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 Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  This is wholly energic and its symbol, woman, being the more susceptible, partook of the fruit and passed it on to the reluctant Adam, genetic consciousness asleep in matter. And this is the awful “sin” from which we have been trying to save our souls for two thousand years. Again, “What fools we mortals be!” It’s time we too had our eyes opened. The “original sin” was the sin of creation—what could be more original? However, the word is wrong; it should be crime. But as sin is the biggest thing priests can think about, they called it sin, and made it human to incriminate man and absolve the Creator. Yet if this world, with all its pain and suffering, is the work of a self-conscious Being, then Creation is a crime and its Creator a criminal. From this there is only one escape—unconscious Causation. While our eyes were still closed we interpreted this “sin” as sex and so made for ourselves a “guilt complex.” Perhaps now we can shift that guilt where it belongs. Perhaps we can even get rid of the complex, for the truth will set us free. 7. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. “The woman clothed with the sun,” namely, the sun, now finds herself “naked earth,” and Ishtar and Inanna were also naked at this point. Adam and Eve are the two principles with which we began, consciousness and energy; on the seventh plane they united and became “naked earth.” As soon as the Life force freed itself from this, it clothed itself in organic matter— the literal grass, herbs, trees, etc., of the first chapter. 8. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. “The cool of the day” is the cooling-off period between Involution and Evolution. It is at this point that the genetic principle is hidden most completely in matter. 9. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? Yes, even the Lord God might have difficulty seeing life in a stone, or even a virus. 10. And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. “And Br’er Rabbit said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch.’” This is allegory, and so is Genesis. 11. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? What naivete! As if God didn’t know he would eat of it. The fruit of this tree is biologic existence, and this God labored six long eons that this might be. Why then should partaking of it be disobedience?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I know perfectly well that if this had happened to somebody else—to Jane herself, for example—I should have been angry on her behalf. Yet because it had happened to me, all I could feel was cold, fatalistic acceptance. I was not simply in shock. For years, people had told me that I was rubbish, and this proved it. I had tried to convince myself that I had talents, but I think that I had been waiting subconsciously, but with a dread that I dared not acknowledge, to be finally, fatally unmasked. Now it had finally happened. There was, if not relief, a grim sense that this was right; it had to happen. I should have known better than to imagine that I could succeed. For all the spurious success that I had enjoyed, I was just no good—and I should have known that all along. This latest debacle was, in the original sense of the word, a revelation: it had “unveiled” a reality that had been there all the time but which I had not seen with sufficient clarity. But that was not the whole of it. I still felt at some profound level that it was wrong to feel distress. For years I had been castigated for being too sensitive. I had spent the three years of my novitiate weeping like a broken waterspout. Reduced to tears by a pitiless rebuke for a failure or mishap, I would then be chastised for weeping. And the tears would flow again. It became a vicious circle. I became obsessed with my sensitivity, and would include these lachrymose episodes in the list of sins for my weekly confession. Eventually I learned to keep my feelings at arm’s length, and refused to allow myself to feel anything at all. It was part of the residual damage that I had incurred as a result of my training and had still not completely overcome. This, coupled with the fact that my “weird seizures” made me see everything in a remote, distanced way, meant that I was unable to connect with my feelings at all. Friends later told me that I had imparted the bad news about my thesis with an uncanny, unearthly smile. “I’ve failed,” I would say calmly. “Yes, failed.” This icy calm persisted for days. Then I had a call from my supervisor. “No, listen!” she said urgently, after we had exchanged greetings and commiserations. “There is a crisis. People are furious. This is a scandal, my dear. There is going to be a row.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  She said, “I have to tell you something, Richard. I don’t know how you’ll take it, or where we can go from here.” She paused, and his face changed. Be quick! she told herself. “I have to tell you because we can never come back together, we can never have any future if I don’t.” Her stomach contracted again, dryly. She wanted to run to the bathroom, but she knew that that would do no good. The spasm passed. “Vivaldo and I have never touched each other. I’ve”—be quick!—“been having an affair with Eric.” His voice, when he spoke, seemed to have no consciousness behind it, to belong to no one; it was a mere meaningless tinkle on the air: “Eric?” She walked to the bar and leaned on it. “Yes.” How the silence rang and gathered! “Eric?” He laughed. “Eric?” It’s his turn now, she thought. She did not look at him; he was rising to his feet; he stumbled, suddenly drunken, to the bar. She felt him staring at her—for some reason, she thought of an airplane trying to land. Then his hand was on her shoulder. He turned her to face him. She forced herself to look into his eyes. “Is that the truth?” She felt absolutely cold and dry and wanted to go to sleep. “Yes, Richard. That’s the truth.” She moved away and sat down in the chair again. She had, indeed, delivered herself up: she thought of the children and fear broke over her like a wave, chilling her. She stared straight before her, sitting perfectly still, listening: for no matter what else was lost, she would not give up her children, she would not let them go. “It’s not true. I don’t believe you. Why Eric? Why did you go to him?” “He has something—something I needed very badly.” “What is that, Cass?” “A sense of himself.” “A sense of himself,” he repeated, slowly. “A sense of himself.” She felt his eyes on her, and also felt, with dread, how slowly the storm in him gathered, how long it would take to break. “Forgive your coarse-grained husband, but I’ve always felt that he had no sense of himself at all. He’s not even sure he knows what’s between his legs, or what to do with it—but I guess I have to take that back now.” Here we go, she thought. She said, wearily, helplessly, “I know it sounds strange, Richard.” Tears came to her eyes. “But he’s a very wonderful person. I know. I know him better than you do.” He said, making a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sob, “I guess you do—though he may have preferred it the other way around. Did you ever think of that? You must be one of the very few women in the world—” “Don’t, Richard. Don’t. It won’t change anything, it won’t help.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  “And, this probably doesn’t help,” he continued, “but I’ve also heard before that other people like me better when I’m drunk, which . . . When you hear someone say they like you better when you’re on something that makes you not yourself, that kind of hits home. It kind of hurts, you know?” Spencer had never had sex sober, though, in truth, he hadn’t had sex much at all—two hookups during his three years of college, each time a drunken one-off—which was not so unusual, statistically, though he believed it was. He compared himself to a high school friend attending a Big Ten school, a guy who hadn’t had his first kiss until two years after Spencer but was now on a “Tinder rampage.” (Spencer’s own profile picture, taken several years earlier, would seem to obviate that possibility: he looked about twelve. Other shots showed him clowning with friends, clearly wasted. His professed favorite pickup line was, “Are you Google? ’Cause you’ve got everything I’ve been searching for.”) Spencer lost his virginity during the first weeks of freshman year, the time when students “go crazy” with their new freedom, when the heaviest drinking and partying tend to occur—as well as the highest rates of assault. He had met the girl once before, briefly, at a pregame gathering. When he saw her again, a few days later at a frat party, he was about ten drinks in; he has no idea how much she’d consumed. They started grinding on the dance floor, then kissing, and somehow—Spencer doesn’t really remember how—they ended up in his room. The whole episode would’ve felt awkward given that they were relative strangers, but he was too drunk to care, or, for that matter, to notice how the encounter was going for her. They barely spoke while it was happening. Or after. Or, really, before. Spencer was glad to have been able to unload his virginity, but beyond that, he said, “It wasn’t too big of a deal. Obviously, I bragged about it to my friends because that’s kind of what you do.” The girl made no effort to get in touch again, so neither did he. His second hookup, sophomore year, was during a “heaven and hell” theme party at his frat. Spencer was doing shots with his baseball pals when a girl with whom he’d occasionally Snapchatted started flirting with him. Again, grinding led to making out, and his inebriation emboldened him to ask the girl up to his room. Except he had “whiskey dick”: he was too drunk to get an erection. “Maybe we can do this another time,” he offered apologetically.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Liam couldn’t recall the names of most of the girls he’d been with, couldn’t describe what they looked like, the sound of their voices, how they kissed—anything about them, really. All he knew was his number. He’d met most of them at youth group conventions or summer camp—he avoided casual hookups with classmates, because his public high school was relatively small and things could get messy. There’d been nights when he’d hooked up with six different girls, grinding on them, then turning them around on the dance floor to make out, sometimes leading them to a spot where they could progress to more. It was exciting, he said, but not particularly . . . He struggled for a word and landed on “personal.” That’s how it had been from the start for Liam: he described the first time a girl performed oral sex on him, during an eighth-grade camping trip, as “traumatic” because everyone quickly found out and ribbed him about it. “It was genuinely hard to deal with everyone knowing such intimate details about my sex life,” he said. “And it didn’t give me status. Not then. Because I didn’t play it that way.” Better, he decided, to turn it around and use the rumor mill to your advantage. More recently, as high school was ending, Liam was experiencing a change of heart: he’d been trying to develop “relationships with girls as human beings and not numbers, which, again, I’m not proud of that, but then I must have been, because I did brag about it.” Although he’s treated girls as more or less disposable, Liam talked about being “communicative and compassionate” with his partners—even when he was drunk. He’s the guy, he said, who “calls out other friends for being shitty, for being disrespectful to girls.” And he always tries to check in verbally with partners, to ask if they are comfortable. So what, exactly, do you say? I asked. “Well, something like ‘Do you want to go down on me?’”—a question that, as opposed to, say, “How do you feel about oral?” some health educators consider more of a directive than a true conversation starter. “But sometimes it would be more wordless. Like, not talking about it, just going further.” I asked Liam if that included pushing a girl’s head down to get her to give him a blow job. He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve done that. I have. Not proud of that, but I have.” Liam shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I think of myself as a good guy,” he said. “I am a good guy. But . . .” He looked pained, seemed to wrestle with himself, then sighed. “I didn’t think I was going to talk about this, but, sure, why not?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  She persisted, in a low voice, “Didn’t you?” “You told me that you weren’t,” he said. “But did you believe me?” He stammered: “I–I had to believe you.” “Why?” Again, he said nothing. “Because you were afraid?” “Yes,” he said at last. “I was afraid.” “It was easier to let it happen than to try to stop it?” “Yes.” “Why?” Her eyes searched his face. It was his turn to look away. “I used to hate you for that sometimes,” she said, “for pretending to believe me because you didn’t want to know what was happening to me.” “I was trying to do what I thought you wanted! I was afraid that you would leave me—you told me that you would!” He rose and stalked the kitchen, his hands in his pockets, water standing in his eyes. “I worried about it, I thought about it—but I put it out of my mind. You had made it a matter of my trusting you—don’t you remember?” He looked at her with hatred, standing above her; but she seemed to be beyond his anger. “Yes, I remember. But you didn’t start trusting me. You just gave in to me and pretended to trust me.” “What would you have done if I had called you on it?” “I don’t know. But if you had faced it, I would have had to face it—as long as you were pretending, I had to pretend. I’m not blaming you. I’m just telling it to you like it is.” She looked up at him. “I saw that it could go on a long time like that,” and her lips twisted wearily. “I sort of had you where I wanted you. I’d got my revenge. Only, it wasn’t you I was after. It wasn’t you I was trying to beat.” “It was Ellis?” She sighed and put one hand to her face. “Oh. I don’t know, I really don’t know what I was thinking. Sometimes I’d leave Ellis and I’d come and find you here—like my dog or my cat, I used to think sometimes, just waiting. And I’d be afraid you’d be here and I’d be afraid you’d gone out, afraid you’d ask me, really ask me where I’d been, and afraid you wouldn’t. Sometimes you’d try, but I could always stop you, I could see in your eyes when you were frightened. I hated that look and I hated me and I hated you. I could see how white men got that look they so often had when they looked at me; somebody had beat the shit out of them, had scared the shit out of them, long ago. And now I was doing it to you. And it made it hard for me when you touched me, especially—” She stopped, picked up her drink, tasted it, set it down. “I couldn’t stand Ellis. You don’t know what it’s like, to have a man’s body over you if you can’t stand that body.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day. It was not a truthful account. This was not because the events I recounted did not happen, but because the book did not tell the whole story. The publishers were concerned that I should not come across as an intellectual. So I had to leave out any kind of learned reflection. There could be no talk of books or poems, for example, and certainly no theological discussion about the nature of God or the purpose of prayer. I should stick to external events to make the story dramatic and accessible. I was also told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible, and as I was still very unsure of myself as a writer, and assumed that my publishers knew what they were doing, I went along with this. But most important, I wanted this cheery self-portrait to be true. It was, therefore, an exercise in wish fulfillment, and predictably, the result was quite awful. Today I can hardly bear to look at Beginning the World, which has a hearty, boisterous, and relentlessly extrovert tone. It is like reading my life story as told by Ruby Wax. The reality was very different. During those years, I did in fact live a great deal inside my head, and approached the world largely through the medium of books and ideas. To an extent, I still do. And I was not a lively, positive girl. Much of the time, I was withdrawn, bitter, weary, frightened, and ill. And while I was writing Beginning the World, I was particularly scared—with good reason, because yet again, my latest career had collapsed and the future looked most uncertain. The book was badly conceived, and could be nothing but a distortion of an important and ultimately valuable period of my life. And so I have decided to try again. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. Reviewing my own story has made me marvel at the way it all turned out. I am now glad that after all I did not simply “begin the world.” Something more interesting happened instead—at least, I think so. T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that traces the process of spiritual recovery, has been central to my journey. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. Catholics have ashes smeared on their foreheads to remind them of their mortality, because it is only when we have become fully aware of the frailty that is inherent in our very nature that we can begin our quest. During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter—a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset.

• From Another Country (1962)

  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. The sun was sinking and the sea was on fire.

• From Another Country (1962)

  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!” “Maybe,” he said, after a moment, “it’s because of her. When I went up there, the day she called me to say Rufus was dead—I don’t know—I walked through that block and I walked in that house and it all seemed—I don’t know— familiar .” He turned his pale, troubled face toward her but she felt that he was staring at the high, hard wall which stood between himself and his past. “I don’t just mean that I used to spend a lot of time in Harlem,” and he looked away, nervously, “I was hardly ever there in the daytime anyway. I mean, there were the same kids on the block that used to be on my block—they were colored but they were the same, really the same—and, hell, the hallways have the same stink, and everybody’s, well, trying to make it but they know they haven’t got much of a chance. The same old women, the same old men—maybe they’re a little bit more alive —and I walked into that house and they were just sitting there, Ida and her mother and her father, and there were some other people there, relatives, maybe, and friends. I don’t know, no one really spoke to me except Ida and she didn’t say much. And they all looked at me as though—well, as though I had done it—and, oh, I wanted so bad to take that girl in my arms and kiss that look off her face and make her know that I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it, whoever was doing it was doing it to me, too.” He was crying, silently, and he bent forward, hiding his face with one long hand. “I know I failed him, but I loved him, too, and nobody there wanted to know that. I kept thinking, They’re colored and I’m white but the same things have happened, really the same things, and how can I make them know that?” “But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Then the king said to the servants, ‘Tie him up, hands and feet, and throw him into the darkness outside, where people weep and grind their teeth.’ “Many are called, you see, but few are chosen.” (Matt. 22:1–14) “So, you see,” he went on, “the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle up accounts with his servants. As he was beginning to sort it all out, one man was brought before him who owed ten thousand talents. He had no means of paying it back, so the master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and everything he possessed, and payment to be made. “So the servant fell down and prostrated himself before the master. “‘Be patient with me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll pay you everything!’ “The master was very sorry for the servant, and let him off. He forgave him the loan. “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred dinars. He seized him and began to throttle him. ‘Pay me back what you owe me!’ he said. “The colleague fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you!’ “But he refused, and went and threw him into prison until he could pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were very upset. They went and informed their master about the whole affair. Then his master summoned him. “‘You’re a scoundrel of a servant!’ he said to him. ‘I let you off the whole debt, because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have taken pity on your colleague, like I took pity on you?’ “His master was angry, and handed him over to the torturers, until he had paid the whole debt. And that’s what my heavenly father will do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matt. 18:23–35) Even the story of the great wedding party to which all and sundry are invited carries within it a dark note of warning: don’t think you can come into God’s party without putting on the proper clothes. Even the great story of spectacular forgiveness is turned back against itself when the servant who had been forgiven a huge sum refused to forgive his fellow servant a tiny sum. If this is what it looks like when God’s kingdom comes on earth as in heaven—if this is what it looks like when God’s in charge—then there must have been more wrong with “earth” than anyone had supposed. That, indeed, is the conclusion we are forced to draw at every turn. It isn’t that God, coming to rule on earth, is picky or grouchy, determined to find fault. It is, rather, that the patient is deathly sick, and the doctor must prescribe an appropriately drastic course of treatment. It is that the sheep are in danger of being totally lost, since they appear to have no shepherd at all.

• From Another Country (1962)

  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!” “Maybe,” he said, after a moment, “it’s because of her. When I went up there, the day she called me to say Rufus was dead—I don’t know—I walked through that block and I walked in that house and it all seemed—I don’t know—familiar.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “But I wasn’t,” I snapped, stung momentarily out of my frozen calm. “I didn’t know that I was going to take the wretched pills. It was like the other times. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed. “And I have been telling you how bad I’ve been feeling,” I went on, hopelessly. “I’ve told you again and again.” “But don’t you see that this is another evasive tactic?” Dr. Piet shook his head. “We’re going to have to work really hard now on the underlying causes of all this.” My heart sank. “But you do need a bit of a rest, I think,” Dr. Piet continued more kindly. “You’re going to need looking after. The hospital will let you out tomorrow. Where do you intend to go?” “I can’t go back to the Harts’,” I said. This was one aspect of the whole debacle that I could not contemplate with equanimity. They had been so kind, and how had I repaid them? “No.” I waved away Dr. Piet’s next question. “I can’t ask them; it would put them in an intolerable position! How could they decently say no?” We ran through my options. My parents were away on holiday, and I did not want them to know about any of this. I could not bear to think of their distress if they realized how bad things were. And whatever Dr. Piet thought, this was not their fault. If they had had their way I would never have set foot in the convent. Nobody had forced me into the religious life; nobody had compelled me to stay there for so long. I had been responsible for the damage of my own mind. “Well, you can’t live by yourself,” Dr. Piet said testily. “We’ll have to keep an eye on you now.” The only alternative that I could come up with was Cherwell Edge. The nuns there had made a few wan overtures to me, implying that if I needed anything, I had only to ask. It was by no means an ideal solution, and I could see that Dr. Piet was not entirely happy about it, but it was better than being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which was the only other option. So we left it that I would ring the nuns and ask if I might stay in the convent for a while. It would at least be familiar, and a holiday from the endless struggle of trying to fit into secular life. And perhaps a little rest was all that I needed.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Cass and Ida stared at him. “Where are you from?” Cass demanded. He smiled at her from a great, tolerant distance. “Belfast,” he said. “Oh,” cried Ida, “I have a friend whose father was born in Dublin! Do you know Dublin? Is it very far from Belfast?” “Geographically? Yes, some distance. Otherwise, the distance is negligible—though the population of either city would hang me if they heard me say so.” And he laughed his cheerful, lubricated laugh. “What have you got against us?” Cass asked. “I? Why, nothing,” said Mr. Nash, laughing, “I make a great deal of money out of you.” “Mr. Nash,” said Ellis, “is an impresario who no longer lives in Belfast.” “Free enterprise, you see,” said Mr. Nash, and winked at Mr. Barry. Mr. Barry laughed. He leaned toward Mr. Nash. “Well, I’m on the side of Mrs. Silenski. What have you got against our system? I think we’ve all made great strides under it.” He raised one bony hand, one manicured finger. “What would you replace it with?” “What,” asked Cass, unexpectedly, “does one replace a dream with? I wish I knew.” Mr. Nash laughed, then stopped, as if embarrassed. Ida was watching her—watching her without seeming to watch. Then Cass sensed, for the first time in her life, the knowledge that black people had of white people—though what, really, did Ida know about her, except that she was lying, was unfaithful, and was acting? and was in trouble—and, for a second, she hated Ida with all her heart. Then she felt very cold again, the second passed. “I suppose,” said Ida, in an extraordinary voice, “that one replaces a dream with reality.” Everybody laughed, nervously. The music began again. She looked again toward the dance floor, but those dancers were gone. She grabbed her drink as though it were a spar, and held it in her mouth as though it were ice. “Only,” said Ida, “that’s not so easy to do.” She held her drink between her two thin hands and looked across at Cass. Cass swallowed the warm fluid she had been holding in her mouth, and it hurt her throat. Ida put down her drink and grabbed Ellis by the hand. “Come on, honey,” she said, “let’s dance.” Ellis rose. “You will excuse us,” he said, “but I am summoned.” “Indeed you are,” said Ida, and smiled at them all, and swept onto the dance floor. Ellis followed, rather like something entangled in her train. “She reminds me of the young Billie Holiday,” said Mr. Barry, wistfully. “Yes, I’d love to hear her sing,” said Mrs. Nash—rather venomously, and most unexpectedly. They all turned expectantly toward her, as though this were a seance and she were the medium. But she sipped her drink and said nothing more.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I was distressed by this conversation with the security guard. I felt that he and I were radically different sorts of people (a realization that can be in itself dispiriting, because you want the rest of randomly encountered humanity to be comprehensible), but at the same time I felt that a case could be made for our fundamental likeness, and I really didn’t want to be like him. Morally, I am different from that security guard—no, let’s not mess around: morally, I’m a little better than he is. I am. But I acknowledge that some of the things I have done are—let me just say it—rape-like acts that some observers would condemn more vehemently than they would condemn the security guard’s offhand remote-control fantasies, because I should know better, and because, in my own case, they really happened. But I mention the security guard, and Arlette the paralegal, and my friend Bill Asplundh, not so as to raise the fretful subject of rape theory. I just want to point out what I think is my own oddity: unlike any of those I questioned, what I want to do, and what I in fact end up doing, in the Fold is to live out my perennial wish to insert some novelty into the lives of women. Arlette wanted to mash her clit-folds into the life of a woman; the security guard wanted to insert his small-minded dick into the lives of women; but I don’t want to be quite that direct. Instead I replace the white chalk in Miss Dobzhansky’s hand with blue; I put the fortune-cookie fortune under one of Joyce’s bottles; I leave the vibrator where the woman in the library can find it. I am still imposing my will on their lives, of course—but I want to arrange things so that they discover my imposition, and I want the imposition, however calculated, to have an element of simulated fortuity. I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by. In college I bought four brand-new copies of Kinflicks and left them one by one on a sidewalk near a gingko tree in front of one of the freshman dorms so that women on their way to class would see them and bend to pick them up and take them off with them. (A woman in my own dorm had told me that the book was very “orgasmy”—I hadn’t read it then, and still haven’t.)

• From Wild (2012)

  He wanted to see me. Right now. Lisa had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and he’d immediately driven the seventeen hundred miles straight through from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at Lisa’s apartment. It was a warm, sunny day in late September. I’d turned twenty-six the week before. Joe hadn’t remembered. It was the first birthday of my life when not one person had said happy birthday to me. “Happy birthday,” said Paul when I walked in the door. “Thank you,” I said, too formally. “I meant to call, but I didn’t have your number—I mean, Joe’s.” I nodded. It was strange to see him. My husband. A phantom from my actual life. The realest person I knew. We sat at the kitchen table with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby, the broom with which Lisa had struck me propped against the wall. He said, “You look different. You seem so … How can I say this? You seem like you aren’t here.” I knew what he meant. The way he looked at me told me everything I’d refused to hear from Lisa. I was different. I wasn’t there. Heroin had made me that way. And yet the idea of giving it up seemed impossible. Looking Paul squarely in the face made me realize that I couldn’t think straight. “Just tell me why you’re doing this to yourself,” he demanded, his eyes gentle, his face so familiar to me. He reached across the table and took my hands, and we held on to each other, locked eye to eye, tears streaming first down my face, then down his. He wanted me to go home with him that afternoon, he said evenly. Not for a reunion with him but to get away. Not from Joe, but from heroin. I told him I needed to think. I drove back to Joe’s apartment and sat in the sun on a lawn chair that Joe kept on the sidewalk outside the building. Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn’t high. As I sat there a man walked up to me and said his name was Tim. He took my hand and shook it and told me that I could trust him. He asked if I could give him three dollars for diapers, then if he could use my phone inside the apartment, and then if I had change for a five-dollar bill, and on and on in a series of twisting questions and sorry stories that confused and compelled me to stand and pull the last ten dollars I had out of my jeans pocket. When he saw the money, he took a knife out of his shirt. He held it almost politely to my chest and hissed, “Give me that money, sweetheart.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The two violent winds of skepticism and conservatism have picked up extra energy from massive social, political, and cultural storms that have raged across the Western world over the last two or three hundred years and that seem, as we speak, to be coming to something of a climax. If you are an American, you will guess that a lot of people taking the “skeptical” position vote Democrat, and a lot of people taking the “trusting” position vote Republican. I could introduce you to several people who buck those trends, but the picture is nonetheless worryingly accurate. Can it really be the case that our judgment about who to vote for and what policies are best for a country and for the world can be mapped so easily onto questions of whether or not to believe a strange set of stories from the first century? Unlikely though it seems, I think that is exactly what has happened. In a complicated, confused, and dangerous world, anything will serve as a guardrail for people blundering along in the dark. We oversimplify complex problems. We bundle up very different social and political issues into two packages, and with a sigh of relief—now at least we know who we are, where we stand!—we declare ourselves to be in favor of this package and against that one. And we make life uncomfortable for anyone who wants to sit loose, to see things differently. Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There was a set package. Jesus, the Bible (if you were Protestant), the Mass (if you were Catholic), family, strict morals, the Rapture (for some Protestants), purgatory (for some Catholics), and ultimately a straight choice between heaven and hell—all of that describes the world many remember only too well. And many of those who do remember it remember it with a shudder. That’s the small, narrow world from which (whew!) the healthy skepticism of the modern world has rescued them. So, for many Americans today, and others elsewhere too, Jesus is part of the tight little world, closed and closed-minded, from which they have thankfully escaped. If you want to know why the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they’re offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term “assurance.” They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying “religion” is gone forever.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But, like the physical healings, forgiveness didn’t stop with this kind of reconciliation. To understand this we must come forward from the Exodus to the other great defining moment in Israel’s history: the exile. We’ve already mentioned the time when the people were taken away to Babylon. Well, the prophets of the time were quite clear why this had happened: it was because of the people’s wickedness. Like their distant ancestors dancing around a golden calf in the desert, they had forgotten their true God. They had worshipped idols. So, instead of being a light to the nations, Israel had become a byword for a godforsaken nation. People looked at the Israelites and sneered at them and their God, the God who had apparently left them defenseless. Exile was seen, throughout the ancient scriptures, as the punishment for Israel’s sin. In a culture where honor and shame were everything, the exile brought deep, deadly shame upon Israel. And, in the eyes of the watching world, on Israel’s God. But if that is so, then forgiveness must mean that exile is now over. “Comfort, O comfort my people,” sang one of the greatest prophets. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from YHWH’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:1–2). And, as the prophecy that follows makes clear, this word of forgiveness is part of the overall message that Israel’s God is in fact king. He will be known as king through his victory over the tyrannical pagan kingdom of Babylon and his bringing his people back home to their land. This was to be the new Exodus: tyrant, rescue, vocation, God’s presence, inheritance. Just as physical healing is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God takes charge, to fix and mend the whole world, so individual forgiveness is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God does what he promised and restores his exiled people. As we saw, most Jews of Jesus’s day saw the Babylonian exile as only the start of a much longer period of history in which God’s people remained unredeemed, unrescued, and unforgiven. When Jesus was announcing forgiveness, both on the one-to-one personal scale and more widely, this was the story people would have had in their heads. And this was the story we must assume Jesus intended them to have in their heads. The First Announcement

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Despite their apparent mortification, boys do want their parents to talk to them about physical intimacy, for someone to go beyond the classic don’ts: don’t have sex, don’t get anyone pregnant, don’t get a disease, don’t be disrespectful. They are particularly eager to have their fathers talk to them about their own experience with sex, love, even regret. But according to a 2017 national survey of three thousand high school students and young adults by the Making Caring Common Project, the large majority of boys had never had a basic conversation with their parents about how to be sure in advance that your partner wants to be—and is comfortable—having sex with you or about the importance of “being a caring and respectful sexual partner.” More than 60 percent had never heard from their parents about the importance of not having sex with “someone who is too intoxicated or impaired to make a decision about sex.” Neither parents nor teachers of most of the male students had ever told them not to catcall girls or use degrading comments such as “bitches” or “hos,” even though 87 percent of the girls reported having been sexually harassed. Those ideas might seem self-evident to an adult, beyond the need for comment, but given the rates of coercion, harassment, and assault, boys are clearly not learning sexual ethics merely by osmosis. What’s more, most of those who did have such conversations with adults described them as at least somewhat influential. Richard Weissbourd, the lead author of the survey, believes that parents have abdicated responsibility for talking with their children about sexual ethics or emotional intimacy, especially their sons. The conversation is more crucial than ever, the report concluded, because we appear to live in a time of “pervasive misogyny and sexual harassment.” “If you ask many parents whether it’s really important that your son has a lot of integrity and is a good person, they would absolutely say yes. But if you were to ask, ‘Have you talked to your son in a concrete way about the many ways he can degrade women?’ Most parents, I think, would say no.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was always something like this - always some neighbour in trouble, and needing money, or help, or a letter writing or a visit to the police; and it was always Ralph and Florence that they came to - I had not been with them a week before I saw Ralph leave his supper and run along the street in his shirt-sleeves, to give some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against. Now, hearing Florence’s plans to visit the family that had the bailiffs coming, I grew sour. ‘You’re a regular pair of saints, you two,’ I said, filling a bowl with soapy water. ‘You never have a minute for yourselves. You have a pretty house - now that I am here to make it so - and not one moment to enjoy it. You earn a decent wage, between you, and yet you give it all away!’‘If I wanted to close my doors to my neighbours and gaze all night at my pretty walls,’ she replied, still passing a hand across her bleary features, ‘I would move to Hampstead! I have lived in this house all my life; there’s not a family in this street who didn’t help Mother out, at one time or another, when we were kids and things were rather hard. You’re right: we do draw a fair wage between us, Ralph and me; but do you think I could enjoy my thirty shillings, knowing that Mrs Monks next door must live, with all her girls, on ten? That Mrs Kenny across the street, whose husband is sick, must make do with the three shillings she gets making paper flowers, sitting up all night and squinting at the wretched things until she is gone half-blind...’‘All right,’ I said. She made speeches like this often - sounding always, I thought, like a Daughter of the People in some sentimental novel of East End life: Maria Jex had liked to read such novels, and Diana had liked to laugh at her. I didn’t say this to Florence, however. I didn’t say anything at all. But when she and Ralph and their union friends had gone, I sat down in an armchair in the parlour, rather heavily. The truth was, I hated their charity; I hated their good works, their missions, their orphan protégés. I hated them, because I knew that I was one of them.

• From Wild (2012)

  “That was different. It was just a phase and you know it,” I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding defensive. There were a lot of reasons I regretted having gotten involved with heroin, but losing credibility with my brother was the thing I regretted the most. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “What time is it?” I asked. “Who cares?” I followed him back along the trail, past the silent tents and cars and down our driveway to the gravel road that passed our house. The light was soft and tinged with the slightest shade of pink, so beautiful that my exhaustion didn’t matter. Without discussing it, we walked to the abandoned house a short way down the road beyond our driveway, where we used to go as kids, bored on the long hot summer days before we were old enough to drive. The house had been empty and falling to the ground then. Now it was falling more. “I think her name was Violet, the woman who lived here,” I said to my brother when we mounted the porch, remembering the lore about the house I’d heard from the Finnish old-timers years before. The front door had never been locked and it still wasn’t. We pushed it open and went inside, stepping over places where boards were missing from the floor. The same items that had been scattered around the house a dozen years ago were still there, amazingly, only now they were even more decrepit. I picked up a yellowed magazine and saw that it was published by the Communist Party of Minnesota and dated October 1920. A chipped teacup with pink roses on it sat on its side and I bent to right it. The house was so tiny it took only a few steps to have it all in view. I walked to the back and approached a wooden door that hung diagonally from one hinge, a pane of pristine glass in its top half. “Don’t touch it,” whispered Leif. “Bad karma if it breaks.” We walked carefully past it and into the kitchen. There were gouges and holes and a giant black stain where the stove used to be. In the corner stood a small wooden table that was missing a leg. “Would you carve your name into that?” I asked, gesturing to the table, my voice suddenly flashing with emotion. “Don’t,” said Leif, grabbing my shoulders to give me a firm shake. “Just forget it, Cheryl. It’s reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.” I nodded and he let go of me. We stood side by side, gazing out the windows to the yard. There was a dilapidated shed that used to be the sauna and a trough that was overrun by weeds and moss now. Beyond it, a wide swampy field gave way to a stand of birch trees in the distance, and beyond that a bog we knew was there but couldn’t see.