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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He begins with the words of Ps. 74:22: "Arise, O God, plead thine own cause: remember how the foolish man reproacheth thee daily. Forget not the voice of thine enemies: the tumult of those that rise up against thee increaseth continually." He calls St. Peter, St. Paul, and the whole body of the saints, to aid against "the boar out of the wood" and "the wild beast of the field" that had broken into the vineyard of the Lord, to waste and destroy it (Ps. 80:13). He expresses deep sorrow at the revival of the Bohemian and other heresies in the noble German nation which had received the empire from the Pope, and shed so much precious blood against heresy. Then he condemns forty-one propositions selected from Luther’s books, as heretical, or at least scandalous and offensive to pious ears, and sentences all his books to the flames. Among the errors named are those relating to the sacramental and hierarchical system, especially the authority of the Pope and the (Roman) Church. The denial of free will (liberum arbitrium) after the fall is also condemned, though clearly taught by St. Augustin. But Luther’s fundamental doctrine of justification by faith is not expressly mentioned. The sentences are torn from the connection, and presented in the most objectionable form as mere negations of Catholic doctrines. The positive views of the Reformer are not stated, or distorted. For the person of Luther, the Pope professes fatherly love and forbearance, and entreats him once more, by the mercies of God and the blood of Christ, to repent and recant within sixty days after the publication of the bull in the Brandenburg, Meissen, and Merseburg dioceses, and promises to receive him graciously like the prodigal son. But failing to repent, he and his adherents will be cut off, as withered branches, from the vine of Christ, and be punished as obstinate heretics. This means that they shall be burned; for the bull expressly condemns the proposition of Luther which denounces the burning of heretics as "contrary to the will of the Holy Spirit." All princes, magistrates, and citizens are exhorted, on threat of excommunication and promise of reward, to seize Luther and his followers, and to hand him over to the apostolic chair. Places which harbor him or his followers are threatened with the interdict. Christians are forbidden to read, print, or publish any of his books, and are commanded to burn them. We may infer from this document in what a state of intellectual slavery Christendom would be at the present time if the papal power had succeeded in crushing the Reformation. It is difficult to estimate the debt we owe to Martin Luther for freedom and progress. The promulgation and execution of the bull were intrusted to two Italian prelates, Aleander and Caraccioli, and to Dr. Eck.

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  Instead of resigning ourselves to the inevitability of bad sex, and even romanticizing it as merely youthful mis-adventure, we should subject it to sustained scrutiny. Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, sex education and sexual health services. It trades on unequal power dynamics between parties, and on racialized notions of innocence and guilt. Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination, and it is as a political issue that we should be examining it, rather than retreating into an individualizing, shoulder-shrugging criticism of young women who are using the tools available to them to address the pains of their sexual lives. In any case, it’s not just college-age beginners who have bad sex, out of which they will supposedly grow. Women of all ages have sex that makes them miserable and frightened, and a narrative about sex that focuses narrowly on college students enables us to overlook the unpleasant sex and the coercion and assault that affect women in all walks of life, and perhaps especially those who are socioeconomically vulnerable. We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival. Daphne Merkin, in the New York Times in 2018, wrote that asking for consent before proceeding with a sexual advance seems ‘both innately clumsy and retrograde’, ‘stripping sex of eros’. This is the commonly expressed view that affirmative consent – and the need for consent to be ongoing – makes sex overly transactional and contractual. But it is dangerous to glibly dismiss, in the name of eroticism, the role of agreements or negotiations in sex. Contracts are crucial for sex workers, or for those working in pornography, for instance, for whom the negotiation of boundaries is critical to the management of the risks inherent in the work. Similarly, individuals practising BSDM sex rely on agreements and contracts in order to mitigate the intensified risks of injury and pain. If you’re playing with fire, or clamps, or wax, a contractual approach can be vital. But many recoil from the idea that agreements, contracts, and transactions may have a role in sex, precisely because this makes sex seem more like work, or seems to involve accepting that sex (either paid or unpaid) is an often unequal exchange of risks. In other words, it highlights imbalances in relation to risk and injury.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I am the trauma you bury away. I am the lie you hold under your tongue, the thing you bury, vanish, erase, the thing you can almost always pretend is forgotten as long as you don’t touch it. My mother goes to her tennis club with her new husband and plays in the local tournaments. My father goes hiking with his two sons and his wife. On Facebook, in private profiles I have to stalk to access, they smile widely in the photos with their new families, my mother flashes a big diamond ring and a little dog, my father posts vacation pictures, smiling with his sons. Their lives appear whole. But only if you forget I exist. I am blood and sin. I am the sum total of my parents’ regrets. I am their greatest shame. — After his trip to New York and once he was back in California, my father texted me a picture of the framed family photo. But now it looked different. I looked photoshopped in, a dark anomaly. I was looking directly into the camera, my eyes a challenge: I will not pretend like nothing happened—like I can be killed off and resurrected without consequence. My eyes held everything that had happened. The thing you left doesn’t forget. — Four months later, I got my diagnosis. And now that my past was spilling over, exploding, a volcano spewing hot toxic waste all over my present life, it was all I could think about. I sent my father an email with the subject line Finally Got an Official Diagnosis. In the body of the email, I attached a link to the Wikipedia page for complex PTSD. At the time, the Wikipedia page read, “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.” And then, a paragraph down: “C-PTSD is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. Unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological, not DNA based, it is a disorder caused by lack of nurture.” A lack of nurture. I didn’t write a hello in the body of the email. I didn’t include a sign-off. All I included in the vast expanse of white space was that link. What I didn’t write, but what was implied, what I hoped to convey: You ruined my life. You ruined my life. You ruined my life. He didn’t answer. He’d stopped calling months ago, now that I’d helped resolve his relationships with his family. I waited and I waited. My phone stayed silent.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by dissoluteness.” Later, Saint Thomas—or at least the theologian that signed his name to Book IV of De regimine principium—asserted: “Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure. In vain did one of Charlemagne’s capitularies vigorously forbid it, in vain did Saint Louis order prostitutes to be chased out of the city in 1254 and brothels to be destroyed in 1269: in the town of Damietta, Joinville tells us, prostitutes’ tents were adjacent to the king’s. Later, attempts by Charles IX of France and Marie-Thérèse of Austria in the eighteenth century also failed. The organization of society made prostitution necessary. “Prostitutes,” Schopenhauer would pompously say later, “are human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy.” And Lecky, a historian of European morality, expressed the same idea: “Supreme type of vice, prostitutes are the most active guardians of virtue.” Their situation and the Jews’ were often rightly compared:1 usury and money lending were forbidden by the Church exactly as extra-conjugal sex was; but society can no more do without financial speculators than free love, so these functions fell to the damned castes: they were relegated to ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. In Paris, loose women worked in pens where they arrived in the morning and left after the curfew had tolled; they lived on special streets and did not have the right to stray, and in most other cities brothels were outside town walls. Like Jews, they had to wear distinctive signs on their clothes. In France the most common one was a specific-colored aglet hung on the shoulder; silk, fur, and honest women’s apparel were often prohibited. They were by law taxed with infamy, had no recourse whatsoever to the police and the courts, and could be thrown out of their lodgings on a neighbor’s simple claim. For most of them, life was difficult and wretched. Some were closed up in public houses. Antoine de Lalaing, a French traveler, left a description of a Spanish establishment in Valencia in the late fifteenth century. “The place,” he said, was

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  That evening, I took everyone to my favorite joint in K-town, which had delicious, meaty stews and opulent spreads of banchan—tiny, sweet, chili-infused dried anchovies and fish cakes with salty bean sprouts and strong, funky kimchi. As we gorged ourselves on galbijjim and chicken stuffed with ginseng and sticky rice, my dad and his wife chatted about the day while his kids grilled me and Joey on what our lives were like. “How did you guys get into your careers? Where did you go to school?” the younger son asked. “I went to UC Santa Cruz, and then I moved to San Francisco, then Oakland,” I responded. “Wow! You lived in San Francisco? And Oakland, too?” he asked, turning those hopeful eyes on me, and the questions poured out of him like bubbly soda: “What was that like? Did you like San Francisco or Oakland more? And how’s San Francisco different from New York?” I kept a smile on my face. I told him about the differences in food and weather. But inside, my heart thumped harder and I felt light-headed. My stepbrothers hadn’t known I’d lived in San Francisco? I’d lived in the Bay Area for five years after college. Just a short drive from their home. I’d visited their home while they were at school. For years, I’d had those monthly dinners with my father. He’d helped me move four times, taking the same twenty boxes, bookshelf, desk, and mattress from tiny apartment to tiny apartment. Where had he told his children he’d gone those days? Had he told them, too, that he was meeting up with “a friend”? How had they not known what college I went to? How had they not known anything about me? On the train ride home, I made a note of it to Joey—that I had been so close and yet so far away. “It’s too bad for them,” he said. “They really would’ve benefited from having a great sister like you in their lives.” Sadness and fury bit into each other like two warring serpents in my stomach. “Don’t say that,” I managed, and I swallowed everything back down and opened up the crossword app on my phone. It took a couple of days for it to hit me: an unbearable understanding that changed everything. This time, I am the secret. I am the same as my long-lost half sister, her existence so cobwebby that nobody in my family can even remember her name. I am my grandparents’ jail time and my mother’s birth parents. I am my mother’s opaque childhood, her missing siblings. I am the great-uncle who cross-dressed, whom my aunts used to peek at beneath the floorboards to catch a glimpse of him putting on lipstick. I am the great-aunt who maybe had a female lover, the one nobody likes to talk about.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  It is a moving story of the dilemma of a father whose son has turned against him. The story of Absalom is a tale of human action, with little divine interference. (In 17:14 we are told that Absalom chose the advice of Hushai over the advice of Ahithophel because the Lord had so ordained.) The humanistic character of the story has led some people to suppose that it is related to the wisdom literature, such as we find in the book of Proverbs. Many scholars have supposed that the Absalom story was composed at the royal court; a similar setting has often been proposed for Proverbs. One of the striking things about this story is the prominent role of counselors and advisers. Amnon is coached by Jonadab; Absalom is advised by Ahithophel and then by Hushai. At one point, we are told that “the counsel that Ahithophel gave was as if one consulted the oracle of God” (16:23). All these counselors are clever; they are not necessarily good. Jonadab, who advises Amnon how to get his sister Tamar at his mercy, is described as “very wise,” but his wisdom seems to be quite amoral. The same may be said of Ahithophel, who switches from one master to another and commits suicide when his counsel is not accepted. Hushai is portrayed positively because he acts in David’s interest, but he has no scruple in misleading Absalom. The conduct of these counselors is probably a reasonable reflection of the roles such people played at royal courts in the ancient world. We shall see later that there was often tension between counselors and prophets who competed for the ear of the king. The Absalom story does not necessarily view all wisdom negatively, but it does not depict it as a moral good in the way that we shall find in the book of Proverbs. THE PSALMS OF DAVID The closing chapters of 2 Samuel contain two poetic compositions ascribed to David. According to 1 Sam 16:18, David was a skillful musician. In later tradition he would become the author of psalms par excellence. A composition found in the Dead Sea Scrolls credits him with 3,600 psalms and 450 songs (11Q5 col. 27)—a total rivaling the productivity of Solomon in 1 Kgs 5:12 (1 Kgs 4:32 in English versions). The psalm attributed to him in 2 Samuel 22 is also found in the Psalter as Psalm 18. It is a thanksgiving psalm, which praises God for delivering the psalmist from the waves of death. It is notable for a description of a theophany of YHWH as a storm-god in 2 Sam 22:8-16. The shorter poem, called “the last words of David,” is notable in several respects. It mentions the “everlasting covenant” that was described at some length in 2 Samuel 7.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  Church’s pastoral concern much more widely. This had a large number of consequences, not least in the Church’s attitude to sin. It certainly did not denounce as sinful the movement to enserf a large section of the population, any more than it had challenged slavery in the ancient world; that was hardly surprising, since very often great monasteries like Cluny were in the forefront of imposing serfdom on their tenants. But the clergy also became more alert to the possibilities of sin which wealth produced, and sought to protect their people from the consequences. It was during the twelfth century that avarice and the taking of interest on money (usury) became major themes for churchmen’s moralizing alongside the most basic of human sins, pride.6 As sins multiplied, so did the means of remedying sin. The great historian of medieval society Sir Richard Southern saw the extension of the clergy’s pastoral care in the parishes as leading to a profound shift in the Western Church’s theology of salvation and the afterlife. The essence of Southern’s argument is that in the earlier Benedictine era, the system of salvation had been geared to benefiting clergy and those wealthy enough to finance monks to pray for them and perform the very heavy penances demanded of the sinful, in order to avoid the pains of Hell. As the parish and tithe system developed, this older approach would not do: some other way must be devised to cope with the hopes and fears of a sinful population who could not afford such provision. This was where the idea of a middle state between Heaven and Hell, first envisaged in the theology of the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen at the turn of the second and third centuries, proved so useful and comforting. The instinct for justifying salvation by human effort, a constant thread from Origen through Evagrius and John Cassian, emerged once more to confront the ‘grace alone’ theology of Augustine. Few people can regard their drearily unspectacular sins as justifying hellfire, but most would agree with the Alexandrians that life on earth provides hardly enough time to remedy even those sins and enter Heaven without further purgation. Penance could be done in this middle state, which was time-limited, and which moreover had only one exit, not to Hell but to Paradise. By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory. Never a notion which gained currency in the Eastern world, despite its precedent in Greek-speaking theologians, Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.7 This was by no means the Church’s only reaction to the new economy. One symptom of the reorganization of society’s wealth was a great deal of local warfare as rival magnates competed to establish their positions and property

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

  “Oh, Sir, I should have said that, for mine is the loss, mine the unspeakable misfortune now”, and through my tears I saw that his eyes too were full. He had just given me a letter to Froude, “good, kindly Froude”, who, he was sure, would help me in any way of commendation to some literary position “if I have gone, as is most likely”, and in due time Froude did help me as I shall tell in the proper place. My pen-portrait of Carlyle was ferociously attacked by a kinsman, Alexander Carlyle, who evidently believed that I had got my knowledge of Carlyle’s weakness from Froude’s revelations in 1904. But luckily for me, Sir Charles Jessel remembered a dinner in the Garrick Club given by him in 1886 or 1887, at which both Sir Richard Quain and myself were present. Jessel recalled distinctly that I had that evening told the story of Carlyle’s impotence as explaining the sadness of his married life and had then asserted that the confession came to me from Carlyle himself. At that dinner Sir Richard Quain said that he had been Mrs. Carlyle’s physician and that he would tell me later exactly what Mrs. Carlyle had confessed to him. Here is Quain’s account as he gave it me that night in a private room at the Garrick. He said: “I had been a friend of the Carlyles for years: he was a hero to me, one of the wisest and best of men: she was singularly witty and worldly-wise and pleased me even more than the sage. One evening I found her in great pain on the sofa: when I asked her where the pain was, she indicated her lower belly and I guessed at once that it must be some trouble connected with the change of life. “I begged her to go up to her bedroom and I would come in a quarter of an hour and examine her, assuring her the while that I was sure I could give her almost immediate relief. She went upstairs. In about ten minutes I asked her husband, would he come with me? He replied in his broadest Scotch accent, always a sign of emotion with him: ‘I’ll have naething to do with it. Ye must just arrange it yerselves’. “Thereupon I went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Carlyle’s bedroom door: no reply: I tried to enter: the door was locked and unable to get an answer I went downstairs in a huff and flung out of the house. “I stayed away for a fortnight but when I went back one evening I was horrified to see how ill Mrs. Carlyle looked stretched out on the sofa, and as pale as death. ‘You’re worse?’ I asked. ‘Much worse and weaker!’ she replied. ‘You naughty obstinate creature!’ I cried.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  When it comes to your health, a time-and energy-consuming porn habit can really interfere with important self-care activities such as exercising, eating well, getting enough sleep, and even bathing and grooming. Sleep problems, such as exhaustion, inability to fall asleep, and sleep deprivation are a particular problem for porn users, given that many people access porn before going to bed or in the middle of the night. Porn users can literally stay up night after night jeopardizing their health, family relationships, and work. Having a busy schedule to begin with can only make matters worse for people who are preoccupied with getting their daily dose of porn. Rob explains, “I was working full-time to support my family, going to college in the evenings, maintaining the house, trying to be a good husband and father, and getting by on four to five hours of sleep at night. I’d work on my homework from nine until eleven or twelve, then I would search the Web for porn until one or two a.m. It got out of hand with the time I was spending. I’d often have a hard time functioning the next day.” Besides taking up time that could have been spent sleeping, porn can also make it difficult to fall asleep. The visual centers in the brain can have a hard time calming down after all that stimulation. Long hours on the computer doing Internet porn can also result in eye problems, back, neck, wrist, and shoulder pain, which make it difficult to sleep and make life more difficult during the day as well. Spending significant amounts of time doing porn also wreaks havoc on work and school pursuits. When your mind is frequently focused on porn, even when you’re not actually using it, you have difficulty paying attention to your own educational or career goals. One man told us that when he was into porn he became 75 percent less productive at work and it cost him his job. Corey describes how his porn use stifled his developing career in the computer field. He said, “As my porn addiction got stronger, I started to ignore other parts of my life, particularly my job. I’d procrastinate and fall behind in my work. I was spending three to four hours a day on something that had no benefit to me whatsoever as far as becoming a better person, gaining skills, understanding the world better, or enhancing my relationships with other people. It was pretty sad. I wasted huge tracks of time, and time is most precious.”

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  Randy, a twenty-six-year-old man, explained how years of pornifying women stymied his efforts at developing a relationship with a real woman. Porn use left him lacking in skills necessary for making friends with women and showing them respect. He said, “I treated women as sex things. If she turned me on I’d talk with her; if she didn’t, I would ignore her. Most girls were turned off by my porn-inspired advances. I couldn’t appreciate a girl for being cute without seeing her as a possible sexual conquest. I didn’t realize there is a big difference between using someone for sex and sharing a sexual experience with them. Porn made it impossible for me to see women as people and treat them well. I am very sad about that.” The more time you spend in the world of porn, the more your views and values become about using people or being used, and not about sharing and connecting with others. Too much porn can blur the line between sexual fantasy and reality and impair your ability to respond to yourself and others with empathy and compassion. 4. “I’m Neglecting Important Areas of My Life” Consuming porn may start out as an exciting form of entertainment or a way to facilitate and enhance masturbation, but over time it can shift from being something extra you do on the side, to an activity that significantly interferes with other pursuits in your life. Many porn users tell us that they have become so involved with porn that it is compromising their career goals, family responsibilities, health, and spiritual life. Anything that provides a lot of pleasure can create a level of obsession—whether it’s fixing up a vintage car, playing online poker, or watching sports on television. Because so much of today’s porn is delivered via high-tech devices that are always right at hand, it’s easy to shift over from other interests to engaging with porn. And even when you’re not actually doing porn, you can lose a lot of time thinking about images you recently saw, imagining what you might see next, setting up circumstances in which you can be alone with porn, and covering your tracks so you don’t get caught. Numerous studies show that as the number of hours spent doing porn increase, the more likely porn users report that they are having a serious problem with it.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Kyrie leyson."646 Penitential hymns in the vernacular were sung by the Flagellants (the Geisslergesellschaften), who in the middle of the fourteenth century, during a long famine and fearful pestilence (the "Black Death," 1348), passed in solemn processions with torches, crosses, and banners, through Germany and other countries, calling upon the people to repent and to prepare for the judgment to come.647 Some of the best Latin hymns, as the "Te Deum," the "Gloria in excelsis," the "Pange lingua," the "Veni Creator Spiritus," the "Ave Maria," the "Stabat Mater," the "Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem," St. Bernard’s "Jesu dulcis memoria," and "Salve caput cruentatum," were repeatedly translated long before the Reformation. Sometimes the words of the original were curiously mixed with the vernacular, as in the Christmas hymn, — "In dulci jubilo Nun singet und seit fro! Unsres Herzens Wonne Leit in praesepio Und leuchtet wie die Sonne In matris gremio Alpha es et O."648 A Benedictine monk, John of Salzburg, prepared a number of translations from the Latin at the request of his archbishop, Pilgrim, in 1366, and was rewarded by him with a parish.649 The "Minnesänger" of the thirteenth century—among whom Gottfried of Strassburg and Walther von der Vogelweide are the most eminent—glorified love, mingling the earthly and heavenly, the sexual and spiritual, after the model of Solomon’s Song. The Virgin Mary was to them the type of pure, ideal womanhood. Walther cannot find epithets enough for her praise. The mystic school of Tauler in the fourteenth century produced a few hymns full of glowing love to God. Tauler is the author of the Christmas poem, — "Uns kommt ein Schiff geladen," and of hymns of love to God, one of which begins, — "Ich muss die Creaturen fliehen Und suchen Herzensinnigkeit, Soll ich den Geist zu Gotte ziehen, Auf dass er bleib in Reinigkeit."650 The "Meistersänger" of the fifteenth century were, like the "Minnesänger," fruitful in hymns to the Virgin Mary. One of them begins, — "Maria zart von edler Art Ein Ros ohn alle Dornen." From the middle ages have come down also some of the best tunes, secular and religious.651 The German hymnody of the middle ages, like the Latin, overflows with hagiolatry and Mariolatry. Mary is even clothed with divine attributes, and virtually put in the place of Christ, or of the Holy Spirit, as the fountain of all grace. The most pathetic of Latin hymns, the "Stabat mater dolorosa," which describes with overpowering effect the piercing agony of Mary at the cross, and the burning desire of being identified with her in sympathy, is disfigured by Mariolatry, and therefore unfit for evangelical worship without some omissions or changes. The great and good Bonaventura, who wrote the Passion hymn, "Recordare sanctae crucis," applied the whole Psalter to the Virgin in his "Psalterium B. Mariae," or Marian Psalter, where the name of Mary is substituted for that of the Lord.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In this we placed our whole glory."1943 In a later oration on classic studies Basil encourages them, but admonishes that they should be pursued with caution, and with constant regard to the great Christian purpose of eternal life, to which all earthly objects and attainments are as shadows and dreams to reality. In plucking the rose one should beware of the thorns, and, like the bee, should not only delight himself with the color and the fragrance, but also gain useful honey from the flower.1944 The intimate friendship of Basil and Gregory, lasting from fresh, enthusiastic youth till death, resting on an identity of spiritual and moral aims, and sanctified by Christian piety, is a lovely and engaging chapter in the history of the fathers, and justifies a brief episode in a field not yet entered by any church historian. With all the ascetic narrowness of the time, which fettered even these enlightened fathers, they still had minds susceptible to science and art and the beauties of nature. In the works of Basil and of the two Gregories occur pictures of nature such as we seek in vain in the heathen classics. The descriptions of natural scenery among the poets and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome can be easily compressed within a few pages. Socrates, as we learn from Plato, was of the opinion that we can learn nothing from trees and fields, and hence he never took a walk; he was so bent upon self-knowledge, as the true aim of all learning, that he regarded the whole study of nature as useless, because it did not tend to make man either more intelligent or more virtuous. The deeper sense of the beauty of nature is awakened by the religion of revelation alone, which teaches us to see everywhere in creation the traces of the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of God. The book of Ruth, the book of Job, many Psalms, particularly the 104th, and the parables, are without parallel in Grecian or Roman literature. The renowned naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, collected some of the most beautiful descriptions of nature from the fathers for his purposes.1945 They are an interesting proof of the transfiguring power of the spirit of Christianity even upon our views of nature. A breath of sweet sadness runs through them, which is entirely foreign to classical antiquity. This is especially manifest in Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of Basil. "When I see," says he, for example, "every rocky ridge, every valley, every plain, covered with new-grown grass; and then the variegated beauty of the trees, and at my feet the lilies doubly enriched by nature with sweet odors and gorgeous colors; when I view in the distance the sea, to which the changing cloud leads out—my soul is seized with sadness which is not without delight.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  There was Kevin, twenty-one and dark, dark black, who, when I first met him (also in the Cameo) wore striped engineer’s overalls and a train engineer’s cap. His big hands, his full mouth, and his general masculine gentleness (Kevin lifted weights years before the buffed and pumped-up nineties) made him an exemplar of male beauty that still, in memory, remains powerful for me. Like Pietro, he was another regular in from Brooklyn. On the third time we made it, he told me, “I won’t go with just anyone. Only special people—like you. Because you’re nice.” He wanted to be a musician, though I was unclear what instruments, if any, he played. By 1985 though, this teak-colored, muscle-bound little powerhouse (he wasn’t much taller than Tommy) was scooting all around the Port Authority, doing dope deals up at Gate 335, passing bags back in the underpass across from Hombres (“’Cause the police are just through the aluminum doors twenty feet away—and that’s the last place they think you be doin’ it!”). When he would run into me in the theater now, it was, “Lemme hold two dollars, man, so I can run down to the bathroom and get somethin’. Then I’ll be back!” and he would—about every three minutes, with the identical plea, as many times as you’d supply the two bucks. In ’88 or ’89, the last time I saw him, I was on my way to the Habana-San Juan Dry Cleaners, recently moved around the corner across from the post office on Eighty-third Street. Really, it was like the heaviest-handed Concluding Moral Resolution from some Dreiser or Dos Passos novel. Kevin was coming along, picking through the garbage cans . . . The power was gone. The gentleness was still there, though. After our wistful three minutes of conversation (he was homeless, he was dirty and ragged, he wasn’t doing too good, but . . . well, maybe things would get better), he shambled off with it to somewhere . . . I haven’t seen him since.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  PREFACEIt was the constant hope of Dr. Philip Schaff, the author of the History of the Christian Church, that he might live to finish the treatment of the Middle Ages, to which he had devoted one volume, covering the years 600–1050. He frequently said, during the last years of his life, "If I am able to accomplish this, my History of the Christian Church will be measurably complete and I will be satisfied then to stop." He entered upon the task and had completed his studies on the pontificates of Gregory VII. and Alexander III., when his pen was laid aside and death overtook him, Oct. 20, 1893. The two volumes found lying open on his study table, as he had left them the day before, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying and a volume of Hurter’s Life of Innocent III., showed the nature of his thoughts in his last hours. Dr. Schaff’s distinction as a writer on Church History dated from the year 1851 when his History of the Apostolic Church appeared, first in its original German form, Mercersburg, Pa., pp. xvi, 576, and Leipzig, 1853, and then in English translation, New York and Edinburgh, 1853, 1854. Before that time, he had shown his taste for historical studies in his tract on What is Church History? translated by Dr. John W. Nevin, Phila., 1846, pp. 128, and the address on the Principle of Protestantism, which he delivered at his inauguration as professor in the theological seminary at Mercersburg, 1844. This address was published in its German form and in an English translation by Dr. Nevin, Chambersburg, 1845. Dr. Schaff continued his publications in this department with the issue of his History of the Christian Church 1–600, in 2 volumes, N. Y., 1858–1867. In the meantime, his attention had been called to the subjects of biblical literature and exegesis, and his labors resulted in the publication of the American edition of Lange’s Commentary in 25 volumes and other works. In 1887 he issued his Creeds of Christendom in 3 volumes. Left free to devote himself to the continuation of his History, which he was inclined to regard as his chief literary work, he found it necessary, in order to keep abreast of the times and to present a fresh treatment, to begin his studies again at the very beginning and consequently the series, to which this volume belongs, is an independent work written afresh and differing in marked features from its predecessors. For example, the first volume, on the Apostolic age, devotes an extensive treatment to the authorship and dates of the Apostolic writings to which scarcely any space was given in the History of the Apostolic Church of 1851 and the History of the Apostolic Church of 1858–1867. The treatment was demanded by the new attitude of scholarship to the questions presented by the Apostolic age.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  During the Buell Center conference where Stern spoke of his employers’ “Ten Year Plan to Promote Theater and the Arts,” theater critic Frank Rich, in his own presentation, pointed out that the organization of the legitimate theaters is moribund, with the two corporations that divide New York’s legitimate Broadway theaters between them, the Schubert Organization and the Neiderlander Company, both on their last legs. Because of current Broadway costs, only a handful of Broadway theaters can even afford to run a full-scale musical. Even if most of the theaters are sold out nightly weeks on end, the houses are too small to support the running costs of an elaborate production today. Thus most of the theaters on Broadway are already considered by the companies that lease them “throwaway” theaters. Should you want to experience that moribundity of the theater firsthand, sit on the steps of the permanently closed Biltmore Theater on Forty-seventh Street, beside the metal gate the bottom of which has been eaten away with uric acid, and chat with one of the homeless men who regularly sleep on a piece of cardboard under the dark marquee during the summer. Go along Thirty-ninth Street along the theater back, where a dozen homeless men and women huddle or sleep in a welter of cardboard and garbage.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “No, not him . . . Anyway. One time there wasn’t even any building at the place the guy told me to show up. So I just figured talking about it, planning it, that was the fun part. The rest, though, that was all bullshit.” (I wondered if, relatives aside, that’s what Flaubert had had in mind in the closing chapter of Sentimental Education?) “I probably figured it was some kind of joke you were pullin’ that I didn’t understand but wished you wouldn’t do it. I went along with it, you know, while we were in the theater, I guess, tryin’ to be nice. But you really wanted some guy like me to come over to your house . . . ? Damn—I think you’re probably just jokin’ now. Naw, I wouldn’t do that; go where anybody in here told me to. Un-uhn! I might even get hurt or somethin’.” • • • I think of the middle eighties in the sex movies as the “Great Winnowing,” from crack and AIDS—with crack very much the leading villain of the two. If I gather the tragedies, most of the ones I remember come from that period: ’84, ’85, ’86 . . . Pietro was a shy, beefy, nineteen-year-old Italian, whom I first met in the Cameo, when he was six months in the country and living with his sister in Brooklyn. Five or six times I took him from the theater for pasta at Pizza King over on Ninth Avenue. Several times I brought him down paper bags full of clothes (which he needed, desperately), and which he could just squeeze into. I would see him wearing them, over the next two, three, four weeks, sometimes in the theater, sometimes walking in the street. Not overly swift, but not particularly slow either, he was the quintessential nice, friendly, naive kid. Hustling? The first time I met him, he didn’t even know the word in English. By the time he was twenty-five, however, a lot of that beef had been pared away by coke. He was in and out of the hustling bars in the neighborhood like a figure in a fast-motion slapstick sequence—Trix, Hombres, (the old) Cats (on Eighth Avenue), O’Neill’s Backyard. The shyness was long gone, replaced now by an almost belligerent friendliness, necessary if you’re to be any sort of successful insurance man—or hustler. A year or two later, I recall a conversation at the bar: “Hey, do you ever see Pete—that short-haired, blond Italian kid with the accent?” “Oh, man—that kid’s dead. You didn’t hear about that? It was about four months ago . . .”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The most flourishing seats of patristic learning, Alexandria and Antioch, were lost by the conquests of Islam. The immense library at Alexandria was burned by order of Omar (638), who reasoned: "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God (the Koran), they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed."766 In the eighth century, however, the Saracens themselves began to cultivate learning, to translate Greek authors, to collect large libraries in Bagdad, Cairo, and Cordova. The age of Arabic learning continued about five hundred years, till the irruption of the Moguls. It had a stimulating effect upon the scholarship of the church, especially upon the development of scholastic philosophy, through the writings of Averroës of Cordova (d. 1198), the translator and commentator of Aristotle. Constantinople was the centre of the literary, activity of the Greek church during the middle ages. Here or in the immediate vicinity (Chalcedon, Nicaea) the oecumenical councils were held; here were the scholars, the libraries, the imperial patronage, and all the facilities for the prosecution of studies. Many a library was destroyed, but always replaced again.767 Thessalonica and Mount Athos were also important seats of learning, especially in the twelfth century. The Latin was the official language of the Byzantine court, and Justinian, who regained, after a divorce of sixty years, the dominion of ancient Rome through the valor of Belisarius (536), asserted the proud title of Emperor of the Romans, and published his code of laws in Latin. But the Greek always was and remained the language of the people, of literature, philosophy, and theology. Classical learning revived in the ninth century under the patronage of the court. The reigns of Caesar Bardas (860–866), Basilius I. the Macedonian (867–886), Leo VI. the Philosopher (886–911), who was himself an author, Constantine VII. Porphyrogenitus (911–959), likewise an author, mark the most prosperous period of Byzantine literature. The family of the Comneni, who upheld the power of the sinking empire from 1057 to 1185, continued the literary patronage, and the Empress Eudocia and the Princess Anna Comnena cultivated the art of rhetoric and the study of philosophy. Even during the confusion of the crusades and the disasters which overtook the empire, the love for learning continued; and when Constantinople at last fell into the hands of the Turks, Greek scholarship took refuge in the West, kindled the renaissance, and became an important factor in the preparation for the Reformation.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  she asked her mother. John Woodward Gutenkunst was born on October 15, 1943, while my mother was away at her first year at Carleton College. The minute she met her newborn brother, my mother knew something was wrong. Johnny’s limbs were floppy, and his eyes slanted upward. He had trouble sucking. Probably best for everyone if you don’t even hold him, dearie, the labor and delivery nurse told my mother’s mother, Chloe. The hospital would find a good home for him where the nuns could care for him. But Chloe would hear none of it. She took her baby home and cheerfully introduced him to friends and relatives, pretending that nothing was wrong. Secretly, she was devastated. Chloe felt guilty for having a baby at the age of forty-three. She knew that the older the mother was, the more likely it was that the baby could be born with complications. Her husband, Charlie, my grandfather, had always been a brooder. No one said it out loud, but it was clear to my mother that her father struggled with depression. He would sit in dark rooms at night and go for long stretches without talking, so that even his children were sometimes frightened of him. My mother had heard whispers about how her father had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital before she was born. She worried that the stress of the new baby, with his obvious medical needs, would send her father into a tailspin. When she was home for Christmas break and again the following summer, my mother tried to tell her parents that Johnny needed special help, but they refused even to discuss it. Precious time was wasting away. Johnny was not getting the early intervention that could have helped him with his language and motor skills. It was only after a nanny insisted that Johnny be examined when he was nearly a year old that Chloe and Charlie took their son to see a specialist in Chicago. The doctor took one look at the toddler and delivered the news in no uncertain terms: This child has mongolism, now known as Down syndrome. He won’t be able to talk intelligibly or look after himself, the doctor warned them. With lots of supervision, he may learn to wipe his bottom and dress himself, but he will never read or write. He may have trouble breathing, and his heart likely will grow weaker each year. The doctor saved the most heartbreaking news for last. Most “mongoloids,” as they were then called, rarely lived past puberty. Nearly half died in the first year. By then, my mother was back at college. Her diaries discuss her thoughts on Chaucer (Ugh! ) and Virginia Woolf (Wow!) , trying to find a date for the spring formal (Slim pickings ), her latest bowling score (Don’t ask ), and how to mix the perfect Manhattan. No mention was made of her baby brother.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  We kept waiting for her to return, but she never did. The youngest two of her four children would come to our house for dinner every once in a while, and my mother would sometimes take them shopping to buy new clothes. Eventually, the woman and her husband divorced, and he married his secretary. But for years, the woman and my mother would talk on the phone on Sunday afternoons when the telephone rates were lowest. Sometimes, I stood outside my parents’ bedroom door and listened, fascinated by their friendship. They’d formed a kind of secret sorority, stronger, more intense than the crew at the beach discussing winter vacation spots and where to get the best leg of lamb, though there was some of that light banter. My mother would fill her in on news of the block: romantic misadventures of the spinster sisters who lived across the street, decorating updates, the medical reports of various kids’ broken bones and burst appendixes. But then my mother’s tone would soften, and there would be long silences while the woman talked. Yes, I know, my mother would say in her most comforting voice. Oh, yes. I know. There were other unexplained absences. A high school girl on the next block left suddenly to live with her aunt in Texas. She came home several months later looking puffy and sad. Years later, I learned she’d had a baby that she gave up for adoption. The odd man who lived a few doors down with his elderly blind mother would disappear and reappear mysteriously, too. We never knew why he still lived at home. Steer clear of that guy, Holmer used to warn my brothers. Sure enough, years later, the man was convicted of having sex with underage boys on a boat that he kept at the Wilmette harbor, called The Slow Poke . The world beyond Greenwood Avenue seemed equally harsh and unforgiving. Each week, the mailman delivered our copies of Time and Newsweek magazines with increasingly gruesome photos: bleeding U.S. soldiers trudging through rice paddies, Vietcong bodies stacked up like cordwood, sobbing children, one naked, her mouth wide open as she ran down the road to escape the napalm bomb that destroyed her village. The evening newscasts showed daily tallies of soldiers killed. Not all the casualties were on foreign soil or even part of the official count. Michael, the boy that Billy claimed to be that day at the beach, had an older sister whose husband came home from Vietnam addicted to heroin. A few years later, they found him dead in a gas station bathroom on the west side of Chicago. On an early spring afternoon in April 1968, my friend’s older brother stood off to the side watching us play basketball. Did you girls hear the news? he asked. The night before, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  Many cultures have long-standing practices of vaginal astringents and antiseptics to dry the surface of the vagina so men can enjoy “dry sex.” Historically, women used a variety of products, like fruit acid or oak galls, to desiccate the surface of the vagina. The increased friction from dry tissue and/or the obvious discomfort of their partner was apparently a turn-on for some men. I have often wondered if normalizing a practice that made sex painful for women was an invisible chastity belt. I have heard from some women who partner with men who have erectile dysfunction that these men say they are more likely to lose their erection with lubricant, and so it is possible that some women prioritize their partner’s pleasure and endure painful sex. It would not surprise me if the “ancient” practice of vaginal drying was also normalized for male partners with erectile dysfunction. It is also possible that many men throughout history have been as phobic of normal vaginal discharge as some are today. Another belief that has historically contributed to douching and still does today is the mistaken idea that attempting to wash out sperm from the vagina could be a contraceptive. It’s not. By the time you’ve grabbed the douche, enough sperm has already made it past the cervix and is well on its way to the fallopian tubes. Douching also doesn’t make it past the cervix. Women today primarily say they douche or do intravaginal cleaning in search of “freshness,” something that has no medical or even cultural definition. Medicine also has a bad track record with douches and vaginal cleaning. Many doctors, even as late as the 1970s and possibly the ’80s, recommended douches. It was likely seen as an easy solution for a myriad of female health concerns, like pain with sex or low libido. Many doctors, almost every one of them a man, would have promoted douching to our mothers and grandmothers. When generation after generation of women have been told their vaginas are dirty or a source of marital distress by both the medical profession and society, it is easy to see how it may take more than two generations to undo. Another time I hear women say they perform vaginal cleaning is after sex with a man, as some women don’t like the idea of ejaculate inside their vagina or running down their leg. Women are also inserting wipes vaginally to scoop out ejaculate.