Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Brandon had been on some dates. He’d kissed someone. I knew he loved me and I loved him, and I wanted him to have a good time. But he was more conflicted, caught up in how odd it felt to be with someone else. We’d told a handful of friends about our open relationship, but we both fretted about being seen. The restaurant industry is small and close-knit: Where could we go in this town without running into someone? I wished I felt proud, maybe even indignant—this is normal, what’s the fuss, etc.—but mostly I felt sheepish. Taking a stab at transparency, we told the manager at Delancey what we were up to, in case she heard whispers. A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage. We’d tried to convince ourselves that our marriage was strong enough, loving enough, flexible enough to accommodate the stretch we asked of it. Something about me had changed, but people are always changing, aren’t they? Just look at Brandon: when we met, he was going to be a music professor, and now he was a chef with three restaurants. We’d changed. So what? What we were doing was natural, no more ill-considered than monogamy. But it almost never felt that way. Most days I wanted to puke. I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love. I remember sitting next to him on the sofa in our living room, the sofa where I’d made out with Nora. He’d come home for lunch, and we had a date to talk. Outside the window the sky was clear and unflinching, the color of a blue raspberry popsicle. I think I’m falling in love with her, I said. The refrigerator motor gurgled. I didn’t mean to, I added. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s true. He was silent. A couch spring squeaked. I wanted to see what his face looked like, but I was afraid to turn my head. It doesn’t have to change anything, I said, not sure if I believed it. We’d always been ourselves, hadn’t we? We’d been like this for a long time. We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in God and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god. 2 There now seems to have been a shift in the cultural mood, however, partly in reaction against this unnecessary dehumanisation of religious believers. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from her more dismissive colleagues who suggested that ‘people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected’. Atheism had become, in her view, tribal . 3 ‘We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.’ Looking back on the meteoric rise of the New Atheism, the New Zealand blogger and cultural critic Giovanni Tiso wondered how ‘such a transparently flawed intellectual project’ managed to hold sway ‘for so long among so many?’ 4 For a while, this view seemed to represent the future, only to end up relegated to the long list of discarded pseudo-certainties that didn’t make the final cut. It is an idea whose time is gone. Yet perhaps a deeper, if less obvious, shift was taking place at the intellectual level – the growing realisation within reflective atheist circles that the great eighteenth-century Age of Reason must now be seen to have failed in its quest to provide meaningful universal truths. There was also some discomfort arising from how the rhetoric of ideas was being policed and manipulated before our very eyes and with no higher standard of proof. While many remain sceptical of Nietzsche’s view that there are ‘no facts but only interpretations’, there is a suspicion that many of the alleged ‘certainties’ of our age are simply influential opinions which have become benchmarks of cultural acceptability today, but may well be abandoned in the future. In her scathing assessment of the credulity of western culture in the closing years of the twentieth century, the novelist Doris Lessing denounced the ‘great over-simplifiers’ who imprison us in facile and shallow accounts of the world, ridiculing those who suggest things might be more complicated (and interesting) than they believe. For Lessing, recent developments within western culture represent a series of ‘boilings up of emotion, of wild partisan passion’, that everyone knows will one day be seen as ‘ridiculous and even shameful’ – but which nobody seemed able or willing to challenge at the time. 5 This book argues for a recalibration of the notion of ‘belief’, and a more nuanced understanding of the positive role this plays in the lives of individuals and communities. I shall explore why certain unevidenced beliefs are much more acceptable than others.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  122 Early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged Germans to fight French imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The state had been devised to contain violence, but the nation was now being used to release it. If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group. In America, the colonies and later the states had lacked the manpower to maintain productivity, so by 1800 between ten and fifteen million African slaves had been forcibly transported to North America. 123 They were subdued brutally: slaves were repeatedly reminded of their racial inferiority, their families were broken up, and they were subjected to hard labor, flogging, and mutilation. None of this seemed to bother the Founders, who had so proudly asserted that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those who would object did so by invoking not Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian abolitionists condemned slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How ‘Religion’ became a False Universal It is well known that the concept of ‘religion’ varies from one historical and cultural context to another. Some historical examples highlight the problems in assuming that the term ‘religion’ is an unproblematically valid universal category. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican inscriptions do not contain any words that can plausibly be translated as ‘religion’. 10 Yet following the Spanish colonisation of this region, the Spanish term religión seems to have been used by early modern ethnographers working in seventeenth-century Mesoamerica as a self-evidently appropriate term to refer to a variety of indigenous cultural practices, which were then assimilated into this western cultural phenomenon. A European template was thus imposed on indigenous Mesoamerican ways of thinking. 11 A century later, Britain established a commercial base in India, which eventually led to the colonisation of the region. Once more, western observers, noting certain Indian cultural beliefs and practices that did not easily fit into existing categories (such as ‘philosophy’), designated these as forms of ‘religion’, and created the English term ‘Hinduism’ to enfold the variegated phenomena they witnessed in the Indian religious landscape. 12 Many have argued that the very idea of Hinduism was a construct of the colonial enterprise, ‘fabricated in the service of foreign interests, whether by European Orientalists or the British colonial regime.’ 13 Others have argued that colonialism gave a new significance to indigenous Indian religions as a means of preserving Indian cultural identity during the colonial period, thus encouraging the idea that Hinduism was a multi-dimensional unitary faith. To this day, Hindu scholars regularly (and rightly) complain that a group of Asian cultural beliefs and practices are still being assimilated to European categories. The same pattern can be seen in the western construction of ‘Confucianism’ as a religion, when it is better seen as a philosophy of life than as a religion . 14 Yet again, an indigenous cultural movement was forced into the preconceived ethnocentric framework of a colonial power, which misrepresents its historical particularities (above all, its own understanding and experience of the nature and social function of ‘religion’) as normative and universal. The universal concept of ‘religion’ is ultimately an outdated remnant of a colonial past, and needs to be recalibrated and rehabilitated, if not set aside as unhelpful and unreliable. Defining Religion: The Problem of Platonism It is often assumed that the recognition of a supernatural realm or transcendent dimension to life (such as belief in God) is a distinct characteristic of religion, and that the term ‘religious’ can be applied to anyone holding such a view. In conversation with Gary Wolf (the journalist who introduced the phrase ‘New Atheism’ in 2006), Richard Dawkins identified the key issue with religious believers as ‘supernaturalism’ – belief in something that lies beyond the empirical world. Yet Dawkins’ use of the word ‘supernatural’ is puzzling.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth. [128] Right or not, Mather was expressing a radical turnaround in the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations. Back in England, the Oxford don Richard Allestree anticipated Mather’s remarks by observing in 1673 that, amid his devotional publishing (he was the anonymous author of the wildly successful Whole Duty of Man ), he considered that women had hearkened to his message far more than men, and that ‘the reputation of Religion is more kept up by women than men’. Like Astell a few decades later, Allestree regretted Protestantism’s rejection of the ‘angelical’ state of celibacy – as a result some suspected that, behind the anonymity of his prolific works, a female author was concealed. [129] By the seventeenth century, even Counter-Reformation clergy began to look past the misogynistic clichés of the past and notice that women were easier to teach than men – and might even shame men into behaving better. [130] As women appeared to show themselves more devout than their menfolk (and, gratifyingly to ministers and priests, often more appreciative of the clergy’s toil), centuries of disparaging theological comments based on medical discussion of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender began to look less convincing. So, in quiet ways, a radical reconstruction of the relationship of the sexes was unfolding, although in the process it opened up a more precise divide between male and female identity. The joint story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation embraces successful female subversions of patriarchy and discreet adaptations of public ideals to reality. It is a dialogue between theology and circumstance: sometimes Christian theory transformed situations, while sometimes theologians found ways of dealing with and explaining situations in danger of escaping their control. At the end of it, around 1700, Western Christianity was becoming a worldwide religion in both its confessional forms, thanks to the expansion of colonial empires. It was discovering how disconcertingly different other long-successful societies might be throughout the world. Christianity was also about to find itself much less able to set agendas in matters of sexuality, gender and marriage. Part Five NEW STORIES

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [45] In this almost Victorian atmosphere, with public suspicion of obscure groupings like Christians easily turning to indignant fantasies about their licentiousness, when Christians defended their devotional practice and common life in literary ‘apologies’, many found it tempting to stress sexual renunciation, a theme of austerity that would appeal to many strands of Graeco-Roman philosophy. It was equally natural, though a little contradictory, to emphasize respectability and conformity to the norms of a society based on a male construction of family, and to make attack a form of defence by criticizing the immorality and promiscuity of Graeco-Roman society. Yet such defence was never a simple task, because even as the Church constructed its notion of Christian marriage, the enterprise was complicated by the obstinate persistence of other thoughts in its tangled inheritance from the past, in which both celibacy and a new place for women contended with the demands of family. It is to those complexities that we now turn. 7 Virgins, Celibates, Ascetics ( c .100– c .300) The writer of the Pastoral Epistles had told the women of his Church that their salvation came from childbearing. During the second century CE , Christianity experienced a powerful reaction against this thought, as both women and men sought salvation by a flight not just from general sexual activity, but even from Christian marriage: this was the beginning of the Christian monastic life. Increasingly, theological commentators were unmarried clerics even if they were not monks, and they praised marriage’s virtues with a certain condescension, or worse. Indeed, over the next thousand years, from the second to the twelfth century, Christians wrote a very great deal more about celibacy than marriage. The two themes have stayed uncomfortably entwined right down to the present day, and so we must scrutinize developments in the second century with some care. MONASTICISM : AN UNEXPECTED

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord.) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, but when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible -- the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk removes fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money. Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non-sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Advani never made it to Ayodhya, because he was arrested on October 23, 1990, but thousands of Hindu nationalists from every region of India had already assembled at the site to begin the mosque’s demolition. Scores of them were shot down by the police and hailed as martyrs, and Hindu-Muslim riots exploded throughout the country. The Babri mosque was finally dismantled in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. For Muslims, its brutal destruction evoked the horrifying specter of Islam’s annihilation in the subcontinent. There were more riots, the most notorious being a Muslim attack on a train conveying Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya, which was avenged by a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Like the Islamists, Hindu nationalists are lured by the prospect of rebuilding a glorious civilization, one that will revive the splendors of India before the Muslims’ arrival. They have convinced themselves that their path to this utopian future is blocked by the relics of Moghul civilization, which have wounded the body of Mother India. Countless Hindus experienced the demolition of the Babri mosque as a liberation from “slavery”; but others argue that the process is far from complete and dream of erasing the great mosques at Mathura and Varanasi. 68 Many other Hindus, however, were religiously appalled by the Ayodhya tragedy, so this iconoclasm cannot be traced to a violence inherent in “Hinduism,” which has, of course, no single essence, either for or against violence. Rather, Hindu mythology and devotion had blended with the passions of secular nationalism—especially its inability to countenance minorities. All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered renouncer Rithambra at Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen. 69 Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self- deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks. . .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amid Mark’s general lack of comment on Jesus’s parentage, there is one remarkable moment where he ventriloquizes the people of Jesus’s home town as offensively calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ as well as brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. This phrase ‘son of Mary’ would normally indicate that the addressee’s father was unknown. Matthew, Luke and an echo of the story in John all briskly alter the alarming usage to highlight Joseph, only Matthew keeping any reference at all to Mary; but Matthew and Luke then provide two different accounts of the circumstances of Jesus’s birth in their Infancy Narratives. [8] In Matthew, Joseph is the main actor, and in Luke, Mary. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s initial horror at Mary’s pregnancy; he has to be instructed by an angel in a dream not to follow his instinct to repudiate his young betrothed, for this child is the Messiah (Matt. 1.18–22). Matthew, of all the Gospel writers, is the most concerned to link Jesus’s ministry to the Judaic past, and his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention. Luke seems more indirect than Matthew, but when in his story the angel Gabriel tells Mary of her pregnancy, she immediately asks him how that can be, since she has no husband (Luke 1.34). In fact, Luke goes much further than Matthew. Among the songs he incorporates into his Infancy Narratives are two hymns of victory, still commonly used in the various Christian regular daily rounds of worship called ‘Offices’. One is attributed to John the Baptist’s father Zacharias (the canticle ‘Benedictus’ used for instance in Anglican Morning Prayer), and the other to Mary herself (the ‘Magnificat’ of Anglican Evensong). Not all their content is relevant to their present context, and it has been plausibly suggested that they are martial songs borrowed from the Maccabean period more than a century before, but their general message of renewal and the overthrow of existing power suits Luke’s purpose. [9] Significant therefore is Mary’s proclamation in the Magnificat that God ‘has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ’ (Luke 1.48). Those Revised Standard Version translations underplay the shock value of these words to their early Christian readers. ‘Low estate’ renders tapeinōsis , which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation’, ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē , which starkly means ‘female slave’, and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Across the Catholic world, the outwardly celibate, claustrophobically single-sex world of the clergy had become a haven for gay men terrified of their sexuality: a ready-made alibi with the bonus of traditional prestige. In the absence of any moral code to make sense of their contradictions, their activities were liable to be full of self-hatred and devoid of anything resembling a moral compass. [16] Trujillo’s story is put in the shade by Pope John Paul’s protégé, the priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had grown up while Mexico was riven by violent confrontation between an anti-clerical government and defiant popular Catholicism; he was the founder of the militantly proselytizing and fervently orthodox Legion of Christ, which spread far beyond his native country. Persistent accusations of Maciel’s sexual abuse, ranging from paedophilia to adult sexual assault to the fathering of children, were ignored in Rome up to the very end of John Paul II’s long pontificate. Not so under his successor Benedict

• From The Girls (2016)

  The Ritz crackers, earnest groups crammed around bowls of watery ice. Talking SDS and comparing reading lists. I half shrugged, the barest shift of a shoulder. He seemed to understand this gesture for the falsehood it was. “Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.” I could hear the stark billow of Suzanne’s laughter carrying in the air. “That’s okay,” I said. “There’s no phone here, anyway.” “They aren’t nice,” Tom said, catching my eyes. He looked like a rural preacher after a baptism, the wet pants clinging to his legs, his earnest stare. “What do you know?” I said, an alarming heat rising in my cheeks. “You don’t even know them.” Tom made an abortive gesture with his hands. “It’s a trash heap,” he said, sputtering, “can’t you see that?” He indicated the crumbling house, the tangle of overgrown vegetation. All the junked-out cars and oil drums and picnic blankets abandoned to the mold and the termites. I saw it all, but I didn’t absorb anything: I’d already hardened myself to him and there was nothing else to say. —Tom’s departure allowed the girls to deepen into their natures without the fracture of an outsider’s gaze. No more peaceful, sleepy chatter, no balmy stretches of easy silence. “Where’s your special friend?” Suzanne said. “Your old pal?” Her hollow affect, her leg jiggling even though her expression was blank. I tried to laugh like they did, but I didn’t know why I got unnerved at the thought of Tom returning to Berkeley. He was right about the junk in the yard, there was more of it, and maybe Nico really could have been hurt, and what then? I noticed all of them had gotten skinnier, not just Donna, a brittle quality to their hair, a dull drain behind the eyes. When they smiled, I glimpsed the coated tongues seen on the starving. Without consciously doing so, I pinned a lot of hope on Russell’s return. Wanting him to weigh down the flapping corners of my thoughts. “Heartbreaker,” Russell catcalled when he caught sight of me. “You run off all the time,” he said, “and it breaks our hearts when you leave us behind.” I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception. Like a boy I’d known in Petaluma who shoplifted makeup to cover his pimples. Russell’s hand worked my neck, passing along a fritter of energy. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. And how immediately the group jolted to attention at his arrival, trooping in his wake like ragged ducklings.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn’t notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed—that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water. I had to pack up my room at my mother’s house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform—I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn’t bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn’t know what else to pack, and it didn’t seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things—a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings—seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day. “You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she’d been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.” I thought that she’d notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn’t. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn’t mentioned anything. “This is fine,” I said. My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked. I hadn’t even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence. “Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome. —I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift—here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  147 o In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. o Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. o Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. o Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. o Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. o He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  When I walked into the house I could hear voices coming from upstairs. I climbed to the top of the steps where my mom’s bedroom was. Her door was open and immediately I realized that was where the voices were coming from. There was my moms, and she had left her bedroom door open not thinking that her little teenager would be home early, and I watched her. I stood there and watched her. At that particular time she just happened to be tricking with two men at the same time. If one was in her mouth, the other was in her cunt. If one was in her cunt, the other was in her ass, or some type of sexual combination. One would have thought my moms was made out of rubber the way they had her stretched and positioned all over the place. The shit looked like it hurt the way they were blowin’ her back out. I don’t know why, but I just continued to stand there watching. I couldn’t move. Then all of a sudden my mother turned around and faced the door. I guess she just had a feeling that someone was watching her. Someone was watching her. That someone was me, her daughter. I’ll never—I mean, never—forget the look in her eyes when they locked with mine. By then I think the tears that had welded in my eyes were running down my cheeks. Without saying a word, I curved around to the left, where my bedroom was, went into my room, and slammed the door behind me. I made it over to my trash can just in time to throw up. I had already thrown up twice at school. But then it was because my stomach was sick, this time it was because my heart was. Of course, Naomi continued fucking those two men. She had to. Everybody knows if dem niggas don’t bust a nut, a ho don’t get paid. Once the two trick niggas finally left, I heard the front door close, and then I heard Naomi come back upstairs. Please don’t come in my room, I remember thinking. Please don’t come in my room. I was embarrassed for her. I knew my moms was a whore, everybody knew she was a whore, but to see it with my own eyes was just too much for me to take. My moms didn’t come into my room, but I could have sworn I heard her standing outside my door. She never came in, though.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “I just don’t get it,” Zav went on, addressing Sasha, “why you stay with Julian. You’re too hot for him.” Sasha giggled, though I glanced back and saw her labor to calculate a response. “I mean, she’s a babe,” Zav said to Julian, “am I right?” Julian smiled what I thought of as the smile of an only son, someone who believed he would always get what he wanted. He probably always had. The three of them were lit like a scene from a movie I was too old to watch. “But Sasha and I know each other, don’t we?” Zav smiled at her. “I like Sasha.” Sasha held a basic smile on her face, her fingers tidying the pile of torn label. “She doesn’t like her tits,” Julian said, pulsing the back of her neck, “but I tell her they’re nice.” “Sasha!” Zav affected upset. “You have great tits.” I flushed, hurrying to finish the dishes. “Yeah,” Julian said, his hand still on her neck. “Zav would tell you if you didn’t.” “I always tell the truth,” Zav said. “He does,” Julian said. “That’s true.” “Show me,” Zav said. “They’re too small,” Sasha said. Her mouth was tight like she was making fun of herself, and she shifted in her seat. “They’ll never sag, so that’s good,” Julian said. Tickling her shoulder. “Let Zav see.” Sasha’s face reddened. “Do it, babe,” Julian said, a harshness in his voice making me glance over. I caught Sasha’s eye—I told myself the look in her face was pleading. “Come on, you guys,” I said. The boys turned with amused surprise. Though I think they were tracking where I was all along. That my presence was a part of the game. “What?” Julian said, his face snapping into innocence. “Just cool it,” I told him. “Oh, it’s fine,” Sasha said. Laughing a little, her eyes on Julian. “What exactly are we doing?” Julian said. “What exactly should we ‘cool’?” He and Zav snorted—how quickly all the old feelings came back, the humiliating interior fumble. I crossed my arms, looking to Sasha. “You’re bothering her.” “Sasha’s fine,” Julian said. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear—she smiled faintly and with effort. “Besides,” he went on, “are you really someone who should be lecturing us?” My heart tightened. “Didn’t you, like, kill someone?” Julian said. Zav sucked his teeth, then let loose a nervous laugh. My voice sounded strangled. “Of course not.” “But you knew what they were going to do,” Julian said. Grinning with the thrill of capture. “You were there with Russell Hadrick and shit.” “Hadrick?” Zav said. “Are you shitting me?” I tried to rein in the hysterical lean coming into my voice. “I was barely around.” Julian shrugged. “That’s not what it sounded like.” “You don’t really believe that.” But there was no entry point in any of their faces. “Sasha said you told her so,” Julian went on.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “It’s not broken,” I said inanely. “You’re a fucking nutcase,” he muttered. He ran his hands along the body of the bike and held a shard of orange metal up to Peter. “You believe this shit?” When Peter looked at me, his face solidified with pity, which was somehow worse than anger. I was like a child, warranting only abbreviated emotions. Connie appeared in the doorway. “Knock knock,” she called, the keys hanging from a crooked finger. She took in the scene: Henry squatting by the motorcycle; Peter’s arms crossed. Henry let out a harsh laugh. “Your friend’s a real bitch,” he said, shooting me a look. “Evie knocked it over,” Peter said. “You fucking kids,” Henry said. “Get a babysitter next time, don’t hang around with us. Fuck.” “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice small, but nobody was listening. Even after Peter helped Henry right the motorcycle, peering closely at the break—“It’s just cosmetic,” he announced, “we can fix it pretty easy”—I understood that other things had broken. Connie studied me with cold wonder, like I’d betrayed her, and maybe I had. I’d done what we were not supposed to do. Illuminated a slice of private weakness, exposed the twitchy rabbit heart. 3The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting—I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I’d tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he’d accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home. —I’d gone back a few days later—Connie’s father answered the door almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home. “Connie’s upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn’t pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence. Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking. “Nice makeup,” she said.

• From The Girls (2016)

  She’s a nice lady.” “I’m not stealing.” My voice was high and false. “Borrowing, let’s say. I’m not gonna tell. I get it. But you should stop. She loves you a lot, you know?” No more noise from the shower, which meant my mother would appear soon. I tried to gauge whether Frank really wouldn’t say anything—he was trying to be nice, I understood, not getting me in trouble. But I didn’t want to be grateful. Imagine him trying to be fatherly with me. “The town party is still happening,” Frank said. “Today and tomorrow, too. Maybe you could go on down there, have some fun. I’m sure that would make your mother happy. You staying busy.” When my mother entered, toweling the ends of her hair, I immediately brightened, arranging my face like I was listening to Frank. “Don’t you think so, Jeanie?” Frank said, gazing at my mother. “Think what?” she said. “Shouldn’t Evie go check out that carnival?” Frank said. “That centennial thing? Keep busy?” My mother took up this pet notion like it was a flash of brilliance. “I don’t know if it’s the centennial, exactly—” she said. “Well, town party,” Frank broke in, “centennial, whatever it is.” “But it’s a good idea,” she said. “You’ll have a great time.” I could feel Frank watching me. “Yeah,” I said, “sure.” “Nice to see you two having a good talk,” my mother added shyly. I made a face, collecting my mug and crackers, but my mother didn’t notice: she had already bent to kiss Frank. Her robe falling open so I saw a triangle of shadowy, sun-spotted chest and had to look away. —The town was celebrating 110 years, after all, not 100, the awkward number setting the tone for the meager affair. To even call it a carnival seemed overly generous, though most of the town was there. There had been a box social in the park and a play about the town’s founding in the high school amphitheater, the student council members sweating in theater department costumes. They’d closed the road to street traffic, so I found myself in a bobbing press of people, pushing and grabbing at the promise of leisure and fun. Husbands whose faces were tight with aggrieved duty, flanked by kids and wives who needed stuffed animals. Who needed pale, sour lemonade and hot dogs and grilled corn. All the proof of a good time. The river was already clotted with litter, the slow drift of popcorn bags and beer cans and paper fans. My mother had been impressed by Frank’s miraculous ability to get me to leave the house. Just as Frank wanted her to be. So she could imagine the neat way he’d slot into a father shape. I was having exactly as much fun as I’d expected to have. I ate a snow cone, the paper cup weakening until the syrup leaked out over my hands.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Donna could tell I was distracted and catted her eyes over at me. “Did he show you the fountain in the backyard?” she said. “He got it from Rome. Mitch’s place has high vibes,” she went on, “all the ions, ’cause of the ocean.” I reddened, trying to concentrate on separating the garlic from its woody husks. The buzz of the radio suddenly seemed nasty, polluting, the announcer talking too fast. They’d all been there, I understood, to Mitch’s strange house by the sea. I’d enacted some pattern, been defined, neatly, as a girl, providing a known value. There was something almost comforting about it, the clarity of purpose, even as it shamed me. I didn’t understand that you could hope for more. I hadn’t seen the fountain. I did not say so. Donna’s eyes were bright. “You know,” she said, “Suzanne’s parents are actually real rich. Propane or something. She never was homeless or anything, either.” She was working the dough on the counter as she spoke. “Didn’t end up in any hospital. Any of that shit she says. Just scratched herself up with a paper clip, on some freaky jag.” I was queasy from the stench of food scraps softening in the sink. I shrugged like I didn’t much care either way. Donna went on. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “But it’s true. We were up in Mendocino. Crashing with an apple farmer. She’d done too much acid, just started working away at herself with that clip until we made her quit. She didn’t even bleed, though.” When I didn’t respond, Donna slammed the dough into a bowl. Punching it down. “Think whatever you want,” she said. —Suzanne came into her bedroom later, while I was changing. I hunched myself protectively over my naked chest: Suzanne noticed and seemed ready to mock me but stopped herself. I saw the scars on her wrist but didn’t indulge the uneasy questions—Donna was just jealous. Never mind Donna and her stiff Vaseline hair, shanky and foul as a muskrat’s. “Last night was a trip,” Suzanne said. I pulled away when she tried to sling her arm around me. “Oh, come on, you were into it,” she said. “I saw.” I made a sick face—she laughed. I occupied myself with tidying the sheets, as if the bed could ever be anything but a dank nest. “Aw, it’s fine,” Suzanne said. “I got something to cheer you up.” I thought she was going to apologize. But then it occurred to me—she was going to kiss me again. The dim room got airless. I almost felt it happen, an imperceptible lean—but Suzanne just hefted her bag onto the bed, the fringe pooling on the mattress. The bag was full of a strange weight. She gave me a triumphant look. “Go on,” she said. “Look inside.” Suzanne huffed at my stubbornness and opened it herself. I didn’t understand what was inside, the odd metallic flash. The sharp corners. “Take it out,” Suzanne said, impatient.