was, you understand.’ And Stephen nodded, divining the reason of Wanda’s exile. But suddenly Mary began to grow restless, putting an end to this dissertation by starting the large, new gramophone which Stephen had given her for Christmas. The gramophone blared out the latest foxtrot, and jumping up Barbara and Jamie started dancing, while Stephen and Wanda moved chairs and tables, rolled back rugs and explained to the barking David that he could not join in, but might, if he chose, sit and watch them dance from the divan. Then Wanda slipped an arm around Mary and they glided off, an incongruous couple, the one clad as sombrely as any priest, the other in her soft evening dress of blue chiffon. Mary lay gently against Wanda’s arm, and she seemed to Stephen a very perfect dancer—lighting a cigarette, she watched them.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  It got worse soon after. The sex was still there, but now it was... sad. The one thing the fiesh and blood Jasmine wasn’t was sad. The best way to get rid of her, in fact, was to get depressed: she’d vanish like pot smoke to find someone more cheerful. Pve always had a hard time putting on a happy face, the one reason why Jasmine and I never stayed together for too long. Now, though, it looked like she was stuck in my dark little bungalow. Trapped. And it was making her sad. It wasn’t something she was used to, getting sad, and it was hitting her hard. I heard her cry one day. I was hard at work on something for a porno mag specializing in dirty buttholes “and the guys who love to lick them” when I heard this weird sound. A sort of choking, wet sound. I hadn’t heard it before. I found her next to my bed, curled into a partially invisible fetal position. Jasmine was crying. It was that heaving, nauseous kind of crying, the kind you do when your cat gets run over, when you know you’ve taken way too much of the wrong kind of shit, when you’re lost and know you can never find your way back. I’m not a very altruistic kinda guy. I don’t really know whee it comes from, or doesn’t: I just really don’t give a flying fuck for a lot of folks. Yeah, ll take Steve to the hospital when his T cells are low, or hold Rosie when she thinks too much of Bolo, but I don’t really see those things are being good. Good is, like, helping fucking orphans or something, or giving change to the smelly crackhead who hangs out, or passes out, at the Laundromat. I don’t have that kind of temperament. I really didn’t care that much about Jasmine. Yeah I’d bail her out when she got busted for forgetting her purse and eating up a storm at some diner. Yeah, I’d give her whatever I had in my checking account when she really needed it. Yeah, I’d always let her in, no matter what was going on in my life. But she was just a pal, and a really good lay. I honestly didn’t think of her in any other terms. But then she was dead, and crying in my bedroom. I could guess the cause. Bolo was a dyke who always knew where she was going and how exactly to get there. She was an iron-plated mean mother who knew what the score was — despite her profound depressions and mood swings. Jasmine was flowers and pot and The Tinkling of Tiny Silver Bells 277 the Beatles. She could get lost walking from the bathroom into the bedroom. It wasn’t all that hard, once I made the decision to do it. One phone call, to Rosie. Then into the bathroom.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “‘Nothing of the sort, he lay there, jiggling like’, (“I guessed what she meant”, said Quain, “the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself to get a cock-stand.”) ‘I thought for some time’, Mrs. Carlyle went on, ‘one moment I wanted to kiss and caress him; the next moment I felt indignant. Suddenly it occurred to me that in all my hopes and imaginings of a first night, I had never got near the reality: silent, the man lay there jiggling, jiggling. Suddenly I burst out laughing: it was all too wretched! too absurd!’ “‘At once he got out of bed with the one scornful word ‘Woman!’ and went into the next room: he never came back to my bed. “‘Yet he’s one of the best and noblest men in the world and if he had been more expansive and told me oftener that he loved me, I could easily have forgiven him any bodily weakness; silence is love’s worst enemy and after all he never really made me jealous save for a short time with Lady Ashburnham. I suppose I’ve been as happy with him as I could have been with anyone yet—’ “That’s my story”, said Quain in conclusion, “and I make you a present of it: even in the Elysian Fields I shall be content to be in the Carlyles’ company. They were a great pair!” Just one scene more. When I told Carlyle how I had made some twenty-five hundred pounds in the year and told him besides how a banker offered me almost the certainty of a great fortune if I would buy with him a certain coal-wharf at Tunbridge Wells (it was Hamilton’s pet scheme), he was greatly astonished. “I want to know”, I went on, “if you think I’ll be able to do good work in literature; if so I’ll do my best. Otherwise I ought to make money and not waste time in making myself another second-rate writer.” “No one can tell you that”, said Carlyle slowly, “You’ll be lucky if you reach the knowledge of it yourself before ye die! I thought my Frederic was great work; yet the other day you said I had buried him under the dozen volumes and you may be right; but have I ever done anything that will live?—” “Sure”, I broke in, heartsore at my gibe, “Sure, your French Revolution must live and the “Heroes and Hero Worship”, and “Latter Day Pamphlets” and, and—” “Enough”, he cried, “You’re sure?” “Quite, quite sure”, I repeated. Then he said, “You can be equally sure of your own place; for we can all reach the heights we are able to oversee.” [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF MY LIFE’S STORY. -------------- I had hardly written “Finis” at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And on arriving, poorly dressed, in London, they began to go round begging for alms, in the manner of the French vagrants that we see here in Italy. And it was when they were begging outside a church one morning, that a great lady, the wife of one of the King of England’s marshals, happened to catch sight of the Count and his two children as she was coming away from her devotions. On asking where he came from and whether the two children were his, he replied that he was from Picardy and that he was indeed their father. But he had been compelled to leave home with the children and lead a vagabond existence because of a crime that an elder son of his had committed. The lady, who was of a kindly nature, ran her eyes over the girl and took a great liking to her, for she was a pretty little thing and had an air of gentility about her. ‘Good sir,’ said the lady. ‘If you would like to leave this little girl with me, I will gladly look after her, for she is a pretty-looking child. And if she turns out as well as she promises, when the time comes I shall arrange a good marriage for her.’ This request greatly pleased the Count, who promptly gave his consent, and with tears in his eyes he handed over his daughter, warmly commending her to the lady’s care. He was well aware of the lady’s identity, and now that he had found a good home for the child, he decided not to remain there any longer. And so, begging as he went, he made his way with Perrot to the other side of the island, finding the journey very tiring as he was unused to travelling on foot. Eventually he arrived in Wales, where there was another of the King’s marshals, a man who lived in great style and kept a large number of servants, and to this man’s castle the Count, either by himself or with his son, would frequently go in order to obtain something to eat. There were several children at the castle, of whom some belonged to the Marshal himself and others were the sons of the local gentry, and whilst they were competing with each other in children’s sports, like running and jumping, Perrot began to mix with them, performing equally as well or better than any of the others in every game they played. His prowess attracted the attention of the Marshal, who, taking a great liking to the child’s manner and general behaviour, demanded to know who he was. On being told that he was the son of a pauper who sometimes came into the castle begging for alms, the Marshal sent someone to ask whether he could keep him; and although it distressed him to part with the child, the Count, who was praying that such a thing might happen, willingly handed him over.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Had Emilia's story been much longer protracted, it is like the compassion had by the young ladies on the misfortunes of Madam Beritola would have brought them to tears; but, an end being now made thereof, it pleased the queen that Pamfilo should follow on with his story, and accordingly he, who was very obedient, began thus, "Uneath, charming ladies, is it for us to know that which is meet for us, for that, as may oftentimes have been seen, many, imagining that, were they but rich, they might avail to live without care and secure, have not only with prayers sought riches of God, but have diligently studied to acquire them, grudging no toil and no peril in the quest, and who,--whereas, before they became enriched, they loved their lives,--once having gotten their desire, have found folk to slay them, for greed of so ample an inheritance. Others of low estate, having, through a thousand perilous battles and the blood of their brethren and their friends, mounted to the summit of kingdoms, thinking in the royal estate to enjoy supreme felicity, without the innumerable cares and alarms whereof they see and feel it full, have learned, at the cost of their lives, that poison is drunken at royal tables in cups of gold. Many there be who have with most ardent appetite desired bodily strength and beauty and divers personal adornments and perceived not that they had desired ill till they found these very gifts a cause to them of death or dolorous life. In fine, not to speak particularly of all the objects of human desire, I dare say that there is not one which can, with entire assurance, be chosen by mortal men as secure from the vicissitudes of fortune; wherefore, an we would do aright, needs must we resign ourselves to take and possess that which is appointed us of Him who alone knoweth that which behoveth unto us and is able to give it to us. But for that, whereas men sin in desiring various things, you, gracious ladies, sin, above all, in one, to wit, in wishing to be fair,--insomuch that, not content with the charms vouchsafed you by nature, you still with marvellous art study to augment them,--it pleaseth me to recount to you how ill-fortunedly fair was a Saracen lady, whom it befell, for her beauty, to be in some four years' space nine times wedded anew.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The lakes were guarded by massive old beech trees, and the beech trees stood ankle-deep in their foliage; a lovely and luminous carpet of leaves they had spread on the homely brown earth of Morton. Each spring came new little shuttles of greenness that in time added warp and woof to the carpet, so that year by year it grew softer and deeper, and year by year it glowed more resplendent. Stephen had loved this spot from her childhood, and now she instinctively went to it for comfort, but its beauty only added to her melancholy, for beauty can wound like a two-edged sword. She could not respond to its stillness of spirit, since she could not lull her own spirit to stillness. She thought: ‘I shall never be one with great peace any more, I shall always stand outside this stillness—wherever there is absolute stillness and peace in this world, I shall always stand just outside it.’ And as though these thoughts were in some way prophetic, she inwardly shivered a little. Then what must the swan do but start to hiss loudly, just to show her that he was really a father: ‘Peter,’ she reproached him, ‘I won’t hurt your babies—can’t you trust me? I fed you the whole of last winter!’ But apparently Peter could not trust her at all, for he squawked to his mate who came out through the bushes, and she hissed in her turn, flapping strong angry wings, which meant in mere language: ‘Get out of this, Stephen, you clumsy, inadequate, ludicrous creature; you destroyer of nests, you disturber of young, you great wingless blot on a beautiful morning!’ Then they both hissed together: ‘Get out of this, Stephen!’ So Stephen left them to the care of their cygnets. Remembering Raftery, she walked to the stables, where all was confusion and purposeful bustle. Old Williams was ruthlessly out on the warpath; he was scolding: ‘Drat the boy, what be ’e a-doin’? Come on, do! ’Urry up, get them two horses bridled, and don’t go forgettin’ their knee-caps this mornin’—and that bucket there don’t belong where it’s standin’, nor that broom! Did Jim take the roan to the blacksmith’s? Gawd almighty, why not? ’Er shoes is like paper! ’Ere, you Jim, don’t you go on ignorin’ my orders, if you do—Come on, boy, got them two horses ready? Right, well then, up you go! You don’t want no saddle, like as not you’d give ’im a gall if you ’ad one! The sleek, good-looking hunters were led out in clothing—for the early spring mornings were still rather nippy—and among them came Raftery, slender and skittish; he was wearing his hood, and his eyes peered out bright as a falcon’s from the two neatly braided eye-holes. From a couple more holes in the top of his head-dress, shot his small, pointed ears, which now worked with excitement.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  CHAPTER 4 1 T he sorrows of childhood are mercifully passing, for it is only when maturity has rendered soil mellow that grief will root very deeply. Stephen’s grief for Collins, in spite of its violence, or perhaps because of that very violence, wore itself out like a passing tempest and was all but spent by the autumn. By Christmas, the gusts when they came were quite gentle, rousing nothing more disturbing than a faint melancholy—by Christmas it required quite an effort of will to recapture the charm of Collins. Stephen was nonplussed and rather uneasy; to have loved so greatly and now to forget! It made her feel childish and horribly silly, as though she had cried over cutting her finger. As on all grave occasions, she considered the Lord, remembering His love for miserable sinners: ‘Teach me to love Collins Your way,’ prayed Stephen, trying hard to squeeze out some tears in the process, ‘teach me to love her ’cause she’s mean and unkind and won’t be a proper sinner that repenteth.’ But the tears would not come, nor was prayer what it had been; it lacked something—she no longer sweated when she prayed. Then an awful thing happened, the maid’s image was fading, and try as she would Stephen could not recall certain passing expressions that had erstwhile allured her. Now she could not see Collins’ face at all clearly even if she willed very hard in the dark. Thoroughly disgruntled, she bethought her of books, books of fairy tales, hitherto not much in favour, especially of those that treated of spells, incantations and other unlawful proceedings. She even requested the surprised Mrs. Bingham to read from the Bible: ‘You know where,’ coaxed Stephen, ‘it’s the place they were reading in church last Sunday, about Saul and a witch with a name like Edna—the place where she makes some person come up, ’cause the king had forgotten what he looked like.’ But if prayer had failed Stephen, her spells also failed her; indeed they behaved as spells do when said backwards, making her see, not the person she wished to, but a creature entirely different. For Collins now had a most serious rival, one who had lately appeared at the stables. He was not possessed of a real housemaid’s knee, but instead, of four deeply thrilling brown legs—he was two up on legs, and one up on a tail, which was rather unfair on Collins! That Christmas, when Stephen was eight years old, Sir Philip had bought her a hefty bay pony; she was learning to ride him, could ride him already, being naturally skilful and fearless.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Yes? No? Which?” she laughed, her lips to his ear, and his body was wracked with both pain and delight, the dildo torturing his arse as it stretched him cruelly, her grip on his cock so abrasive that it burned, so exciting that it made his balls ache. He screamed then, closed his eyes as he forced the ejaculation which she was fighting to contain, spitting it out so fiercely that it spurted between the fingers of her clenched fist. Never mind that she might make him lick those fingers clean, take a cane to him as punishment or slap his balls with the flat of her hand until they smarted. For that single orgasm he was willing to give the cruel heartless bitch anything. * * * A Cruel Heartless Bitch 265 Business took Brian back to that city some two months later, his contacts were established and his meetings conducted more quickly on this occasion so that he made the time to return to that pub with the brass plaques above the bar. She smiled at him sadly, and then more sadly still as he drank pint after pint of her beer; he stayed there from mid afternoon, when the place was as busy as she said it could be, until early evening when it was as quiet as he remembered it. His last memory, as he returned to his hotel, was of a man seated at the bar where he had once sat, gazing up at those brass plaques, his lips were moving silently as he took in the portentous legend — “I may be a cruel heartless bitch”. Brian was aware of her following him along the bar, the heavy bunch of Keys in her hand, and so he paused to rest his hand lightly on the man’s shoulder. “Pretentious piffle, take no notice, it will only fuck up your mind,” Brian told him, his words a little slurred, and with shoulders hunched he shuffled from the pub, as if his feet were shackled together and his nuts in a knot. , ; 6 Pierced Alison Tyler “T want to get my clit pierced.” She stared down at the marred counter rather than up into his dark eyes. “My clitoris,” she stammered after. Maybe “clit” was too colloquial. What was the proper way to ask for what she wanted? She quickly scanned the walls of the tattoo parlor/piercing studio, landing on an image of an impish Devil Girl with a spiked tail stuffed violently up the ass of an innocent-looking Angel Girl. Maybe “clit” was okay.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “T don’t think I’ve ever been in such a quiet landscape.” “Good. Then this will be a perfect place to talk.” “Talk about what?” Sheldon pulls in his paddle and lays it across the thwarts. “You,” he says. Dominique knows he’s talking about what he said last night, about healing her. “Oh, Sheldon, that was sweet, but you weren’t serious? You’re going to be my sex therapist?” “No,” he says. “Don’t call it that. A sex therapist works on a particular sexual problem. Sex is just the means to the end.” “What’s the end?” “To get you away from him and give you back to yourself. Don’t you think that’s a worthy goal?” Dominique looks at him as his eyes scan the shore. Last night he’d seen her in all her naked vulnerability. He’d taken her not against her will, but forcibly, taking what he wanted without asking, and it had been the best thing he could have done. His selfish desire had aroused her more than any gentle consideration would have and had thrilled her, so much so that she was surprised at the lack of shame and remorse she felt today. She’d not only enjoyed last night, but she’d had a most intense orgasm, unusual for her, and quite inexplicable. The boat barely seems to move. It’s a strange shape, unusually wide for a craft so short. The generous beam makes it very stable. She trails her fingers in the water. “So what do you want to know?” “About this man, the one who broke your heart. What was his name?” Dominique brings her hand into the boat and rolls over on her back. The prow of the little boat is an elaborate chair with pillows and cushions. Because of the stillness of the lake, they never become wet. .. do we have “Michael,” she says. “Just when I was feeling better . to, Sheldon?” “Hevleft your? The Cavern 29 “Yes. He walked out one night, angry. He came back two days later while I was at work and got his things. I couldn’t afford the place without him. I had to leave.” “And why did he leave?” She loathes to talk about it. She says, “We were always fighting.” He asks, “What about?” Dominique drops her fingers in the still waters again. The smooth movement of the boat leaves barely a ripple. “I don’t know. Everything. What do people fight about? It’s all so stupid. What we have for dinner at night, where we go on the weekend. Things he said, things I said. I hate to remember those awful words. Words can hurt terribly, don’t you think?”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [86] Equally interesting is Anne’s characteristic iconography, for she is generally shown as teaching her daughter to read, or at least as armed with a book, a motif unknown to the apocryphal Gospels and apparently first attested in the ninth century in a Byzantine source unlikely to have been on the radar of English theologians or artists (see Plate 22). Evidently the pious fifteenth-century Western public regarded it as perfectly natural for a girl to be instructed in basic literacy, enough at least for her to be able to say her prayers. [87] Problem aunts are also a feature of family cliché, and that role was filled for Mary and the Holy Family by a reconstructed Mary Magdalen. The reconstruction had begun quite early for the Latin West by Pope Gregory I, who, in 591, preached an unusually influential sermon that audaciously gathered into a single person three of the spare Marys in the New Testament, all as Mary Magdalen. As a result, she became a sinner from whom seven devils had been cast out, but also penitential in washing Jesus’s feet with her tears and listening to him rapt in her home in Bethany while her sister Martha bustled around with practical tasks, plus in the end becoming ‘Apostle to the Apostles’ as the first witness to the Resurrection. It was a rich mixture that in the next few centuries also annexed to itself the story of that hugely popular Eastern ex-prostitute Mary of Egypt. It also produced two successive and never wholly reconciled sets of relics of Mary Magdalen in eastern France, first at Vézelay, where they became a major prop of the Cluniac pilgrimage industry, and later at Saint-Maximin near Aix-en-Provence, watched over by the Dominicans. [88] The Magdalen was thus readily available to take her place in the construction of the Holy Family, aided by the fascinated speculations of celibate authors who added to her backstory. Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend dismissed the idea that she had embraced her life of excess after being left abandoned on her wedding day, but evidently some readers felt that he was being a spoilsport. England’s early printer William Caxton expanded the story without qualification in his English translation of Voragine’s work, adding for good measure that some laid the finger of blame on no less a figure than John the Evangelist, who had jilted her to go off and become Jesus’s Beloved Disciple. At least she had been a well-born demi-mondaine, and thus a worthy patron of all those Magdalen homes for the prostitutes of Europe’s cities. In any case, it was comforting to know that within Jesus’s inner circle there was a spectacular but beloved sinner who had suitably repented, a model for all those feeling wretched about their own sins and a little wary of Our Lady’s sinlessness. Accordingly, the Magdalen’s iconography varied between showing her in her alluring finery to extreme gaunt misery worthy of the desert years of Mary of Egypt (see Plates 13–15).

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [14] Irish ascetics fighting demons in their windswept stone cells, as well as laypeople in their everyday lives, were set the task of identifying and dealing with the sins they committed. Their spiritual progress was a constant series of little setbacks, laboriously compensated for before the next little lapse; each time the Church would help its flock find an appropriate degree of sorrow and penitence. Out of this theology of moral struggle came a new practice of individual penance. Public penance as practised in the early Church had been a daunting, once-in-a-lifetime act witnessed by a congregation, and connected with adult baptism. [15] From the sixth century, clergy in Ireland and Wales pioneered a penitential practice of individual confession, based on the compilation of ‘tariff books’ or ‘penitentials’ to guide confessors in dealing with their flocks, whether monastic or lay. The penitentials were structured around the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but also that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance matched which sin: tariffs of forgiveness. Clergy were armed with their books when they presided over ‘auricular confession’, a face-to-face personal encounter between

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He didn’t try anything that first date, because he’s a gentleman, with his short dark hair and innocent face. He’s tall and thin, straight shouldered and from a good family with a good name. He works in a brokerage, wears a suit to work and a black leather jacket. He asked her on a second date and then asked what her deal was. She explained that she was seeing someone, this guy. But the guy had moved to Seattle. So now they were still together but she was seeing other people as well. She said she liked seeing other people. She didn’t believe in only seeing one person anymore, in constraining her love, not fulfilling her desires. She was never going to be monogamous again; she had tried and it made her unhappy. This was Northern California, a woman’s body was her own and people didn’t have to abide by the old rules if they didn’t want to. He asked if he could be one of those other people she was seeing and she said yes and six months later they were living together and then they were married and she became a mother to his son. We had almost broken up on our first of four days. I had arrived to pick her up at her house badly damaged and trying to hide it. Why was I so sad? I thought it was the holidays. Christmas is my least favorite day of the year. And my girlfriend had been gone, unreachable, away with her husband. And we’d had a fight before she left. And my friends were also out of town. But maybe I’m just a sad person. I make decisions assuming that I’m probably going to kill myself anyway. It’s just a matter of time. That’s my big secret. Christmas was over; it was cold and the streets were wet. It was eight in the morning and I was on time but not early because her husband left for work at 7.30 a.m. and he and I had already run into each other too many times. They owned a house in Berkeley, a small ranch house built in the backyard of a larger house. Their bedroom was different from mine, dominated by a king size bed with a short space between two large dressers. Her husband’s laundry sat in a small pile in the corner and I waited there while Eden showered. She had been miserable in Chicago where the streets were so cold and her feet hurt from walking the city. She said they’d been to the library and the museum, the Art Institute, and Clark and Division. They’d taken a train to Addison and seen Wrigley Field. I was from 404 Stephen Elliott Chicago and I held my tongue because I thought they had missed everything.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I met her mother once. She was visiting from the East Coast, and she wanted to meet me. She offered to take us to dinner, chose a steak restaurant. I liked the idea of being brought into the fold, and I dressed up for the evening. Nora’s mother asked about June. She asked about my mother. She couldn’t wait to know them. The next afternoon, we all met up at a playground. Nora’s mother had stopped at a toy store and lavished June with gifts, a brand-new flower-print backpack full of them. She was trying hard, and it touched me. June was reticent, quiet in her excitement. She had no idea who this woman was, and I barely did either. June didn’t want me to talk with the other grown-ups; she wanted me to join her on the playground equipment. Nora hung back with our mothers, made periodic visits to me and June on the swings. I wanted her to stay with us, to join us in our play, swing high like we did. She leaned on the steel supports, hands in her pockets, and stared out at the lake. She walked with our mothers down to the water. I dragged June’s doll and new backpack over the grass toward them, sweating and irritated and sad. None of us knew what to do in this scene. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Recently my mother reminded me about that afternoon. God, remember that? Doesn’t it seem like ages ago? She thought we could laugh together about its awkwardness. Instead I cringed. I had wanted things to work out with Nora, wanted it enough to introduce our parents. But it hadn’t worked—not that afternoon, not really anytime. “The trouble with letting people see you at your worst,” writes Sarah Manguso, “isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.”32 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon and Nora met only once, the morning of Labor Day. She had come over for dinner the night before, and he texted early, while we were still in bed. He wanted to grab a tool from the garage. Nora’s here, I replied, but you can come if you want. She says she’d be happy to meet you. He arrived with June in tow. Surely it couldn’t have happened any other way but this: on short notice, so no one had time to get anxious, and with June around, a healthy distraction. He knocked, and I answered, Nora waiting in the hall. Brandon bounded in, extending his hand. I could see the effort behind his high spirits, and a tender sting rose in the back of my throat. When I walked him and June out to the car, his eyes were wet, unspeakable. 21One Monday, I was at the restaurant, calculating tips for payroll. June was at the dance studio next door, taking her first pre-ballet class. Brandon was in the kitchen, doing prep for the next day. It was late September.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The shows went on like that for weeks, and then abruptly they ceased, all at once. No warning, no explanation. A half-dozen evenings in a row we congregated beneath the window with our snacks and banter, our hopes and shortcomings, but nothing happened up above. The window stayed dark. Maybe she was sick, we speculated. Or maybe she’d moved away. Maybe the man in her life — surely she had a man — had learned of what she was doing and put a stop to it. Maybe the police had gotten wind of the burlesque shows and shut them down. As with so many facets of the world’s business, we just didn’t know. I recalled that in her last performance, the girl had stripped down absolutely to the buff, the only time I’d seen her do so. A lot of impressed fingers dropped a lot of food that evening. Had the nudity been her way of saying not just goodnight but goodbye? Had it been the glorious capstone to what she meant as her farewell performance? Well, as I say, we didn’t know. Didn’t know her name or anything about her, other than she was easy to look at and wasn’t opposed to stripping in a public window — or up till now she hadn’t been. The scant knowledge I had of her left me feeling somewhat guilty, though I couldn’t have explained why. I told Hal that he and I should get together sometime under different circumstances — go bowling or fishing or maybe just sip a few cold ones — but I doubted we ever would. And, as it happened, we never did. The other guys I’d hung out with all seemed to vanish as well, and on the rare occasions when I bumped into one, we found we had little to say to each other. After a while, my trips to the Superfresh shrank away to what they’d been before the advent of the girl. I went there only when I needed groceries. If I thought about it, ’d glance up at the window, which nowadays was always dark, but mostly I didn’t. I felt sad that a special epoch in my life had ended, but I wouldn’t have traded it for the moon or the stars or all the antiques in the world. Speaking of antiques, I recall with singular clarity the last time I saw my boss, Mr Pickering. Or, to put it more accurately, I recall the last time he put his bulging eyes on me. The quality of my relationship with the boss tended to parallel the quality of my stripping, and, by mid-summer, both were in breathtaking decline — the sort of decline you get when you drive Strippers 359 a car headlong off a cliff. On this particular afternoon he’d turned a table made of tiger maple upside down — he was a great one for turning things upside down — and was registering dismay at my handicraft.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  But it was also true, as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) would claim later, that the exercise of our rational powers was essential to the empathetic experience of tragic drama. Without the detached critical rigor that enabled you to stand back from the reptilian me-first mentality, you would be unable to escape from your self-preoccupation and appreciate the plight of another person. Tragedy, Aristotle believed, educated the emotions and taught people to experience them appropriately. As he watched the drama unfold, a small-minded person would see his own troubles in perspective and an arrogant person would learn to feel compassion for the unfortunate. Purified, drained of their dangerous potential, the emotions could thus become beneficial to the community.4 We are a tragic species, divided against ourselves, our two brains locked in conflict. As they learned to identify with the suffering hero, the Greek audience found themselves weeping for people they might otherwise shun—for Medea or for Heracles, who in a fit of divinely inspired madness killed his wife and children. At the end of Euripides’ Heracles, Theseus, legendary king of Athens, embraces the broken man and leads him gently offstage, the two bound together “in a yoke of friendship.” As they bid him farewell, the chorus laments Heracles’ fate “with mourning and with many tears … For we today have lost our noblest friend.”5 The art of the dramatist enabled the audience to achieve an expansion of sympathy, so that they had a taste of the “immeasurable” power of compassion. An audience that could befriend a man who had committed an act like that of Heracles had achieved a Dionysian ekstasis, a “stepping out” of ingrained preconceptions in an empathy that, before seeing the play, they would probably have deemed impossible.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  It is often tempting to envy those who lead apparently charmed lives. But even the most fortunate people will face death, sickness, and the possibility of a debilitating and humiliating old age. We know that nothing lasts; everything is impermanent, even our most intense moments of joy. That is why the Buddhists insist that existence is suffering (dukkha). A better translation would be “existence is awry.” There is something wrong, incomplete, or unsatisfactory in almost any situation. If I get a wonderful job, the other candidates are disappointed. The beautiful shirt I have just bought may have been made in a sweatshop with appalling conditions for workers. In the course of a single day, we can be momentarily cast down by myriad tiny disappointments, rejections, frustrations, and failures. We are subject to minor physical distress, anxiety about our health, and fatigue. “Pain, grief and despair are dukkha,” the Buddha explained. “Being forced into proximity with what we hate is suffering; being separated from what we love is suffering, not getting what we want is suffering.”7 Making ourselves aware of these small discomforts and the reality of our own dukkha is an essential step toward enlightenment and compassion. We are so often the cause of our own misery. We pursue things and people even though we know in our heart of hearts that they cannot make us happy. We imagine that all our problems will be solved if we get a particular job or achieve a certain success—only to find that the things we desired so intensely are not so wonderful after all. The moment we acquire something, we start to worry about losing it. Much of our suffering comes from a thwarted sense of self. When we wake in the early hours of the morning, we toss and turn, asking: Why does nobody appreciate me? Why can I not have what X has? When we love people, we may become possessive and unreasonably angry if they declare independence of us. When we hear of somebody else’s success, our first reaction is often a pang of jealousy or resentment. We feel impaired by a colleague’s beauty or brilliance, waste an inordinate amount of energy worrying about our image and status, and are constantly alert to anything that might threaten our standing and self-esteem. We identify so closely with our opinions that we become disproportionately upset if we lose an argument. We are so anxious to see ourselves in a good light that we find it difficult to apologize wholeheartedly, often emphasizing that the other person was also at fault. The result of all this self-preoccupation is that we not only make ourselves suffer but we also cause pain to other people.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  through the desert. Later I sat beside the moat surrounding the fortress. In the distance, beyond the penal colony, the fence and the watchtowers, I saw the high-rise blocks of Mechelen encroaching further and further on the fields and the countryside. A gray goose was swimming on the dark water, going a little way in one direction and then a little way back in the other. After a while it scrambled up on the bank and settled on the grass not far from me. I took the book Austerlitz had given me on our first meeting in Paris out of my rucksack. It was by Dan Jacobson (a colleague of his, although unknown to him all these years, Austerlitz had said), and it described the author’s search for his grandfather Rabbi Yisrael Yehoshua Melamed, known as Heshel. All that had come down from Heshel to his grandson was a pocket calendar, his Russian identity papers, a worn spectacle case containing not only his glasses but a faded and already disintegrating piece of silk, and a studio photograph of Heshel in a black coat with a black velour top hat on his head. His one eye, or so at least it looks on the cover of the book, is shaded; in the other it is just possible to make out a white fleck, the light of life extinguished when Heshel died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three soon after the First World War. It was this premature death which made Menuchah, the rabbi’s wife, decide in 1920 to emigrate with her nine children from Lithuania to South Africa, and that was also the reason why Jacobson himself spent most of his childhood in the town of Kimberley, near the diamond mines of the same name. Most of the mines, so I read as I sat there opposite the fortifications of Breendonk, were already disused at the time, including the two largest, the Kimberley and De Beers mines, and since they were not fenced off anyone who liked could venture to the edge of those vast pits and look down to a depth of several thousand feet. Jacobson writes that it was truly terrifying to see such emptiness open up a foot away from firm ground, to realize that there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other. The chasm into which no ray of light could penetrate was Jacobson’s image of the vanished past of his family and his people which, as he knows, can never be brought up from those depths again. On his travels in Lithuania, Jacobson finds scarcely any trace of his forebears, only signs everywhere of the annihilation from which Heshel’s weak heart had preserved his immediate family when it stopped beating. Of the town of Kaunas, where Heshel had his photograph taken all those years ago, Jacobson tells us that the Russians built a ring of twelve fortresses around it in the late nineteenth century, which then in 1914, despite the elevated positions on which they had been constructed, and for all the great number of their cannon, the thickness of their walls, and their labyrinthine corridors, proved entirely useless. Some of the forts, writes Jacobson, fell into disrepair later;

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  That is why it was important to revisit your own past pain during the third step. The dynamic of the Golden Rule is beautifully expressed in an early sura of the Qur’an in which God (referring to himself in the third person) asks Muhammad to remember the sorrows of his childhood—he had been orphaned as small child, parceled out to relatives, and for years was a marginalized member of his family and tribe—and make sure that nobody else in his community would endure this deprivation. What is after will be better than what came before To you your lord will be giving You will be content Did he not find you orphaned And give you shelter Find you lost and guide you Find you in hunger and provide for you As for the orphan— do not oppress him And one who asks for help— do not turn him away And the grace of your lord—proclaim! 12 In this step, we begin to make this dynamic part of our own lives. The experience of pain and humiliation has inspired people to heroic compassion. When Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer who had hitherto led a privileged life, was violently thrown off a train in South Africa, he became aware of the plight of Indians in the country: he had been sitting in a first-class carriage, which was forbidden to “colored” men, and refused to move. Within a week, he summoned all the Indians of Pretoria to a meeting, which marked the beginning of a lifelong, nonviolent campaign against oppression. Patty Anglin, who chairs the Children’s Health Alliance of Wisconsin, has devoted her life to caring for children abandoned by their parents, many of them with special needs. She has always claimed that the misery she experienced in a harsh boarding school, where she had learning difficulties, prepared her for her life’s work: “I would need to understand the feelings of abandonment, loneliness, fear, and the sense of not belonging—the same feelings that children from abusive, dysfunctional, and broken homes feel.” 13 Our pain, therefore, can become an education in compassion. Some people deliberately steel their hearts against involvement with other people’s suffering: the bank manager must turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the insolvent borrower and cannot allow his distress to keep him awake at night, the businessperson has no option but to sack an inefficient employee, and the doctor cannot afford to become emotionally distraught each time a patient dies. It is natural to try to avoid unnecessary grief. During this step, we should take note of our initial reluctance to engage. We don’t want to listen to the sad story that a colleague is telling us. We feel that we have enough to deal with and push her troubles from our mind. We can be irritated by somebody’s bad mood instead of asking ourselves why she is depressed.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It is noticeable that a major concern of early ascetic literature is how to cope with nocturnal emissions: depressing symbols of the uncontrollable nature of the human body to which the celibate is particularly liable despite the best spiritual intentions. Likewise, Christian texts do not seem to have discussed masturbation at all before the time of John Cassian in the late fourth century. [31] Not all would have followed the fifth-century monk Pachon’s desperate technique for resisting demonic spiritual temptation, by applying a small desert snake to his genitals, but it was worth being aware that this was potentially an item in a hermit’s spiritual toolkit. [32] More common would be the effect of intensifying the routine observance of fasting by early Christians; a side-effect of extreme hunger would be loss of sexual appetite. In turn that led to another preoccupation in early ascetic texts: food, how to get it in a desert environment, and how to resist its excesses. Success in that respect would signify a further triumph over that constant worry of most people in ancient society, how to eat well, or even just how to get anything to eat. [33] A further distinctive regulatory device evolved in Eastern monasticism as a liturgical mechanism to form a framework for close monastic relationships: adelphopoiēsis , or ‘brother-making’. The earliest manuscript evidence for this rite is as early as the first surviving Byzantine prayer books, from the eighth century, which indicates a well-established existing custom (and in fact there are papyrus fragments possibly attesting early forms of the ceremony from an Egyptian monastery site dateable to around 600 CE ). From then on, down to the nineteenth century, around seventy manuscripts from Orthodox Christian contexts preserve versions of the rite. [34] The pioneering historian of sexuality John Boswell became over-excited by his rediscovery of this institution (and he excited many others too), describing it as a ceremony for same-sex union – shifted by less subtle commentators towards ‘gay marriage’. Something like that thought might earlier have occurred uncomfortably to modern Orthodox theologians, which could explain the obscurity into which the rite has fallen in recent times, despite its continuing formal presence in liturgical books. [35] It has taken later historians, notably the careful work of Claudia Rapp, to restore a still-significant context to adelphopoiēsis , while gently detaching it from some of Boswell’s wishful thinking and exaggeration of its similarities to later Orthodox forms of marriage liturgy for men and women. [36] Rapp demonstrates that adelphopoiēsis relates to the once very common practice in Egyptian and Byzantine monasticism of two or three monks sharing a common life. That might be seen as a development of traditional Mediterranean same-sex relationships with older and younger partners, in counterpoint to the imperial legislation seeking to drive that institution out of society.