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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  about what sort of Christianity to teach the uninstructed). Valdés was an assiduous commentator on and translator of the Bible. There is evidence that he read Luther with interest. However, he parted company with north European evangelicals in his belief that the Spirit progressively offered its light to Christians: he believed that some favoured children of God would be led to ever deeper union with Christ, and the scriptures might not be the only or chief illumination on the way. He was notably reticent in what he said about the Trinity, perhaps because he regarded it as one of the deeper mysteries of the faith for initiates, but perhaps for more dangerous reasons. He also had little to say about the sacraments or the institutional Church – an Erasmian indifference, perhaps, but one has to remember his Jewish converso ancestry and weigh up these silences. Among the Valdesians, Vittoria Colonna became the subject of discreet pressure from Reginald Pole, who urged this prominent patron of the Spirituali more fully to acknowledge that the institutional structures of the Church were of vital importance in the Christian life. Pole’s insistence on loyalty to the visible Church did seem more plausible from the mid-1530s, because now the papal machine seemed at last to be harnessing its potential resources. Poor Pope Clement VII, overwhelmed by multiple catastrophes which had included Martin Luther, died in 1534. His successor, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, came from the same northern Italian aristocratic circle as Clement, and devoted much of his fifteen years as Pope Paul III to indulging his scandalously greedy children and family, just like his notorious predecessor and former patron Alexander VI, the Borgia pope. Paul was nevertheless also a perceptive and intelligent Renaissance prince anxious to capitalize on all his assets. While he made two of his teenage grandsons cardinals in 1535, the Pope additionally bestowed cardinals’ hats on respected promoters of reform: Pole, Contarini, Carafa, Jacopo Sadoleto and the imprisoned English bishop John Fisher. Fisher’s pleasure in this honour may have been qualified by the effect of the news on an infuriated Henry VIII, who immediately had him beheaded. The Pope even appointed Contarini, Pole, Carafa and other reformers to a commission to consider faults in the Church, and although this commission, De emendanda ecclesia, confined itself in its report of 1537 to recommending an administrative shake-up, its frankly expressed picture of corruption and misused resources immediately proved a mine of congenial information for Protestant polemicists. Paul then began making plans for a general council of the Church, much to the alarm of northern European rulers who had broken with papal obedience. The Emperor Charles V was also extremely suspicious, and his obstruction was one of the main forces postponing the council meeting for nearly

• From Action (2014)

  Once, someone I trusted took advantage of me in my own home when I was supremely trashed. His best friend, my boyfriend, was asleep in our bed one room away. The other time, as a teenage person, I was berated into doing something I didn’t want to. I “acquiesced” to that boyfriend’s physical advances because I was stoned and found it cumbersome to keep repeating “no” and moving his hand off of, then out of, the fly of my jeans. I didn’t consider it “real” rape because he wasn’t aggressively forceful with me. No bruises? I must have wanted it after all, even though I verbally reprised over and over that I didn’t. Everyone owes it to themselves to trust their feelings and decisions far more than that. How can you tell if some malcontent’s intentions for you are dangerous or don’t account for you as an equal person? Well, sometimes you can’t. There’s no use, or logic, in beating yourself up in those cases: YEAH, YOU ARE HORRIBLE AND IN THE WRONG FOR NOT GUESSING THAT SOMETHING THAT IS USUALLY EXCITING AND WONDERFUL WAS GOING TO BE USED TO HURT YOU BY A CRETINOUS SPIT GLOB. Something to bellow from deep where I know it in the soles of my feet to the tiny split ends Alfalfa-ing off the top of my head right now: You are never accountable for another person’s abuse of your trust. If something happens to you, the shame of that should only shackle the person who chose it. While staying super-aware of what’s going on might help reduce the risk of your being hurt, no amount of self-defense and -awareness is infallible. Protecting yourself doesn’t extend only to deciding not to skip merrily down dark alleyways at 3 a.m. while high. (If you did decide to do that, you STILL wouldn’t deserve to be hurt.) Sexual assault and rape, the majority of the time, are the work of someone the victim knows or is even close with. Recall how only one of those three times I was violated did I not know the person to be “a really good guy” or “my actual high school sweetheart of many years.” Still: Even if I sound like a super-herb, it’s so important to try your best to look out for yourself even if the situations at hand (or junk) aren’t palpably dangerous. This has meant that after returning from my island getaway, I behave like I’m being paid to be my own armed guard.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “You’re late,” Susan’s mother said. “You killed your father.” The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything . As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him. After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style. Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go. All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new dream, of becoming an Air Force general, come true. Susan knew: She was no longer his mission. The letter broke her heart. By the end of his third year, Borman ranked near the top of his class. For her part, Susan had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania’s dental hygiene school, following in her mother’s footsteps.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  If I were to weave a basket from rushes or to plait palm leaves, so that I might eat my bread in the sweat of my brow and work to fill my belly with a troubled mind, no-one would criticize me, no-one would reproach me. But now, since according to the word of the Savior I wish to store up the food that does not perish, I who have made authenticity my cause, I, a corrector of vice, am called a forger.16 The long-term result can be seen in the curiously discrepant portrayals of Jerome in medieval art (Spain especially bristles with examples, thanks to the devotion of the powerful and wealthy Spanish monastic order later named after him, the Jeronimites). Either he is portrayed in a lavishly equipped study, as a scholar absorbed in his reading and writing, or he is a wild-eyed hermit in the desert – precisely the career at which he had failed. In either case he is very often accompanied by a lion, who has actually arrived in the picture by mistake, thanks to a pious confusion of names, probably by medieval Western pilgrims in the Middle East. They would have been told of a popular Palestinian hermit- saint called Gerasimos, who had actually lived a generation later than Jerome (Hieronymus). Gerasimos’s spectacular feats of ascetic self-denial attracted to himself the pre-Christian story of a good man who removed a thorn from a lion’s paw and won its long-term friendship – or maybe indeed a lion had grown fond of the wild holy man. Lions apart, if Jerome had not been so successful in his campaign for sainthood, and in persuading future writers that it was as much of a self-sacrifice for a scholar to sit reading a book as it was for St Simeon to sit on top of his pillar in a Syrian desert, it might have been far more difficult for countless monks to justify the hours that they spent reading and enjoying ancient texts, and copying them out for the benefit of posterity. Ultimately the beneficiary was Western civilization.17 Besides this, there was Jerome’s immediate and spectacular scholarly triumph: along with a fleet of biblical commentaries, he constructed a Latin biblical text so impressive in its scholarship and diction that it had an unchallenged place at the centre of Western culture for more than a thousand years. This Vulgate version (from the Latin vulgata, meaning ‘generally known’ or ‘common’), was as great an achievement as Origen’s work in producing a single Greek text a century and a half before (see pp. 150–52). Undeniably Jerome’s Vulgate was a work of Latin literature, but there was nothing much like it in Latin literature which predated the arrival of Christianity. That was the problem for Damasus and his new breed of establishment Christians. They wanted to annex the glories of ancient Rome, but they had no time for the gods who were central to it. All through the fourth century arguments simmered between traditionalist aristocrats and Christian emperors, bishops and government officials about the fate of the historic and ancient statue of Victory which stood with its altar in the Senate building in the Forum of Rome. The statue and altar were removed by imperial

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On arrival, each was given a single bullet; it was a one-shot hunt, and that’s all the ammunition they were allowed. Anders wasn’t going to shoot at an antelope unless he was certain he could hit it. And yet he knew he couldn’t return to camp with an unfired bullet; nothing would cement the view of him as a square more than that. After a time, he spotted an antelope walking peaceably a few hundred yards away. Anders had been on the Air Force pistol team and was a good shot. He hated to do it but aimed his rifle and fired. His bullet tore into the antelope’s hindquarters, sending the wounded animal running and bleeding. Anders followed the trail, then killed the antelope with his knife, all the while apologizing to the poor creature and thinking, “This is the last goddamn antelope hunt I’m going on.” He knew astronauts were supposed to do manly things. But he also knew a hunt like this wasn’t him. He determined never to go on another. Back in Houston, another astronaut, Alan Bean, joined Anders, Cunningham, and Schweickart in their unofficial group. Bean had been a test pilot, but as an avid painter, he seemed more artist than warrior. By now, Anders should have realized it didn’t pay to look like an egghead, but since he and his friends weren’t being put on crews anyway, they decided (with the exception of Bean) to enroll at Rice University to pursue PhDs. For all Anders knew, he was destined to sit on the sidelines forever. His fortunes, however, changed in early 1966, when he became CapCom for Gemini 8. (CapComs, or Capsule Communicators, were the astronauts at Mission Control who communicated by radio with the crew.) A few minutes after Anders came on duty, pilot Dave Scott radioed to Control from space. “We have serious problems here. We’re—we’re tumbling end over end up here.” The spacecraft was rolling violently out of control while in orbit around Earth. Suddenly NASA was face-to-face with disaster. While Anders calmly relayed information from Mission Control and reassured the astronauts, commander Neil Armstrong battled to regain control of the ship by using the craft’s reentry thrusters. Several agonizing minutes later, Gemini 8 had been steadied. The mission was terminated early and the crew survived. Anders didn’t think he’d done anything special; he’d just stayed cool under pressure, and it was Scott and Armstrong who deserved credit for a terrific save. But after Gemini 8, Anders registered brighter on Slayton’s radar. Not long after, he was assigned, along with Armstrong, to be the backup crew for Gemini 11. He then joined Frank Borman’s crew after the Apollo 1 fire in early 1967. Along with Mike Collins, he and Borman would man Apollo 9. (Owing to problems caused by a bony growth between his neck vertebrae, Collins would later be replaced by Jim Lovell.) The flight would be a high Earth orbit checkout of the full Apollo spacecraft.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  an intellectual bent, and all three were interested in space science. Not one had been a test pilot. Together, the trio tackled the single most vexing question at NASA: How does a new astronaut best position himself to get selected as soon as possible for a space flight? After careful analysis, they determined to increase their physical fitness, become more expert in their specialties, and further master the science of space travel. None of it made a ripple. To Anders, it seemed the more he and his pals tried, the more invisible they became to Slayton, the man who assigned astronauts to flights. And then it dawned on Anders. Slayton considered him, Cunningham, and Schweickart to be nerds. Slayton didn’t seem to give a damn about Anders’s advanced degree in nuclear engineering, or Cunningham’s doctoral work in physics, or Schweickart’s research on upper atmospheric physics at MIT. He certainly didn’t seem to appreciate that Anders had signed up for extra geology field trips. Selection appeared to come down to two criteria: seniority and one’s standing as a test pilot. And that wasn’t good news for Anders or his friends. It all struck Anders as unfair, but he still had to look for an edge. It seemed to him that Slayton, an avid hunter, liked astronauts who joined his hunts. Anders had little interest in shooting game, but when an invitation to an antelope hunt went out, he signed up. Slayton and at least a dozen astronauts packed rifles and flew to Lander, Wyoming. On arrival, each was given a single bullet; it was a one-shot hunt, and that’s all the ammunition they were allowed. Anders wasn’t going to shoot at an antelope unless he was certain he could hit it. And yet he knew he couldn’t return to camp with an unfired bullet; nothing would cement the view of him as a square more than that. After a time, he spotted an antelope walking peaceably a few hundred yards away. Anders had been on the Air Force pistol team and was a good shot. He hated to do it but aimed his rifle and fired. His bullet tore into the antelope’s hindquarters, sending the wounded animal running and bleeding. Anders followed the trail, then killed the antelope with his knife, all the while apologizing to the poor creature and thinking, “This is the last goddamn antelope hunt I’m going on.” He knew astronauts were supposed to do manly things. But he also knew a hunt like this wasn’t

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  industrialized killings of Jews, it could succeed in co-opting them in the work of dehumanizing the victims because the collaborators had absorbed eighteen centuries of Christian negative stereotypes of Judaism – not to mention the tensions visible in the text of the New Testament, which had prompted the urge to create those stereotypes, up to the most mendacious and marginalizing such as the ‘blood libel’ (see pp. 400–401). This is a hard burden for post-war European Christians to bear. To their credit, after unhappy half-measures in the immediate post-war period, the Churches have done their best to face facts. Like the missionary failure in India, the Holocaust has provided a useful spur to humility for Christianity. There were also those Christians who stood out: often lonely figures, whose resistance to the apparently limitless success of the Nazis seemed baffling to most people at the time. Franz Jägerstätter was a humble man from the same area of Austria as Hitler himself, and with a not dissimilarly murky family background. What he constructed out of these personal circumstances was a firm decision to serve his little local church as sexton, a choice not to vote for the plebiscite acclaiming Hitler’s absorption of Austria, and finally a fixed refusal to fight for his country in an evil cause. He was beheaded in Berlin in 1943, and the inclusion of his name on his village’s war memorial after the Second World War was the subject of heated local argument.69 From the Confessing Church, there remains the now emblematic figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although he was a marginal figure in the resistance to the Nazis, this Lutheran pastor was intimately involved in the circles of those seeking the destruction of the regime, and knew of the plans which culminated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944; that was why the Gestapo arrested him and took him to his final imprisonment. His situation left Christians facing anew the moral questions about the murder of tyrants which the Reformation had already raised. His execution just before the end of the war gave German Lutherans a martyr, when so many others had not been. From Bonhoeffer’s time in prison, he left as the end of an industrious production of theological works a series of fragments and letters which contained phrases still echoing round Western Christian ears, as possible clues to future directions for the Church (see p. 988). His parents’ quietly handsome house and garden in a leafy suburb of Berlin, from where the Gestapo escorted him to prison, remain as his memorial, but the place of his burial will probably never be known. There were those among the Allies fighting Nazi Germany who realized that the Allies too were capable of wicked acts. George Bell, Bonhoeffer’s close friend in England and an Anglican bishop with unusually wide ecumenical contacts in mainland Europe, acted as a conscience of the British governing elite,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The Pope’s unhappy equivocations contrast with the conduct of a Catholic Church leader in an infinitely more dangerous personal situation: Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galician Ukraine since 1900, when it had been Habsburg territory. In the desperate situation of German- occupied Galicia in 1944, Sheptyts’kyi could see no other course than that a division of the Waffen-SS should become the core of an army to defend the region against the advancing Russians. That might suggest that he was another Father Tiso or a Pavelić for the Ukrainians; but despite his deep commitment to the construction of a Ukrainian nation, Sheptyts’kyi was an aristocrat whose family looked back to the old multiconfessional and multi-faith Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. A convert to the Greek Catholic Church from Roman Catholicism, with a brother who had helped to create the victorious Polish army in 1920, he put his own life in danger when the Germans invaded by personally sheltering Jews against deportation and setting up networks to hide them. Sheptyts’kyi went further. As the Nazis first recruited Ukrainians to murder Jews and then encouraged them to murder Poles, the Metropolitan took the highly dangerous step of writing personally to Heinrich Himmler, pleading with him not to call up Ukrainian policemen. He then issued a pastoral letter, to be read out from every Greek Catholic pulpit in even more perilous circumstances than the distribution of Mit brennender Sorge: its title was ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and it reminded his congregations that nothing could excuse murder. It was not his only pastoral letter on the subject, and he wrote to Pius XII in 1942 to denounce Nazism as a ‘system of egoism exaggerated to an absurd degree’. His Church was fortunate to have such a leader; although the old man died only a few months after Soviet tanks rolled back through Ukraine and beyond, his memory sustained Greek Catholics through half a century more of misfortune and repression.66 Pope Pius XII was the successor of rulers who confined their Jewish subjects to a ghetto in Rome up to the nineteenth century, yet the papacy need not alone shoulder responsibility in a religion which has institutionalized anti-Semitism for most of its existence. German Protestants did little better than the Pope in the 1950s in confronting their wartime past.67 The taint lies throughout Chalcedonian Christianity, including the casual unthinking anti-Semitism which characterized British and American society until the late twentieth century. It will not do to point out the undoubted fact that most Nazis hated Christianity and would have done their best to destroy its institutional power if they had been victorious.68 As the Nazi extermination machine enrolled countless thousands of European Christians as facilitators or uncomplaining bystanders of its

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  for the Mormons. One of Smith’s long-standing lieutenants, Brigham Young, Hong Rengan to Smith’s Hong Xiuquan, seized the initiative and led the battered faithful on the final journey which would save their movement, at a cost of a hundred days’ westwards travel by wagon to Utah. Young would have liked a territory to rival the Taiping conquest in scale, but he had to settle for the wilderness that the United States government allowed him. There was a long and stormy path to wary acceptance by wider American society, not least because of one of Smith’s later revelations, posthumously released to the public in 1852, which had interesting resonances with the battles then going on in Protestant missions in Africa. He had been told that he must authorize polygamy. Brigham Young reminisced in later life that he ‘desired the grave’ when first informed of this in 1843, but he later implemented it thoroughly in his own life, with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish. As one of his less reverential biographers observed, Young’s home in Salt Lake City ‘resembled a New England household on a larger scale. Instead of one superficially forbidding lady in blacks or grays, there were nineteen of them’. The widowed Mrs Emma Smith, previously much tried by Prophet Smith’s own clandestine accumulation of wives, married again; but not to a Mormon.106 It was 1890 before the mainstream of the Church laid polygamy aside, and plenty of Mormons did not acknowledge that decision (some still do not, in carefully maintained seclusion in Utah and Arizona), but Utah still became a full state in 1896.107 If polygamy proved a casualty of external nineteenth-century social assumptions, the end of the twentieth century saw another incursion of external liberal values when, in 1978, a revelation allowed men of Negro descent to take their place among whites in the universal priesthood allotted to all adult Mormon men – the original ban is of contested origin.108 Wholesome prosperity such as the youthful Smith might have envied has become a worldwide Mormon speciality, together with a systematic approach to spreading the message which has hardly been equalled in the Christianity which reserves itself the description Evangelical. The Mormons’ doctrinal interest in genealogy, motivated by their belief in posthumous baptism of ancestors, has exercised a powerful appeal on those whose history is based on migration from another country. In the United States, its growth has been such that it has a good claim to be America’s fourth- largest Christian denomination.109 Behind all this nationwide outburst of energetic service of a Protestant God, a shadow lay across the expanding Republic. The British Parliament resolved the question of slavery in 1833; it took a civil war to do so in America. Before that, the Evangelical nation which shared the same rhetoric of redemption and sang

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  figures in the movement was Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor and former submarine commander, whose natural conservatism and patriotism wrestled uneasily with his sense of revulsion at Nazi violence and illegality. He had voted for the Nazis in the sequence of elections which brought them to power, and his brother Wilhelm, also a Confessing pastor, was a member of the Party, though neither fact prevented the Niemöllers’ arrest in 1937. In April 1938 a majority of the Confessing Church’s clergy were still ready to sign an oath of loyalty to Hitler as Führer in the wake of his annexation of Austria.59 All were making decisions in a situation which positively invited moral confusion. The Nazis could never be consistent in their support of any Christian body, however closely it aspired to align itself to the Party; they were extremely good at spreading favours around as it suited them. So the small Free Church bodies in Germany, such as the Methodists and Baptists, found that the Nazis ended the discrimination that the old State Churches had maintained against their work; Hitler even paid for a new pipe organ in one Methodist church. In their pleasure at the Third Reich’s encouragement of family life and campaigns against modern decadence, the German Free Churches failed to notice that they were being used to conciliate hostile opinion in their British and American sister Churches.60 And so as Europe fell into general war in 1939, very many Christians both Protestant and Catholic found it all too easy to fall into complicity with Nazism. There is admittedly a difference between positive support and confused mixtures of inaction and protest or even resistance. In the former category might fall those German army chaplains who were present at mass killings by the German Army after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Presiding over the German atrocities in Ukraine as its chief administrator was Erich Koch, among the most long- standing members of the Nazi Party, but also a devout Protestant who was sometime President of the Provincial Synod of the Lutheran Church in East Prussia, a great patron of Reichsbischof Müller.61 One of the most unlovable churches in the world is the Martin Luther Memorial Church in the south Berlin suburb of Mariendorf. This parish church planned by nationalist Lutherans in the 1920s was taken over by the Nazis when they came to power and made into a prestige project (see Plate 48). Although its swastikas have been carefully chiselled out of the sculptures, the storm trooper carved on the font deprived of his rifle and the bust of Hitler removed, the Lutheran Church has found it hard to know what to do with this egregious place of worship, whose pipe organ was first played at a Nazi Nuremberg rally, and its future remains in doubt – in an unfortunate perversity of fate, Allied bombing spared it amid the city’s devastation. Just as difficult to excuse were the regimes emerging in the wake of Hitler’s

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  million hungry people in the United States, a figure that stunned viewers. The filmmakers even showed footage of a dying, malnourished newborn. But perhaps the most memorable moments came in an exchange with a fourteen-year-old black student named Charles from Hale County, Alabama, who told a doctor he went hungry during the school day because he didn’t have twenty-five cents to pay for lunch: Dr. Wheeler: Well, what do you do while the other children are eating? Charles: Just sit there. Dr. Wheeler: How do you feel toward the other children who are eating when you don’t have anything? Charles: Be ashamed. Dr. Wheeler: Are you ashamed? Charles: Yes, they haunt you. Dr. Wheeler: Why are you ashamed? Charles: Because I don’t have the money. — To win the Democratic nomination for president, Robert Kennedy had to win the California primary. A week earlier, he’d lost Oregon to McCarthy, and was trailing new entrant Vice President Hubert Humphrey in delegates. For RFK, the Golden State was the crossroads. If he lost there, he’d likely drop out. As the California returns rolled in, it was clear Kennedy would win. Just before midnight, the candidate went to the sweltering ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and addressed a packed house of supporters. Looking more boyish than his forty-two years, Kennedy spoke of his belief that America could be healed and come together. In closing, he made a V with his raised fingers—which in 1968 stood for both peace and victory. Followed by his entourage and a string of reporters, Kennedy made his way to the hotel’s pantry, where he reached out to shake hands with Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who’d delivered food to his room earlier that week. As the two moved close, a man with a pistol lunged forward, pointed the gun just inches from Kennedy, and began

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Her hand flew to her mouth, and his own mouth curved derisively. “Instead of demanding satisfaction from me, her brother approached Edmund, whose damned sense of honor prevented him from refusing. I learned of the duel only after it was over. My father woke me from my bed with the news.” He didn’t even attempt to hide the bitter edge that crept into his voice. “I was foxed and debauched when he shouted the congratulations at me, as if I’d planned Edmund’s demise.” He closed his eyes. “Edmund was groomed for his place. I, on the other hand . . .” His voice trailed off. Why was he telling her these things? The words falling from his mouth had never left his lips before. “You, on the other hand, are too wild and untamed for such a station,” Olivia finished. Sebastian opened his eyes to find her facing the window, allowing him a modicum of privacy to collect himself. He moved to stand behind her, close enough so that his breath stirred the strands of hair at her crown and her evocative scent fired his blood. His hands clenched into fists. “I’d wager you were a wild child,” she continued, her honeyed voice pouring down his spine, hardening his cock. “You most likely could not bear to sit through your lessons, got dirty regularly, kissed girls you had no business kissing, and defied your father at every turn just to spite him for having such a perfect firstborn—a sibling you could never hope to measure up to.” Stunned at her perceptiveness, Sebastian stared sightlessly out the window. “Am I close?” she asked. “Too close,” he admitted gruffly. “How did this conversation progress so rapidly to the deeply personal?” “Your remarkable eyes betray the ruthlessness of your nature and your restlessness. I’ve been pondering what circumstance could possibly have driven you to this life you live.” She turned to face him. “Did your father tell you how sorry he was that it was not you who had died instead of Edmund?” His breath hissed out through clenched teeth. Olivia looked through him, into him, seeing things she had no right to see. Her eyes filled with a sympathy he didn’t want, damn her. Lust, yes. Passion, admiration—he wanted all of those from her. But pity . . . His teeth ground together until his jaw ached. “So you are determined,” she continued, flaying him with her words, “to prove to him and anyone else paying attention that he was indeed correct and you are a worthless ‘spare’ for his heir. Being the man you are, you can do nothing half-measure. No, you had to rebel in the worst possible manner. Perhaps you’ve even hoped to be caught in the midst of your misdeeds. Then your father’s humiliation would be complete. Why else would you wear the signet ring that betrays you?”

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  “I’m going to be working most of the night,” you say. Actually, you are about to give up, but a night of Allagash is not the remedy for your blues. You’re thinking of bed. You are so tired you could stretch out right here on the linoleum and slip into a long coma. “Give me a time. I’ll pick you up,” Tad says. The phrase “last-ditch effort” jumps out from the column of print in front of you. It makes you ashamed of yourself. You think of the Greeks at Thermopylae, the Texans at the Alamo, John Paul Jones in his leaky tub. You want to rally and whip hell out of falsehood and error. You tell Tad you will call him back in half an hour. Later, when the phone rings, you ignore it. At a little after ten you put the proofs on Clara’s desk. It would at least be a relief if you could tell yourself that this was your best shot. You feel like a student who is handing in a term paper that is part plagiarism, part nonsense and half finished. You have scoped out and fixed a number of colossal blunders, which serves only to make you more aware of the suspect nature of everything you haven’t verified. The writer was counting on the Verification Department to give authority to his sly observations and insidious generalizations. This is not cricket on his part, but it is your job to help him out and it is your job that is on the line. There has only been one printed retraction in the magazine’s history and the verificationist responsible for the error was immediately farmed out to Advertising. Your only hope is that the Clinger won’t read it. A fire of mysterious origin might sweep through the offices. Or Clara might get sloshed tonight, fall off a barstool and crack her head open. She might get picked up by a Sex Killer. Any Post reader will tell you it’s possible. Happens every day. There was a cartoon you used to watch, at least you think there was, with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. The turtle would journey back to, say, the French Revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle. • • • Already you feel a sense of nostalgia as you walk down the narrow halls past all the closed doors. You remember how you felt when you passed this way for your first interview, how the bland seediness of the hallway only increased your apprehension of grandeur. You thought of all the names that had been made here. You thought of yourself in the third person: He arrived for his first interview in a navy-blue blazer.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  The more you learned of Amanda’s early life, the less surprised you were at her desire to start afresh. Her father left home when she was six. He did something on oil rigs, and the last Amanda heard he was in Libya. She got a Christmas card with a picture of a mosque. When she was ten she moved with her mother to a cousin’s farm in Nebraska. It was not much of a home. Her mother married a feed-and-grain salesman, and they moved to K.C. The salesman wasn’t home often and, when he was, he was either abusive or amorous to both mother and daughter. Amanda had to look after herself; you gathered her mother didn’t much care about her. She left home when she was sixteen and moved in with a boyfriend, who lasted until a few months before she met you. He left a note explaining that he was moving to California. Hers was a childhood grimmer than most, and whenever you were inclined to find her lacking, you reminded yourself to give her credit for endurance. In the eight months you lived together in Kansas City you visited her mother only once. Amanda was skittish and snappy on the way out. You pulled up to a trailer home on a treeless street. She introduced her mother as Dolly. The feed-and-grain salesman, you surmised, was no longer in the picture. There was tremendous tension in the cramped living room. Dolly chain-smoked Kools, flirted with you, and tossed offhand jabs at Amanda. You could see that Dolly was used to trading on her looks and that she loathed and envied her daughter’s youth. The resemblance between the two was strong, except that Dolly had a bust—a difference she alluded to several times. You could tell Amanda was ashamed of her, ashamed of the velvet painting on the wall and the unwashed dishes in the sink, ashamed that her mother was a beautician. When Dolly went to the bathroom—“to freshen up,” as she put it—Amanda picked up the souvenir Statue of Liberty on top of the television set and said, “Look at this. It’s my mother all over.” She seemed afraid that you would think it was her possession, her taste, afraid that you would identify her with Dolly. Two years later Dolly was invited to the wedding back East. Amanda was relieved when she couldn’t make it. Her father’s invitation was Returned to Sender bearing a collection of Arabic postmarks, Address Unknown. There was no bride’s side at the church, no one except a distant, aged aunt and uncle to indicate that Amanda’s past extended farther back than the day she arrived with you in New York. That seemed to be just how she wanted it. If your parents were not thrilled with the living-together arrangement, they went out of their way to give her a home when you returned to the East Coast.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Falange. When Franco was at last victorious in 1939, Pope Pius XII broadcast to the Spanish people, praising Spain because it had ‘once again given to the prophets of materialist atheism a noble proof of its indestructible Catholic faith’. Pius XI’s attempt to differentiate between Hitler and Mussolini was forgotten. No protests went up from the Vatican when Hitler invaded the helpless remnant of Czechoslovakia, and for a while the Catholic Church in Germany benefited accordingly.50 At least the Church did not advocate the restoration of the Spanish Inquisition alongside the continuing existence of the Holy Office in Rome; but it hardly needed to in the police state which was the Spain of the Caudillo Franco (Caudillo means what Führer means in German). Franco’s regime reasserted the Spain of the 1492 expulsion, against all that had happened in the peninsula over the last hundred years: Spain was conceived of as racially pure, deferential to paternalistic authority, corporatist, uniformly Catholic. The dictatorship was to last with only tactical modifications of its icy authoritarianism until the Caudillo‘s death in 1975, by which time developments in the Catholic Church made him an increasingly embarrassing relic of the past. THE CHURCHES AND NAZISM: THE SECOND WORLD WAR As Franco was savouring his triumph in 1939, all Western Churches, not merely Roman Catholics, were facing the consequences of Hitler’s electoral manoeuvres in 1933. Protestants came to be as soiled by the situation as Catholics. Because of its close identification with the German Empire, State Protestantism found it very difficult to adjust to the 1918 defeat and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic, which at a stroke dismissed not just the Kaiser but all the crowned heads of the empire, who, if they were Protestants, had also been heads of their State Churches. Protestant leaders shared the general sense that an undefeated German army had been betrayed by enemies of the Reich. They over- whelmingly regarded the foundation of a Republic as part of that betrayal; feeling was particularly bitter in Prussia, where the successor in 1918 to the portfolio once held by Wilhelm von Humboldt as Minister of Education and Public Worship was an anticlerical Social Democrat, Adolf Hoffmann. It has been estimated that when the Weimar Republic came into existence in 1919, 80 per cent of its Protestant clergy sympathized with its enemies, and were monarchist and angrily nationalist. This was not a good basis for mounting a critique of Nazism, which drew on the same anger and turned it to its own uses.51

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Hugh turned toward the deep voice and saw Remington standing behind his desk, his famous blue eyes lit with amusement as he waved a hand toward one of the chairs that faced him. “How did you know where I was?” Hugh asked crossly as he took a seat. “You owe me one hundred thousand quid, my lord. I’m not likely to misplace you.” Hugh scowled. “A drop in the bucket for you, Remington.” “True. Now, I assume you’ve come to repay me?” Shifting uncomfortably, Hugh said, “I was hoping to make payment arrangements with you.” A black brow lifted. “I see. What do you propose?” “At the end of the Season, I can repay half of what I owe, and then—” Remington raised a hand. “I won’t accept Fontaine’s money. You owe me. You will pay me.” “Damnation!” Hugh flushed with anger and embarrassment. “Money is money, damn it. Why do you care where it comes from?” “The point is, I do care.” “If you expect me to pay you out of my own pockets, it will take years.” “I’m not inclined to wait any longer. Either pay me the money, or listen to my alternate proposal.” Hugh stiffened warily. “What alternate proposal?” Remington leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I wish to see your sister socially. You will smooth the way for me. For every outing, every dance, every private moment with her, I will reduce your debt by ten thousand pounds.” Hugh’s mouth fell open. “Bloody hell. This is extortion!” Remington said nothing. “Lady Julienne is close to announcing her betrothal to the Marquess of Fontaine,” Hugh pointed out. “Your request could seriously jeopardize his interest in her.” Remington remained silent. “She’s a debutante, Remington, not one of your trollops. I won’t whore her out for my debts.” Remington’s brows rose, and Hugh colored with embarrassment at the silent challenge that said he was doing exactly that. “Fontaine offers marriage,” he argued. “So do I.” Hugh choked. “The devil, you say! This grows more outrageous by the moment. Julienne can’t marry you! She’s an earl’s daughter, for Christ’s sake.” “And I am a duke’s son.” “Well, yes, but you’re . . . well . . . you’re . . . Damnation, you know what the hell you are! It’s not the same thing at all.” Remington shrugged, not the least bit perturbed. “Marriage is out, so we return to my offer. You may begin this evening. I want one dance with Lady Julienne. Afterward you can deduct ten thousand pounds from your debt to me.” Hugh ran both hands through his hair before massaging his temples. “She’s marrying someone else, Remington. Why not find some other chit?” “My motives are my own.” Remington rested his elbows on his desk. “I’m a very busy man, Montrose. Tell me your decision now—the money or ten moments with your sister. What shall it be?” “This is appalling.” “Indeed?” “You’ve gone mad.” “Quite possibly.”

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  “I do some writing. I’m sort of an editor actually.” “Oh, God,” Theresa says, when you mention the name of the magazine. “I’ve been reading it all my life. I mean, my parents get it. I always read it at the gynecologist. What’s your name? Should I know you?” She asks you about writers and artists on the staff. You dish up a standard portion of slander and libel that would never pass the Clinger’s requirements of verification. Without getting too specific you imply that your job is extremely demanding and important. In the past you could often convince yourself as well as others of this, but your heart is no longer in it. You hate this posturing, even as you persist, as if it were important for these two strangers to admire you for all the wrong reasons. It’s not much, this menial job in a venerable institution, but it’s all you’ve got left. Once upon a time, you assumed you were very likable. That you had an attractive wife and a fairly interesting job seemed only your due. You were a good guy. You deserved some of the world’s booty. After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in. When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing. This conviction grew with each new school you attended. Your father’s annual job transfers made you the perennial new kid. Every year there was a new body of lore to be mastered. The color of your bike, your socks, was always wrong. If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeated itself in schoolyards across the country. Not until you reached college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel these days. Even now, as you puff yourself up with tales of high adventure in magazine publishing, you can see Elaine’s eyes wandering out over the room, leaving you behind. She’s drinking champagne. As you watch, she dips her tongue into the tulip bowl and slides it around inside the glass. A woman who looks vaguely famous glances up from her table and waves. Elaine waves back. Her smile goes sour when the woman turns away.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  “Okay now,” he says, “where does the neutrino fit into all of this?” Wade grew up on Air Force bases until he escaped to Bennington and New York. His speech is Sunbelt Swish—a lisp on a twang, occasionally supplemented by feigned R and L confusion, particularly when he has a chance to use the phrase “President-elect.” His mother is Japanese, his father an Air Force Captain out of Houston. They married in Tokyo during the Occupation, and Yasu Wade is the unlikely result. He calls himself the Yellow Nonpareil . Wade is irreverent in every direction, yet somehow manages to amuse where you offend. He is Clara’s favorite, not counting Rittenhouse, who is so naturally adapted to his environment as to be invisible. “Tardy, very tardy,” Wade says to you when he hangs up the phone. “This won’t do. Facts wait for no man. Tardiness is a species of error with regard to Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich Mean Time is now fifteen-fifteen hours, which means that Eastern Daylight Saving Time, which many of us observe hereabouts, is eleven-fifteen. Starting time here at the office is ten A.M .—hence an error in your disfavor of one hour and fifteen minutes.” In fact, things are more casual than Wade would have it: Clingfast likes to assert her prerogatives by coming in somewhere between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. As long as one is at one’s desk by ten-thirty, one is relatively safe. Somehow you manage to miss this banker’s deadline at least once a week. “Is she pissed,” you ask. “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Wade says. “I like that word better the way the British use it—colloquial for intoxicated: e.g., Malcolm Lowry’s consul getting pissed on mescal in Quauhnahuac, if I remember the name of the town correctly.” “Can you spell it,” you ask. “Of course. But to return to your original question—yes, Clara is a tad peeved. She is not pleased with you. Or perhaps she is pleased to see you confirming her worst expectations. I think she’s got the scent of blood. If I were you …” Wade looks toward the door and raises his eyebrows. “If I were you, I’d turn around.” Clingfast is in the door, looking like a good candidate for a Walker Evans Depression-era photo; flinty faced and suspicious. The guardian of the apertures, the priestess of Webster’s Second Edition Unabridged Dictionary , eagle eyes and beagle nose. She gives you a look that could break glass, and then steps out. She’s going to let you suffer for a while. You dig into your desk and pull out a Vicks inhaler. Try to plow a path through some of the crusted snow in your head. “Still got that nasty sinus problem, I see.” Wade gives you a knowing look. Though he prides himself on being hip, he is too fastidious to do anything dangerous or dirty. You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  We remind you that all magazine business is strictly confidential. The memo occasions amusement in the Department of Factual Verification. The magazine has been involved in many freedom of press trials, but in this gag order there is not a glimmer of irony. Wade says, “I wish Richard Fox would call me.” Megan says, “Forget it, Yasu. I know for a fact that Richard Fox is straight.” “For a fact ? I’d be very interested to hear about your verification procedure.” “I know you would,” Megan says. “At any rate,” Wade says, “I only meant that I would be fantastically curious to know how many pieces of silver some of the institutional dirty laundry is worth. But don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I don’t find Fox attractive.” Rittenhouse is tugging at his glasses, indicating that he wishes to speak. “I, for one, do not feel that Richard Fox is an objective reporter. He has a penchant for sensationalism.” “Of course,” Wade says. “That’s why we love him.” The possession of dangerous information excites a brief feeling of power here in the Department of Factual Verification. You wish Richard Fox or anyone else cared enough about Clara Tillinghast to perform a character assassination. By seven everyone is gone. They all offered to help, and you waved them away. There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself. Clara sticks her head in the door as she’s leaving. “My desk,” she says. My ass, you think. You nod and, in token of your earnestness, hunker down over the page proofs. From this point on it’s a matter of covering your tracks, running pencil lines through anything that you have not been able to verify and hoping that nothing important slips through. At seven-thirty Allagash calls. “What are you doing at the office?” he says. “We have plans for the evening. Monstrous events are scheduled.” Two of the things you like about Allagash are that he never asks you how you are and he never waits for you to answer his questions. You used to dislike this, but when the news is all bad it’s a relief that someone doesn’t want to hear it. Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside. Allagash tells you that Natalie and Inge are dying to meet you. Natalie’s father runs an oil company and Inge is soon to be in a major television commercial. Moreover, the Deconstructionists are playing the Ritz, one of the modeling agencies is sponsoring a bash for Muscular Dystrophy at Magique and Natalie has cornered a chunk of the Gross National Product of Bolivia.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  “Julienne was here?” He shot to his feet. “Last night?” “Sit down, Lucien. I shall get a neck cramp looking up at you.” Frowning, he sat. His Julienne? Here? In the midst of London’s demimonde? He flushed. “It bothers you that she was here?” his mother asked. “Why was she here?” Amanda smiled. “She was dragging her scapegrace brother home.” Lucien stood again. “Montrose is back?” He swallowed hard. This was dreadful. Now Fontaine could pay his addresses. “Lucien, please! Sit down.” Again he dropped dutifully into the seat. “What happened?” he asked hoarsely, fighting off a mild panic. “She was quite firm with him, scolding him and ordering him to start accepting his responsibilities.” Lucien couldn’t hold back a smile. Fierce, passionate, no-nonsense Julienne. Amanda smiled over the rim of her cup. “And when Montrose made a nasty comment about you, she defended you. I wish you could have heard her. She was magnificent.” The nausea he’d been fighting all morning suddenly worsened. Last night. After the things he’d done and said to her, Julienne had defended him anyway. His head dropped into his hands. Damnation. He would have felt better if she’d maligned him right along with her brother. This morning he’d been certain there was no more wretched person on earth than himself. He’d believed it wasn’t possible to feel any worse. But he did. Much worse. How would he ever make amends to her? Fueled by brandy, jealousy had eaten him alive. Julienne had spoken with Fontaine at length. The sight of them together had crushed him further. They presented a dashing couple—two perfect, blond, beautiful aristocrats. The handsome marquess had staked an obvious claim to Julienne, and Lucien had wanted nothing more than to rip them apart. He’d determined to make her as jealous as he was, to force her to share in his misery. But when he’d succeeded, when she’d fled the room in obvious distress, he’d followed, unable to do otherwise. The smell of her, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth—he’d been consumed by a singular madness. To give her up, to lose her, was nigh unbearable, and he’d wanted her to say she felt the same. He’d wanted her to fight for him, and when she had, when she’d turned the tables, he’d wanted her even more. “Lucien?” His mother’s voice was filled with concern. He slid his hands through his hair and laced them at the back of his neck. He looked at his mother with a pained smile. “I’ve made a mess of things again.” The parlor door opened. “Good morning!” the duke greeted as he entered. Lucien rose from his chair and extended his hand to the man with whom he bore a remarkable resemblance. “Good morning, Your Grace.” “You look terrible, son.” “So I’ve been told. Repeatedly.” “Your father thinks Lady Julienne would be perfect for Haverston,” Amanda murmured.