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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  So there remains the last stage, the one that saintliness can attain: the absence of those “utterly” involuntary pollutions that take place during sleep. Cassian does remark, however, that not all such pollutions are necessarily involuntary. For them, too much food or impure thoughts during the day are a kind of acquiescence, if not of preparation. He also makes distinctions as to the nature of the dream that accompanies the pollution and the degree of impurity of the images. One taken by surprise in this way would be wrong to shift the blame onto the body and sleep: “It is the sign of an evil that was incubating internally, to which the hour of the night did not give birth, but which, buried in the deepest part of the soul, the repose of sleep caused to rise to the surface, revealing the hidden fever of the passions that we have contracted by reveling in unhealthy thoughts for days on end.”98 And finally, there is pollution without any trace of complicity, without the pleasure that proves you consent to it, even without the accompaniment of any dream image. This is the point, no doubt, which the ascetic can arrive at after sufficient striving; pollution is nothing more than a “remainder” which the subject no longer has any part in. “So we must make an effort to restrain the impulses of the soul and the passions of the flesh till the flesh satisfies the demands of nature without giving rise to sensual pleasure, ridding itself of the overabundance of its humors without any unhealthy itching or provoking any combat for chastity.”99 Since what remains here is purely a phenomenon of nature, only the power that is greater than nature can free us from it: its intervention is called grace. This is why non-pollution is the mark of saintliness, the seal of the highest possible chastity, a blessing one can hope for, but not acquire.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Has Janet crossed the line when it comes to sexual integrity? [image file=image_rsrc244.jpg] Kelly’s secret has been eating her alive for over ten years: As a freshman in college, I began dating Sam, an older man who was far more sexually experienced than I was. I fell head over heels in love with him, and within a few months, we were sleeping together. Within a year, we were living together. That was when I stumbled upon his vast array of videos hidden on the top shelf of his closet. I’m embarrassed to say that at the time, I wasn’t offended by his pornography collection, but curious. I began watching the videos with him, just to see what was on them. It wasn’t long until I was asking to watch particular ones while we were having sex together. I don’t understand why, but the ones that really turned me on were the ones that included a threesome (a guy and two girls) or the ones that had just two women together. Even after Sam and I broke up, I asked him if I could keep the couple of videos that were my favorites. I masturbated to them over and over, but when I got married to a Christian man who I knew wouldn’t approve of them, I threw them away. That’s been years ago, but I’ve never been able to get these images out of my mind. Even though my husband is a good lover, I think about all those old scenes when I’m trying to orgasm just because that is what really seems to do it for me. I would never actually want to be with a woman in real life, so I don’t understand why these fantasies are such a big part of my sex life. I’m afraid if my husband knew about them, he’d think he married a lesbian. Has Kelly crossed the line when it comes to sexual integrity? [image file=image_rsrc244.jpg] In her midforties, Caroline confesses that her biggest battle in life has been not to compare herself to others. In the women’s locker room, Caroline finds herself comparing the size of her waist and hips, the firmness of her breasts, and the amount of “cottage cheese” in her thighs with each passerby. “If I am changing clothes in the presence of a larger woman, I feel lean and powerfully pretty. But let a skinny-minny walk in, and I do a double take at the image staring back at me in the mirror and think, Yuck!” Unfortunately this comparison trap not only affects Caroline’s self-esteem, but has carried over into her marriage of sixteen years as well. Although she describes their relationship as “okay,” Caroline also admits:

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Cassian goes even further. The verbalization is sometimes a material eviction. With the confessional disclosure, it’s the devil himself that is expelled from the body. This is the lesson that Cassian draws from a memory shared by the abbot Serapion. As a child, he was inhabited by the spirit of gluttony and every evening he would steal a biscuit; but he “was ashamed to disclose the secret theft” to the saintly old man who directed him. Finally, one day, stricken by an exhortation from the abbot Theonas, he couldn’t keep from bursting into sobs: “He produced from the folds of his robe which shared his theft and received it, the biscuit which he had carried off in his bad habit to eat on the sly; and he laid it in their midst and, lying on the ground and begging for forgiveness, confessed how he used to eat one every day in secret, and with copious tears implored them to entreat the Lord to free him from that dreadful slavery.” And forthwith “a burning lamp proceeding from the folds of his robe filled the cell with a sulfurous smell so that the pungency of the odor scarcely allowed them to stay there.” Now, according to Cassian, the words that the abbot Theonas speaks during this scene are important. Theonas first of all stresses the fact that the deliverance is not directly due to the words spoken by the director,102 but to the words of the sinner who confesses: “Without any words of mine, your confession frees you from this slavery.” This confession has the effect of bringing into broad daylight the thing that lay hidden in the darkness of secrecy: it is an intervention of light. And at the same time, by that very fact, it is an inversion of power. “You have today triumphed over your victorious adversary, laying him low by your confession in a manner that more than makes up for the way in which he overthrew you through your former silence […] and therefore after being exposed, that evil spirit will no longer be able to vex you.” And this power inversion is manifested in a material eviction. In a strict sense, the confession that brings the evil spirit to light causes it to vacate the premises: “The Lord […] wanted you to see with your eyes how he who was the author of this passion has been driven out from your heart by your life-giving confession, and know that the enemy who has been exposed will certainly no longer find a home in you, as his expulsion is made manifest.”103

• From Another Country (1962)

  The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire? He had always been a heavy, healthy boy, had played like other children, and fought as they did, made friends and enemies and secret pacts and grandiose plans. And yet none of his playmates, after all, had ever sat with Henry in the furnace room, or ever kissed Henry on his salty face. They did not, weighed down with discarded hats, gowns, bags, sashes, earrings, capes, and necklaces, turn themselves into make-believe characters after everyone in their house was asleep. Nor could they possibly, at their most extended, have conceived of the people he, in the privacy of night, became: his mother’s friends, or his mother—his mother as he conceived her to have been when she was young, his mother’s friends as his mother was now; the heroines and heroes of the novels he read, and the movies he saw; or people he simply put together out of his fantasies and the available rags. No doubt, at school, the boy with whom he was wrestling failed to feel the curious stabs of terror and pleasure that Eric felt, as they grappled with each other, as one boy pinned the other to the ground; and if Eric saw the girls at all, he saw mainly their clothes and their hair; they were not, for him, as were the boys, creatures in a hierarchy, to be adored or feared or despised. None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different—subtly and cruelly and criminally different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Psychoanalysis assumed a legacy of shame around the body. Freud wrote, “The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim.” That is, beauty derives from sexual excitement that must be deflected away from its source. “It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful.” Too much cultivation of beauty, he wrote, reflects pathological narcissism. Like masochism and passivity, narcissism is largely a female problem, a cover for shame and worthlessness, feelings to which women are prone. Until recently, many people who sought cosmetic surgery ended up getting psychiatric diagnoses—they were labeled depressed, hysterical, obsessional, narcissistic. If the patient was a man, he was almost always given a psychiatric diagnosis since attention to appearance in a man was considered a graver sign than it was in a woman. In the last twenty years, the number of “healthy” recipients of plastic surgery has vastly increased according to psychiatric studies. Perhaps this is a reflection of more mainstream acceptance of plastic surgery and a greater diversity among its clients. But it is equally likely to reflect a change in modern psychiatry, which can look at appearance enhancement as something other than an unhealthy need. Psychoanalyst John Gedo recently made the radical suggestion that cosmetic surgery is not so different from altering character traits by means of psychoanalysis: both are attempts at refashioning the self. Psychiatrist Peter Kramer has made analogies between cosmetic surgery and what he calls “cosmetic psychopharmacology,” for example the use of drugs such as Prozac not just to cure depression, but to transform personality, to feel “better than well.” The Evolution of Beauty The social sciences have been strangely absent from the rich intellectual debate about the nature of human beauty. As you will see, much of the research that informs the arguments of this book emerged only in the 1970s and after. Gardner Lindzey’s 1954 Handbook of Social Psychology, a lengthy tome devoted to the study of social interaction, listed only one entry for “physical factors.” Any reading of psychology and anthropology texts written before the late 1960s would suggest that physical appearance had absolutely no bearing on human attitudes or affections, and no role in human mental life. Why have the social sciences had so little interest in the human body?

• From Another Country (1962)

  None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different—subtly and cruelly and criminally different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries. And, of course, in Eric’s case, in Alabama, his increasing isolation and strangeness was held, even by himself, to be due to the extreme unpopularity of his racial attitudes—or, rather, as far as the world in which he moved was concerned, the lack of any responsible attitudes at all. The town in which Eric lived was celebrated and well-to-do, but it was not very big; as far as Eric was concerned, the South was not very big, certainly, as it turned out, not big enough for him; and he was the only son of very prominent people. So it was not long before his appearance anywhere caused heads to shake, lips to purse, tongues to stiffen or else, violently, venomously, to curl around his name. Which was also, however, his father’s name, and Eric, therefore, encountered, very often and very soon, the hideous obsequiousness of people who despised him but who did not dare to say so. They had long ago given up saying anything which they really felt, had given it up so long ago that they were now incapable of feeling anything which was not felt by a mob. Now, Eric stepped out of the shower, rubbing his body with the enormous, rough, white towel Yves had placed in the bathroom for him. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back. The thought of the Oriental opulence which overtook Yves each time he bathed caused Eric to smile. He smiled, but he was troubled, too. And as he put on his bathrobe, his body tingled less from the effect of the towel and the toilet water than from his image, abruptly overwhelming, of Yves leaning back in the bathtub, whistling, the washrag in his hand, a peaceful, abstracted look on his face and his sex gleaming and bobbing in the soapy water like a limp, cylindrical fish; and from his memory, to which his image was somehow the gateway, of that moment, nearly fifteen years ago, when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun. He walked into the dining room and poured himself a drink. Then the bottle was empty and he dropped it in the waste basket. He lit a cigarette and sat down in a chair near the window, overlooking the sea.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  54 Boys, incidentally, far and away, said: They were also twice as likely as girls to report feeling good about themselves after oral sex; girls were three times more likely to say they felt used. Brady and Halpern-Felsher, “Adolescents’ Reported Consequences of Having Oral Sex Versus Vaginal Sex.” This study specifically looked at consequences of oral sex among ninth- and tenth-graders. 54 For both sexes, but particularly for girls: Cornell and Halpern-Felsher, “Adolescent Health Brief.” 54 Intercourse could bring stigma, turn you into a “slut”: Initiating fellatio earlier than their peers, however, was associated with low self-esteem for girls. Fava and Bay-Cheng, “Young Women’s Adolescent Experiences of Oral Sex.” Although they said oral sex was a strategy to gain popularity, ninth- and tenth-grade girls were only half as likely as boys to feel that strategy was successful. Brady and Halpern-Felsher, “Adolescents’ Reported Consequences of Having Oral Sex Versus Vaginal Sex”; Cornell and Halpern-Felsher, “Adolescent Health Brief.” 54 the calculus and compromises they made to curry favor: One in three girls in a national survey of teens reported engaging in oral sex specifically to avoid intercourse. Hoff, Green, and Davis, “National Survey of Adolescents and Young Adults.” 55 They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about: Burns, Futch, and Tolman, “‘It’s Like Doing Homework.’” 60 As Anna said, reciprocity in casual encounters: In their research on college students, Laura A. Backstrom and her colleagues similarly found that cunnilingus was an assumed part of relationships but not of hookups. Women who wanted oral sex in hookups had to be assertive to get it; those who did not want it were found to be relieved. In relationships, women who did not want oral sex were uncomfortable, whereas it was considered a source of pleasure for those who enjoyed it. Backstrom et al., “Women’s Negotiation of Cunnilingus in College Hookups and Relationships.” 62 Around a third masturbated regularly: According to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB), more than three quarters of boys ages fourteen to seventeen say they have ever masturbated; less than half of girls have; about a third of girls in every age group masturbate regularly, while the percentage of boys rises steadily with time. Fortenberry, Schick, Herbenick, et al., “Sexual Behaviors and Condom Use at Last Vaginal Intercourse”; Robbins, Schick, Reese, et al., “Prevalence, Frequency, and Associations of Masturbation with Other Sexual Behaviors Among Adolescents Living in the United States of America”; Alan Mozes, “Study Tracks Masturbation Trends Among U.S. Teens,” U.S. News and World Report, August 1, 2011. According to Caron, The Sex Lives of College Students, 65 percent of male students masturbate once a week compared to 19 percent of female students.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Eve is the other figure who is regularly contrasted with Cain. In the seventeenth Homily on Genesis (5), Chrysostom makes Eve and Adam into sinners who confess. This confession has two forms. A verbal form when Adam then Eve, after having tried for a moment to hide, reply to God who is calling them and acknowledge that they did eat the forbidden fruit. (Chrysostom notes that if God asked the man Did you eat? and the woman Why did you eat?, if therefore he solicited confessions from them, on the other hand to the serpent, whose sin is unforgivable, he does not extend this lifeline, and he only says: Since you did that, you will be damned.) But this verbal confession was preceded by another, which was not in words, but both in conscience and in gesture. As soon as they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve felt naked; they were ashamed and sought to cover themselves. This interpretation of shame as a form of confession is important and it clarifies what Chrysostom describes, in the nineteenth Homily, as Cain’s impudence, his anaideia. By giving this modesty the value of a confession, Chrysostom means first of all that the confession is not simply a communication to the other of something which one already knows, but that it is above all an interior discovery. He also means to say that the confession is a gesture that both conceals and shows, more exactly that it shows by intending to hide. This desire to hide authenticates the awareness that one has done wrong, and the telling gesture shows that one is not afraid to reveal this awareness to everyone. Hence, at the heart of the confession there needs to be this game of modesty. Without the shame of having sinned and thus without the desire to conceal it, there would be no confession, but only an impudent sin. But if this shame leads one to hide to the point of not being willing to confess, and entails that, like Cain, one denies one’s own crime, then this shame becomes impudence.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Little did I know that these kinds of thoughts made me more vulnerable to emotional and sexual temptations. My self-esteem was in the gutter, so I continually sought affirmation from outside sources, especially older men. I felt exactly the way Mindy did—I hated what I saw in the mirror each day—and I hoped that if men thought that I was attractive, then maybe I could believe it too. But even finding a husband didn’t solve my problem. It wasn’t enough to have a man who thought the world of me. Even with a wedding band on my finger, my antenna was still up to see who was noticing me. And when my radar went off and I knew that someone had me in his range, I was too often a sitting duck. I’d say to myself, You may as well give in. You know how you are when you are tempted. What’s one more time? One day as I was beating myself up for yet another emotional affair, my best friend interrupted me with these sobering words: “Do you know what you are saying about the blood that Jesus shed for you when you refuse to forgive yourself for your past? You are saying that His blood wasn’t good enough for you. It didn’t have enough power to cleanse you.” She was right. Underlying all of my self-pity was the belief that what Jesus did for me couldn’t possibly be enough to rid me of my stain. I needed some special miracle to set me free, and until I got that miracle, I had to beat myself up as an act of penance. If this rings true for you as well, then guess what? The Holy Spirit is telling you the same thing He told me back then: Jesus opened your prison door. It’s up to you to walk out! How do you do this? By forgiving every person who has ever brought you pain, including yourself. If God does not despise you for the ways you have tried to fill the void in your heart, neither should you despise yourself. Paul preached, “Righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:22-24). In other words: • Righteousness does not come from perfect living, but as a gift from God. • We receive this gift not by our worthiness, but simply by faith in Jesus Christ (and in the blood He shed for the redemption of our sins). • We are justified freely by God’s grace—no strings attached.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Try me.” “That’s true,” said his wife, “he never forgets a name or a face. I don’t know how he does it.” “I,” said Vivaldo, “am not an actress.” Ellis looked startled, then he laughed. “You could have fooled me,” he said. He took Vivaldo by the elbow. “Come and have a drink with me. Please.” “I don’t know why I said that. I was half-kidding.” “But only half. What’s your name?” “Vivaldo. Vivaldo Moore.” “And you’re not an actress—?” “I’m a writer. Unpublished.” “A ha ! You’re working on something?” “A novel.” “What’s it about?” “My novel’s about Brooklyn.” “The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?” Vivaldo swallowed. “All of them.” “That’s quite an assignment. And if you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old-fashioned.” He put his hand before his mouth and burped. “Brooklyn’s been done. And done.” No it hasn’t, Vivaldo thought. “You mean,” he said, with a smile, “that it doesn’t have any TV possibilities?” “It might have, who knows?” He looked at Vivaldo with friendly interest. “You really have a sneer in your voice when you say TV, you know that? What are you so afraid of?” He tapped Vivaldo on the chest. “Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it isn’t just for you and your handful of friends. Christ, if you knew how sick I am of this sensitive-young-man horseshit!” “I’m sick of it, too,” said Vivaldo. “I don’t think of myself as a sensitive young man.” “No? You sound like one and you act like one. You look down your nose at everybody. Yes,” he insisted, for Vivaldo looked at him in some surprise, “you think that most people are shit and you’d rather die than get yourself dirtied up in any of the popular arts.” Then he gave Vivaldo a deliberate, insolent once-over. “And here you are, in your best suit, and I bet you live in some dingy, ice-water apartment and you can’t even take your girl out to a night club.” His voice dropped. “The colored girl, Miss Scott, you see I do remember names, she’s your girl, isn’t she? That’s why you got pissed off at me. Man, you’re too touchy.” “I thought you were too free.” “I bet you wouldn’t have felt that if she were a white girl.” “I’d have felt that about any girl who happened to be with me.” But he wondered if Ellis were right. And he realized that he would never know, there would never be any way for him to know. He felt that Ellis had treated Ida with a subtle lack of respect. But he had spoken to her in the only way he could, and it was the way he spoke to everyone. All of the people in Ellis’ world approached each other under cover of a manner designed to hide whatever they might really be feeling, about each other or about themselves.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Yes, he had been there: chafing and pushing and pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl. The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. Every movement that seemed to bring her closer to him, to bring them closer together, had its violent recoil, driving them farther apart. Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body. The tendrils of shame clutched at them, however they turned, all the dirty words they knew commented on all they did. These words sometimes brought on the climax—joylessly, with loathing, and too soon. The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility. In Harlem, however, he had merely dropped his load and marked the spot with silver. It had seemed much simpler for a time. But even simple pleasure, bought and paid for, did not take long to fail—pleasure, as it turned out, was not simple. When, wandering about Harlem, he came across a girl he liked, he could not fail to wish that he had met her somewhere else, under different circumstances. He could not fail to disapprove of her situation and to demand of her more than any girl in such a situation could give. If he did not like her, then he despised her and it was very painful for him to despise a colored girl, it increased his self-contempt. So that, by and by, however pressing may have been the load he carried uptown, he returned home with a greater one, not to be so easily discharged.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He wondered why she should look like that, what her memories or experience could be. She could only look at him this way because she knew things he had never imagined a girl like Cass could know. “How is Leona?” she asked. “Where is she now?” and did not take her eyes from his face. He did not want to answer. He did not want to talk about Leona—and yet there was nothing else that he could possibly talk about. For a moment he almost hated Cass; and then he said: “She’s in a home—down South somewhere. They come and took her out of Bellevue. I don’t even know where she is.” She said nothing. She offered him a cigarette, lit it, and lit one for herself. “I saw her brother once. I had to see him, I made him see me. He spit in my face, he said he would have killed me had we been down home.” He wiped his face now with the handkerchief Vivaldo had lent him. “But I felt like I was already dead. They wouldn’t let me see her. I wasn’t a relative, I didn’t have no right to see her.” There was silence. He remembered the walls of the hospital: white; and the uniforms and the faces of the doctors and nurses, white on white. And the face of Leona’s brother, white, with the blood beneath it rushing thickly, bitterly, to the skin’s surface, summoned by his mortal enemy. Had they been down home, his blood and the blood of his enemy would have rushed out to mingle together over the uncaring earth, under the uncaring sky. “At least,” Cass said, finally, “you didn’t have any children. Thank God for that.” “She did,” he said, “down South. They took the kid away from her.” He added, “That’s why she come North.” And he thought of the night they had met. “She was a nice girl,” Cass said. “I liked her.” He said nothing. He heard Vivaldo say, “—but I never know what to do when I’m not working.” “You know what to do, all right. You just don’t have anybody to do it with.” He listened to their laughter, which seemed to shake him as though it were a drill. “Just the same,” said Richard, in a preoccupied tone, “nobody can work all the time.” Out of the corner of his eye, Rufus watched him stabbing the table with his stir-stick. “I hope,” Cass said, “that you won’t sit around blaming yourself too much. Or too long. That won’t undo anything.” She put her hand on his. He stared at her. She smiled. “When you’re older you’ll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Angiolieri told them his own story, but his words were not heeded; nay, Fortarrigo, with the aid of the countrymen, pulled him off his palfrey and stripping him, clad himself in his clothes; then, mounting to horse, he left him in his shirt and barefoot and returned to Siena, avouching everywhere that he had won the horse and clothes of Angiolieri, whilst the latter, who had thought to go, as a rich man, to the cardinal in the Marches, returned to Buonconvento, poor and in his shirt, nor dared for shamefastness go straight back to Siena, but, some clothes being lent him, he mounted the rouncey that Fortarrigo had ridden and betook himself to his kinsfolk at Corsignano, with whom he abode till such time as he was furnished anew by his father. On this wise Fortarrigo's knavery baffled Angiolieri's fair advisement,[431] albeit his villainy was not left by the latter unpunished in due time and place." [Footnote 431: Syn. goodly design of foresight (_buono avviso_).] THE FIFTH STORY [Day the Ninth] CALANDRINO FALLETH IN LOVE WITH A WENCH AND BRUNO WRITETH HIM A TALISMAN, WHEREWITH WHEN HE TOUCHETH HER, SHE GOETH WITH HIM; AND HIS WIFE FINDING THEM TOGETHER, THERE BETIDETH HIM GRIEVOUS TROUBLE AND ANNOY Neifile's short story being finished and the company having passed it over without overmuch talk or laughter, the queen turned to Fiammetta and bade her follow on, to which she replied all blithely that she would well and began, "Gentlest ladies, there is, as methinketh you may know, nothing, how much soever it may have been talked thereof, but will still please, provided whoso is minded to speak of it know duly to choose the time and the place that befit it. Wherefore, having regard to our intent in being here (for that we are here to make merry and divert ourselves and not for otherwhat), meseemeth that everything which may afford mirth and pleasance hath here both due place and due time; and albeit it may have been a thousand times discoursed thereof, it should natheless be none the less pleasing, though one speak of it as much again. Wherefore, notwithstanding it hath been many times spoken among us of the sayings and doings of Calandrino, I will make bold, considering, as Filostrato said awhile ago, that these are all diverting, to tell you yet another story thereof, wherein were I minded to swerve from the fact, I had very well known to disguise and recount it under other names; but, for that, in the telling of a story, to depart from the truth of things betided detracteth greatly from the listener's pleasure, I will e'en tell it you in its true shape, moved by the reason aforesaid.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  he’d be young, but he looked like a teenager. I had a hunch he’d be dressed in sharkskin, like his father, and he was. But his suit was three sizes too big. Was it in fact his father’s? And like so many teens, he started every sentence with “I.” I think this. I think that. I, I, I. I shot a glance at Sumeragi. He looked gravely concerned. THE FIRST OF the factories we wanted to see was outside Hiroshima. All three of us went there by train, arriving midday. A cool, overcast afternoon. We weren’t due at the factory until the next morning, so I felt it important to take the extra time and visit the museum. And I wanted to go by myself. I told Sumeragi and Sole Jr. I would meet them in the hotel lobby the following morning. Walking through those museum rooms... I couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t process it. Mannequins dressed in singed clothes. Clumps of scorched, irradiated— jewelry? Cookware? I couldn’t tell. Photos that took me to a place far beyond emotion. I stood in horror before a child’s liquefied tricycle. I stood, open-mouthed, before the blackened skeleton of a building, where people had loved and worked and laughed, until. I tried to feel and hear the moment of impact. I felt sick at heart as I turned a corner and came upon a scorched shoe, under glass, the footprint of its owner still visible. The next morning, these ghastly images still fresh in my head, I was somber, heavily subdued as I drove with Sumeragi and Sole Jr. into the countryside, and I was almost startled by the good cheer of the factory officials. They were delighted to meet us, to show us their wares. Also, they said forthrightly, they were most eager to do a deal. They’d long been hoping to crack the U.S. market. I showed them the Cortez, asked how long it might take to produce a sizable order of this shoe. Six months, they said. Sole Jr. stepped forward. “You’ll do it in three,” he barked. I gasped. With the exception of Kitami, I’d always found the Japanese unfailingly polite, even in the heat of disagreement or intense negotiation, and I’d always strived to reciprocate. But in Hiroshima of all places I felt that politeness was that much more essential. Here, if nowhere else on earth, humans should be gentle and kind with one another. Sole Jr. was anything but. The ugliest of Americans. It got worse. As we made our way across Japan he was brusque, boorish, strutting, swaggering, condescending to everyone we met. He embarrassed me, embarrassed all Americans. Now and then Sumeragi and I exchanged pained looks. We wanted desperately to scold Sole Jr., to leave him—but we needed his father’s contacts. We needed this horrid brat to show us where the factories were.

• From Every Woman's Battle: Discovering God's Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment (2003)

  Therefore, I urge you, [sisters], in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. We are not to use our bodies for the fulfillment of our own selfish desires; they are instruments through which God can do His mighty work. In order to prepare ourselves for this purpose, we must resist what the world tries to put in our minds and keep a fresh flow of godly messages coming in. That is how we will know what God wants to do through us, because then His still, small voice won’t be drowned out by the blaring noise of an ungodly world. Susan’s e-mail is a classic example of how we can stop temptations at the gate, redirect our thoughts, and renew our minds: When I was thirteen, I stumbled upon an adult movie channel while babysitting for some family friends. I knew watching it was wrong, but I felt so aroused by it I began masturbating to it and did so each time I babysat, once the children were in bed. The first time I tried masturbating at home without watching this channel, I was surprised that all I had to do was close my eyes to replay any scene I mentally selected. I had total recall. By the time I left for college, my masturbation and fantasy habit was all-consuming. Without access to a graphic television channel, I stole some pornographic magazines and hid them underneath the carpet lining of the trunk of my car. At least once or twice each week, I would drive to a secluded place, get out my magazines, and masturbate in my car. Even after I was married, I would bring out a couple of my favorite magazines and one video I kept hidden from my husband and masturbate while he was at work. This went on for a couple of years until I had my first child. As I was baby-proofing the house, taking special precautions to keep dangerous things out of reach, I was stricken with the idea that my child might one day find my secret hiding place. I prayed about it and asked God to give me two things: (1) a clear sign that I should get rid of these things, and (2) the strength to resist ever replacing them once they were gone. The next day I was thumbing through my Bible and came across this scripture:

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But, O Lord, Thou alone Lord without pride, because Thou art the only true Lord, who hast no lord; hath this third kind of temptation also ceased from me, or can it cease through this whole life? To wish, namely, to be feared and loved of men, for no other end, but that we may have a joy therein which is no joy? A miserable life this and a foul boastfulness! Hence especially it comes that men do neither purely love nor fear Thee. And therefore dost Thou resist the proud, and givest grace to the humble: yea, Thou thunderest down upon the ambitions of the world, and the foundations of the mountains tremble. Because now certain offices of human society make it necessary to be loved and feared of men, the adversary of our true blessedness layeth hard at us, every where spreading his snares of “well-done, well-done”; that greedily catching at them, we may be taken unawares, and sever our joy from Thy truth, and set it in the deceivingness of men; and be pleased at being loved and feared, not for Thy sake, but in Thy stead: and thus having been made like him, he may have them for his own, not in the bands of charity, but in the bonds of punishment: who purposed to set his throne in the north, that dark and chilled they might serve him, pervertedly and crookedly imitating Thee. But we, O Lord, behold we are Thy little flock; possess us as Thine, stretch Thy wings over us, and let us fly under them. Be Thou our glory; let us be loved for Thee, and Thy word feared in us. Who would be praised of men when Thou blamest, will not be defended of men when Thou judgest; nor delivered when Thou condemnest. But when—not the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, nor he blessed who doth ungodlily, but—a man is praised for some gift which Thou hast given him, and he rejoices more at the praise for himself than that he hath the gift for which he is praised, he also is praised, while Thou dispraisest; better is he who praised than he who is praised. For the one took pleasure in the gift of God in man; the other was better pleased with the gift of man, than of God.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “My God,” Vivaldo said again, “where’ve you been? Don’t you know you shouldn’t do things like that? You’ve had all of us scared to death, baby. We’ve been looking for you everywhere.” It was a great shock and it weakened Rufus, exactly as though he had been struck in the belly. He clung to Vivaldo as though he were on the ropes. Then he pulled away. Vivaldo looked at him, looked hard at him, up and down. And Vivaldo’s face told him how he looked. He moved away from the door, away from Vivaldo’s scrutiny. “Ida’s been here; she’s half crazy. Do you realize you dropped out of sight almost a month ago?” “Yes,” he said, and sat down heavily in Vivaldo’s easy chair—which sagged beneath him almost to the floor. He looked around the room, which had once been so familiar, which now seemed so strange. He leaned back, his hands over his eyes. “Take off your jacket,” Vivaldo said. “I’ll see if I can scare up something for you to eat—are you hungry?” “No, not now. Tell me, how is Ida?” “Well, she’s worried, you know, but there’s nothing wrong with her. Rufus, you want me to fix you a drink?” “When was she here?” “Yesterday. And she called me tonight. And she’s been to the police. Everybody’s been worried, Cass, Richard, everybody——” He sat up. “The police are looking for me?” “Well, hell, yes, baby, people aren’t supposed to just disappear.” He walked into his small, cluttered kitchen and opened his refrigerator, which contained a quart of milk and half a grapefruit. He stared at them helplessly. “I’ll have to take you out, I haven’t got anything to eat in this joint.” He closed the refrigerator door. “You can have a drink, though, I’ve got some bourbon.” Vivaldo made two drinks, gave one to Rufus and sat down on the other, straight-backed, chair. “Well, let’s have it. What’ve you been doing, where’ve you been?” “I’ve just been wandering the streets.” “My God, Rufus, in this weather? Where’ve you been sleeping?” “Oh. Subways, hallways. Movies sometimes.” “And how’d you eat?” He took a swallow of his drink. Perhaps it was a mistake to have come. “Oh,” he said, astonished to hear the truth come out, “sometimes I sort of peddled my ass.” Vivaldo looked at him. “I guess you had pretty rough competition.” He lit a cigarette and threw the pack and the matches to Rufus. “You should have got in touch with somebody, you should have let somebody know what was happening.” “I—couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” “We’re supposed to be friends, you and me.” He stood up, holding an unlit cigarette, and walked around the small room, touching things. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He lit the cigarette. “I know what I did to Leona. I’m not dumb.” “So do I know what you did to Leona. Neither am I dumb.” “I guess I just didn’t think—” “What?” “That anyone would care.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  “One time,” he said, “we got into a car and drove over to the Village and we picked up this queer, a young guy, and we drove him back to Brooklyn. Poor guy, he was scared green before we got halfway there but he couldn’t jump out of the car. We drove into this garage, there were seven of us, and we made him go down on all of us and then we beat the piss out of him and took all his money and took his clothes and left him lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter.” He looked over at her, looked directly at her for the first time that morning. “Sometimes I still wonder if they found him in time, or if he died, or what.” He put his hands together and looked out of the window. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m still the same person who did those things—so long ago.” No. It was not expressed. She wondered why. Perhaps it was because Vivaldo’s recollections in no sense freed him from the things recalled. He had not gone back into it—that time, that boy; he regarded it with a fascinated, even romantic horror, and he was looking for a way to deny it. Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly, because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his talent. It had not really been written to make money—if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep. I don’t care, she told herself, quickly. And: It’s not his fault if he’s not Dostoievski, I don’t care. But whether or not she cared didn’t matter. He cared, cared tremendously, and he was dependent on her faith in him. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly, “that you should be remembering all these things now!”