Shame

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 Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  She and I shared the same sense of humor and were kindred spirits on account of each of us having recently broken up with a boyfriend. Her boss had a way of inviting us for drinks after work at the 99 Club, a pub frequented by Boston’s equivalent of Wall Street traders. It was a pleasant way to end the day before I headed to my evening classes at Boston University, where I was now enrolled. One afternoon, as he was leaving the office, he asked in an offhand way, “Want to catch a drink at the 99?” “Sure,” I replied, thinking I could have one quick drink before evening school. I walked into the pub. He was there at the bar, talking to the bartender, and he offered me a seat on the barstool next to him, a broad smile across his face. A drink was awaiting me. What I next remember is waking up in my own bed in the pitch black, naked, in pain and aware that a man was getting out of my bed. I was jolted out of my sleepiness and stared in shocked silence as the man slipped into his trousers, picked up his shoes, and tiptoed out of my bedroom. His gait, the eyeglasses—they told me who he was, the broker who had offered to buy me a drink. The apartment door shut behind him, and I lay motionless, racking my brain to try to recreate the events of the prior evening. For hours I lay awake—too stunned to cry, too mortified to call anyone. How did this happen? How could I have let it happen? The next morning, I was the first to arrive at the office, taking my place at the receptionist’s desk that faced the elevators, and thus allowed me to greet each person who arrived. Long after normal starting hours, the elevator door opened and out stepped the criminal of the prior evening. I grabbed a telephone as though I were engaged in conversation, refusing to look at him as he strode past my desk and on to his elegant office. Will he apologize to me? I wondered. How naïve I was to think there might be any remorse in that man. Did he think perhaps that I had no idea what had transpired, that I was dead to the world when he sneaked out of my apartment? I wanted to scream at him, to punch him in the face, but that would entail sharing my nightmare with the whole office. Would anyone even believe me? I had never heard of such a thing happening to a person—it would be my word against his—he the big producer versus me the pretty receptionist who wore miniskirts. A combination of shame and the fear of retaliation silenced me.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Circumstances had placed me in a position where fortunately I could be of aid to them; I secured jobs for them, I harbored them, and I fed them when necessary. They were very grateful, I must say; so much so, in fact that they made my life miserable with their attentions. Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint is; particularly Gupte who was found one morning with his throat cut from ear to ear. In a little boarding house in Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat gashed, as I say, from ear to ear. It was never discovered whether he had been murdered or whether he had committed suicide. But that’s neither here nor there. ... I’m thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has brought me finally to Nanantatee’s place. Thinking how strange it is that I should have forgotten all about Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby hotel room on the Rue Cels. I’m lying there on the iron bed thinking what a zero I have become, what a cipher, what a nullity, when bango! out pops the word: NONENTITY! That’s what we called him in New York—Nonentity. Mister Nonentity. I’m lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms he boasted of when he was in New York. Nanantatee is playing the good Samaritan; he has given me a pair of itchy blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the dusty floor. There are little jobs to do every hour of the day—that is, if I am foolish enough to remain indoors. In the morning he wakes me rudely in order to have me prepare the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans, etc. His friend, Kepi, warns me not to eat the food—he says it’s bad. Bad or good what difference? Food! That’s all that matters. For a little food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a broken broom, to wash his clothes and to scrape the crumbs off the floor as soon as he has finished eating. He’s become absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way, the clock must ring, the toilet must flush properly. ... A crazy Hindu if ever there was one! And parsimonious as a string bean. I’ll have a great laugh over it when I get out of his clutches, but just now I’m a prisoner, a man without caste, an untouchable. ...

• From The Girls (2016)

  She watched me through the smoke. I felt shamed. For doubting Suzanne or thinking it was strange to share. For the limits of my carpeted bedroom at home. I shoved my hands in my shorts. This wasn’t bullshit dabbling, like my mother’s afternoon workshops. “I get it,” I said. And I did, and tried to isolate the flutter of solidarity in myself. The dress Suzanne chose for me stank like mouse shit, my nose twitching as I pulled it over my head, but I was happy wearing it—the dress belonged to someone else, and that endorsement released me from the pressure of my own judgments. “Good,” Suzanne said, surveying me. I ascribed more meaning to her pronouncement than I ever had to Connie’s. There was something grudging about Suzanne’s attention, and that made it doubly valued. “Let me braid your hair,” she said. “Come here. It’ll tangle if you dance with it loose.” I sat on the floor in front of Suzanne, her legs on either side of me, and tried to feel comfortable with the closeness, the sudden, guileless intimacy. My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum. It was an unexplained blessing. Her tangy breath on my neck as she swept my hair to one side. Walking her fingers along my scalp, drawing a straight part. Even the pimples I’d seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible. — Both of us were silent as she braided my hair. I picked up one of the reddish rocks from the floor, lined up beneath the mirror like the eggs of a foreign species. “We lived in the desert for a while,” Suzanne said. “That’s where I got that.” She told me about the Victorian they had rented in San Francisco. How they’d had to leave after Donna had accidentally started a fire in the bedroom. The time spent in Death Valley where they were all so sunburned they couldn’t sleep for days. The remains of a gutted, roofless

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  During the winter, we had collected a bowl of snow and poured Pet milk over it, and sprinkled it with sugar and called it ice cream. Momma beamed and Uncle Willie was proud when Bailey regaled the customers with our exploits. We were drawing cards for the Store and objects of the town's adoration. Our journey to magical places alone was a spot of color on the town's drab canvas, and our return made us even more the most enviable of people. High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths. Bailey played on the country folks' need for diversion. Just after our return he had taken to sarcasm, picked it up as one might pick up a stone, and put it snufflike under his lip. The double entendres, the two-pronged sentences, slid over his tongue to dart rapier-like into anything that happened to be in the way. Our customers, though, generally were so straight thinking and speaking that they were never hurt by his attacks. They didn't comprehend them. “Bailey Junior sound just like Big Bailey. Got a silver tongue. Just like his daddy.” “I hear tell they don't pick cotton up there. How the people live then?” Bailey said that the cotton up North was so tall, if ordinary people tried to pick it they'd have to get up on ladders, so the cotton farmers had their cotton picked by machines. For a while I was the only recipient of Bailey's kindness. It was not that he pitied me but that he felt we were in the same boat for different reasons, and that I could understand his frustration just as he could countenance my withdrawal. I never knew if Uncle Willie had been told about the incident in St. Louis, but sometimes I caught him watching me with a far-off look in his big eyes. Then he would quickly send me on some errand that would take me out of his presence. When that happened I was both relieved and ashamed. I certainly didn't want a cripple's sympathy (that would have been a case of the blind leading the blind), nor did I want Uncle Willie, whom I loved in my fashion, to think of me as being sinful and dirty. If he thought so, at least I didn't want to know it. Sounds came to me dully, as if people were speaking through their handkerchiefs or with their hands over their mouths. Colors weren't true either, but rather a vague assortment of shaded pastels that indicated not so much color as faded familiarities. People's names escaped me and I began to worry over my sanity. After all, we had been away less than a year, and customers whose accounts I had formerly remembered without consulting the ledger were now complete strangers. People, except Momma and Uncle Willie, accepted my unwillingness to talk as a natural outgrowth of a reluctant return to the South.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (3) Sometimes when a criminal was being led to judgment or to execution, a dagger, with point upwards, was fixed below his chin so that he could not bow his head to avoid being recognized, but had to keep it up so that all could see his face and know his dishonour. When that was done, the person was said to be tetrachēlismenos. In the end, we have to meet the eyes of God. We may avert our gaze from people we are ashamed to meet; but we are compelled to look God in the face. The American sociologist Kermit Eby writes in The God in You: ‘At some time or other, a man must stop running from himself and his God – possibly because there is just no other place to run to.’ To each one of us, there comes a time when we have to meet that God from whose eyes nothing can ever be concealed. THE PERFECT HIGH PRIEST Hebrews 4:14–16 Since then, we have a high priest, great in his nature, who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our creed. For we have not a high priest who is such that he cannot feel with us in our weaknesses; but one who has gone through every temptation, just in the same way as we have, and who is without sin. Let us then confidently approach his throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help as need demands. HERE, we are coming to closer grips with the great characteristic conception of Hebrews – that of Jesus as the perfect high priest. His task is to bring the voice of God to men and women, and to usher them into the presence of God. The high priest at one and the same time must perfectly know what it is to be human and also know God. That is what this epistle claims for Jesus. (1) This passage begins by stressing the sheer greatness and absolute deity of Jesus. He is great in his nature, not by worldly honours or by any external trappings but in his own essential being. He has passed through the heavens. That may mean one of two things. In the New Testament, the word heaven is used in different ways. It can mean the heaven of the sky, and it can mean the heaven of the presence of God. This may mean that Jesus has passed through every heaven that may be and is in the very presence of God. It can mean what Christina Rossetti meant in the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’ when she said: ‘Heaven cannot hold Him.’ Jesus is so great that even heaven is too small a place for him. No one ever stressed the sheer greatness of Jesus in the same way as the writer to the Hebrews. (2) Then he turns to the other side.

• From The Girls (2016)

  3 The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting—I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I’d tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he’d accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home. — I’d gone back a few days later—Connie’s father answered the door almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home. “Connie’s upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn’t pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence. Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking. “Nice makeup,” she said. “Did you do that just for me?” She threw

• From The Girls (2016)

  Suzanne didn’t speak for a minute, then smiled without looking over. “Okay,” she said. I didn’t miss the test in her voice. “You want to help. You can help.” — My task made me a spy in my mother’s house, my mother the clueless quarry. I could even apologize for our fight when I ran into her that night across the stillness of the hallway. My mother gave a little shrug but accepted my apology, smiling in a brave way. It would bother me, normally, that wavery brave smile, but the new me bowed my head in abject regret. I was imitating a daughter, acting like a daughter would. Part of me thrilled at the knowledge I held out of her reach, how every time I looked at her or spoke to her, I was lying. The night with Russell, the ranch, the secret space I tended to the side. She could have the husk of my old life, all the dried-up leftovers. “You’re home so early,” she said. “I thought you might sleep at Connie’s again.” “I didn’t feel like it.” It was strange to be reminded of Connie, to jar back to the regular world. I’d been surprised, even, that I could feel the ordinary desire for food. I wanted the world to reorder itself visibly around the change, like a mend marking a tear. My mother softened. “I’m just glad because I wanted to spend some time with you. Just us. It’s been a while, huh? Maybe I’ll make Stroganoff,” she said. “Or meatballs. What do you think?” I was suspicious of her offer: she didn’t buy food for the house unless I wrote notes for her to find when she got back from group. And we hadn’t eaten meat in forever. Sal told my mother that to eat meat was to eat fear and that ingesting fear would make you gain weight. “Meatballs would be good,” I allowed. I didn’t want to notice how happy it made her. — My mother turned on the radio in the kitchen, playing the kind of slight, balmy songs that I’d loved as a child. Diamond rings, cool streams, apple

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  They were regarded with hatred and suspicion and contempt. In Sparta, xenos was the equivalent of barbaros, barbarian. One man writes complaining that he was despised ‘because I am a xenos’. Another writes that, however poor a home is, it is better to live at home than epi xenēs, in a foreign country. When clubs had their common meal, those who sat down to it were divided into members and xenoi. Xenos can even mean a refugee. All their lives, the patriarchs were foreigners in a land that was never their own. (b) In 11:9, he uses the word paroikein, to stay for a time, of Abraham. A paroikos was a resident alien. The word is used of the Jews when they were captives in Babylon and in Egypt. Anyone called paroikos was not considered much above a slave in the social scale and had to pay an alien tax. Such people were always outsiders and only became members of the community as a result of payment. (c) In 11:13, he uses the word parepidēmos. A parepidēmos was a person who was staying there temporarily and who had a permanent home somewhere else. Sometimes, the stay was strictly limited. A parepidēmos was someone in lodgings, someone without a home in a particular place at a particular time. All their lives, the patriarchs were men who had no settled place that they could call home. It is to be noted that, in the ancient world, to dwell in a foreign land was considered humiliating; a certain stigma was attached to the foreigner in any country. In the Letter of Aristeas, the writer says: ‘It is a fine thing to live and to die in one’s native land; a foreign land brings contempt to poor men and shame to rich men, for there is the lurking suspicion that they have been exiled for the evil they have done.’ In Ecclesiasticus (29:22–8), there is a wistful passage: Better is the life of the poor under their own crude roof than sumptuous food in the house of others. Be content with little or much, and you will hear no reproach for being a guest. It is a miserable life to go from house to house; as a guest you should not open your mouth; you will play the host and provide drink without being thanked and besides this you will hear rude words like these: ‘Come here, stranger, prepare the table; let me eat what you have there.’ ‘Be off, stranger, for an honoured guest is here; my brother has come for a visit, and I need the guestroom. ’ It is hard for a sensible person to bear scolding about lodging and the insults of the moneylender. At any time, it is an unhappy thing to be a stranger in a foreign land; but, in the ancient world, to this natural unhappiness there was added the bitterness of humiliation. All their days, the patriarchs were strangers in a strange land.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Lies, always lies! She was growing proficient at the glib kind of lying that pacified Ralph, or at all events left him with nothing to say, nonplussed and at a distinct disadvantage. She was suddenly seized with a kind of horror, she felt physically sick at what she was doing. Her head swam and she caught the jamb of the door for support—at that moment she remembered her father. 2Two days later as they sat alone in the garden at Morton, Stephen turned to Angela abruptly: ‘I can’t go on like this, it’s vile somehow—it’s beastly, it’s soiling us both—can’t you see that?’ Angela was startled. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ ‘You and me—and then Ralph. I tell you it’s beastly—I want you to leave him and come away with me.’ ‘Are you mad?’ ‘No, I’m sane. It’s the only decent thing, it’s the only clean thing; we’ll go anywhere you like, to Paris, to Egypt, or back to the States. For your sake I’m ready to give up my home. Do you hear? I’m ready to give up even Morton. But I can’t go on lying about you to Ralph, I want him to know how much I adore you—I want the whole world to know how I adore you. Ralph doesn’t understand the first rudiments of loving, he’s a nagging, mean-minded cur of a man, but there’s one thing that even he has a right to, and that’s the truth. I’m done with these lies—I shall tell him the truth and so will you, Angela; and after we’ve told him we’ll go away, and we’ll live quite openly together, you and I, which is what we owe to ourselves and our love.’

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Tamm says, “There is a clear separation between those ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Members are holy, special, chosen; outsiders are unholy, ignorant[, and] toxic.”514 She also explains that the group became all encompassing. “Contact with the outside world—often including family—is discouraged, and family is redefined as the group itself…The group assumes all roles—family, friends, church, home, work, community,” Tamm says.515 She also explains that members in the group were influenced to subordinate their thoughts and emotions to the dictates of the leadership. Tamm explains, “Subjugation and subservience is expected and obedience and control demanded.”516 Tamm further recalls how the group emotionally manipulated its members. She explains, “Conformity is enforced through notions of guilt, shame and failure, by both the leader and other members.”517 This drive for conformity can be seen as part of Lifton’s thought-reform process the group and its leader used to mold a mind-set. Harmful Consequences Tamm notes that the group diminished virtually anything that might reflect independence and promote self-esteem. She says, “Individual achievements [are] discouraged, downplayed and finally eradicated while the group’s achievements are encouraged, celebrated and memorialized.”518 The net result was that members of the Chinmoy group continually concentrated their energy and efforts on the guru’s goals, not their own. For example, Chinmoy “didn’t want his disciples to get an education,” Tamm said in an interview.519 She says that the net result of involvement with the Chinmoy group produced “narrow, claustrophobic existences whose singular purpose is the cult itself” and that “logical reason and facts [became] blurry and nonsensical.”520 Tamm’s mother was reportedly once told to have an abortion and put the guru first. And when Tamm became disillusioned, she was “banished.” Tamm says that Sri Chinmoy “sent a message to my parents that I should be evicted and not be spoken to.” Such family estrangements, which cult leaders order, can have devastating results. In Tamm’s case she attempted suicide.521 Can destructive cults change? After the death of the founding leader, many cults begin to disintegrate. Without their defining elements and driving forces, most cultic groups eventually fade away. But in some situations, especially when there is a large membership or substantial residue of remaining assets, the cult may continue under new leadership. Professor Benjamin Zablocki recognizes that some cults may evolve and eventually become generally accepted churches or denominations. Zablocki has defined a cult as “an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and demanding total commitment.”522 In his classic book The True Believer , Eric Hoffer w writes about a similar progression for some mass movements. Hoffer said that such movements go through stages of development. He called the initial and most volatile stage of that development the “active phase” and observed “there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion.”523 In this sense Hoffer, like Zablocki, provides for the possibility that controversial or revolutionary movements like destructive cults might eventually evolve into relatively reasonable and more mainstream movements.

• From The Girls (2016)

  My impending departure forced a newly critical distance on my friendship with Connie. I’d started to notice certain things, almost against my will. How Connie said, “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” as if we were shopgirls in London instead of inexperienced adolescents in the farm belt of Sonoma County. We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one- eighteenth of an orgasm. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high schools. Every day after school, we’d click seamlessly into the familiar track of the afternoons. Waste the hours at some industrious task: following Vidal Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions. As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school. Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey. Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk). Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over. As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash, a silk bandanna around its neck. How thrilled I’d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl’s, and how vacant I’d felt when it was over, when no one needed to look at me anymore. I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2In her vast drawing-room so beautifully proportioned, Anna would sit with her pride sorely wounded, dreading the thinly veiled questions of her neighbours, dreading the ominous silence of her husband. And the old aversion she had felt for her child would return upon her like the unclean spirit who gathered to himself seven others more wicked, so that her last state was worse than her first, and at times she must turn away her eyes from Stephen. Thus tormented, she grew less tactful with her husband, and now she was always plying him with questions: ‘But why can’t you tell me what Stephen said to you, Philip, that evening when she went to your study?’ And he, with a mighty effort to be patient, would answer: ‘She said that she couldn’t love Martin—there was no crime in that. Leave the child alone, Anna, she’s unhappy enough; why not let her alone?’ And then he would hastily change the subject. But Anna could not let Stephen alone, could never keep off the topic of Martin. She would talk at the girl until she grew crimson; and seeing this, Sir Philip would frown darkly, and when he and his wife were alone in their bedroom he would often reproach her with violence. ‘Cruel—it’s abominably cruel of you, Anna. Why in God’s name must you go on nagging Stephen?’ Anna’s taut nerves would tighten to breaking, so that she, when she answered, must also speak with violence. One night he said abruptly: ‘Stephen won’t marry—I don’t want her to marry; it would only mean disaster.’ And at this Anna broke out in angry protest. Why shouldn’t Stephen marry? She wished her to marry. Was he mad? And what did he mean by disaster? No woman was ever complete without marriage—what on earth did he mean by disaster? He frowned and refused to answer her question. Stephen, he said, must go up to Oxford. He had set his heart on a good education for the child, who might some day become a fine writer. Marriage wasn’t the only career for a woman. Look at Puddle, for instance; she’d been at Oxford—a most admirable, well-balanced, sensible creature. Next year he was going to send Stephen to Oxford. Anna scoffed: Yes, indeed, he might well look at Puddle! She was what came of this higher education—a lonely, unfulfilled, middle-aged spinster. Anna didn’t want that kind of life for her daughter. And then:’ It’s a pity you can’t be frank, Philip, about what was said that night in your study. I feel that there’s something you’re keeping back from me—it’s so unlike Martin to behave as he has done; there must have been something that you haven’t told me, to have made him go off without even a letter—’

• From The Girls (2016)

  boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I’d seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-iam, like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr. “He’s always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing’s different. He can’t even drive anymore, I don’t think.” This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter’s face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn’t have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell? “It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.” “Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn’t turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.” “He’s proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That’s what’s crazy.” The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too. I was stirred by the alcohol, the burn in my chest I exaggerated until I became moved by an authority not my own. I stood up. The boys didn’t notice. They were talking about a movie they had seen in San Francisco. I recognized the title—they hadn’t shown it in town because it was supposed to be perverted, though I couldn’t remember why. When I finally watched the movie, as an adult, the palpable innocence of the sex scenes surprised me. The humble pudge of fat above the actress’s pubic hair. How she laughed when she pulled the yacht captain’s face to her saggy, lovely breasts. There was a good-natured quality to the raunch, like fun was still an erotic idea. Unlike the movies that came later, girls wincing while their legs dangled like a dead thing’s. Henry was fluttering his eyelids, tongue in an obscene rictus. Aping some scene from the movie. Peter laughed. “Sick.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She was hungry, not having eaten much luncheon, but now she could not enjoy her cake; Roger himself was stuffing like a grampus, but his eyes never left her face. Then Roger, the slow-witted in his dealings with Stephen, all but choked in the throes of a great inspiration. ‘I say, you,’ he began, with his mouth very full, ‘what about a certain young lady out hunting? What about a fat leg on each side of her horse like a monkey on a stick, and everybody laughing!’ ‘They were not!’ exclaimed Stephen, growing suddenly red. ‘Oh, yes, but they were, though!’ mocked Roger. Now had Stephen been wise she would have let the thing drop, for no fun is derived from a one-sided contest, but at eight years old one is not always wise, and moreover her pride had been stung to the quick. She said: ‘I’d like to see you get the brush; why you can’t stick on just riding round the paddock! I’ve seen you fall off jumping nothing but a hurdle; I’d like to see you out hunting!’ Roger swallowed some more cake; there was now no great hurry; he had thrown his sprat and had landed his mackerel. He had very much feared that she might not be drawn—it was not always easy to draw Stephen. ‘Well now, listen,’ he drawled, ‘and I’ll tell you something. You thought they admired you squatting on your pony; you thought you were being very grand, I’ll bet, with your new riding breeches and your black velvet cap; you thought they’d suppose that you looked like a boy, just because you were trying to be one. As a matter of fact, if you really want to know, they were busting their sides; why, my father said so. He was laughing all the time at your looking so funny on that rotten old pony that’s as fat as a porpoise. Why, he only gave you the brush for fun, because you were such a small kid—he said so. He said: “I gave Stephen Gordon the brush because I thought she might cry if I didn’t.” ’ ‘You’re a liar,’ breathed Stephen, who had turned very pale. ‘Oh, am I? Well, you ask father.’ ‘Do stop—’ whimpered Violet, beginning to cry; ‘you’re horrid, you’re spoiling my party.’ But Roger was launched on his first perfect triumph; he had seen the expression in Stephen’s eyes: ‘And my mother said,’ he continued more loudly, ‘that your mother must be funny to allow you to do it; she said it was horrid to let girls ride that way; she said she was awfully surprised at your mother; she said that she’d have thought that your mother had more sense; she said that it wasn’t modest; she said—’ Stephen had suddenly sprung to her feet: ‘How dare you! How dare you—my mother!’ she spluttered.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Hungry lately, huh?” “Don’t touch me, perv,” she said, hitting his hand away. She giggled a little. “Fuck you.” “Fine,” he said, grabbing Connie’s hands by the wrist. “Fuck me.” She tried halfheartedly to pull away, whining until Henry finally let her go. She rubbed her wrists. “Asshole,” she muttered, but she wasn’t really mad. That was part of being a girl—you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you. I didn’t like the taste of beer, the granular bitterness nothing like the pleasing hygienic chill of my father’s martinis, but I drank one and then another. The boys fed the slot machine from a shopping bag full of nickels until they were almost out of coins. “We need the machine keys,” Peter said, lighting a thin joint he pulled from his pocket. “So we can open it up.” “I’ll get them,” Connie said. “Don’t miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry’s attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine. That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces. They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first

• From The Girls (2016)

  4 My mother was dating again. First, a man who introduced himself as Vismaya and kept massaging my mother’s scalp with his clawed fingers. Who told me that my birthday, on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, meant my two phrases were “I believe” and “I know.” “Which is it?” Vismaya asked me. “Do you believe you know, or do you know you believe?” Next, a man who flew small silver planes and told me that my nipples were showing through my shirt. He said it plainly, as if this were helpful information. He made pastel portraits of Native Americans and wanted my mother to help open a museum of his work in Arizona. Next, a real estate developer from Tiburon who took us out for Chinese food. He kept encouraging me to meet his daughter. Repeating again and again how sure he was that we’d get along like a house on fire. His daughter was eleven, I came to realize. Connie would have laughed, dissecting the way the man’s teeth gummed up with rice, but I hadn’t spoken to her since the day at her house. “I’m fourteen,” I said. The man looked to my mother, who nodded. “Of course,” he said, a tang of soy sauce on his breath. “I see now you’re practically a grown-up.” “I’m sorry,” my mother mouthed across the table, but when the man turned to feed her a slimy-looking snow pea from his fork, she opened her mouth obediently, like a bird. — The pity I felt for my mother in these situations was new and uncomfortable, but also I sensed that I deserved to carry it around—a grim and private responsibility, like a medical condition. There had been a cocktail party my parents had thrown, the year before

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

  Lullus was born in Palma on the island of Majorca. His father had gained distinction by helping to wrest the Balearic islands from the Saracens. The son married and had children, but led a gay and licentious life at court and devoted his poetic gifts to erotic sonnets. At the age of thirty-one he was arrested in his wild career by the sight of a cancer on the breast of a woman, one of the objects of his passion, whom he pursued into a church, and who suddenly exposed her disease. He made a pilgrimage to Campostella, and retired to Mt. Randa on his native island. Here he spent five years in seclusion, and in 1272 entered the third order of St. Francis. He became interested in the conversion of Mohammedans and other infidels and studied Arabic under a Moor whom he had redeemed from slavery. A system of knowledge was revealed to him which he called "the Universal Science," ars magna or ars generalis. With the aid of the king of Aragon he founded, in 1276 on Majorca, a college under the control of the Franciscans for the training of missionaries in the Arabic and Syriac tongues. Lullus went to Paris to study and to develop his Universal Science. At a later period he returned and delivered lectures there. In 1286 he went to Rome to press his missionary plans, but failed to gain the pope’s favor. In 1292 he set sail on a missionary tour to Africa from Genoa. In Tunis he endeavored in vain to engage the Mohammedan scholars in a public disputation. A tumult arose and Lullus narrowly escaped with his life. Returning to Europe, he again sought to win the favor of the pope, but in vain. In 1309 he sailed the second time for Tunis, and again he sought to engage the Mohammedans in disputation. Offered honors if he would turn Mohammedan, he said, "And I promise you, if you will turn and believe on Jesus Christ, abundant riches and eternal life." Again violently forced to leave Africa, Lullus laid his plans before Clement V. and the council of Vienne, 1311. Here he presented a refutation of the philosophy of Averrhoes and pressed the creation of academic chairs for the Oriental languages. Such chairs were ordered erected at Avignon, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca, and Bologna to teach Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic.893 Although nearly eighty years old the indefatigable missionary again set out for Tunis. His preaching at Bougia led, as before, to tumults, and Lullus was dragged outside of the city and stoned. Left half dead, he was rescued by Christian seamen, put on board a ship, and died at sea. His bones are preserved at Palma.

• From The Girls (2016)

  goodbye when I left, like she didn’t mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back. Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me—it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns. “Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It’s not some stranger’s body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s Evie. Nothing in you but beauty.” The words worked on me, even if only temporarily. A trance overtaking me when I saw my reflection—the scooped breasts, even the soft stomach, the legs rough with mosquito bites. There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles—just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed. Afterward he’d hand me a towel to clean myself, and this seemed like a great kindness. When I returned to her purview, there was always a brief period when Suzanne was cool to me. Even her movements were stiff, as if braced, a lull behind her eyes, like someone asleep at the wheel. I learned quickly how to compliment her, how to ride by her side until she forgot to be aloof and deigned to pass her cigarette to me. It would occur to me later that Suzanne missed me when I left, her formality a clumsy disguise. Though it’s hard to tell—maybe that is only a wishful explanation. — The other parts of the ranch flash in and out. Guy’s black dog that they called by a rotating series of names. The wanderers who passed through the ranch that summer, crashing for a day or two before leaving. Denizens of the brainless dream, appearing at all hours of the day with woven backpacks and their parents’ cars. I didn’t see anything familiar in how quickly Russell talked them out of their possessions, put them on the spot so their generosity became a forced theater. They handed over pink

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  Her son was at first dumb with astonishment. Then he reasoned with his mother: 'Senpatji did not kill my father out of personal enmity. He bore my father no hatred. He could not ad otherwise, since the Lord commanded it. He is not really my father's enemy. If you wish to avenge him, it is the Lord Jibudayu whom I ought to kill, not my friend Senpatji. We owe him much gratitude for his kindness. Think, mother: I cannot kill him. We have no right to kill him.' But his mother was angry, and cried: 'I know that you cannot kill him; you are too cowardly and soft. If I had known that he was my husband's murderer I should never have accepted his help. I would rather have Starved to death than see you form a friendship with him. But I tell you that you are wrong to abandon your revenge because of your love, and, if you do so, you smirch the honour of a samurai. If you are such a coward I no longer know you. I will avenge him myself.' And, seizing her dagger, she rushed forth. But her son caught her by the sleeve, and said: 'If you are so firmly determined to avenge my father, there is nothing for me to do but obey you. I shall kill him with my own hands. I pray you not to do it yourself, mother. I beg you to be calm.'And he made ready his vengeance. His love with Senpatji had already lasted for more than two years, and yet he was now compelled to destroy that man to whom he had vowed both affection and assistance for ever. He could not, however, kill him without telling him his reason for doing so. So that evening he called Senpatji to his room, but he was pale and weighed down with sorrow. Senpatji at once perceived this, and said to him: 'Dear Shynosuke, you seem very sad this evening. Are you in trouble? Tell it to me, that I may share it.' Shynosuke sighed, touched by these gentle words; and Senpatji again urged him to open his heart. Then Shynosuke confessed to him: 'Oh, what a wretched business is this human life! I am the son of Shingokei Disaki. You know yourself what you did to my father. I am aware that you could not do otherwise, and that you acted at your master's command. But as the son of a samurai I cannot overlook the matter. At that time I was Still in my mother's womb. Truly I am sorry to kill you, for you have been good to my mother and myself. I am in great distress.'

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  enjoying the games I had been given when I was sick. When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness. For a while I was punished for being so uppity that I wouldn't speak; and then came the thrashings, given by any relative who felt himself offended. • • • We were on the train going back to Stamps, and this time it was I who had to console Bailey. He cried his heart out down the aisles of the coach, and pressed his little-boy body against the window pane looking for a last glimpse of his Mother Dear. I have never known if Momma sent for us, or if the St. Louis family just got fed up with my grim presence. There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child. I cared less about the trip than about the fact that Bailey was unhappy, and had no more thought of our destination than if I had simply been heading for the toilet.