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 Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away. Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again. Then other factors raised their heads. “You know, I had dinner with Alice and Roger last week,” he said, tearing a bite out of his little sponge cake. Constance halted in her burrowing. “I thought you didn’t see them anymore.” “What? Why?” “What about that big fight you had with Roger?” “What big fight?” “The one about the article you did on him in Art in America .” “Oh, that . It was just a spat. I see him all the time. You wouldn’t believe their new loft. It’s perfect.” This person, thought Connie, does not have one deep feeling about anything. She felt like a crabbed, bitter woman in a brittle curl over her coffee. “You should give Alice a call—she’d love to hear from you.” “Alice was the one who stopped calling me, in case you don’t remember.” “Connie, Alice loves you. She really does.” “Horseshit, Franklin. She stabbed me in the back.” “God, you girls are unbelievable. Girls are unbelievable.” They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad. But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes. “I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.” “Roger and Alice will be there.” “Oh, come on!” “All right, I’ll probably come.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I was very moved by his poetic description and marveled once again at his transformation. “What kind of husband would you say you are?” “Certainly not a perfect husband. We have our ups and downs. I have a temper that can flare. When it does, I’m stubborn and mean. I have a terrible habit of getting caught up with work and forgetting to call. Look, you know what I have to go on. I keep saying to myself, ‘Do it better, do it right, don’t mess up.’ I try. I try every day.” He smiled. “She’s a generous woman and she makes allowances for dumbness.” “What would you like to change if you could?” I realized that this blunt question might throw him off balance but decided to take the chance. Larry looked out the window for a full minute without speaking. Turning to face me, he gave an answer that I will long treasure, one that captures the continuing emotional constriction and fear that so many of these young men feel but have a very hard time talking about. They are ashamed and lack the words. He said: “I have a difficult time showing love to my wife, even telling her that I love her. She complains that I don’t show her enough affection. I’m aware of that. And I try to change it. But I can’t because of my parents’ marriage and divorce. I feel almost cursed. Sometimes when Grace comes to meet me here at the office, I want to jump up and hug her—but I can’t.” Of course, women have complained since time immemorial that their men have trouble expressing tender loving feelings. Obviously this problem is not confined to children of divorce. But it’s fair to say that the men in divorced families are conscious of this difficulty long before any woman brings it to their attention. They’ve known for years that they have inexpressible feelings and that their anxiety stops them from reaching out. They have rehearsed in their minds a hundred times the things they wanted to say to their parents. And then they couldn’t do it. I would venture to say that many of the men raised in divorced families were conscious of their inhibitions and badly disappointed in themselves when they failed to break out of them. Some said they mastered the ploy of silent withdrawal because they had to protect themselves from becoming their mother’s confidant as young adolescents. Used to a life of pulling away and hiding feelings, they could not break the habit even within a loving marriage. Residues of ViolenceWALKING BACK TO Larry’s office after lunch, I asked a question that had been bothering me since the interview began. “Larry, how gone are the memories of your dad’s violence?”

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  bags.” To which Michele replied, “Sleeping bags cost money.” Remembering that she had all the money, and knowing I’d look like an even bigger lightweight if I asked for it back— suppose she said, “No!” Suppose she said, “Fucl^you!” Then what?—I heard myself mumbling, Marlon Brando—style, “Don’t worry about it. One thing I know how to do is steal.” And without another word, I headed back to the mall. Be fore I left, I thought I caught a flicker of respect in her eyes. It gave me hope. (And a partial erection.) I was back in ten minutes with a pair of lightweight goose downs, army green and waterproof. When I handed hers over, I could tell she was impressed. With any luck, I wouldn’t have to knock off a gas station to make her forget my cowardice. I could probably kill a man with my bare hands and it wouldn’t matter now. Too-chicken- to-licl^. It might as well have been tattooed on my forehead. What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man? Michele’s eyes grew huge under her Beatles cap. At some point, she’d dumped the rose-petal grannies, and I didn’t miss them. She squeezed the sleeping bag, then smiled. “You . . . you stole these?” “No big thing.” I shrugged, and pretty much stood still while she hugged me. I didn’t want to look too eager. Didn’t want her to know what I felt. Most of all, I didn’t want her to accidentally touch my ass. The credit card was in my back pocket. The last thing I needed was her finding out I charged the bags to my mother. DANI SHAPIRO Bed of Leaves l^ater, she will remember the leaves. The way they scratch and crumble against her back. The way her panties are smudged with dirt and she will have to ball them up and stuff them into her knapsack where her mother won’t find them. Years later, as a woman, there will be a moment at the end of each summer when the scent of fresh-mowed grass will fill her lungs through an open car window, and she will close her eyes and her tongue will go soft, her inner thighs moist like the pale insides of a half-baked cake. Eddie Fish is unbuttoning her shirt. There have been boys before this moment, boys who have stuck their fingers be tween her blouse and jeans, tugging the fabric loose, pushing their hands up around her bra and cupping her breasts. There have been boys—two, to be exact—who have unzipped her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was a dingy, patched-up little place on the edge of town, close to where Matt lived; I passed it every day and never saw a sign of life. Only the most insatiable antiquary could ever have dreamt of going there by choice. I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge, which wasn't even monk-knowledge, just a part of the accusing streetscape of the morning after. But my mouth was as dry as cloth and my features had a rubbery stiffness, as if I had been terribly wounded by an old friend and didn't know what to say. Luc glanced sideways at me, but thought perhaps I was merely angry, and that he was in for a difficult hour. I was on the brink of tears just to be walking beside him in the real world, the two of us in' our black jeans and smart today with light sports-jackets, though his was costly and Scottish whilst mine was American and second-hand. "So whatever did happen to your glasses?" Luc asked with new informality as we sat down in our regular places at the dining-room table. I fingered the cracked bridge and the side-hinges stiffly fixed with tape. I wanted to tell him how when he had finally gone into the house and left nothing but the silvered oblong on the grass where his towel had been spread I had stood up and wandered desolately over the half-seen floor, treading on the spectacles that I had discarded to make love to him and inflicting the damage he could now see. "I fell off my bicycle," I said absurdly: "or more accurately I was knocked off." "I hope you weren't hurt, Edward," he said with eager sympathy, almost more eager than sympathetic, but he was only seventeen and what did he know? "Everybody rides bicycles and I think they can be very dangerous." I shrugged to show that I was fine. "I didn't know you had a bicycle," he said. "It wasn't actually my bicycle," I admitted. "It was a friend's." I could see myself being pressed further and further into deceit rather as a lying quick answer to a barber's question, incuriously followed by a further question, can lead in minutes to a crazy-house of invention and non-sequitur. "I won't be riding it again," I emphasised. "It was a complete write-off." "A write-off. Yes. Anyway, I think of you as a walker," he said. (So he thought of me.) "I have often seen you walking along this street, when I am working in the evening, and it reminds me to work even harder."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Shameful; for he was heathen as well as black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings. Shameful; for, since our role as missionary had not been wholly disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we had deliv ered him in order more easily to escape our own. As he ac cepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody crass-in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, he sometimes did-he must, hencef orth, accept that image we then gave him of hi mself : having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness. It is this quite simple dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his psychology. However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject-"pr oblem" literature when written by whites, "protest" literature when written by Ne groes-and nothing is more striking than the tremendous dis parity of tone between the two creations. Kingsblood Royal bears, for example, almost no kinship to If He Hollers Let Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world. �ow the most powerful and celeb rated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is un questionably Richard Wright's Native Son. The feeling which pre\·ailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very ex istence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud deco ration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before- which was true. Nor could it be written today.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I think you've got an admirer there," I said, shamed and somehow treacherous. At which Luc frowned. And then the bastard was back: "Oh, I found the Fratry, by the way." He smiled as if this really was their own private success. "Absolutely fascinating!" And Luc now not knowing how to react, whilst his admirer, my hateful and forward rival, gave a little wave and darted off. "When is it we meet again?" I boomed out wretchedly. But somehow Luc failed to hear. He strode away from his empty locker with all his clothes in his arms, entered one of the four changing-cubicles preserved, I had imagined, for the clinically insecure or for those who perhaps for some religious reason . . . and bolted the half-door. Ten seconds later, like the rape of Danae, there was a scattering of coins from an upturned pocket and a smothered "Fuck". A few centimes came spinning towards me across the damp tiled floor. Chapter 19 On standard speed the wipers made an indolent, halting trawl of the windscreen, but on full speed they flicked from side to side so fast you felt the mechanism was about to snap. Marcel told me about the wipers on a friend's father's BMW, apparently adjustable to anything from lento to prestissimo at the touch of a finger, and with varying degrees of intermission. He was interested in cars, but only so far at the level of fixtures; he played determinedly with the cigarette-lighter and had quickly assessed the austere alternatives of the heating-system. We travelled in a roar of boosted warmth, peering out under misted arcs at the flowing stampede of cloud. The idea that Luc and Sibylle were somewhere ahead of us and would wait to be found lost all sense in the midday darkness, streaked with cars' lights, in the drowned anonymity of the road. Oh, I wanted to get to him first, to find out what story he was telling, to do a deal with him—but if he had been at the station early he could be hundreds of miles away by now. His mother thought not; she said it was another of his moody crises, which could be drastic in effect but were local in physical range. I gripped the wheel, ignobly anxious for myself but also with a larger, dimmer wish that he shouldn't fuck up his young life. Marcel was restless, eager, whisked away from his lessons on a quest for his beautiful and scandalous senior. He was pink-faced at the privilege of it and chattered solemnly until my nervous silence, my curt demands for help with road-signs and turnings, affected him too, rather as a parent's misery seeps into a child and subdues it. I heard the drag of his breathing amid the heater's bluster, and then the breathy squawk of his inhaler. When I remembered I gave him a little side smile and saw him sigh with sudden reassurance.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Their daughters, however, are at risk for remaining trapped in relationships that echo the violent marriage. Tragically, toxic elements in the marriage endure after the breakup. Larry’s father did not hesitate to make abundantly clear to his little daughter his views about the inferiority of women. He insulted her openly on visits, calling her “little bitch” and “stupid.” There’s almost no way a little girl hearing this can escape internalizing the view that she’s an inferior being. Moreover, the violent father is often a seductive and charming man who doesn’t hesitate to court his sons and daughters in the hope of enlisting their support. This combination of power and helplessness is very appealing to a child. It has strong erotic overtones. The child internalizes the image of a man who is overpowering, needy, and appealing. She buys into and internalizes a view of herself as an inferior being who needs a strong man to hang on to because, as several of these sad young women said to me, “Without a man I am nothing.” As she matures, this image is built into her expectations of men and her relationships with men. The man is supposed to hurt her and she is to remain the helpless victim. Her job is to rescue him. When he fails to respond, it is her fault. Unfortunately, the mother’s transformation from victim to independent woman often comes too slowly and too late to be built into the psyche of her daughters. It may be years before the child is able to see her mother as a person worth emulating, with the strength to stand up for herself. The view of the mother as weak and helpless is a lasting and powerful one. Little girls do not for many years see their mother’s courage in breaking free. Only as adults did the young women in this study begin to understand the wisdom of their mother’s decision. Most of the women raised in violent families in this study were able to break out of the pattern by their early thirties—but only with great difficulty and only with individual or group therapy. Some who escaped violent relationships ended up in lasting unhappy marriages or remained caught in demeaning long-term relationships without marriage. (I’ll talk more about this group in Chapter 14 when we examine early, impulsive marriages.) Anja was helped by the encouragement of her mother and her brother plus several years of psychotherapy. She was eventually able to find a man who loved her and was not abusive. But when I saw her at age thirty, she was extremely worried about the future. Her self-confidence was still poor. Although she had graduated from college, her career plans were shaky. Compared to Larry, she was floundering.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Cricket. “Michele, I really like you ... I mean, I’ve always, like, loved you, it’s just that. . .” “Forget it,” she said, her face hardening. She pulled up her pants and launched herself off the station wagon in a single movement, as though she’d been bouncing off cars and asphalt her entire life. “Forget it, Bobby. It’s nothing.” “Really?” This was so hugely untrue, so clearly not nothing, I hated myself for needing to hear it. I held my hand out to help, but Michele ignored it and dusted herself off. “You don’t,” she said with a brittle laugh, “you don’t think I was serious, do you? You don’t think I’m some kind of exhibi tionist. ” “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. I just knew I wanted to rip my tongue out at the sound of “gee.” This was worse than Jiminy Cricket. My voicebox had been hijacked by Wally Cleaver. Be cause I never said “gee.” Never before and never since. I was not a “gee”-type person. But I couldn’t tell Michele that. What was the point? To Michele, from here on in, I’d be the geek who said “gee” and didn’t have the balls to lick her pussy in broad daylight. With one move—or lack of one—I’d killed something horri bly important. Whatever else happened, I knew I’d spend the rest of whatever time I had left walking upright, trying to re deem myself. When Michele slouched off toward the highway, I resolved to be a bad-ass. A rebel. A daredevil. Keith Richards with Jew- hair. Whatever it took to de-lame myself, that’s what I’d do. With no plan to speak of, I announced, “We need sleeping bags.” To which Michele replied, “Sleeping bags cost money.” Remembering that she had all the money, and knowing I’d

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder in affected surprise, sometimes she reclined on a sofa in short black stockings, or with the black feathers of a fan clustered between her legs. She was a handsome girl, young, unembarrassed; she looked cynical but dependable. I was very slow to realise that this was the second Jane, the laundry-woman who was the actress's reincarnation. There was a general likeness, though in monochrome the overwhelming feature, the torch of her hair, could have been any middling colour. She was pale and strong-jawed and big without being fat. She could certainly have been a relation of Jane, a younger sister, with a sirmlar humour and nerve. I tried to forget she was a prostitute, and had presumably been paid for these sessions in the studio, but the impression of detachment and compliance couldn't be dispelled. She met the camera's stare very levelly: she still had life and self-esteem, but her bright eyes, in the middle range of the sepia, had nothing of Jane's disconcerting power, the impression she gave of seeing through time and experimenting with dangerous drugs. The new girl could never have been the Kundry of "Jadis Herodias, quoi encore?" In one picture she stood with her arms full of the dusky bundle of her hair, though at first glance I mistook it for a cat. There was another small envelope among the photographs, on which the word "Private" had provocatively been written. I opened it circumspectly, the old gum still duily tacky, and slid out yet another set of photos, that made me wince and hesitate. I knew for a moment or two what "Private" meant—desires expressed without the filter of art, glum shaming needs . . . I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them. It figured that the downside of Orst's mysticism should be something coarse and exacting. The young Jane—I didn't know what to call her—had a wary look now: she was a professional, she would have upped the fee, but she was not an actress like her predecessor. There was a sense, that was perhaps the cruel erotic pivot of the pictures, that though she was a working woman she was a good Catholic too, who believed in eternal fire and wondered, as she took the lash or pissed herself for Orst's camera, if that might land her there. There were only half a dozen of them. In the first, she stood with one foot on a table, one on a chair, looking back over her shoulder (he seemed to like that startled supplicating glance), two fingers spreading her cunt from behind. There was a glistening detail to it that was far beyond the things I had puzzled out long ago from Charlie's under-mattress stash of Escorts and Parades.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, abm·e al l , wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the Amer ican air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul. for this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a mar ketplace and seeing black men ti:>r the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assump tions with the fact-and the necessity-of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea ex presses, with a truly American blunt ness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves. Rut between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama which begins for Americans over three hundred years ago at Jamestown, there are at least two differences to be observe d. The American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thi ng, as slaves in past epochs had supposed and often done, that he would ever be able to wrest the power from his master's hands. This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and di mensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprec edent ed fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resur rected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undimin ished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this su pposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means-if only in memory-of revering and sustaining the f(>rms of his former lif e, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One won ders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark STRAN GER IN THE VI LLAG E 125 child he bore . I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  so stupid, I asked her to her face, “What is this thing?” Now, she was already lying there with her sari pulled up to her stomach, and her legs bent at the knees, and I was trying not to look at her big white panties that she was shamelessly showing me through her wide-open legs, when suddenly she stuck one finger inside of her panties and pulled the material down and showed me all her hair there. I felt so ashamed! All this time, I didn’t know that the ladies wax down there. This Mrs. Yusuf said, very sweetly, that only young girls like me are pure enough in the heart to wax it down there. Naturally she wanted me to go to her house to do this delicate job. In a salon, anyone can walk into the private room, even when the curtain is pulled. Some of the other waxing girls told me that they don’t do such type of work. Why shouldn’t I? If they want to pay better than at the salon and, on top of that, pay for my taxi here and there, then what do I care. So I did the work for Mrs. Yusuf, and she told her friends, and before I knew it I had more work waxing things than arms and legs and all. All the ladies like me better because I’m not married. They tell me that marriage will make me rough, like a man, and then I won’t be able to do the delicate job. All our Indians, you know, are so rough and hairy. The shameless Indian men are always scratching themselves be tween the legs because of the Bombay heat, but the ladies don’t have to, because their skin down there is cool and clean. And definitely the smell is also a little less. I never knew how many kinds of smells could come out of these city ladies’ things! Even though they wash night and day and remove every single hair from their bodies, I tell you, some of them smell down there like an armpit. I tell them to put a little baby powder, or maybe even some eau de cologne on the day that I’m coming, otherwise I have to breathe

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Good God no. There’s so much, it rather puts one off. And then he’s so frightfully keen about it himself, and regards it all as a big treat for me. I’ve got to try and be honest about it.’ James looked at me sceptically. ‘You must show me the bit about R.F.,’ he said. ‘Yes, that is good. Parts of it are—he must have put a lot of care into it. There are some rather Bridesheady bits about Oxford—though somewhat more candid than that deplorable novel. They would be good in a book. But a lot of the stuff in the Sudan is very routine—and he has this trying kind of nature-worship thing about blacks. He has only to see the back of a black hand or the curl of a black lip and he’s off.’ ‘I thought you were rather the same.’ ‘Well, up to a point—but I don’t go writing about it in this secret, religious kind of way. There’s no indication that old Charlie ever actually got it together with any of these tribesmen, bearers, and so on.’ ‘I think you’re going to have to brush up on one or two things, dear. I mean, you could hardly have the District Commissioner riding round on his camel rogering the subject people, could you? I know that’s what you would have done, but it would really have been rather frowned on in the Political Service.’ I smiled in gap-toothed, humorous shame. ‘I haven’t been very systematic about it,’ I further confessed. ‘I’ve read bits here and there—just to see if I like it, if I think I can do it. The idea of writing a whole great big book—it’s too ghastly. Of course,’ I added, ‘I haven’t got everything here. The diaries stop, I think about 1950.’ ‘Does he still keep one, do you suppose?’ ‘I don’t know. He could do. He’s full of energy, even though he’s so old and not, strictly speaking, all there.’ ‘He’s probably writing about you now—the peaches and cream of your complexion—soon to be restored—the well-knit frame.’ I aimed a swipe at him with a cushion, and then clutched at my ribs. ‘The subject describing his biographer … It all gets rather complicated and modern,’ he said, frowning and getting up to go. As usual he had been a corrective, and when Phil turned up later he found me aloof with a volume of the diaries, and hardly interested in his anecdotes about Pino and the hotel lift, and how there was a gay couple staying who had made a pass at him. He unpacked some veal, some ripe peaches, some wine and more bread. He seemed to believe in bread in some literal way as the staff of life.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: As stated above [3511](A[1]; Q[142], A[2]), the concupiscence of that which gives pleasure is especially likened to a child, because the desire of pleasure is connatural to us, especially of pleasures of touch which are directed to the maintenance of nature. Hence it is that if the concupiscence of such pleasures be fostered by consenting to it, it will wax very strong, as in the case of a child left to his own will. Wherefore the concupiscence of these pleasures stands in very great need of being chastised: and consequently chastity is applied antonomastically to such like concupiscences, even as fortitude is about those matters wherein we stand in the greatest need of strength of mind. Reply to Objection 3: This argument considers spiritual fornication metaphorically so called, which is opposed to spiritual chastity, as stated. Whether chastity is a distinct virtue from abstinence?Objection 1: It would seem that chastity is not a distinct virtue from abstinence. Because where the matter is generically the same, one virtue suffices. Now it would seem that things pertaining to the same sense are of one genus. Therefore, since pleasures of the palate which are the matter of abstinence, and venereal pleasures which are the matter of chastity, pertain to the touch, it seems that chastity is not a distinct virtue from abstinence. Objection 2: Further, the Philosopher (Ethic. iii, 12) likens all vices of intemperance to childish sins, which need chastising. Now “chastity” takes its name from “chastisement” of the contrary vices. Since then certain vices are bridled by abstinence, it seems that abstinence is chastity. Objection 3: Further, the pleasures of the other senses are the concern of temperance in so far as they refer to pleasures of touch; which are the matter of temperance. Now pleasures of the palate, which are the matter of abstinence, are directed to venereal pleasures, which are the matter of chastity: wherefore Jerome says [*Ep. cxlvii ad Amand. Cf. Gratian, Dist. xliv.], commenting on Titus 1:7, “Not given to wine, no striker,” etc.: “The belly and the organs of generation are neighbors, that the neighborhood of the organs may indicate their complicity in vice.” Therefore abstinence and chastity are not distinct virtues. On the contrary, The Apostle (2 Cor. 6:5,6) reckons “chastity” together with “fastings” which pertain to abstinence. I answer that, As stated above ([3512]Q[141], A[4]), temperance is properly about the concupiscences of the pleasures of touch: so that where there are different kinds of pleasure, there are different virtues comprised under temperance. Now pleasures are proportionate to the actions whose perfections they are, as stated in Ethic. ix, 4,5: and it is evident that actions connected with the use of food whereby the nature of the individual is maintained differ generically from actions connected with the use of matters venereal, whereby the nature of the species is preserved. Therefore chastity, which is about venereal pleasures, is a distinct virtue from abstinence, which is about pleasures of the palate.

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

  Objection 2: Further, sins committed against God would seem to be the most grievous. Now sacrilege is committed directly against God, since it is injurious to the Divine worship. Therefore sacrilege is a graver sin than the unnatural vice. Objection 3: Further, seemingly, a sin is all the more grievous according as we owe a greater love to the person against whom that sin is committed. Now the order of charity requires that a man love more those persons who are united to him—and such are those whom he defiles by incest—than persons who are not connected with him, and whom in certain cases he defiles by the unnatural vice. Therefore incest is a graver sin than the unnatural vice. Objection 4: Further, if the unnatural vice is most grievous, the more it is against nature the graver it would seem to be. Now the sin of uncleanness or effeminacy would seem to be most contrary to nature, since it would seem especially in accord with nature that agent and patient should be distinct from one another. Hence it would follow that uncleanness is the gravest of unnatural vices. But this is not true. Therefore unnatural vices are not the most grievous among sins of lust. On the contrary, Augustine says (De adult. conjug. [*The quotation is from Cap. Adulterii xxxii, qu. 7. Cf. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, viii.]) that “of all these,” namely the sins belonging to lust, “that which is against nature is the worst.” I answer that, In every genus, worst of all is the corruption of the principle on which the rest depend. Now the principles of reason are those things that are according to nature, because reason presupposes things as determined by nature, before disposing of other things according as it is fitting. This may be observed both in speculative and in practical matters. Wherefore just as in speculative matters the most grievous and shameful error is that which is about things the knowledge of which is naturally bestowed on man, so in matters of action it is most grave and shameful to act against things as determined by nature. Therefore, since by the unnatural vices man transgresses that which has been determined by nature with regard to the use of venereal actions, it follows that in this matter this sin is gravest of all. After it comes incest, which, as stated above [3551](A[9]), is contrary to the natural respect which we owe persons related to us.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  435 from Italy in 1821 by the reactionary Austrian police, he returned to Paris and lived there—during the Restoration—for nine years on very little money. When the July Revolution brought a constitutional monarchy to France, he returned to Italy as a consul, which enabled him to write his two most well known novels. In Red and Black, the hero is obsessed with the memory of Napoleon’s glory yet impelled to gratify his ambition by social rather than military triumphs. In Paris, Julien learns that the only pro fi table campaign to be fought must now take place in a drawing room. Like the real-life Antoine Berthet, Julien ends up by shooting the woman he loves, and the novel shows us what fi nally motivates him. Antoine Berthet, a young seminarian, seduced the mother of the two children he had been hired to tutor, mortally wounded her when she tried to stifl e his clerical career, and was sentenced to death. Inspired by the story of Berthet, Stendhal’s novel shows how Julien is fi nally made to feel that he must kill the woman he loves. From the start, Julien’s manner combines vulnerability with fi erce military aggression. He presents himself to Madame de Rênal as a poor, sensitive boy who has been beaten by his brothers. In spite of the class barrier between himself and this fi ne bourgeois lady, he conceives the wild idea of kissing her hand—the fi rst of his aggressive moves. His ambition to conquer Madame de Rênal becomes a campaign to take fi rm possession of her hand. By seizing her hand, holding it, and later regaining possession of it, he performs what he considers his “heroic duty.” When Julien is scolded by Monsieur de Rênal but then forces him to back down by threatening to quit, he tells himself, “I’ve won a battle.” Julien’s battles in this novel are chiefl y social. Just after threatening Mathilde with a sword drawn from the wall of the library of the marquis’s house, he can’t bring himself to use it and puts it back. Julien “ fi ghts” the bourgeois, reactionary Monsieur de Rênal not by physically attacking him but by making love to his wife. While Monsieur de Rênal rages against radicals one evening, Julien takes Madame de Rênal’s hand and kisses it. He thus turns a kiss into a political sign.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was how they charmed and achieved—I was suddenly on her side. "Why would she make up that? I mean she borrowed your car, I think I'm right in saying, and drove all over the place on the strength of that phone-call—he told her to meet him at . . . wherever it was." "No, you're probably right . . ." The waitress came and he left me to order; I was aware of him watching me. "I don't know what you know about Luc," he said afterwards. "Urn . . ." "Sibylle is madly in love with him," he shied away. "That is why she can become very rude—she always looks so cool, and so bloody beautiful, you don't realise she is very worried underneath and says things she doesn't mean. She's trying to keep hold of him and keep him away from everyone else." He looked at me with the large brown eyes of an extrovert boy who is learning about the heart; I thought he would always be unafraid of its demons and would get what he wanted. "She thinks of you as a great threat." For a moment or two I believed I wasn't reddening. "I'm just his teacher," I said, scratching my head in a spasm and feeling more generally compromised, as though Patrick had implied some sordid leering motive in my merely being with him now. I twisted and shrugged out of the hot coat. "Luc's not in love with me, for heaven's sake." I hadn't put it quite so cleanly before, even to myself. "It might be better if he was," Patrick said, masking the riskiness of the words with a prudential frown. We were silent for a minute or more, gazing towards the counter as if we were thinking about nothing in particular. I couldn't tell yet what hostility the boy felt for me and began to suppose he didn't know either, and expected no more than the gloomy comfort of a chat. "Can't Luc sort of make a go of it with Sibylle?" I deviously put out. Patrick grunted mirthlessly. "I'm sure he'd like to"—and held back, I felt, from saying more, as the milky coffees arrived. Then, "No, they're very old friends." I sipped the warm froth with its hot undershock of liquid and was back for a few seconds in the stifling love-culture of the late teens, its thrilling new absolutes, the hormonal frenzy. "Forgive me if I'm too curious," I said with a smile. "I was under the impression—You remember one weekend you all three went down to I think it's your parents' house somewhere on the coast?" Patrick looked at me warily. "We often do." "It was quite recently. Luc told me afterwards it had just been you and him there—then later he let slip that Sibylle was with you too.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In the first place, popular belief to the contrary, it is not enough to have been born a Negro to understand the history of Negroes in America. And, whereas whites have a complicated social machinery and a natural-and culti vated-mental and spiritual laziness operating to keep far from them any sense of how Negroes live; Negroes, beginning with the natural desire to escape the humiliations, the downright persecutions, which Negroes endure, end, often enough, by despising all the other Negroes who have brought them to this condition-a condition which they spend incalculable amounts of energy blotting out of their conscious minds. But they, naturally enough, therefore, also hate all whites, who make the world as bleak for them as does a cloud before the sun. This universal hatred, turning inward and feeding on it self, is not the least ghastly aspect of the heritage of the Amer ican Negro, for all that it remains, by its nature, so hidden. It is, for one thing, the absolute death of the communication which might help to liberate both Negroes and whites. And all this, according to Mr. Furnas (and in the words of Abraham Lincoln) because of the "little woman who made this big war." Well, of course, not quite. Mr. Furnas, who clearly cannot stand the "little woman," makes the point that she was able to have such a tremendous effect because she was 612 OTHER ESSAYS a mildly gifted woman who mirrored the assumptions of her time-and place-so perfectly. She helped to inspire and keep aflame the zeal in the general Northern breast to liberate those sla,·es, of whom they knew only that the souls belonged to God. Of the motives beneath the zeal she helped inspire, Mrs. Stowe knew nothing; it was not real to her that the war which was finally being fought was not being fought to fr ee the slave, that it was a hand to hand contest between the North and the South for dominance. And when the slave was finally fr eed, it developed that his soul did indeed belong to God and that God could take it, for all the nation seemed to care. For it is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God: it is hard to make men equal on earth, in the sight of men. This problem had never entered Mrs.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘It was a little romance of mine, back in London. I was most frightfully smitten with a young Trinidadian barman at the Trocadero, who went under the charming name of Makepeace. The Troc was a very big, rather vulgar restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue, with masses of mauve marble—long since gone now, of course. I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship—this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course—and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly musical type as we used to say—and also a third-rate painter by the way—and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable apparently but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine. ‘How did it all end up?’ ‘Oh, Scottie had him dismissed for drunkenness (he did put it away rather) so I took him on myself for a bit. That didn’t really work out, what with Taha in the house as well, so I farmed him out to a friend.’ His face clouded. ‘There was quite a lot of talk about it at the time. Of course in a way it helped being a Lord—the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you—the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’—words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success. ‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then—in England.’

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  had to aim at what he hoped to hit. Then he shook another from his pack and fired up. “Lemme tell y’all what I dreamed the other night,” he said. He gave us each a look. “I dreamed I fucked my brother. He had a pussy, and balls too. I took him from behind, like dogs. Like I used to take my girlfriend, the one in Charleston. He made serious grunts and kept his eyes closed. He had a frown of pleasure on his face. He needed a shave and his skin wasn’t so hot. Little breakouts here and there. When I came, I woke up, and goddamn it all if I hadn’t soiled the sheets and jizzed in my shorts. And I’m not even queer. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to him again. I’ve barely been able to eat for three days.” None of us had looked him in the eye while he was talking. None of us was looking at him now. Then Hampton piped up. He knew it was over, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. “You ain’t sticking by the rules. Your brother ain’t done nothing to you. That’s all in your mind. That’s something you done to yourself. That’s another contest. That ain’t the game we was playing.” But we weren’t the kind of guys to make much of technical ities. I made a move to go back below deck, and I was glad to have lost. ROSALIND CHRISTINE LLOYD Deflower | he Union Square Green Market has a certain nuance that cannot be found anywhere else in the city. New Age farmers gather there to hawk agriculturally sophisticated organic per ishables and flora. It was early April and the sun was burning the New York City sky at an unseasonable seventy-five de grees. A trough of wild orchids: their cups were tiny with colors so vibrant they seemed surreal. After I’d selected a nice bunch, while I was waiting patiently to pay, someone’s elbow, sharp and swift, violently found its way into my left kidney. Now, I’m what’s called a typical New Yorker. In other words, this rude, ill-mannered culprit was about to feel my wrath in the most scathing criticism I could hurl. I looked at the guilty party. Before me was a tight little ass squeezed into a pair of

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

  Reply to Objection 2: Martyrdom embraces the highest possible degree of obedience, namely obedience unto death; thus we read of Christ (Phil. 2:8) that He became “obedient unto death.” Hence it is evident that martyrdom is of itself more perfect than obedience considered absolutely. Reply to Objection 3: This argument considers martyrdom according to the proper species of its act, whence it derives no excellence over all other virtuous acts; thus neither is fortitude more excellent than all virtues. Whether death is essential to martyrdom?Objection 1: It seems that death is not essential to martyrdom. For Jerome says in a sermon on the Assumption (Epist. ad Paul. et Eustoch.): “I should say rightly that the Mother of God was both virgin and martyr, although she ended her days in peace”: and Gregory says (Hom. iii in Evang.): “Although persecution has ceased to offer the opportunity, yet the peace we enjoy is not without its martyrdom, since even if we no longer yield the life of the body to the sword, yet do we slay fleshly desires in the soul with the sword of the spirit.” Therefore there can be martyrdom without suffering death. Objection 2: Further, we read of certain women as commended for despising life for the sake of safeguarding the integrity of the flesh: wherefore seemingly the integrity of chastity is preferable to the life of the body. Now sometimes the integrity of the flesh has been forfeited or has been threatened in confession of the Christian faith, as in the case of Agnes and Lucy. Therefore it seems that the name of martyr should be accorded to a woman who forfeits the integrity of the flesh for the sake of Christ’s faith, rather than if she were to forfeit even the life of the body: wherefore also Lucy said: “If thou causest me to be violated against my will, my chastity will gain me a twofold crown.” Objection 3: Further, martyrdom is an act of fortitude. But it belongs to fortitude to brave not only death but also other hardships, as Augustine declares (Music. vi). Now there are many other hardships besides death, which one may suffer for Christ’s faith, namely imprisonment, exile, being stripped of one’s goods, as mentioned in Heb. 10:34, for which reason we celebrate the martyrdom of Pope Saint Marcellus, notwithstanding that he died in prison. Therefore it is not essential to martyrdom that one suffer the pain of death. Objection 4: Further, martyrdom is a meritorious act, as stated above (A[2], ad 1; A[3]). Now it cannot be a meritorious act after death. Therefore it is before death; and consequently death is not essential to martyrdom. On the contrary, Maximus says in a sermon on the martyrs that “in dying for the faith he conquers who would have been vanquished in living without faith.”