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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For Coral’s part, she may never like Jed’s sexual kinks, but I encourage her to be open to understanding them. By holding court, judging him, and failing to grasp his red-light tastes, she’s condemned to feeling demeaned. Sadly, she fails to see that Jed is actually taking a big risk by trusting her to enter the primal bog of his erotic self. Rebalancing the “Dominant” Culture Most fans of kinky sex, at least those I’ve encountered, are drawn by the erotics of power and not, as it may appear to an outsider, by violence or pain. In fact, the carefully negotiated contracts, which specify what can and cannot be done, by whom, to whom, and for how long, are meant to guarantee both pleasure and safety. You submit only as much as you’re willing; you dominate only as far as you’re allowed. In the parallel universe of sex, power bids become a plaything, an experiment, a way to temporarily experience relations we’re loath to inhabit in real life. If, in our daily life, we shun dependence, in our erotic life we might welcome it. If it is our aggression that makes us twitch with discomfort, sexual enactments can permit a safe experience of power. Whether our real-life aversion is to submission, as it is for Elizabeth, or to autonomy, as it is for Jed, the sexual drama can offer catharsis. For years S-M and D-S (domination and submission) were fringe behaviors that roamed on the outskirts of conventional sexuality. They were primarily a practice of gay men, who tended to be more successful than heterosexuals at isolating sexual aggression for the purpose of pleasure (as the sociologist Anthony Giddens notes). In recent years these marginal practices have moved into the mainstream. A growing number of citizens in the early twenty-first century—gay and straight, male and female, left and right, urban and suburban—get their sexual kicks from giving and taking orders. There are far too many of them to fit a minority psychological profile. The social critic Camille Paglia sees this rise in domination and submission as a collective fantasy that tweaks the rough spots of our egalitarian culture. It seems to me that rituals of domination and submission are a subversive way to put one over on a society that glorifies control, belittles dependency, and demands equality. In cultures where these values are at a premium—America, for example—we find more and more people seeking to give up control, revel in dependency, and recognize the very inequities no one wants to talk about. Seen in this light, sex clubs are havens of acceptance for what society rejects. This explicit exchange of power, which transfers freely and consensually from one party to another, is a far cry from the rigid distribution of power that pervades our society. In real life, power is much harder to negotiate, and almost impossible either to acquire or to relinquish. No one wants to give up her piece of the pie.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Well, you know—complain, speak in a whiny voice, talk in a way that makes people want to get away from me. Do I?” “What do you think, Myrna?” “I don’t think so. And your opinion?” Unable to procrastinate indefinitely, or to lie, or to tell the truth, Ernest squirmed. “If by ‘whine’ you mean you tend to complain about your situation repetitively and unproductively—then, yes, I’ve heard you do that.” “An example, please.” “I promise to answer that,” said Ernest, deciding it was time for a process comment, “but let me say something first, Myrna. I’m struck by the change in you these last weeks. It’s been so fast. You aware of it?” “Change how?” “How? In almost every way. Look at what you’re doing—you’re direct, focused, challenging. Like you say, you’re keeping it in the room; you’re talking about what’s taking place between us.” “And that’s good?” “It’s great, Myrna. I’m delighted to see it. To be honest, there were times in the past when I felt you hardly noticed I was in the room with you. When I say it’s great, I mean you’re moving in the right direction. But still you seem so—what should I say? So one-sided, so—well, acerbic, as though you’re continually angry with me. Am I off base?” “I don’t feel angry with you, just frustrated with my whole life. But you said you’d give me examples of my whining.” Suddenly this woman who had been too slow for him was becoming almost too fast. Ernest had to concentrate all his attention on their discourse. “Not so fast. I’m not buying into that word, Myrna. I feel you’re trying to brand me with it. I said ‘repetitious,’ and I’ll give you an example of that: your feelings about your CEO. How he’s not efficient, how he should make the company leaner, how he should fire incompetent workers, how his softheartedness is going to cost you big money in your stock options—that’s the kind of thing I mean. You’ve discussed this over and over again, hour after hour. Just like your comments about the dating scene—you know what I mean. During those hours I’ve ended up feeling less engaged with you and less helpful as well.” “But those are the things that preoccupy me—you tell me to share what I’m thinking.” “You’re absolutely right, Myrna. I know it’s a dilemma, but it’s not what you say but how you say it. But I don’t want to detract from my earlier point. The mere fact that we’re talking so openly supports what I said a little while ago—that you’re different, working better and harder in therapy. “It’s time to stop for today, but let’s try to pick up from here next week. Oh, yes, here’s the bill for last month.” “Hmmm,” said Myrna, uncrossing her legs, not neglecting to swish them vigorously, and scanning the proffered bill before dropping it into her purse. “How disappointing!” “What do you mean?”

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  to “atone for your sins with righteousness” (4:27; MT 4:24). The word for “righteousness” was commonly used for “almsgiving” in later Judaism. Daniel’s advice was a subject of controversy at the time of the Reformation, as Lutheran interpreters objected to the implication that the welfare of the king depended on good works (rather than faith). Nebuchadnezzar undergoes the transformation and is ultimately restored. He learns his lesson, that the Most High alone is sovereign and that he can raise up and put down kings at his pleasure. Nebuchadnezzar stops short of converting to Judaism, but he is unstinting in his praise of the God of heaven. Needless to say, there is no evidence that the historical Nebuchadnezzar was ever forced to eat grass like the beasts of the field. Attempts to diagnose his medical condition are beside the point. Indeed, we know something of the way in which this story developed. The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, was absent from Babylon for several years. He spent the time in Teima, in the Arabian wilderness, and devoted himself to the worship of the moon-god. Because of his absence, he was reviled by the priests of Marduk in Babylon. Scholars have long suspected that the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness was originally a story about Nabonidus. This suspicion was confirmed by the discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls of an Aramaic text called the Prayer of Nabonidus. This text is introduced as “the words of the prayer that Nabonidus . . . prayed,” but the fragments do not preserve a prayer. Instead, they preserve Nabonidus’s account of how he was “stricken with an evil disease by the decree of God in Teima.” He was smitten for seven years but was eventually restored when a Jewish diviner explained to him that he should pray, not to idols, but to the true God. The story in Daniel 4 is evidently an elaboration of this tradition. The name of Nebuchadnezzar was substituted for that of Nabonidus because he was much better known. Like all the stories in Daniel 1–6, the tale of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness is designed to show the sovereign power of the Most High God. One can imagine that Jews would take some delight in the idea of the mighty king of Babylon eating grass like an ox. Nonetheless, the portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar is not

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  In her prescient book Pornified, Pamela Paul found that women had begun feeling competitive with porn stars, worried that unless they put on their own show to maintain a partner’s interest, they would lose him to the Internet. They believed that the unnatural thinness, inflated breasts, and overfilled lips of those surgical cyborgs were distorting men’s standards of beauty, eroding women’s own body image, increasing their self-consciousness. “Porn has terrible effects on what young women are supposed to look like, particularly during sex,” said Leslie Bell, a psychotherapist and author of Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom. “There’s this idea that someone is going to be evaluating your appearance not only outside of the bedroom, which was true before, but also during sex, that your body has to look a certain way then. It seems very pressured and shame-inducing, because bodies don’t look like that naturally.” You’d need self-esteem of steel to remain immune. The girls I met sometimes disconnected from their bodies during sex, watching and evaluating their encounters like spectators. “I’ll be hooking up with some guy who’s really hot,” confided a high school senior in Northern California, “and we’ll be snuggling and grinding and touching and it’s cool. Then things get heavier and all of a sudden my mind shifts and I’m not a real person: it’s like, This is me performing. This is me acting. It’s like, How well am I doing? Like, This is a hard position, but don’t shake. And I’m thinking, What would ‘she’ do? ‘She’ would go down on him.’ And I don’t even know who it is I’m playing, who that ‘she’ actually is. It’s some fantasy girl, I guess, maybe the girl from porn.” JON MARTELLO IS a simple guy, a New Jersey native who cares about “my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my guys, my girls, my porn,” not necessarily in that order. The protagonist of the film Don Jon, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who also wrote and directed), Jon Martello got his womanizing nickname by “pulling” a different girl every weekend. No single partner, though, can compare to the bounty he finds online. “All the bullshit fades away,” he says in a voice-over, “and the only thing in the world is those tits . . . dat ass . . . the blow job . . . the cowboy, the doggie, the money shot and that’s it, I don’t gotta say anything, I don’t gotta do anything. I just fucking lose myself.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  If the script handed down by our hypersexualized culture expanded the vision of “sexy” to include a broad range of physical size and ability, skin shade, gender identity, sexual preference, age; if it taught girls that how their bodies feel to them is more important than how they look to others; if it reminded them that neither value nor “empowerment” are contingent on the size of their boobs, belly, or ass; if it emphasized that they are entitled to ethical, reciprocal, mutually pleasurable sexual encounters; then maybe, maybe I’d embrace it. The body as product, however, is not the same as the body as subject. Nor is learning to be sexually desirable the same as exploring your own desire: your wants, your needs, your capacity for joy, for passion, for intimacy, for ecstasy. It’s not surprising that girls feel powerful when they feel “hot”: it’s presented to them over and over as a precondition for success in any realm. But the truth is that “hot” refracts sexuality through a dehumanized prism regardless of who is “in control.” “Hot” demands that certain women project perpetual sexual availability while denying others any sexuality at all. “Hot” tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than possessing knowledge of their own bodies. Because of that, as often as not, that confidence that “hot” confers comes off with their clothes. CHAPTER 2Are We Having Fun Yet?A latte can be a great prop, kind of like a cigarette in a 1940s noir movie. Giving it a stir, taking a thoughtful sip, offers you time to gather yourself, which can be pretty vital when a virtual stranger, one who is basically old enough to be your mother, asks you point blank how often you masturbate, whether you’ve ever had an orgasm, or to describe your last sexual encounter with a partner. In fact, it gives the stranger asking the questions something to focus on as well, because, let me tell you, launching into a discussion of blow jobs with someone you’ve just met, someone young enough to be your daughter, can feel just a smidge uncomfortable. So I was relieved that Sam, eighteen, a senior at a California high school, had chosen to meet me on the patio of her favorite café, even if we were sitting next to a couple of middle-aged guys in Dockers and button-downs who were clearly shocked by our conversation. Sam was tall and full-figured, with golden skin and dark, loose curls that flowed nearly to the middle of her back. Her mother, a middle school math teacher, was African American; her father, whom she had rarely seen since her parents split, was white. Her mom had remarried a man from Samoa about five years ago; Sam calls him Dad. “I knew about romance and all that from an early age because I’d meet my mom’s boyfriends,” Sam told me. “And when I went through puberty, she had books around.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Few of the heterosexual young women I interviewed had ever had an orgasm with a partner, though most, from time to time, had faked it, taking their cues from the soundtrack of porn videos. Around a third masturbated regularly, which was, I was surprised to discover, about average. About half said they had never masturbated at all. It’s hard to imagine adults would stand for such ignorance or lack of curiosity about any other body part. Most girls waved away my questions on masturbation, saying things such as “I have a boyfriend to do that” (though these were the same girls who’d never come with a partner). Beyond making them dependent on someone else for their pleasure, this was yet another inversion of what they said boys believed: that since they could masturbate on their own (it was a “man job”), they didn’t require a partner for that. As for being on the receiving end of oral sex, girls tended to describe allowing (let alone wanting) a boy to head south as an intimate, emotional act requiring a deep level of trust. “I was in a relationship with a kid for a year where I had given him head,” recalled Rachel in Chicago, “but I never felt comfortable for him to return the favor. Because . . . okay, this is weird to say, but a guy going down on you is more like a sacred thing. Like once you’ve done that, you really must be comfortable with the person, because it is not something that I’m just going to let you do.” “I’d rather have sex before I did that,” Devon agreed. “A guy is totally aware of what he looks like down there,” Rachel continued, “but I don’t know what they’re seeing on me. I can’t see it.” “Well,” I said, “there are these things called mirrors . . .” “Yeah,” Rachel said dryly. “I’m not going to do that.” It’s understandable that girls wouldn’t let a partner go “down there” if they themselves were squeamish about their genitals. They worried that their vaginas were ugly, rank, unappealing. Again, not new concerns—I recall hiding a can of FDS “feminine deodorant spray” in the back of a desk drawer in junior high—but how is it that they still persist? Hadn’t these girls heard of The Vagina Monologues? Erin, a senior at a San Francisco high school who was president of her school’s feminist issues club, boasted that she was “really good” at giving oral sex to her boyfriend of a year, but when I asked how she felt about receiving it, she wrinkled her nose. “He doesn’t go down on me,” she said. “He doesn’t want to. And I’ve never asked. Because . . .” She took a deep breath. “I don’t like my vagina,” she admitted. “I know that sucks. And I don’t know why it should be so different, but I’ve internalized that idea. “It’s like that whole thing about queefing,” she continued. “Queefing?” I asked.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This statement raises difficult and disturbing questions about how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were interpreted within British colonial thinking and practice concerning the role of ‘favoured races’ in Australia and New Zealand. Wallace concluded his lecture with some significant reflections on where accepting ‘natural selection’ as a biological and cultural metanarrative pointed, including his suggestion that ‘it must inevitably follow that the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races.’9 Wallace’s lecture creates the impression that there is scientific justification for the historical inevitability of the triumph of intellectually and morally superior Europeans over ‘mentally undeveloped populations’ or ‘savages,’10 thus improving the human condition. Darwin himself entertained similar ideas. In a letter of 1862 to Charles Kingsley – to which the Darwin Correspondence Project wisely attaches a ‘Content Warning’ on account of the unsettling views it expressed – Darwin concurs with Kingsley’s remarks (which appear to have been widespread in educated British circles of this period) that in 500 years ‘the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.’11 Most evolutionary biologists today would reject these historically specific interpretations and applications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It is, however, important to note the intellectual plausibility and cultural prominence of these interpretations in the 1860s and 1870s, and the perception that they created or encouraged – namely, that colonialism would lead to the improvement of the human race. Wallace’s specific (and demeaning) references to ‘the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander’ can hardly be overlooked. What can be learned from this? For Coyne, the integrity of the natural sciences is at stake; for others, there is a real problem arising from the abiding historical memory of the way in which science was deployed as a legitimating resource by British colonial administrators and educationalists to suppress indigenous beliefs and peoples in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth century. Anyone concerned with the public understanding of science needs to confront the ways it has been exploited, abused and distorted in the service of political and social agendas. To indigenous populations, Darwinism turned out to be yet another aspect of the western colonial attempt to deny or eliminate ‘the knowledge and cultures of these populations, their memories and ancestral links and their manner of relating to others and to nature.’12 For these people, mātauranga Māori was identity-giving, essential to their future survival and flourishing, and part of their self-understanding as a distinct people group. It is not a ‘fixed’ form of detached knowledge, but is a form of embodied knowledge, understanding, wisdom and practices which is intergenerational, being expanded as it is passed on. Yet there are clear possibilities for dialogue with other approaches here – for example, in the emerging discipline of ‘ethnoastronomy’, which allows dialogue between the ancestral Polynesian astronomical knowledge systems and their western counterparts.13

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The sex in TV and movies can be simultaneously explicit and evasive. Sex, particularly noncommitted sex, is typically presented as fun and advisable; rarely is it awkward or silly or challenging or messy or actively negotiated or preceded by discussion of contraception and disease protection. There’s always plenty of room in the backseat of those limousines, and nary a pothole in the road. Of course there are exceptions: Glee in its early seasons deftly portrayed issues surrounding teen pregnancy, sex and disability, homosexuality, bisexuality, first intercourse, fat and slut shaming, and the nature of love. Orange Is the New Black, which was beloved by many of the girls I met, brought unprecedented gender and sexual diversity to TV. The sex in Lena Dunham’s work is radically raw. One of the most realistic (if depressing) scenes ever filmed may be found in her 2010 release, Tiny Furniture. In it Aura, a newly minted college graduate played by Dunham, finally gets together with the object of her affection, a loutish chef at the restaurant where she works. A typical Hollywood version of such an encounter—which takes place outside at night, in a metal tube on a loading dock while both partners are mostly clothed—would’ve been sleek and effortless, the woman instantly orgasmic. In Dunham’s hands, it went something like this: they kissed for ten seconds; he unzipped his fly and wordlessly shoved her head downward; he told her to “suck harder,” cursed her incessantly ringing phone, and then scuttled around her body to enter her doggie style; he pounded into her until he ejaculated, which took less than a minute; he never once looked at her face. Aura’s expression shifted from aroused to confused, to slightly disappointed, to resigned. Afterward, he bid her good-bye while checking his texts. The scene is hard to watch without cringing—it’s poignant, it’s agonizing, it’s embarrassing, and it’s real.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  That phrase, “proud of my body,” continued to bedevil me. On one hand, I admired the young women’s bravado, their willingness to be overtly on the prowl, their refusal to be shamed for how they did or didn’t dress. At the same time, only certain bodies were allowed to be a source of “pride,” to be seen as sexual, to deflect shame, and Holly’s had not always been one of them. As a freshman, she was twenty-five pounds heavier than when we first met—she’d dieted and worked out all summer to lose the weight—and her wardrobe had been considerably more conservative. “I would never have worn anything skimpy because I wasn’t happy with how I looked,” she said. “Presenting myself in skimpy attire would have had a very negative impact on my mental state, because there would be those people, especially boys, who would say, ‘She’s fat and she should wear something else.’” It’s understandable that Holly would feel good about showing off the “right” body—it’s affirming to attract male approval and even female envy—but it’s hard to see her outfits as “liberating” when the threat of ridicule always lurks. One of her sorority sisters, for instance, had recently gained weight. “It’s not that she couldn’t wear skimpy clothes,” Holly said. “But she knows how she would feel if there were asshole-y boys who were like, ‘She’s a fat girl.’”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK, the streets around Megan’s campus were crowded with girls in tiny skirts, boys hoisting beers. It was the first weekend of spring, and everyone was partying. As we cut through a quiet quad, a couple of boys called out, “Come here!” to Megan. When she didn’t respond, they yelled, “Where are you going!” Then, still met with rejection, they sneered, “Sluts!” “I hate that,” Megan said, rolling her eyes. Like Holly, Megan tended to blame herself rather than a persistent double standard when she was treated disrespectfully. “Boys don’t take me seriously,” she’d told me. “I kind of ruined that. I sabotaged myself. I try to meet new people and go to parties where I can be seen differently. If they find out about me, they feel like they have more leeway to grab my ass or try to make out with me on the dance floor. No one wants to take the slutty girl on a date. It bothers me, but not enough for me to change my behavior.” Leslie Bell, the psychologist and the author of Hard to Get, has said that women are neither “primarily victims nor victors in hookup culture, but they are often misinformed.” They need, she believes, to clearly understand what they can and will not get out of casual encounters—hookups are unlikely, for instance, to help them develop the skills necessary to have either good sex or good relationships. That’s wise advice, but it doesn’t change the terms of the debate. Some girls bragged to me that they could “have sex like a guy,” by which they meant they could engage without emotion, they could objectify their partners as fully and reductively as boys often objectified them. That seemed a sad, low road to equality. What if, instead, they expected boys to be as sexually giving as girls? What if they were taught that all sexual partners, whether total strangers or intimates, deserved esteem and generosity, just as people do in any human interaction? What if they refused to settle for anything less? It was time for me to return to the land of the grownups—Megan was heading to a frat party, and we both knew that I’d never get past the bouncer at the front door. Megan fussed over me, worrying about whether I could find my way across campus alone, where I’d get a cab, whether I’d be all right. We said good-bye and hugged, and I began to walk away. “Be safe!” Megan called after me. And I thought to myself, “You too.”

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  40Part of disciplining the body is denial. We want but we dare not have. We deny ourselves certain foods. We deny ourselves rest by working out. We deny ourselves peace of mind by remaining ever vigilant over our bodies. We withhold from ourselves until we achieve a goal and then we withhold from ourselves to maintain that goal. My body is wildly undisciplined, and yet I deny myself nearly everything I desire. I deny myself the right to space when I am in public, trying to fold in on myself, to make my body invisible even though it is, in fact, grandly visible. I deny myself the right to a shared armrest because how dare I impose? I deny myself entry into certain spaces I have deemed inappropriate for a body like mine—most spaces inhabited by other people, public transportation, anywhere I could be seen or where I might be in the way, really. I deny myself bright colors in my daily clothing choices, sticking to a uniform of denim and dark shirts even though I have a far more diverse wardrobe. I deny myself certain trappings of femininity as if I do not have the right to such expression when my body does not follow society’s dictates for what a woman’s body should look like. I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve. Punishment is, in fact, one of the few things I allow myself. I deny myself my attractions. I have them, oh I do, but dare not express them, because how dare I want. How dare I confess my want? How dare I try to act on that want? I deny myself so much, and still there is so much desire throbbing beneath my surfaces. Denial merely puts what we want just beyond reach, but we still know it’s there.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  On a visit to Los Angeles, my best friend and I were drinking wine in a hotel room. During a pleasant lull in the conversation, she grabbed my hand to paint my thumbnail. She had been threatening to do this for hours and I was resisting for reasons I could not articulate. Finally, I surrendered and my hand was soft in hers as she carefully covered my nail in a lovely shade of pink. She blew on it, let it dry, added a second coat. The evening continued. I stared at my finger the next day as I sat on an airplane hurtling across the country. I could not remember the last time I had allowed myself the simple pleasure of a painted fingernail. I liked seeing my finger like that, particularly because my nail was long, nicely shaped, and I hadn’t gnawed at it as I am wont to do. Then I became self-conscious and tucked my thumb against the palm of my hand, as if I should hide my thumb, as if I had no right to feel pretty, to feel good about myself, to acknowledge myself as a woman when I am clearly not following the rules for being a woman—to be small, to take up less space. Before I got on the plane, my best friend offered me a bag of potato chips to eat, but I denied myself that. I told her, “People like me don’t get to eat food like that in public,” and it was one of the truest things I’ve ever said. Only the depth of our relationship allowed me to make this revelation and then I was ashamed for buying into these terrible narratives we fit ourselves into and I was ashamed at how I am so terrible about disciplining my body and I was ashamed by how I deny myself so much and it is still not enough. 41I hate myself. Or society tells me I am supposed to hate myself, so I guess this, at least, is something I am doing right. Or, I should say, I hate my body. I hate my weakness at being unable to control my body. I hate how I feel in my body. I hate how people see my body. I hate how people stare at my body, treat my body, comment on my body. I hate equating my self-worth with the state of my body and how difficult it is to overcome this equation. I hate how hard it is to accept my human frailties. I hate that I am letting down so many women when I cannot embrace my body at any size.

• From Confessions

  And I had thought that I therefore deferred from day to day to reject the hopes of this world, and follow Thee only, because there did not appear aught certain, whither to direct my course. And now was the day come wherein I was to be laid bare to myself, and my conscience was to upbraid me. "Where art thou now, my tongue? Thou saidst that for an uncertain truth thou likedst not to cast off the baggage of vanity; now, it is certain, and yet that burden still oppresseth thee, while they who neither have so worn themselves out with seeking it, nor for often years and more have been thinking thereon, have had their shoulders lightened, and received wings to fly away." Thus was I gnawed within, and exceedingly confounded with a horrible shame, while Pontitianus was so speaking. And he having brought to a close his tale and the business he came for, went his way; and I into myself. What said I not against myself? with what scourges of condemnation lashed I not my soul, that it might follow me, striving to go after Thee! Yet it drew back; refused, but excused not itself. All arguments were spent and confuted; there remained a mute shrinking; and she feared, as she would death, to be restrained from the flux of that custom, whereby she was wasting to death.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And so it went, the two of us speaking past each other. I did my best to reach her. I told her I needed her—for myself, not for the group. Indeed, I did need her. There were issues in my life troubling me at the time, and I yearned for her inspiration and her soothing presence. Once, several months before, I had called Paula one evening, ostensibly to discuss our plans for the group but in reality because my wife was out of town and I was feeling lonely and anxious. After our phone conversation, which went on for over an hour, I felt much better—though slightly guilty for having gotten therapy on the sly. I thought now about that long, healing phone conversation with Paula. Why hadn’t I been more honest? Why hadn’t I simply said, “Look here, Paula, can I talk to you tonight? Can you help me—I’m feeling anxious, lonely, driven? I’m having trouble sleeping.” No, no, out of the question! I preferred to take my nourishment secretly. How hypocritical, therefore, for me to have demanded that Paula ask help from me openly. So she’d covertly asked for help, using a cover story about the workshop? So what! I should have tried to comfort her without insisting she genuflect. As I contemplated Paula’s anger rock, I realized how little chance there was of salvaging our relationship. Certainly this was no time for subtlety, and I opened up to her as never before. “I need you,” I said, reminding her, as I often had before, that therapists too have needs. “And perhaps,” I went on, “I haven’t been sensitive enough to your distress. Yet I’m not a mind reader, and haven’t you for years refused all my offers to help you?” What I wanted to say was, “Give me another chance. Even if this one time I didn’t pick up on your distress, Paula, don’t leave forever.” But I had come close enough to begging that day. Paula was adamant, and we parted without touching. I put Paula out of my mind for many months until Dr. Kingsley, the young psychologist to whom she had taken such an irrational dislike, told me of a disagreeable encounter she had had with Paula. Paula had returned to the group Dr. Kingsley was leading (we now had several groups in the project) and—sounding like “Mrs. Cancer,” as the psychologist put it—had monopolized the session with a speech. I immediately phoned Paula and invited her to lunch again.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  exposed himself and David’s consequent rejection of her. The installation of the ark is followed by the singing of praise illustrated by a medley of passages from the Psalms (cf. Psalms 96, 106). The report of Nathan’s oracle, promising an everlasting dynasty to David, in 1 Chronicles 17 closely follows 2 Samuel 7. There are some crucial differences, however. First, Chronicles does not say that the Lord had given David rest (and therefore provided conditions suitable for building a temple). Second, there is no mention of punishment in the event of sin, as there is in the Deuteronomistic account in 2 Sam 7:14. Finally, the oracle concludes with an emphatic promise to “confirm him in my house and in my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever” (1 Chron 17:14). The use of the first person pronoun here may be significant. “My house,” spoken by God, can be understood as the temple. In that case the promise to the Davidic line may be linked to the temple in a way that was not at all the case in 2 Samuel 7. There follows an account of David’s wars in 1 Chronicles 18–20, drawn from 2 Samuel 8, 10, and 19–22. Most notable are the omissions. The entire episode with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11–12) is passed over, as is the rape of Tamar by Amnon and the subsequent rebellion of Absalom (2 Samuel 13–19). Also omitted are the stories of David’s kindness to Saul’s son Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9), the rebellion of Sheba the Benjaminite (2 Samuel 20), and the psalms of David in 2 Samuel 22–23. While some of these passages would have reflected well on David, there seems to be a clear tendency to avoid stories that might be regarded as embarrassing or might detract from the portrayal of David as an ideal king. Chronicles does, however, pick up the story of the census from 2 Samuel 24. Several discrepancies catch the eye. First, it is Satan who incites David to count the people. Satan is not yet here the devil, which he becomes in later Jewish and Christian mythology, but he is an adversary who puts people to the test. We have already encountered him in Zechariah 3. His most famous appearance in the Hebrew Bible is in the book of Job. Nothing more is said of his role here. In 2 Sam 24:1, David was incited by “the anger of the Lord.” Second, Levi and Benjamin are not included in the census. This may be due to

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  It is this question that appears in the form of an absolutely general and amusingly tautological principle in the first speech of the Symposium at Agathon’s house: “shame [aischynē] at what is disgraceful [aischrois] and ambition for what is noble”;2 but Pausanias immediately takes up the principle in a more serious way, differentiating between two loves, the one “whose only aim is the satisfaction of its desires,” and the other which desires above all to test the soul.3 We may also note that in the Phaedrus the first two speeches—both of which will be dismissed, the first becoming the object of an ironic recapitulation, and the second, that of a reparative palinode—pose, each in its own way, the question of “to whom should one yield?”; and that they answer the question by saying that one must yield to the person who loves. And all these first speeches appeal to a common thematics: that of transitory loves that disintegrate when the beloved comes of age, leaving him stranded;4 that of dishonorable relations that place the boy under the domination of the lover,5 compromise him in the eyes of everyone, and alienate him from his family or from honorable relations from which he could benefit;6 that of the feelings of disgust and contempt the lover might have for the boy due to the satisfactions the latter grants him, or the feelings of hatred the young man might experience for the aging man who imposes disagreeable relations on him;7 that of the feminine role the boy is led to assume, and the effects of physical and moral deterioration that this kind of relation invites;8 that of the often burdensome compensations, benefits, and services that the lover must impose on himself, obligations that he tries to escape by abandoning his erstwhile companion to shame and solitude.9 All of that constituted the elementary problematics of the pleasures and their use in the love of boys. It was these difficulties that the customs, courtship practices, and regulated games of love attempted to overcome.

• From The City of God

  How could these, and whatever like things are found in the Roman history, have become so widely known, and have been proclaimed by so great a fame, had not the Roman empire, extending far and wide, been raised to its greatness by magnificent successes? Wherefore, through that empire, so extensive and of so long continuance, so illustrious and glorious also through the virtues of such great men, the reward which they sought was rendered to their earnest aspirations, and also examples are set before us, containing necessary admonition, in order that we may be stung with shame if we shall see that we have not held fast those virtues for the sake of the most glorious city of God, which are, in whatever way, resembled by those virtues which they held fast for the sake of the glory of a terrestrial city, and that, too, if we shall feel conscious that we have held them fast, we may not be lifted up with pride, because, as the apostle says, "The sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us."[217] But so far as regards human and temporal glory, the lives of these ancient Romans were reckoned sufficiently worthy. Therefore, also, we see, in the light of that truth which, veiled in the Old Testament, is revealed in the New, namely, that it is not in view of terrestrial and temporal benefits, which divine providence grants promiscuously to good and evil, that God is to be worshipped, but in view of eternal life, everlasting gifts, and of the society of the heavenly city itself;--in the light of this truth we see that the Jews were most righteously given as a trophy to the glory of the Romans; for we see that these Romans, who rested on earthly glory, and sought to obtain it by virtues, such as they were, conquered those who, in their great depravity, slew and rejected the giver of true glory, and of the eternal city. 19. _Concerning the difference between true glory and the desire of domination._ There is assuredly a difference between the desire of human glory and the desire of domination; for, though he who has an overweening delight in human glory will be also very prone to aspire earnestly after domination, nevertheless they who desire the true glory even of human praise strive not to displease those who judge well of them. For there are many good moral qualities, of which many are competent judges, although they are not possessed by many; and by those good moral qualities those men press on to glory, honour, and domination, of whom Sallust says, "But they press on by the true way."

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy. With effort, I managed to convey this point. I got released from Lenox Hill. My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg. After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned. An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell. Many tests were scheduled and done. A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes. There had not been. A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs. There had not been. A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery. There had not been. And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body. I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner. Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen. I lay motionless on the scanner. It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean. It would be one more version of the bed in the cardiac unit: a full-body PET scan had been ordered, ergo, as night follows day, there would need to be abnormalities for the full-body PET scan to show. A day later I was given the results. There were, surprisingly, no abnormalities seen in the scan. Everyone agreed on this point. Everyone used the word “surprisingly.” Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.

• From Three Women (2019)

  There is an actual moment when it happens. She has just left his class, where he seemed so into her. His gaze was penetrating and his shirt looked like something from a department store where nobody she knew shopped. The other kids in the class laughed a lot that day and Maggie felt dislodged, lopsided, almost as if she were an exchange student. She walks outside and stands by the entrance to the high school. Formations of students walk past, laughing, gloriously unencumbered. Maggie feels she might have the most private of everyone’s private life. Maybe there is something incestuous that happens in the home of one of these other girls or boys—an uncle with a rotting back tooth and a wandering palm. Perhaps someone has killed a dog on purpose. But Maggie knows how big her secret is, how much it flies against her Catholicism and the religion of her friends, who would look at her like a broken doll in the trash if they knew. They wouldn’t think it was cool that she and everybody’s favorite teacher were “together,” sexlessly but otherwise wholly. She knows what their faces would look like and what they would say to her. But mostly she knows what they would say behind her back. The way they did after Hawaii. She stands there and tries to figure out if she really loves him or if her feelings are utterly reactionary—that they exist only because he wants her. It isn’t that she’s angry at him. It’s the opposite. She feels that he cares more than she does, suddenly, and this freaks her out. It makes her feel sad for him and it makes her feel she will suffocate under the pressure to reciprocate; and this feeling of suffocation in turn begins to lessen her liking of him, so the situation becomes cyclical. What she finally comes up with is that she cannot go back in time. If this were a boy from another school it would be easy to meet him at the bowling alley and say, This is going too fast. We need to slow down. And then wait a few hours to reply to his texts until one day she doesn’t reply at all. But she can’t do this with Aaron. He’s her teacher, and it’s simply too late. Maggie’s parents met in high school. When her mom, Arlene, was a sophomore she attended a party and saw from across the smoky room a handsome young man with penetrating eyes. He looked right at her. But she was shy and dating a classmate. Mark was one year older, and she felt all of those days younger.

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. This passage shews, that when the star had brought the Magi nearly to Jerusalem, it was hidden from them, and so they were compelled to ask in Jerusalem, where Christ should be born? and thus to manifest Him to them; on two accounts, first, to put to confusion the Jews, inasmuch as the Gentiles instructed only by sight of a star sought Christ through strange lands, while the Jews who had read the Prophets from their youth did not receive Him, though born in their country. Secondly, that the Priests, when asked where Christ should be born, might answer to their now condemnation, and while they instructed Herod, they were themselves ignorant of Him. The star went before them, to shew them the greatness of the King. AUGUSTINE. To perform its due service to the Lord, it advanced slowly, leading them to the spot. It was ministering to Him, and not ruling His fate; its light shewed the suppliants and filled the inn, shed over the walls and roof that covered the birth; and thus it disappeared. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. What wonder that a divine star should minister to the Sun of righteousness about to rise. It stood over the Child’s head, as it were, saying, ‘This is He;’ proving by its place what it had no voice to utter. GLOSS. (Anselm.) It is evident that the star must have been in the air, and close above the house where the Child was, else it would not have pointed out the exact house. AMBROSE. (in Luc. ii. 45.) The star is the way, and the way is Christ; and according to the mystery of the incarnation, Christ is a star. He is a blazing and a morning-star. Thus where Herod is, the star is not seen; where Christ is, there it is again seen, and points out the way. REMIGIUS. Or, the star figures the grace of God, and Herod the Devil. He, who by sin puts himself in the Devil’s power, loses that grace; but if he return by repentance, he soon finds that grace again which leaves him not till it have brought him to the young Child’s house, i. e. the Church. GLOSS. (ord.) Or, the star is the illumination of faith, which leads him to the nearest aid; while they turn aside to the Jews, the Magi lose it; so those who seek counsel of the bad, lose the true light. 2:10–1110. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. 11. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down, and worshipped Him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. GLOSS. This service of the star is followed by the rejoicing of the Magi. REMIGIUS. And it was not enough to say, They rejoiced, but they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.