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 The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  With many Christians bent on escaping the present world, leaving it to its own devices and desires, the world channeled the optimistic energy of the earlier Christian mission into “secularism,” the development of the world and society as though God was either remote or nonexistent. Having banished God to a distant “heaven,” earth was free to move under its own steam and in its own chosen direction. This split-level world, a modern version of the ancient philosophy called Epicureanism, is still widely assumed as the norm. The Enlightenment was, in effect, trying to get the fruits of the older Christian culture while ignoring the roots. Most modern Western countries emphasize education, medicine, and the care of the poor; these were all concerns of the church from the earliest times. It is an open question whether such concerns can be sustained in a just and peaceful society in a world from which God has been banished. Of course, part of the Enlightenment rhetoric is to point out that many wars and injustices had been committed by the churches themselves or by people claiming to act in God’s name. This cannot be denied. The charge must be faced with penitence and shame. But it remains the case that social concern beyond one’s own family, faith, or nation, more or less unknown in the ancient world, was part of the church’s life from its earliest days. The second mood I have been describing has often been as quick to disown that tradition as the secular world has been to dismiss it. Dividing history into “periods” or “movements” is always tricky, but these two stand out. In part, the second was a reaction against the overoptimism of the first. It too bred a reaction, as new “social gospel” movements arose in the early twentieth century, insisting that the emphasis on “going to heaven” wasn’t the point and that following the Jesus of the gospels meant working to help the poor and the sick here and now. Many churches today are shaped through traditions that go back to one or another of these movements, and many debates in church councils, synods, and the like reflect the unresolved issues in question. Many Christians grew up reading the Bible in the light of this or that version, often without realizing that these traditions of reading scripture were themselves shaped by cultural forces that distorted some elements of biblical teaching and screened out others altogether.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When we moved from our alley, we left our proper social and economic level. Even if people were poor in our new street, they dressed better and patronized more expensive stores. We now had to live above our means and to sacrifice necessities to appearances. As she had in the past, my mother continued to buy remnants and pieces of defective cloth in the covered bazaars; but now, in making our clothes, she had to sew the pieces together into something “stylish.” She also started taking cheap permanent waves which reddened her lovely black hair and, for some months, made her head resemble a hideous brown sheep’s head. I retained, consequently, a fixed horror of permanents. For the first time in his life, my father now bought a suit of overalls. We had gas and electricity; for her long-term Sabbath cooking, however, my mother reverted to charcoal which was cheaper. Our gas and electricity bills were indeed occasions for collective remorse: “Put out that light! Is it so hard to press a button? It cost us two hundred francs last month!” I heard those words thousands of times. My father groaned continuously and made plans to reduce our budget. But he didn’t have the severity needed to carry out these plans; besides, we could hardly live on less than we did. In order to pay our higher rent, to buy more conventional clothes and to meet the other indispensable expenses of our new status, we could no longer eat our fill. Besides, our family was always increasing. My father and his friends discussed their common problems at the café, and each passed his own unworkable suggestions on to the next. One evening, my father came home with this scheme: “There are so many of us that each meal is very expensive. If we cut out only one meal a week we could make a real monthly saving. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we go to bed on an empty stomach. That evening, there’ll be boiled chick-peas and as much bread as you want.” In a firmer tone, he then concluded: “I’ve decided we’re going to follow my plan.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The narrow alleys of the red-light district bordered immediately on the open ghetto and nothing particular distinguished them from other streets. Impatient men waited at the little doors of the cells only ten yards away from the ragged children playing marbles in the cracks in the uneven pavement. The first shops on these streets were still occupied by second-hand dealers. The topography of the place suited me perfectly, for I could wander around as though I were passing there by accident or looking for something. But I could not prevent myself from walking too fast and too stiffly, with a false air of preoccupation. My quick searching glances into the main street, vaulted like a covered bazaar, never went beyond the dealers, and I avoided their eyes and those of passers-by as though I would find in them some sort of ironical accusation; so I hurried past. But even if I were to cross into the zone of public shame, how could I ever accost the women I saw there, sitting on their doorsteps? That seemed an insurmountable trial. And there was another frightening obstacle. I knew, from having often heard our school supervisors say so, that one should never go there without a condom. I had already seen comrades of mine, pale and proud, with rings around their eyes and an awkward gait, announce with affected nonchalance that they had caught gonorrhea, as though that were a proof of their virility. The others, who knew most of the prostitutes by name, would nod knowingly. “Never go to Lola without a condom. Fontana caught this from her.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In short, I brought my bag over to the scouts, and thus began a retreat which was to have important consequences. The distinction between the middle class and the ghetto population continued within the camp. Of course, the soldiers made no distinctions and manhandled and degraded all the workers alike. But the men grinned when they saw a middle-class son arrive, caught in a raid or requested by name by the Germans, for they were sure he would not stay long. Nor were they wrong: as soon as he had been forgotten by the Germans, the middle-class boy went home in the convoys of the sick and the fathers of large families, or became a driver or nurse who, one day, on a trip to town, just disappeared. I found that the scouts, who slept apart, were also left outside all the little intrigues of the camp. Besides, the rejection was mutual. When they started confiding in me, they admitted they had invited me so as to avoid a disaster: the head of the camp had asked them to take one or two more men in their tent, but they had feared they would not be able to command the same cleanliness and discipline in the others. It was certainly too late now for me to indulge in remorse. All through the long monotonous days in the camp, I still tried to force the confidence of the men. Today, the spring that drove me is broken and I’m amazed at my decision to go to camp and at my naiveté, as though they were foreign to me. What innocence, what fervor, but also what self-sufficiency I must have had to believe I would be welcomed by the others merely because I had gone to them, full of faith and goodwill! In spite of the difficulties, I thought I was succeeding. The men, covered with lice, no longer fought disease. I discovered a barber among the workers. He had brought his tools with him, but he was called upon only on the eve of a day of leave. Together, we organized a little plot which would also be profitable for him. The following Sunday, rather ostentatiously, in the middle of the camp, I had my whole head shaved. After a few ironic comments, a few men followed my example when I explained that this would help protect me from lice. After that, the barber held his sessions every Sunday.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But just as we must (I believe) restore the biblical vision of God’s ultimate future and reconceive atonement in relation to that—the task of Part Three of the present book—so we must restore the biblical analysis of evil and see the cross as addressing it all, not just part of it. Scandalous—For the Wrong Reasons? If a quick tour of two thousand years of church history leaves us somewhat confused about the meaning of the cross, we will not be surprised that there is plenty of confusion in our own day as well. When, as I mentioned earlier, the National Gallery opened its 2000 exhibition “Seeing Salvation” and the skeptics sneered, the standard Christian response might have been, “Well, he died for our sins.” But that, for many today, just makes it worse. Skeptics come back with more scorn. “Sin” itself is out of date, they say. It’s just a projection of anxieties or childhood phobias. To land our “sins” onto a dead first-century Jew is not just ridiculous; it’s disgusting. To suggest that some god projected our “sins” onto that man is even worse: it’s a sort of cosmic child abuse, a nightmare fantasy that grows out of—or might actually lead to!—real human abuses in today’s world. We can do without that nonsense. The angry scorn of the skeptics gets extra traction from the fact that some have found the sign of the cross to be a symbol of fear. The horrible dark history of “Christian” persecution of people of other faiths, particularly Jewish people, has left a stain on what should be a symbol of hope and welcome. I remember being shocked, as a young man, to read about Jews who had escaped from persecution in supposedly “Christian” cultures in eastern Europe and who then, upon arriving in America, saw on street corners the sign of the cross, which they had come to fear and loathe. Those of us who grew up with crosses in our churches and all around us and with no anti-Jewish ideas in our heads have to face the fact that our central symbol has often been horribly abused. It has been used as a sign of a military might or of a dominant culture determined to stamp out all rivals. The emperor Constantine, facing a crucial battle, saw a vision of the cross in the sky and was told, “In this sign you will conquer.” The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses, claiming to bring the light of the Christian gospel into dark places. The fact that such nonsense is a scandalous denial of the early Christian meaning of the cross doesn’t make it any better. It isn’t just those outside the Christian faith who have found the cross a symbol of fear. Many inside the church too have shrunk back from one particular interpretation that, in some form or other, has dominated much Western Christianity over the last half millennium.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Because, of course, we have all failed in this vocation. When humans turn from worshipping the one God to worshipping anything else instead, anything within the created order, the problem is not just that they “do wrong things,” distorting their human minds, bodies, hearts, and everything else, though of course that is true as well. In addition—and this is vital for grasping the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion—they give to whatever idol they are worshipping the power and authority that they, the humans, were supposed to be exercising in the first place. Worshipping things other than the one true God and distorting our human behavior in consequence is the very essence of “sin”: the Greek word for “sin” in the New Testament means, as we saw, not just “doing wrong things,” but “missing the target.” The target is a wise, full human life of worship and stewardship. Idolatry and sin are, in the last analysis, a failure of responsibility. They are a way of declining the divine summons to reflect God’s image. They constitute an insult, an affront, to the loving, wise Creator himself. The Great Playwright has composed a drama and written a wonderful part especially for us to play; and, like a spoiled and silly child, we have torn up the script and smirked our way through a self-serving but ultimately self-destructive plot of our own. As we know in other walks of life, when people duck out of their assigned responsibilities, someone else will take them over instead, and no good will come of it. When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have. And that is why, if God’s plan is to rescue and restore his whole creation, with humans as the active agents in the middle of it, “sins” have to be dealt with. That is the only way by which the nondivine forces that usurp the human role in the world will lose their power. They will be starved of the oxygen that keeps them alive, that turns them from ordinary parts of God’s creation into distorted and dangerous monsters.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  72. And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man. 73. And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee. 74. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew. 75. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. iii. 6.) Among the other insults offered to our Lord was the threefold denial of Peter, which the several Evangelists relate in different order. Luke puts Peter’s trial first, and the ill usage of the Lord after that; Matthew and Mark reverse the order. JEROME. Peter sat without, that he might see the event, and not excite suspicion by any approach to Jesus. CHRYSOSTOM. And he, who, when he saw his Master laid hands on, drew his sword and cut off the ear, now when he sees Him enduring such insults becomes a denier, and cannot withstand the taunts of a mean servant girl. A damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee. RABANUS. What means this, that a handmaid is the first to tax him, when men would be more likely to recognise him, except that this sex might seem to sin somewhat in the Lord’s death, that they might be redeemed by His passion? He denied before them all, because he was afraid to reveal himself; that he said, I know not, shews that he was not yet willing to die for the Saviour. LEO. (Serm. 60, 4.) For this reason it should seem he was permitted to waver, that the remedy of penitence might be exhibited in the head of the Church, and that none should dare to trust in his own strength, when even the blessed Peter could not escape the danger of frailty. CHRYSOSTOM. But not once, but twice and thrice did he deny within a short time. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) We understand that having gone out after his first denial, the cock crowed the first time as Mark relates. CHRYSOSTOM. To shew that the sound did not keep him from denial, nor bring his promise to mind.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  songs he’d learned at Choate. We still sing them. After I went East to school my mother took a job in Washington, D.C. During the Christmas holidays Dwight trailed her there and tried to strangle her in the lobby of our apartment building. Just before she blacked out she kneed him in the balls. He hollered and let her go; then he grabbed her purse and ran. While all this went on I was sitting in our room, reading Hawaii and languidly pretending to believe that the strange noises I heard came from cats. The neighborhood was rough, and I had formed the habit of assigning all such sounds to inhuman origin. When my mother stumbled upstairs and told me what had happened, I tore off blindly down the street and was immediately collared by a plainclothesman who suspected me of another crime. By the time I got home Dwight had been arrested. He was standing outside with my mother and two cops, staring at the ground, the lights of the cruiser flashing across his face. “Bastard,” I said, but I said it almost gently, conscious of the falseness of my position. I had known someone was in trouble and had done nothing. Dwight raised his head. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t recognize me. He lowered his head again. His curly hair glistened with melting snowflakes. This was my last sight of him. My mother got a cease-and-desist order, and the police put him on a bus for Seattle the next morning. I DID NOT do well at Hill. How could I? I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said. The masters thought I was lazy, except for my English master, who saw that I loved books but had no way of talking about them beyond what I’d begun to learn from my brother. This man befriended me. He tutored me, cast me in some of the plays he directed, and tolerated the presumption his kindness sometimes gave rise to. But most of my teachers were clearly disappointed. It scared me to do so poorly when so much was expected, and to cover my fear I became one of the school wildmen—a drinker, a smoker, a make-out artist at the mixers we had with Baldwin and Shipley and Miss Fine’s. But that’s another story. If I worked hard I could just stay afloat; as soon as I relaxed I went under. When I felt myself going under I panicked and did wildman things that got me in trouble. My demerit count was almost always the highest in the class. While the boys around me nodded off during Chapel I prayed like a Moslem, prayed that I

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  “Must’ve been good to get out.” “It was. Real good.” “Terrific,” Roy said. “Have a nice walk home?” She nodded. Roy smiled at me, and I gave in. I smiled back. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” Roy said to her. “Even your own kid knows what you’re up to.” He turned and walked back into the living room. My mother closed her eyes, then opened them again and went on stirring. It was one of those dinners where we didn’t talk. Afterward my mother got out her typewriter. She had lied about her typing speed in order to get work, and now her boss expected more from her than she could really do. That meant having to finish at night the reports she couldn’t get through at the office. While she typed, Roy glowered at her over the the rifles he was cleaning and I wrote a letter to Alice. I put the letter in an envelope and gave it to my mother to mail. Then I went to bed. Late that night I woke up and heard Roy’s special nagging murmur, the different words blurring into one continuous sound through the wall that separated us. It seemed to go on and on. Then I heard my mother say, Shopping! I was shopping! Can’t I go shopping? Roy resumed his murmur. I lay there, hugging the stuffed bear I was too old for and had promised to give up when I officially got my new name. Moonlight filled my room, an unheated addition at the rear of the apartment. On bright cold nights like this one I could see the cloud of my breath and pretend that I was smoking, as I did now until I fell asleep again. I WAS BAPTIZED during Easter along with several others from my catechism class. To prepare ourselves for communion we were supposed to make a confession, and Sister James appointed a time that week for each of us to come to the rectory and be escorted by her to the confessional. She would wait outside until we were finished and then guide us through our penance. I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I wanted satin and lace, black and emerald green, but Claire gently overruled me. I pretended she was my mother and whined a bit before giving in. CLAIRE HAD new photographs taken, actor’s head shots. We went to Hollywood to pick them up from a shop on Cahuenga. In photographs, she looked different, focused, animated. In person she was thin, dreamy, as full of odd angles as a Picasso mademoiselle. The photographer, an old Armenian man with a sleepy eye, thought I should have photographs too. “She could model,” he said to Claire. “I’ve seen worse.” My hand instinctively rose to touch the scars on my jaw. Couldn’t he see how ugly I was? Claire smiled, stroked my hair. “Would you like that?” “No,” I said, low, so the photographer wouldn’t hear me. “We’ll keep it in mind,” Claire said. On the way back to the car in the heat of a pigeon-wing-pale afternoon, we passed an old hippie man with gray hair and a green army surplus bag strapped to his chest, asking people for money. Passersby shouldered his outstretched paper cup aside and crossed the street. He wasn’t menacing enough for this line of work. I thought of myself panhandling in the liquor store parking lot, but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t an alkie, a drug addict. I was only fifteen. He’d done it to himself. “Come on,” he said. “Help a guy out.” I was ready to cross, to escape this scarecrow of a man, but Claire looked over at him. She didn’t know how to ignore people. “Can you spare some change, lady? Anything’ll help.” The light changed, but Claire wasn’t paying attention. She was digging in her purse, emptying out her change. She never learned about street people, that if you showed them the least little kindness, they’d latch onto you like castor seeds. Claire only saw how thin he was, the limp where he must have been hit by a car while panhandling between traffic lights. My mother would have offered to shove him out in front of a bus, but Claire cared. She believed in the commonality of the soul. The hippie man pocketed the money. “You’re a real human being, lady. Most people won’t look a man in the eye when he’s down.” He gave me an accusing look. “I don’t care if a guy gives me something, I just want him to look me in the eye, you know what I’m saying?” “I do,” Claire said, in her voice that was cool water and soft hands. “I worked steady all my life, but I pulled my back out, see. I never drank on the job. I never did.” “I’m sure you didn’t.” The stoplight turned red again. I was ready to pull Claire out into traffic. Everywhere we went, people ended up telling her their sad stories. They could see she was too polite to just walk away. He came closer.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  as it fell toward Horseface’s foot, and got his fingers crushed. I BROUGHT HOME good grades at first. They were a fraud—I copied other kids’ homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn’t bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C’s instead of A’s, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself. All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much. I had fallen in with some notorious older boys from Concrete who took me on as a curiosity when they discovered that I’d never been drunk and still had my cherry. I was grateful for their interest. I wanted distinction, and the respectable forms of it seemed to be eluding me. If I couldn’t have it as a citizen I would have it as an outlaw. We smoked cigarettes every morning in a shallow gully behind the school, and we often stayed there when the bell rang for class, then cut downhill through a field of ferns—ferns so tall we seemed to be swimming through them—to the side road where Chuck Bolger kept his car. Chuck’s father owned a big auto parts store near Van Horn and was also the minister of a Pentecostal church. Chuck himself talked dark religion when he was drinking. He was haunted and wild, but his manner was gentle; even, at least with me, brotherly. For that reason I felt easier with him than with the others. I believed that there were at least some things he would not do. I did not have that feeling about the rest. One of them had already spent time in jail, first for stealing a chain saw and then for kidnapping a cat. He was big and stupid and peculiar. Everyone called him Psycho and he had accepted the name like a vocation. Chuck was with Psycho when he snatched the cat. The cat walked up to them while they were standing outside the Concrete drugstore and began to rub against their legs. Psycho picked the cat up to do it some injury, but when he saw the name on its collar he got an idea. The cat belonged to a widow whose husband had owned a car dealership in town. Psycho figured she must be loaded, and decided to put the arm on her. He called the widow from a pay phone and told her he had the cat and would sell it back to her for twenty dollars. Otherwise he would kill it. To show he meant business he held the cat up to the receiver

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 4: Further, it is a relief to know that one has had many associates in sin, so that one is less ashamed thereof. If therefore every one were to know the sin of another, each sinner’s shame would be much diminished, which is unlikely. Therefore every one will not know the sins of all. On the contrary, A gloss on 1 Cor. 4:5, “will . . . bring to light the hidden things of darkness,” says: “Deeds and thoughts both good and evil will then be revealed and made known to all.” Further, the past sins of all the good will be equally blotted out. Yet we know the sins of some saints, for instance of Magdalen, Peter, and David. Therefore in like manner the sins of the other elect will be known, and much more those of the damned. I answer that, At the last and general judgment it behooves the Divine justice, which now is in many ways hidden, to appear evidently to all. Now the sentence of one who condemns or rewards cannot be just, unless it be delivered according to merits and demerits. Therefore just as it behooves both judge and jury to know the merits of a case, in order to deliver a just verdict, so is it necessary, in order that the sentence appear to be just, that all who know the sentence should be acquainted with the merits. Hence, since every one will know of his reward or condemnation, so will every one else know of it, and consequently as each one will recall his own merits or demerits, so will he be cognizant of those of others. This is the more probable and more common opinion, although the Master (Sent. iv, D, 43) says the contrary, namely that a man’s sins blotted out by repentance will not be made known to others at the judgment. But it would follow from this that neither would his repentance for these sins be perfectly known, which would detract considerably from the glory of the saints and the praise due to God for having so mercifully delivered them. Reply to Objection 1: All the preceding merits or demerits will come to a certain amount in the glory or unhappiness of each one rising again. Consequently through eternal things being seen, all things in their consciences will be visible, especially as the Divine power will conduce to this so that the Judge’s sentence may appear just to all. Reply to Objection 2: It will be possible for a man’s merits or demerits to be made known by their effects as stated above (A[1], ad 1), or by the power of God, although the power of the created intellect is not sufficient for this.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I could tell nobody of my difficult struggle with myself for fear of his making a fool of me. So I hesitated between an awareness of ridicule and a heroic satisfaction, between the temptation to deceive myself at small cost and the impossibility of not condemning my failures. You can fool the whole world, but not yourself. To drop the sacred phylacteries that we bind around our foreheads was a horrible sin, to be punished by death. The Law said it, it seems; the rabbis gravely affirmed it; the faithful repeated it with terror. I decided I could; I must cast them aside calmly, I would certainly not die because of it. Still, I didn’t do it. And I rationalized beautifully: I had no need of childish demonstrations, it was enough to affirm my own freedom. A free man doesn’t have to spend his time being blasphemous to deny God. But I felt my attitude was the least costly; I was ashamed to risk so little. At other times, I went to the point of blasphemy in committing less serious offenses. Bread must not be thrown away or left where it can be stepped on by passers-by; all crumbs must therefore be carefully gathered and left on the windowsill or stuffed into cracks in the wall. So I took whatever bread I didn’t eat and made a show of throwing it where it could be stepped on. Of course, I felt ridiculous while doing it, but my very embarrassment seemed a hesitation, a trick of my superstitious fear, and I continued to throw my bread away, in spite of myself. How mixed up I was! At home, however, my revolt had been completely expressed, and I no longer wisecracked or attacked but merely tried to live apart. Instead of peace, there was only more unpleasantness. When my father put on his cap and picked up his prayerbook to officiate, he seemed to become cramped as if a stranger were staring at him in mockery; and if I too put on a cap and stood up whenever required, I felt that I was watched by him and the rest of the family, as if they unmasked me in spite of my play-acting. It was an intolerable situation. As luck would have it, the younger children began having difficulties similar to mine. Frightened at their own audacity, they would look to me for support; but I refused to give it to them. When they began a destructive argument, they sought my eyes, but I looked away guiltily. My father answered quickly and brutally, not wanting to reopen the burning debates, ashamed before an adversary who was voluntarily silent. We ended by avoiding the ceremonies of minor importance and observed only the most solemn ones. And, I must admit, as I had nothing to offer in its stead, I was sometimes sorry to have shaken the world of their traditions. ~ 6. THE DANCE ~

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Maybe. But maybe more than a joke. Maybe you were giving voice to your sense that I have little of value to offer you—at best, an introduction to another man. So I felt invisible. Devalued. And I guess that’s why I lashed out at you.” “Poor thing!” Myrna muttered. “What?” “Nothing, nothing—another joke.” “I’m not going to let you drive me away with that kind of comment. In fact, I’m wondering whether we should be meeting more than once a week. For today, though, we have to stop. We’re running over. Let’s pick up from here next week.” Ernest was glad Myrna’s hour was over. But not for the customary reasons: he wasn’t bored or irritated by her; he was exhausted. Punch-drunk. Staggering. On the ropes. But Myrna hadn’t finished punching. “You really don’t like me, do you?” she remarked as she picked up her purse and started to rise. “On the contrary,” said Ernest, determined to hang in there with his patient, “I felt particularly close to you in this session. It was scary and hard today but good work.” “That’s not exactly what I asked you.” “But that’s the way I feel. There are times when I feel more distant from you; times when I feel close to you.” “But you really don’t like me?” “Liking isn’t a global feeling. Sometimes you do things I don’t like; sometimes there are things I like very much about you.” Yeah, yeah. Like my big tits and the swish of my stockings, Myrna thought as she got out her car keys. At the door Ernest, as always, offered his hand. She was repelled. Physical contact with him was the last thing she wanted, but she saw no way to refuse. She took his hand lightly, quickly turned it loose, and left without looking back. For Myrna, sleep came slowly that night. She lay awake, unable to erase from her mind Dr. Lash’s dictated opinion of her. “Whining,” “boring,” “sharp angles,” “narrow,” “vulgar”—his phrases whirled around and around in her mind. Awful words—yet none of them as hurtful as his comment that she never said anything interesting or beautiful. His hope that she might write a poem stung, brought tears to her eyes. A long-forgotten incident drifted into her mind. When she was ten or eleven she had written a great deal of poetry but had kept it secret—especially from her gruff, relentlessly critical father. Before she was born he had been dismissed from his surgical residency program because of alcoholism, and he had lived out the rest of his life as a disillusioned, half-drunk small-town doctor whose office was in his home and who spent every evening in front of the TV, sipping bourbon from an Old Granddad whiskey glass. She had never been able to make him interested in her. Never, not once, had he openly expressed any love for her.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn’t like her. She usually called them rats with fur. “Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I’m so bored I’m talking to cats.” She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying. She gave me the stick and took a cigarette out of the Benson and Hedges pack. She stuck the wrong end in her mouth, and I watched to see if she would light it. She caught it just in time. “Don’t know which end is up,” she joked, and took a sip from her coffee cup. I dragged the ribbons along the carpet, luring a little gray-and-white furball out from beneath the swing. It hopped, pounced, ran off. “So talk to me,” she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream. She bared her lovely throat as she arched back her neck, her head huge with hot curlers like a dandelion puff. “We used to talk all the time. Everybody’s so darn busy, that’s what’s wrong with life. You seen Carolee?” Up the road, we could both see the plumes of dust from the dirt bikes rising into the thin blue sky. I wanted to be dust, smoke, the wind, sun glimmering over the chaparral, anywhere but sitting here with the woman whose man I was stealing. “Carolee’s trouble,” Starr said, holding out her foot to look at the silvery pedicure. “You stay away from her. I’m going to have to talk to that girl, stop the downward spiral. Needs a big dose of the Word.” She pulled out a curler, looked cross-eyed at the ringlet over her forehead, started pulling out the other ones, dropping them into her lap. “You’re the good girl. I’m making my amends to you. A-mend. Where’s Carolee, you seen her?” she asked again. “I think she’s with Derrick,” I said, wiggling the ribbon end near the glider where the kitten was hiding. She leaned her head forward to get the curlers at the back. “Of all the white trash. His mama’s so dumb she puts the TV dinner in the oven with the box still on.” She laughed and dropped the curler, and the kitten that had just come out dashed back underneath the glider. That’s when I realized Starr was drunk. She’d been sober eighteen months, kept the AA chips on her key ring, red, yellow, blue, purple. It was such a big deal to her, too.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Still rolling, we hit the boggy swale at the foot of the bank. He got on top of me, I got on top of him, he got back on top of me. My news bag had armored me well when I was on my feet but now it was heavy with mud and twisted around my shoulders. I couldn’t get off a good swing. All I could do was hold on to Arthur and try to keep him from getting one off at me. He struggled, then abruptly collapsed on top of me. He was panting for breath. His weight pressed me into the mud. I gathered myself and bucked him off. It took everything I had. We lay next to each other, gasping strenuously. Pepper tugged at my pant leg and growled. Arthur stirred. He got to his feet and started up the bank. I followed him, thinking it was all over, but when he got to the top he turned and said, “Take it back.” The other boys were watching me. I shook my head. Arthur pushed me and I began sliding down the bank. “Take it back,” he yelled. Pepper followed me in my descent, yapping and lunging. There hadn’t been a moment since the fight began when Pepper wasn’t worrying me in some way, if only to bark and bounce around me, and finally it was this more than anything else that made me lose heart. It wounded my spirit to have a dog against me. I liked dogs. I liked dogs more than I liked people, and I expected them to like me back. I started up the bank again, Pepper still at my heels. “Take it back,” Arthur said. “Okay,” I said. “Say it.” “Okay. I take it back.” “No. Say, ‘You’re not a sissy.’” I looked up at him and the other two boys. There was pleasure and scorn on their faces, but not on his. He wore, instead, an expression of such earnestness that it seemed impossible to refuse him what he asked. I said, “You’re not a sissy.” He called Pepper and turned away. When I got to the top he was walking toward home. The other two boys were excited, restless, twitching with the

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Yes, in spite of everything, I admitted to myself, I was impressed. But why should I be present at such an affair? Barbarous, like all the rest of it! Outside, the luxurious hearse was waiting, all black and silver, surrounded by funerary lamps, drawn by horses caparisoned in black and with black plumes on their heads. This was indeed an expense, which the brothers must have agreed to share, but appearances have to be respected. People would not have understood, had the surviving Benillouche brothers made a mediocre funeral for their senior, their father. Neighbors and relatives began to cluster around the hearse in the shade, and soon a crowd had gathered. Windows along the street that had been closed for siesta were now flung open, and people leaned out to watch the show. Not knowing who I was, the people around me chatted pleasantly. The funeral had broken up their daily routine and they were, in spite of themselves, in a quietly pleasant mood. Everyone was silent when the coffin appeared; it had been carried with difficulty down the narrow stairwell and now made a hollow sound as they slid it into the hearse. We, the men, lined up behind the hearse, according to our ages, with the oldest standing at the head. So I found myself next to my cousin, Uncle Gagou’s son, who had exactly the same name as I. In the hullabaloo that had begun again, we were able to speak openly to each other. He immediately reproached me bitterly. Why hadn’t I come at once? Our widowed aunt had notified all the members of the family, individually and without delay. Uncle Joseph was entitled to all respect. (I was beginning to know this.) My cousin spoke with confidence, sure of his rights; it was also true that we had the same name, the same given and family name, both of us samples of the same job, and the copy could certainly criticize the original or vice versa, for I was deviating from the well-founded rules of religion, custom, and tradition. He was the real Alexandre Benillouche, dressed in black and deeply involved in his family’s grief for the loss of its head. The hearse began to move. Howling and shrieking suddenly broke loose from all the windows of the apartment we had just left. The women, forbidden by custom to accompany the corpse to the cemetery, were now bidding Uncle Joseph a last farewell. The crowd below was silenced for a moment by the wailing from above. We began the slow procession across the city. I took advantage of every movement in the flow of the procession to move back slightly, away from my cousin, who kept his place.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I wanted to grab her wrists and still her hands before she lacerated her flesh. A long pause and then: “And they is other things Ah could say too, but they is very personal.” I knew that Magnolia was primed. I had no doubt that with the slightest prod, she would tell us everything. But she had gone far enough for the rest of us. Too far. Rosa’s distraught eyes were telling me, “Please, please, no more! Stop this!” And it was enough for me too. I had taken the lid off, but for once I did not want to look inside . After two or three minutes, Magnolia stopped weeping, stopped scratching. Slowly her smile reappeared and her voice became soft again. “But then Ah figure that the good Lawd has His reasons for giving us each a burden. Wouldn’t it be prideful fo’ me to try and figure out His reasons?” The group members were silent. Apparently embarrassed, they all—even Dorothy—looked away, out the window. This is, I kept trying to tell myself, good therapy: Magnolia has faced some of her demons and now seems poised on the brink of some important therapeutic work. Yet I felt I had desecrated her. Perhaps the other members felt that way too. Yet they said nothing. A heavy silence descended. I caught each member’s gaze and silently urged each to speak. Perhaps I had read into Magnolia too much earth mother. Perhaps it was only I who had lost an icon. I struggled to put my sense of desecration into words that would be useful to the group. Nothing came. My mind was silent. Giving up, I glumly resigned myself to a tired, scuffed comment I had uttered countless times before in countless group meetings: “Magnolia has said a great deal. What feelings do her words stir up in each of you?” I hated saying that, hated its ordinariness, its technical banality. Ashamed of myself, I slumped into my chair. I knew precisely how the group members would respond and grimly awaited their formulaic comments: “I feel I really know you now, Magnolia.” “I feel a lot closer to you now.” “I see you as a real person now.” Even one of the residents, venturing out of his role as silent observer, chipped in: “Me too, Magnolia. I see you as a full person, someone I can relate to. I experience you in three dimensions now.” Our time was up. I had to summarize the session somehow and delivered the obvious, mandatory interpretation: “You know, Magnolia, this has been a tough meeting but a rich one.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I could never learn to use the phone. My excitement prevented me from hearing anything and, as I myself screamed and stammered into the receiver, no one could understand me. As for the refrigerator, white and cold and majestic as a medical mystery, I had a very special respect for it. I realized, quite truthfully, that to buy one of them we would have to sell all our furniture, and who, anyway, would want to buy our junk? So I managed to acquire a kind of practical wisdom. Unable to gain their elegance, their natural ease, their detachment born of excessive wealth, I pretended, at the cost of much self-torture, to be disinterested about the material things of the world. Because I could not afford cakes, I pretended not to like them; I pretended not to enjoy billiards, going to cafés, horse-racing, collecting stamps, dancing, dressing with care, chasing after girls. And, up to a point, I became really austere and modest in my appetites, even something of a moralist, for I was stern in my judgments of the conduct of others. In brief, I managed to acquire the reputation of being a serious boy. At this game, one can either diminish oneself or sublimate. I have known boys who have acquired tearful eyes, a head that always leans or turns to the side, and the gentleness and politeness of the vanquished. But I became inflexible in my principles, dogmatic in my judgments, easily offended, merciless about weakness, whether my own or that of others, and ambitious to the point of self-destruction. More or less consciously, of course, I tried to imitate my schoolmates. But nothing I did was spontaneous, everything required effort and calculation. I forced myself to listen to operas, to follow plays, to note the lives of their authors and information about the works themselves. I attended gatherings of youth organizations but brought to them so much tension and gravity of my own that I could never join in their spontaneity and enthusiasm that was so childish and thoughtless, but so relaxing. I was one of those rare characters who reflect on the theory of being a Boy Scout, on the organization’s place in society and its educational value, while the other boys are living it, singing and playing. It was impossible for me to forget myself; every once in a while this was brought to my attention by others. One day, Bouli, a boy I had begun to like because he was intelligent and seemed not to be blind to certain distinctions, remarked to me, much to my humiliation and surprise: “Why do you dress in such an impossible way? You love to ridicule the affectations of the overfastidious and yet, at heart, you have all those of the negligent.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, that which is shameful in itself can by no means be well done. Now the marriage act is always connected with concupiscence, which is always shameful. Therefore it is always sinful. Objection 4: Further, nothing is the object of excuse save sin. Now the marriage act needs to be excused by the marriage blessings, as the Master says (Sent. iv, D, 26). Therefore it is a sin. Objection 5: Further, things alike in species are judged alike. But marriage intercourse is of the same species as the act of adultery, since its end is the same, namely the human species. Therefore since the act of adultery is a sin, the marriage act is likewise. Objection 6: Further, excess in the passions corrupts virtue. Now there is always excess of pleasure in the marriage act, so much so that it absorbs the reason which is man’s principal good, wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 11) that “in that act it is impossible to understand anything.” Therefore the marriage act is always a sin. On the contrary, It is written (1 Cor. 7:28): “If a virgin marry she hath not sinned,” and (1 Tim. 5:14): “I will . . . that the younger should marry,” and “bear children.” But there can be no bearing of children without carnal union. Therefore the marriage act is not a sin; else the Apostle would not have approved of it. Further, no sin is a matter of precept. But the marriage act is a matter of precept (1 Cor. 7:3): “Let the husband render the debt to his life.” Therefore it is not a sin. I answer that, If we suppose the corporeal nature to be created by the good God we cannot hold that those things which pertain to the preservation of the corporeal nature and to which nature inclines, are altogether evil; wherefore, since the inclination to beget an offspring whereby the specific nature is preserved is from nature, it is impossible to maintain that the act of begetting children is altogether unlawful, so that it be impossible to find the mean of virtue therein; unless we suppose, as some are mad enough to assert, that corruptible things were created by an evil god, whence perhaps the opinion mentioned in the text is derived (Sent. iv, D, 26); wherefore this is a most wicked heresy. Reply to Objection 1: By these words the Apostle did not forbid the marriage act, as neither did he forbid the possession of things when he said (1 Cor. 7:31): “They that use this world” (let them be) “as if they used it not.” In each case he forbade enjoyment [*”Fruitionem,” i.e. enjoyment of a thing sought as one’s last end]; which is clear from the way in which he expresses himself; for he did not say “let them not use it,” or “let them not have them,” but let them be “as if they used it not” and “as if they had none.”