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.

Page 39 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The City of God

  332 Books That Matter: The City of God „The irony of this punishment is that it is precisely the opposite of what we thought we would gain. We wanted what we thought was mastery and were delivered over to servitude. The pride of the transgressor was worse than the sin itself and so we are made impotent by our very desire for inordinate power. This is the deep logic of punishment: the most immediate victim of our sin is ourselves. True Emotions and Human Sexuality „Augustine is often accused of being against the body and especially of being against the sexual body. In fact, unlike other theologians of his time and many non-Christian thinkers as well, he thought sexuality was part of our created nature, created as a good by God, not a consequence of our fallenness. „For Augustine, the problem with human sexuality lies not in the fact that we have sex but in the fact that we have sex badly, and the badness with which we have sex serves him as an especially visible site for examining the calamity that has befallen us on account of what we did. „Consider why we feel so embarrassed, even ashamed about sex. Augustine’s answer is that in sexual activity, we are seen to be not simple voluntary agents, but rather a passel of involuntary appetites. ›Sexuality is distinct from other lusts because it is more totally under the command of ungovernable passion than any other sphere of human behavior. This is why it causes us shame. There were no negative emotions because there were no evils to prompt such emotions, no sources of suffering or pain outside the self, and no incoherence or rebellion within it.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I do assure you,” he replied, “that I have long thought on this point, as you think now. It has been, and is, and probably will always be a heavy misfortune to me, that I have had no necessary business to engage me, no profession to give me employment, or afford me any thing like independence. But unfortunately my own nicety, and the nicety of my friends, have made me what I am, an idle, helpless being. We never could agree in our choice of a profession. I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law, even in this less abstruse study of it, which my family approved. As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was first started to enter it—and, at length, as there was no necessity for my having any profession at all, as I might be as dashing and expensive without a red coat on my back as with one, idleness was pronounced on the whole to be most advantageous and honourable, and a young man of eighteen is not in general so earnestly bent on being busy as to resist the solicitations of his friends to do nothing. I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since.” “The consequence of which, I suppose, will be,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “since leisure has not promoted your own happiness, that your sons will be brought up to as many pursuits, employments, professions, and trades as Columella’s.” “They will be brought up,” said he, in a serious accent, “to be as unlike myself as is possible. In feeling, in action, in condition, in every thing.” “Come, come; this is all an effusion of immediate want of spirits, Edward. You are in a melancholy humour, and fancy that any one unlike yourself must be happy. But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by every body at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope. Your mother will secure to you, in time, that independence you are so anxious for; it is her duty, and it will, it must ere long become her happiness to prevent your whole youth from being wasted in discontent. How much may not a few months do?” “I think,” replied Edward, “that I may defy many months to produce any good to me.”

• From The City of God

  344 Books That Matter: The City of God For Augustine, the problem with human sexuality does not lie in the fact that we have sex; rather, the calamity lies in the fact that we have sex badly, and the badness with which we have sex serves him not as the anchor of our fallenness but rather as an especially visible site for examining the calamity that has befallen us on account of what we did. In a way, he was the original sex therapist. Consider, for a start, as Augustine does, the fact of human embarrassment, even shame at sex. Today, of course, the only thing we are typically more secretive about than our sex lives, is our salaries—which suggests a whole other kind of pathology, but one more local to our current culture, and not basic to the human condition; so I’ll let that pass here. But Augustine notes we would rather blow our cool in public, blow up in anger at everyone in public than let one other person see us having sex with our rightful spouse. Why do we feel so embarrassed, even ashamed, at so natural and appropriate an act? Augustine’s answer is that in sexual activity, we are seen to be not simple voluntary agents, but rather most vividly a passel of involuntary appetites. Here is the key, sexuality is distinct from other lusts because, Augustine thinks, it is more totally under the command of ungovernable passion, more totally than pretty much any other sphere of human behavior. This is why it causes us shame. Augustine is not complaining here of the loss of a kind of Stoic [inaudible 19:41] control, but rather the disappearance of the simple harmony of self with itself. The soul is ashamed of the body’s resistance to its commands, humiliated by that resistance. Anger and lust are not naturally part of the human’s healthy state before the Fall. After the Fall, it seems that all the world is a matter of domination, including not just inter-human relations, but even relations wholly inside the person. We’re kind of constantly at war with even ourselves. This is how he reads Adam and Eve’s discovery of their own nakedness and their shame at it—the pain of knowledge, and in particular their partial knowledge. Their eyes were opened, he says, opened to their

• From The City of God

  345 Lecture 16 Transcript—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) sin, but not enough opened enough to see God’s grace. This for Augustine is what Genesis means when Adam and Eve, after eating the fruit, have their eyes opened. This is the nakedness by which they feel ashamed. What exactly is it about sex that Augustine thinks we find so fundamentally embarrassing, even humiliating? Consider the experience of sex that your average human. Crucial here is the character of sexual activity, for Augustine, as effacing self-control, even, he thinks, effacing mental experience altogether; he talks about the eclipse of the mind, the eclipse of rationality as you move toward climax. For Augustine, this is, of course, explicitly a masculine description, though he wouldn’t think women are in a better state in terms of their mental control during sex either, for this is a human condition in a way. In our fallen state, Augustine submits, we do not experience that loss of control in positive terms, as a liberation from subjectivity or an escape from self. Rather we experience this loss of control as an event of domination by our lusts. Sexuality is a sign of our sinfulness for him, not as some sort of synecdoche of magnificent demonic heroism; instead, sexuality here is experienced as a kind of form of captivity, of kidnapping. Note the irony here—for Augustine, the whole reason this lust exists is because we rebelled against God because we did not want to serve God. So now, instead, all serve, not themselves even, but one part of themselves. Furthermore, this lust is an untrustworthy master. Augustine points out, sometimes we cannot be aroused when we want to have sex, and sometimes we are aroused when we do not want to have sex. For Augustine, thinking exclusively here in terms of the male body, what we call erectile dysfunction is as much a sign of the Fall as is an unwanted erection. In fact, wanted erection, unwanted erection, or a wanted erection that doesn’t appear, both are for him forms of erectile dysfunction. It’s amazing that he said this and that he said it out loud. In a context of the very macho culture of Roman antiquity,

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Henriette decided to take her new extra-big ass on a walk to the noisy quay where the Masturboats docked. She wanted to feed the gulls and see what was up. First she got in the shower to wash herself so that she could be clean all day and the world wouldn’t know what a totally freaky, filthy-minded, cocksucking whore of a princess she actually was. She washed her hair and her face and her body, and last of all she washed her pussy and her huge deep asscrack. Her pussy she washed by holding it spread open with her right hand and splashing water up at it a bunch of times, and her asscrack she washed by jamming the cold soap between her pleasantly joggling cheeks and working it around a few times. Washing the asscrack wasn’t really that difficult; rinsing was trickier. Soap could burn later if you didn’t rinse every bit of it away, Henriette knew from experience—burn like a bastard—and you couldn’t just rely on the water that was coursing down your back to do the job. So Henriette employed what she thought of as the Aswan Dam method. She cupped her left hand in the shape of a C, and then she pressed this C below her anus, but before her pussyhole, in the no-man’s-land known as the perineum, which is a word that comes from the Greek word for “pine barrens.” She cupped her left hand there and made a seal against her asscheeks so that the water as it coursed down her back would be caught in this temporary well or spillway that she had created. She had in effect dammed her ass temporarily. When her hand was full she began agitating it, still keeping the seal intact—steadily slooshing the water in waves against her anus for ten seconds or so. Then she opened her fingers to let that rinse effluent fall away. Again she made the C-cup with her left hand and let it fill, and again sloshed it vigorously. At last she knew that she had a truly clean, well-rinsed asscrack, ready to greet the day. She dressed in her new form-fitting ass jeans and went strutting outside. She walked down the Avenue of the Men Who Need to Suck on Twat Every Day and took a left on Upskirt Street. There she heard a voice calling, “Wait, stop, hello, wait!” Ruzty hurried up in his torn jeans, out of breath. His T-shirt was old and red, and it said “Phillies.” “I request to squeeze your ass,” he said, in his foreign voice. “You will notice that I have the ass-squeezer’s license.” “Do you now?” asked Henriette. “Good for you. What else do you have?”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Henriette decided to take her new extra-big ass on a walk to the noisy quay where the Masturboats docked. She wanted to feed the gulls and see what was up. First she got in the shower to wash herself so that she could be clean all day and the world wouldn’t know what a totally freaky, filthy-minded, cocksucking whore of a princess she actually was. She washed her hair and her face and her body, and last of all she washed her pussy and her huge deep asscrack. Her pussy she washed by holding it spread open with her right hand and splashing water up at it a bunch of times, and her asscrack she washed by jamming the cold soap between her pleasantly joggling cheeks and working it around a few times. Washing the asscrack wasn’t really that difficult; rinsing was trickier. Soap could burn later if you didn’t rinse every bit of it away, Henriette knew from experience—burn like a bastard—and you couldn’t just rely on the water that was coursing down your back to do the job. So Henriette employed what she thought of as the Aswan Dam method. She cupped her left hand in the shape of a C, and then she pressed this C below her anus, but before her pussyhole, in the no-man’s-land known as the perineum, which is a word that comes from the Greek word for “pine barrens.” She cupped her left hand there and made a seal against her asscheeks so that the water as it coursed down her back would be caught in this temporary well or spillway that she had created. She had in effect dammed her ass temporarily. When her hand was full she began agitating it, still keeping the seal intact—steadily slooshing the water in waves against her anus for ten seconds or so. Then she opened her fingers to let that rinse effluent fall away. Again she made the C-cup with her left hand and let it fill, and again sloshed it vigorously. At last she knew that she had a truly clean, well-rinsed asscrack, ready to greet the day. She dressed in her new form-fitting ass jeans and went strutting outside. She walked down the Avenue of the Men Who Need to Suck on Twat Every Day and took a left on Upskirt Street. There she heard a voice calling, “Wait, stop, hello, wait!” Ruzty hurried up in his torn jeans, out of breath. His T-shirt was old and red, and it said “Phillies.” “I request to squeeze your ass,” he said, in his foreign voice. “You will notice that I have the ass-squeezer’s license.” “Do you now?” asked Henriette. “Good for you. What else do you have?”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “Basically, that’s it,” said Ruzty. “Everybody is trying to keep going, but then they turn out to be broke. The size of what they owe is how rich they are. If they can borrow a billion dollars, that makes them rich. Really they have nothing. But never mind, because I have”—he pulled out a folded sheet of paper and patted it—“an ass-squeezer’s license, signed. This means I can walk up to a girl like you with a big, beautiful ass and tell her I want to squeeze it, and she has to let me.” “Let’s see the license,” said Henriette. Ruzty waved it at her. “Very well. Where?” “My hotel.” They went up to his suite at the Portalino Extended Stay Suites. “How do you want to squeeze it?” Henriette asked. “I want you up on the bed, as soon as possible.” Henriette took off her roomy denim ass pants and arranged herself bending forward on the bed like a person skiing down a slalom course. She felt his hands on her, squeezing their way along her backthighs and finding her lower backcheeks and massaging her deeply, with an interest in all her cores and centers. Then she felt his cock pushing strangely at the seams of her underwear. “No, now, Ruzty,” she said. “You have an ass-squeezer’s license, not a pussy-fucker’s license.” “Wait a second, yes, I do, I do, I just forgot to show it,” Ruzty said, rummaging in his pockets. He had a slightly desperate sound. He waved another folded piece of paper. “I’ve been saving it for this moment.” Henriette looked the paper over. “You just typed this yourself and printed it out, didn’t you?” Ruzty looked chagrined. “Yes.” “Is the ass-squeezer’s license forged as well?” “Yes,” he said. “Daggett said he couldn’t give me a real one because there are too many. I was wrong, I know it now. I went outside the proper channels.” Henriette said, “Ruzty, you very bad boy.” Ruzty said, “I’m sorry.” She looked at his eyes, which traveled to her ass. Then she caught sight of his remarkably solid but curved piece of equipment. She made a tiny hissing sound and said, “Oh, might as well go ahead anyway. Fuck me, horny sailor.” Ruzty’s dick bounced with gladness. Henriette gnawed the sheet and waited. She felt his cock helmet finding the sloppy gates. Then impulsively she turned onto her back. “Take me where I can see you,” she said. He sank over her, and she led him inside, forcing his cock to unbend. She gave him the Cook’s tour of her innerness. His backbone worked lithely; his bottom, swiveling, rose and fell. Henriette straightened her knees, so that her feet were up in the air, running. She laughed because it felt so good, and she said, “Ruzty, you are a swervy-dicked master of the fuck! Don’t stop! Fill my bitchgroove!”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “Stuff me full of your hot substance, oh mighty king, for I am Unique,” the girl would say, as she knelt over him on the throne, planting her hands on his enormous chest. And at the moment of their perfect union, King Bohuslav would seize his black braided beard and hold it to her mouth, whereupon she would clamp down on it to stifle her cries. Thus the memory of innumerable couplings entered his beard. This went on for almost ten years. Bohu’s beard by now had a huge double braid and looked like a loaf of pumpernickel challah. It was said by some in the court that if you held your ear to his beard, you could hear the pleasure cries of a thousand women. One night, though, a Unique of uncommon intelligence was lacing up the penis sandal. King Bohuslav groped for her breast and tried to kiss her, but suddenly she pulled out a large pair of shears and lopped off his beard with one powerful snip. King Bohuslav let out an agonized bellow and lost consciousness. The girl ran out the side door and hid carefully for a week in the hills with a friend. Meanwhile the prince had sent guardsmen and black dogs out in search of his braided beard. “How can we hide it?” asked the girl of her friend. The friend knew the arts of pharmacy, and the two young women boiled the beard until it dissolved. Then they skimmed off the purple scum and buried it, and they purified and distilled the barbaric essence, mixing it with the liqueurs of fennel and saps of wild spinach, making of this mixture an uncommonly powerful aphrodisiac. The two women fled to Paris and grew wealthy selling Prince Bohu’s beardwater, under the name Gouttelettes de Bonheur, or Droplets of Happiness. Even much diluted, the liquid had a startling effect on anyone, male or female, who tasted it. The prince, meanwhile, took the loss of his beard as a warning. He ended his dalliance with Uniques and built a large hospital so that his wife wouldn’t go away on Thursdays. Seventeen of his penis sandals are on view in the museum of the House of Holes. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Rhumpa Makes Her Come Video [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Rhumpa emerged from her shower in a hotel bathrobe, with her hair in a towel turban. Daggett had arranged fourteen bras on the bed, sorted neatly by color. “These are all roughly your size, I believe,” he said primly. She looked at them with a secret smile. “They’re all very nice,” she said. “Does one in particular call out?” She shook her head no.

• From The City of God

  337 Lecture 16 Transcript—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) could turn the model on them, and himself, and show them that the temptation, to smugly despise others, that they were in the process of some ugly despising the Donatists for inhabiting, was just what they themselves were doing, in despising the Donatists. So these temptations in other words he showed, also gripped themselves. Augustine’s strategy here reminds me of that old joke about the guy who says, “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide everyone into two kinds, and those thoughtful and nuanced people, like me, who don’t do that.” In response to such moral dualists, we’ll see Augustine resist the temptation toward such polarization. The practice of drawing lines, of marking an inside and an outside, is pretty much inescapable in human life; but we must try as best we can, Augustine thinks, to make those boundaries porous and provisional. There is a second reason why he must seek such a way to distinguish these two cities, a reason rooted in the more permanent facts of human moral psychology. Augustine must account for what we can call the obscurity of vice, the fact that sin since it is disguised inside the self, is not obviously and reliably trackable in non-contestable ways. Augustine is alive to the perilous and ironic character of the human moral adventure, manifest here in terms of the fact that we simply cannot count on being ourselves morally durable, either for good or for evil. Saints and sinners we might from time to time be, but we are rarely if ever reliably or predictably so. This is, as it were, annoying. Where is the key to the humans’ behavior to be found, then? Augustine roots it in psychology, in the inner life of humans, in how humans are innately constituted, in their souls. Remember, psychology just means the logic of the soul, the logic of the succos. For in the Fall, human nature was changed, he says in Book 14. And it is as regards humans’ divergent attitudes toward that change that Augustine thinks we can begin to differentiate the two cities. In principle, this distinction is theoretically apprehensible, as belief informs behavior, so the inner psychology of each of us should be manifest in the outer behavior.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Dirt crawled in the grey mop hung out of the windows to dry. John thought with shame and horror, yet in angry hardness of heart: He who is filthy , let him be filthy still. Then he looked at his mother, seeing, as though she were someone else, the dark, hard lines running downward from her eyes, and the deep, perpetual scowl in her forehead, and the downturned, tightened mouth, and the strong, thin, brown, and bony hands; and the phrase turned against him like a two-edged sword, for was it not he, in his false pride and his evil imagination, who was filthy? Through a storm of tears that did not reach his eyes, he stared at the yellow room; and the room shifted, the light of the sun darkened, and his mother’s face changed. Her face became the face that he gave her in his dreams, the face that had been hers in a photograph he had seen once, long ago, a photograph taken before he was born. This face was young and proud, uplifted, with a smile that made the wide mouth beautiful and glowed in the enormous eyes. It was the face of a girl who knew that no evil could undo her, and who could laugh, surely, as his mother did not laugh now. Between the two faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate her. Now she saw him and she asked, breaking off her conversation with Roy: ‘You hungry, little sleepyhead?’ ‘Well! About time you was getting up,’ said Sarah. He moved to the table and sat down, feeling the most bewildering panic of his life, a need to touch things, the table and chairs and the walls of the room, to make certain that the room existed and that he was in the room. He did not look at his mother, who stood up and went to the stove to heat his breakfast. But he asked, in order to say something to her, and to hear his own voice: ‘What we got for breakfast?’ He realized, with some shame, that he was hoping she had prepared a special breakfast for him on his birthday. ‘What you think we got for breakfast?’ Roy asked scornfully. ‘You got a special craving for something?’ John looked at him. Roy was not in a good mood. ‘I ain’t said nothing to you,’ he said. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said Roy, in the shrill, little-girl tone he knew John hated. ‘What’s the matter with you to-day?’ John asked, angry, and trying at the same time to lend his voice as husky a pitch as possible. ‘Don’t you let Roy bother you,’ said their mother. ‘He cross as two sticks this morning.’ ‘Yeah,’ said John, ‘I reckon.’ He and Roy watched each other. Then his plate was put before him: hominy grits and a scrap of bacon.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  But on the surface, Rhea did not know I was gay, and I did not tell her. Homosexuality was outside the party line at that time; therefore, Rhea defined it as “bad,” and her approval was important to me. Without words, we both more or less agreed never to allude to what was obviously the guiding passion of my life, my involvement with those female friends to whom Rhea always referred as “your cool-voiced young women.” Rhea and I loved each other, yet she would have professed horror had she been forced to imagine an extension of our love into the physical. Fortunately, or maybe because of her attitudes, I was never physically attracted to Rhea. She was a beautiful, strong, and vivacious woman, but I have never found straight women physically appealing. Self-protective as this mechanism is, it also has served me as a sixth sense. In those days, whenever two or more lesbians got together, the most frequent topic of conversation was “Do you think she’s gay?” It was a constant question about any woman we happened to be interested in. Nine times out of ten, if I felt a strong physical pull toward a woman, whatever her protective coloration might be, she would usually turn out to be either gay, or so strongly women-oriented that being gay became only a question of time or opportunity. Always before, the few lesbians I had known were women whom I had met within other existing contexts of my life. We shared some part of a world common to us both—school or work or poetry or some other interest beyond our sexual identity. Our love for women was a fact that became known only after we were already acquainted and connected through some other reason. In the bars, we met women with whom we would have had no other contact, had we not all been gay. There, Muriel and I were pretty well out of whatever was considered important. That was namely drinking, softball, dyke-chic fashion, dancing, and who was sleeping with whom at whose expense. All other questions of survival were considered a very private affair. When Muriel came into the city on weekends that spring, she stayed at the YWCA over on Hudson Street in the West Village, which is now a nursing home. We spent the weekend in her tiny room making love, in between barring and trips back to Seventh Street for something to eat. Sometimes, we didn’t have the money to rent a room at the Y, because I was not working again and she only had a part-time job in Stamford. Then, we braved Rhea’s bewildered and questioning glances and stayed at the apartment. After Muriel left one Sunday, Rhea and I talked. “Muriel’s around a lot, isn’t she?” I could see Rhea remembering the weeping Bea in the stairwell. “I love Muriel very much, Rhea.” “I can see that.” Rhea laughed. “But how do you love her?” “In every way I know how!”

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And he dropped his eyes to the mantelpiece, lifting one by one the objects that adorned it. The mantelpiece held, in brave confusion, photographs, greeting cards, flowered mottoes, two silver candlesticks that held no candles, and a green metal serpent, poised to strike. To-day in his apathy John stared at them, not seeing; he began to dust them with the exaggerated care of the profoundly preoccupied. One of the mottoes was pink and blue, and proclaimed in raised letters, which made the work of dusting harder: Come in the evening, or come in the morning, Come when you’re looked for, or come without warning, A thousand welcomes you’ll find here before you, And the oftener you come here, the more we’ll adore you. And the other, in letters of fire against a background of gold, stated: For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John iii , 16 These somewhat unrelated sentiments decorated either side of the mantelpiece, obscured a little by the silver candlesticks. Between these two extremes, the greeting cards, received year after year, on Christmas, or Easter, or birthdays, trumpeted their glad tidings; while the green metal serpent, perpetually malevolent, raised its head proudly in the midst of these trophies, biding the time to strike. Against the mirror, like a procession, the photographs were arranged. These photographs were the true antiques of the family, which seemed to feel that a photograph should commemorate only the most distant past. The photographs of John and Roy, and of the two girls, which seemed to violate this unspoken law, served only in fact to prove it most iron-hard: they had all been taken in infancy, a time and a condition that the children could not remember. John in his photograph lay naked on a white counterpane, and people laughed and said that it was cunning. But John could never look at it without feeling shame and anger that his nakedness should be here so unkindly revealed. None of the other children was naked; no, Roy lay in his crib in a white gown and grinned toothlessly into the camera, and Sarah, sombre at the age of six months, wore a white bonnet, and Ruth was held in her mother’s arms. When people looked at these photographs and laughed, their laughter differed from the laughter with which they greeted the naked John. For this reason, when visitors tried to make advances to John he was sullen, and they, feeling that for some reason he disliked them, retaliated by deciding that he was a ‘funny’ child. Among the other photographs there was one of Aunt Florence, his father’s sister, in which her hair, in the old-fashioned way, was worn high and tied with a ribbon; she had been very young when this photograph was taken, and had just come North.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  When Muriel and I received stares and titters on the streets of the West Village, or in the Lower East Side market, it was a toss-up as to whether it was because we were a Black woman and a white woman together, or because we were gay. Whenever that happened, I half-agreed with Muriel. But I also knew that Felicia and I shared both a battle and a strength that was unavailable to our other friends. We acknowledged it in private, and it set us apart, in a world that was closed to our white friends. It was even closed to Muriel, as much as I would have liked to include her. And because that world was closed to them, it was easy for even lovers to ignore it, dismiss it, pretend it didn’t exist, believe the fallacy that there was no difference between us at all. But that difference was real and important, even if nobody else seemed to feel that way, sometimes not even Flee herself, tired as she was of explaining why she didn’t go swimming without a bathing cap, or like to get caught in the rain. Between Muriel and me, then, there was one way in which I would always be separate, and it was going to be my own secret knowledge, if it was going to be my own secret pain. I was Black and she was not, and that was a difference between us that had nothing to do with better or worse, or the outside world’s craziness. Over time I came to realize that it colored our perceptions and made a difference in the ways I saw pieces of the worlds we shared, and I was going to have to deal with that difference outside of our relationship. This was the first separation, the piece outside love. But I turned away short of the meanings of it, afraid to examine the truths difference might lead me to, afraid they might carry Muriel and me away from each other. So I tried not to think of our racial differences too often. I sometimes pretended to agree with Muriel, that the difference did not in fact exist, that she and all gay-girls were just as oppressed as any Black person, certainly as any Black woman. But when I did think about it, it was as something that set me apart, but also protected me. I knew there was nothing I could do, including wearing skirts and being straight, that would make me acceptable to the little old Ukrainian ladies who sunned themselves on the stoops of Seventh Street and pointed fingers at Muriel and me as we walked past, arm in arm.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And she certainly was; through a bitterness that only the hand of God could have laid on her, this same hand brought her through. Florence and Elizabeth worked as cleaning-women in a high, vast, stony office-building on Wall Street. They arrived in the evening and spent the night going through the great deserted halls and the silent offices with mops and pails and brooms. It was terrible work, and Elizabeth hated it; but it was at night, and she had taken it joyfully, since it meant that she could take care of John herself all day and not have to spend extra money to keep him in a nursery. She worried about him all night long, of course, but at least at night he was sleeping. She could only pray that the house would not burn down, that he would not fall out of bed or, in some mysterious way, turn on the gas-burner, and she had asked the woman next door, who unhappily drank too much, to keep an eye out for him. This woman, with whom she sometimes spent an hour or so in the afternoons, and her landlady, were the only people she saw. She had stopped seeing Richard’s friends because, for some reason, she did not want them to know about Richard’s child; and because, too, the moment that he was dead it became immediately apparent on both sides how little they had in common. And she did not seek new people; rather, she fled from them. She could not bear, in her changed and fallen state, to submit herself to the eyes of others. The Elizabeth that she had been was buried far away—with her lost and silent father, with her aunt, in Richard’s grave—and the Elizabeth she had become she did not recognize, she did not want to know. But one night, when work was ended, Florence invited her to share a cup of coffee in the all-night coffee shop nearby. Elizabeth had, of course, been invited before by other people—the night watchman, for example—but she had always said no. She pleaded the excuse of her baby, whom she must rush home to feed. She was pretending in those days to be a young widow, and she wore a wedding ring. Very shortly, fewer people asked her, and she achieved the reputation of being ‘stuck up.’ Florence had scarcely ever spoken to her before she arrived at this merciful unpopularity; but Elizabeth had noticed Florence. She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous. She was extremely unpopular also and she had nothing whatever to do with any of the women she worked with. She was, for one thing, a good deal older, and she seemed to have nothing to laugh or gossip about.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  His hands, rigid to the very fingertips, moved outward and back against his hips, his sightless eyes looked upward, and he began to dance. Then his hands closed into fists, and his head snapped downward, his sweat loosening the grease that slicked down his hair; and the rhythm of all the others quickened to match Elisha’s rhythm; his thighs moved terribly against the cloth of his suit, his heels beat on the floor, and his fists moved beside his body as though he were beating his own drum. And so, for a while, in the centre of the dancers, head down, fists beating, on, on, unbearably, until it seemed the walls of the church would fall for very sound; and then, in a moment, with a cry, head up, arms high in the air, sweat pouring from his forehead, and all his body dancing as though it would never stop. Sometimes he did not stop until he fell—until he dropped like some animal felled by a hammer—moaning, on his face. And then a great moaning filled the church. There was sin among them. One Sunday, when regular service was over, Father James had uncovered sin in the congregation of the righteous. He had uncovered Elisha and Ella Mae. They had been ‘walking disorderly’; they were in danger of straying from the truth. And as Father James spoke of the sin that he knew they had not committed yet, of the unripe fig plucked too early from the tree—to set the children’s teeth on edge—John felt himself grow dizzy in his seat and could not look at Elisha where he stood, beside Ella Mae, before the altar. Elisha hung his head as Father James spoke, and the congregation murmured. And Ella Mae was not so beautiful now as she was when she was singing and testifying, but looked like a sullen, ordinary girl. Her full lips were loose and her eyes were black—with shame, or rage, or both. Her grandmother, who had raised her, sat watching quietly, with folded hands. She was one of the pillars of the church, a powerful evangelist and very widely known. She said nothing in Ella Mae’s defence, for she must have felt, as the congregation felt, that Father James was only exercising his clear and painful duty; he was responsible, after all, for Elisha, as Praying Mother Washington was responsible for Ella Mae.

• From The City of God

  346 Books That Matter: The City of God this was an almost unspeakable thing that Augustine says. And to many people, it’s still squirm-worthy today despite the many ads we see on TV. But whether the immediate experienced problem was, whether it was a lack of desire or an excess of it, the key, he wants to bring to our attention here, is that this most intimate, most existentially consequential act is experienced by us as reminding us of our sunderedness from ourselves, and our subjugation to blind, dumb lust. Finally, even if we do manage to have sex, Augustine thinks the pleasure we actually take from the act is so overlaid with appetitive lust and reflexivity that we have merely empty or vain pleasure. The true joy of sexuality for Augustine is in the mutuality and creativity of new life, both the life together of the spouses and the life that their sex will produce in children. When sex becomes lust, it loses something, our lust gets in the way, as it were, of our sex, making it one more kind of soliloquy about how we have performed once again our mastery over things outside of us. In this way, for Augustine after the Fall no one actually has sex, people, just a series of extremely proximate masturbatory acts. If this is so, then what is—or what was— sex supposed to be like? The possibility of real sex was available in Eden, Augustine against many theologians at this time, insisted that Adam and Eve were going to be fruitful and multiply, that sex would have happened in Eden. But after the Fall that possibility was lost. It’s only possible now to have the capabilities for it restored in the eschaton. Though whether we’ll have sex in the eschaton is a topic for another time. Until then, though, we are condemned to have nothing but fallen sex. What would edenic sex have been like? The organs would have been obedient to the mind, Augustine said, so sexual agency would have been under both parties’ rational voluntary control. It’s very difficult for us to imagine what sexual agency would be like; but that just suggests the problem we have—that we cannot imagine sexuality

• From The City of God

  319 Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13) their body what others can never do, and, indeed, scarcely believe when they hear of others doing. Some people can move their ears, either one at a time, or both together; some, without moving the head, can bring the hair down upon the forehead, and move the whole scalp back and forth at will. Some, by lightly pressing their stomach, bring up an incredible number and variety of things they have swallowed, and produce whatever they please, quite whole, as if out of a sack. Some so accurately mimic the voices of birds and beasts and other men, that, unless they are seen, no one knows the difference. Some people produce at will such musical sounds from their behind—without any smell—that they seem indeed to be singing from that region. I myself knew a man who was accustomed to sweat whenever he wished. It is well known that some weep when they please and shed a flood of tears. This gives you a sense of what Augustine thought was the nature of the damage to human bodies caused by the Fall. It’s also an incredible hook for undergrads by the way. Furthermore, all inherit this punishment, the punishment of a broken, physical capacity, and a broken joint between the soul and the body for all inherit the condition. In Adam, and then also in Eve, human nature, is vitiated and degraded. And this sin was not a relapse into the rudimentary condition of infancy, Augustine says, Rather, [he goes on] human nature in him [in Adam] was vitiated and altered, so that he experienced the rebellion and disobedience of desire in his body, and was bound by the necessity of dying, and he procured offspring in the same condition to which his fault and its punishment had reduced him, that is, liable to sin and death. So, all suffer this death, for while our first parents were created upright, from their first wills' perversion followed a chain of disasters which affect us all, as we were all in Adam. Sometimes people find this account of inherited sin shamefully primitive as if Augustine’s account of inherited sin makes our sexual generation the reason why we were sinners, burdening each generation with the helpless

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  It was somehow on that Sunday, a Sunday shortly before his birthday, that John first realized that this was the life awaiting him—realized it consciously, as something no longer far off, but imminent, coming closer day by day. John’s birthday fell on a Saturday in March, in 1935. He awoke on this birthday morning with the feeling that there was menace in the air around him—that something irrevocable had occurred in him. He stared at a yellow stain on the ceiling just above his head. Roy was still smothered in the bedclothes, and his breath came and went with a small, whistling sound. There was no other sound anywhere; no one in the house was up. The neighbours’ radios were all silent, and his mother hadn’t yet risen to fix his father’s breakfast. John wondered at his panic, then wondered about the time; and then (while the yellow stain on the ceiling slowly transformed itself into a woman’s nakedness) he remembered that it was his fourteenth birthday and that he had sinned. His first thought, nevertheless, was: ‘Will anyone remember?’ For it had happened, once or twice, that his birthday had passed entirely unnoticed, and no one had said ‘Happy Birthday, Johnny,’ or given him anything—not even his mother. Roy stirred again and John pushed him away, listening to the silence. On other mornings he awoke hearing his mother singing in the kitchen, hearing his father in the bedroom behind him grunting and muttering prayers to himself as he put on his clothes; hearing, perhaps, the chatter of Sarah and the squalling of Ruth, and the radios, the clatter of pots and pans, and the voices of all the folk nearby. This morning not even the cry of a bed-spring disturbed the silence, and John seemed, therefore, to be listening to his own unspeaking doom. He could believe, almost, that he had awakened late on that great getting-up morning; that all the saved had been transformed in the twinkling of an eye, and had risen to meet Jesus in the clouds, and that he was left, with his sinful body, to be bound in hell a thousand years. He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 23. --What We are to Think of the Example of Cato, Who Slew Himself Because Unable to Endure Caesar's Victory. Besides Lucretia, of whom enough has already been said, our advocates of suicide have some difficulty in finding any other prescriptive example, unless it be that of Cato, who killed himself at Utica. His example is appealed to, not because he was the only man who did so, but because he was so esteemed as a learned and excellent man, that it could plausibly be maintained that what he did was and is a good thing to do. But of this action of his, what can I say but that his own friends, enlightened men as he, prudently dissuaded him, and therefore judged his act to be that of a feeble rather than a strong spirit, and dictated not by honorable feeling forestalling shame, but by weakness shrinking from hardships? Indeed, Cato condemns himself by the advice he gave to his dearly loved son. For if it was a disgrace to live under Caesar's rule, why did the father urge the son to this disgrace, by encouraging him to trust absolutely to Caesar's generosity? Why did he not persuade him to die along with himself? If Torquatus was applauded for putting his son to death, when contrary to orders he had engaged, and engaged successfully, with the enemy, why did conquered Cato spare his conquered son, though he did not spare himself? Was it more disgraceful to be a victor contrary to orders, than to submit to a victor contrary to the received ideas of honor? Cato, then, cannot have deemed it to be shameful to live under Caesar's rule; for had he done so, the father's sword would have delivered his son from this disgrace. The truth is, that his son, whom he both hoped and desired would be spared by Caesar, was not more loved by him than Caesar was envied the glory of pardoning him (as indeed Caesar himself is reported to have said [79] ); or if envy is too strong a word, let us say he was ashamed that this glory should be his. [79] Plutarch's Life of Cato, 72.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 9. --Of the Reasons for Administering Correction to Bad and Good Together. What, then, have the Christians suffered in that calamitous period, which would not profit every one who duly and faithfully considered the following circumstances? First of all, they must humbly consider those very sins which have provoked God to fill the world with such terrible disasters; for although they be far from the excesses of wicked, immoral, and ungodly men, yet they do not judge themselves so clean removed from all faults as to be too good to suffer for these even temporal ills. For every man, however laudably he lives, yet yields in some points to the lust of the flesh. Though he do not fall into gross enormity of wickedness, and abandoned viciousness, and abominable profanity, yet he slips into some sins, either rarely or so much the more frequently as the sins seem of less account. But not to mention this, where can we readily find a man who holds in fit and just estimation those persons on account of whose revolting pride, luxury, and avarice, and cursed iniquities and impiety, God now smites the earth as His predictions threatened? Where is the man who lives with them in the style in which it becomes us to live with them? For often we wickedly blind ourselves to the occasions of teaching and admonishing them, sometimes even of reprimanding and chiding them, either because we shrink from the labor or are ashamed to offend them, or because we fear to lose good friendships, lest this should stand in the way of our advancement, or injure us in some worldly matter, which either our covetous disposition desires to obtain, or our weakness shrinks from losing. So that, although the conduct of wicked men is distasteful to the good, and therefore they do not fall with them into that damnation which in the next life awaits such persons, yet, because they spare their damnable sins through fear, therefore, even though their own sins be slight and venial, they are justly scourged with the wicked in this world, though in eternity they quite escape punishment. Justly, when God afflicts them in common with the wicked, do they find this life bitter, through love of whose sweetness they declined to be bitter to these sinners.