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 57 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  I dug my own grave.” “You didn’t have enough time,” Megan says. “It was a sloppy article.” “We’ve all seen errors slip through the net,” Rittenhouse adds. “How bad could it be,” Megan asks. “You got most of it done, didn’t you?” “I really don’t even know,” you say. They’re wondering: Could this happen to me? and you would like to reassure them, tell them it’s just you. They’re trying to imagine themselves in your shoes, but it would be a tough thing to do. Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view—the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you. You want to thank them for their concern, yet you could never truly explain how this fiasco came about. The group disperses. It’s coming up on ten o’clock. You don’t have anything to do. Your hands move around the desk collecting paper clips and pens, rearranging stacks of paper. The Druid sneaks past the door. His eyes meet yours and then he looks away. You feel a touch of heat in the cheeks. His renowned manners have failed him. That is something, at least. Tell your children you were the only man in history snubbed by the Druid. On your desk is a short story that you have been wanting to read. You follow the lines of print across the page, and it’s like driving on ice with bald tires; no traction. You get up and fix yourself a cup of coffee. The others are hunched over their desks. In the quiet you can hear the scratching of pencil lead on paper and the hum of the refrigerator. You go to the window and look down on Forty-fifth Street. Maybe you can spot Clara on her way in and let her have it with a flower pot. Although the pedestrians are indistinct, you can make out a man sitting on the sidewalk playing a guitar. You open the window and stick your head out, but the traffic noise covers the music. Someone taps your hip. Wade is pointing toward the door, where Clara is standing. “I would like to see you in my office immediately.” Wade whispers, “If I were you I would’ve jumped.” From the window to Clara’s office is a very short distance. Much too short. You are there.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  The folk history of the place has it that no one has ever been fired: not the narcoleptic theater critic who confused two different off-Broadway premieres and ran a review that combined elements of a southern family saga and a farce about Vietnam; not the award-winning plagiarist who cribbed a five-thousand-word piece direct from a twenty-year-old issue of Punch and signed her name to it. It’s a lot like the Ivy League, from which its staff is mostly drawn, or like a cold, impenetrable New England family which keeps even the black sheep suffocating within the fold. You, however, are a minor cousin at best; if there were a branch of the family business in a distant, malarial colony, you would have been shipped off long ago, sans quinine. Your transgressions are numerous. You can’t call them specifically to mind, but Clingfast has the list in one of her file cabinets. She takes it out from time to time and reads you excerpts. Clara has a mind like a steel mousetrap and a heart like a twelve-minute egg. Lucio, the elevator operator, says good morning. He was born in Sicily and has been doing this for seventeen years. With a week’s training he could probably take over your job and then you could ride the elevator up and down all day long. You’re at the twenty-ninth floor in no time. Say so long to Lucio, hello to Sally, the receptionist, perhaps the only staffer with a low-rent accent. She’s from one of the outer boroughs, comes in via bridge or tunnel. Generally people here speak as if they were weaned on Twinings English Breakfast Tea. Tillinghast picked up her broad vowels and karate-chop consonants at Vassar. She’s very sensitive about coming from Nevada. The writers, of course, are another story—foreigners and other unclubbables among them—but they come and go from their thirtieth-floor cubbyholes at strange hours. They pass manuscripts under the doors at night, and duck into empty offices if they spot you coming at them down the hallway. One mystery man up there—the Ghost—has been working on an article for seven years. The editorial offices cover two floors. Sales and advertising are several floors below, the division emphasizing the strict independence of art and commerce in the institution. They wear suits on twenty-five, speak a different language and have carpeting on the floors, lithographs on the walls. You are not supposed to talk to them. Up here, the air is too rarefied to support broadloom, the style a down-at-the-heels hauteur. A shoeshine or an overly insistent trouser press is suspect, quite possibly Italian. The layout suggests a condo for high-rise gophers: the private offices are rodent-sized, the halls just wide enough for two-way pedestrianism. You navigate the linoleum to the Department of Factual Verification. Directly across the hall is Clara’s office, the door of which is almost always open so that all who come and go from the kingdom of facts must pass her scrutiny.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation. After a hard day of work on other people’s manuscripts—knowing in your heart that you could do better—the last thing you wanted to do was to go home and write. You wanted to go out. Amanda was the fashion model and you worked for the famous magazine. People were happy to meet you and to invite you to their parties. So much was going on. Of course, mentally, you were always taking notes. Saving it all up. Waiting for the day when you would sit down and write your masterpiece. You dig your typewriter out of the closet and set it up on the dining-room table. You have some good twenty-pound bond from the supply cabinet in the office. You roll a sheet, with backing, onto the platen. The whiteness of the sheet is intimidating, so you type the date in the right-hand corner. You decide to jump immediately into the story you have in mind. Waste no time with preliminaries. You type: He was expecting her on the afternoon flight from Paris when she called to say she would not be coming home. “You’re taking a later flight?” he asked. “No,” she said. “I’m starting a new life.” You read it over. Then you tear the sheet out of the typewriter and insert a new one. Go farther back, maybe. Try to find the source of this chaos. Give her a name and a place. Karen liked to look at her mother’s fashion magazines. The women were elegant and beautiful and they were always climbing in and out of taxis and limousines on their way to big stores and restaurants. Karen didn’t think there were any stores or restaurants like that in Oklahoma. She wished she looked like the ladies in the pictures. Then maybe her father would come back. This is dreadful. You tear the sheet into eighths and slide them into the wastebasket. You insert another piece of paper; again you type the date. At the left margin you type, “Dear Amanda,” but when you look at the paper it reads “Dead Amanda.” Screw this. You are not going to commit any great literature tonight. You need to relax. After all, you’ve been busting ass all day. You check the fridge; no beer. A finger of vodka in the bottle on the sink. Maybe you will step out and get a six-pack. Or wander over to the Lion’s Head, as long as you’re going out, to see if there’s anybody you know. It’s not impossible there to meet a woman avec hair, sans tattoo, at the bar. The intercom buzzes while you’re changing your shirt. You push the Talk button: “Who is it?” “Narcotics squad.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  66 Lecture 10: Was Pontius Pilate a Secret Christian? o In front of the crowds, Pilate washes his hands in a basin of water and declares that he is innocent of Jesus’s blood. But the crowd cries out, “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matthew 27:25). In other words, the Jewish crowd accepts responsibility for Jesus’s death and passes on that responsibility to their descendants.  The emphasis on the innocence of Pilate and the guilt of the Jewish crowd is even greater in the Gospel of John. Here, an extended discussion takes place between Jesus and Pontius Pilate. As in Luke, Pilate declares Jesus to be innocent on three occasions and tries to force the chief priest of the Jews to accept Jesus’s innocence. When the chief priest refuses, Pilate hands Jesus over to be crucifi ed. Pilate outside the New Testament  This heightened emphasis on Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus is continued in later gospels that are not found in the New Testament, such as the Gospel of Peter. o This fragmentary gospel begins in the middle of a sentence: “but none of the Jews washed his hands, nor did Herod or any of his judges. Since they did not wish to wash, Pilate stood up.” In other words, Pilate had washed his hands of Jesus’s blood, but none of the Jews would do so. In the next verse, we’re told that King Herod—not Pilate—ordered Jesus to be taken away. o Later on, in verse 5, we learn that Herod delivered Jesus to the people, who pushed him about and mocked him. We’re told in verse 17 that the Jewish people “thus brought all things to ful fi llment.” o In verse 25, after the death of Jesus, the Jews—the elders and the priests—realized the extent of their evil and began beating their breasts in woe. Because of their sins, they say, the judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  they wanted to please her, to make her like them. When she then shifted often drive her to tears. tone, indirectly praising them, they felt they were winning her over and Gradually he forced her were encouraged to open up. Without realizing it, they would give freer into the position of doing nothing without his leave, rein to their emotions. even trifles of no In social situations we all wear masks, and keep our defenses up. It is importance. Sometimes, embarrassing, after all, to reveal one's true feelings. As a seducer you must when she was ready to go find a way to lower these resistances. The Charmer's approach of flattery to the Opera, he insisted that she stay at home; and and attention can be effective here, particularly with the insecure, but it can sometimes he made her go take months of work, and can also backfire. To get a quicker result, and to there against her will. He break down more inaccessible people, it is often better to alternate harsh-obliged her to grant favours to ladies she did not like or ness and kindness. By being harsh you create inner tensions—your targets of whom she was jealous. may be upset with you, but they are also asking themselves questions. What She was not even free to have they done to earn your dislike? When you then are kind, they feel dress as she chose; he would amuse himself by relieved, but also concerned that at any moment they might somehow dis-making her change her please you again. Make use of this pattern to keep them in suspense— coiffure or her dress at the dreading your harshness and keen to keep you kind. Your kindness and last minute; he did this so harshness should be subtle; indirect digs and compliments are best. Play the often and so publicly that she became accustomed to psychoanalyst: make cutting comments concerning their unconscious mo-take his orders in the tives (you are only being truthful), then sit back and listen. Your silence will evening for what she would goad them into embarrassing admissions. Leaven your judgments with oc-do and wear the following day; then the next day he casional praise and they will strive to please you, like dogs. would alter everything, and the princess would cry all Love is a costly flower, but one must have the desire to the more. In the end she took to sending him pluck it from the edge of a precipice. messages by trusted —STENDHAL footmen, for from the first he had taken up residence in Luxembourg; messages which continued Keys to Seduction throughout her toilette, to know what ribbons she would wear, what gown and other ornaments; Almost everyone is more or less polite. We learn early on not to tell people what we really think of them; we smile at their jokes, act inter-almost invariably he made ested in their stories and problems. It is the only way to live with them.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  185 and a balanced budget was essential for the party to stay in power. Thus, passive injustice and the false notion of British self-interest allowed Hitler to gain power. Britain did not understand the value of bringing large and small powers together into a working coalition that would have the moral authority and strength to overthrow Hitler. The British initially dismissed the possibility of coalition. With the collapse of France, Britain was alone. Britain allowed Hitler to move into the Rhineland, considering this action to be in its own self-interest. After all, Hitler was only moving into his own backyard. Britain’s false conception of where its interests lay proved ruinous. Self-interest, Churchill says, is always in doing what is right. When Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, Britain moved from passive to active injustice. Without allowing Czechoslovakia at the bargaining table, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany decided its fate. The British progressed from allowing wrongs to be done to actively doing wrong themselves, because they lacked a sense of true justice. According to Churchill, the concept of true justice harks back to Cicero. It consists of keeping one’s world; it is the fi des, the honor of a nation. The Second World War breathes an air of old-fashioned honor. The generation of the 1940s did not understand the concept of honor, and Churchill seemed to be a relic of a bygone age. As Cicero, Gandhi, and Churchill understood, honor is at the heart of justice, because it rests on integrity and courage. Justice and courage were fundamental to Churchill’s view of history and the world. Churchill also exhibited moderation. No one was more resolute in pursuit of the war than Churchill, and no one was more willing to rebuild Germany at the end of the war. Churchill showed wisdom gained not in school and not from a series of great books. He read few books but absorbed those that he read. Churchill’s writing, for example, re fl ects the power of Gibbon’s prose. He made the books that he read part of himself—and therein lies true wisdom. Churchill approached life always willing to change. Like Gandhi, his life was a series of experiments with the truth. He was never afraid to say that he had been wrong or to seek redemption. For Gandhi, Cicero, and Churchill, the ultimate lesson is to never give in. ■ 186 Lecture 35: Churchill, My Early Life; Painting as a Pastime; WWII Churchill, My Early Life. ———, Painting as a Pastime. ———, The Second World War, vol. I. Manchester, Churchill, vols. I and II. 1. Churchill thought that great books are frequently wasted on the young. College students do not have the life experience to appreciate these books. Do you agree? 2. Churchill disliked Gandhi in life. Do you think, upon re fl ection, he would appreciate the comparison? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider Essential Reading

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  mont can not only disguise his manipulations but elicit pity and concern. be consciously ridiculed and Playing the victim, he can stir up the tender emotions produced by a sick rejected. . . . Most ad men child or a wounded animal. And these emotions are easily channeled into will confirm that over the love—as the Présidente discovers to her dismay. years the seemingly worst commercials have sold the Seduction is a game of reducing suspicion and resistance. The cleverest best. An effective TV way to do this is to make the other person feel stronger, more in control of commercial is purposefully designed to insult the things. Suspicion usually comes out of insecurity; if your targets feel supe- viewer's conscious rior and secure in your presence, they are unlikely to doubt your motives. intelligence, thereby You are too weak, too emotional, to be up to something. Take this game as penetrating his defenses. far as it will go. Flaunt your emotions and how deeply they have affected —WILSON BRYAN KEY, you. Making people feel the power they have over you is immensely flatter- SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION ing to them. Confess to something bad, or even to something bad that you did, or contemplated doing, to them. Honesty is more important than virtue, and one honest gesture will blind them to many deceitful acts. Cre- It takes great art to use ate an impression of weakness—physical, mental, emotional. Strength and bashfulness, but one does achieve a great deal with it. confidence can be frightening. Make your weakness a comfort, and play How often I have used the victim—of their power over you, of circumstances, of life in general. bashfulness to trick a little This is the best way to cover your tracks. miss! Ordinarily, young girls speak very harshly about bashful men, but You know, a man ain't worth a damn if he can't cry at the secretly they like them. A right time. little bashfulness flatters a teenage girl's vanity, makes — L Y N D O N BAINES JOHNSON her feel superior; it is her 290 • The Art of Seduction earnest money. When they Keys to Seduction are lulled to sleep, then at the very time they believe you are about to perish from bashfulness, you show We all have weaknesses, vulnerabilities, frailnesses in our mental makeup. Perhaps we are shy or oversensitive, or need attention— them that you are so far whatever the weakness is, it is something we cannot control. We may try to from it that you are quite compensate for it, or to hide it, but this is often a mistake: people sense self-reliant. Bashfulness makes a man lose his something inauthentic or unnatural. Remember: what is natural to your masculine significance, and character is inherently seductive. A person's vulnerability, what they seem therefore it is a relatively

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  If either bears greater responsibility, it is Adam, insofar as he seems to hold primacy, and in fact the act became known traditionally as the “sin of Adam.” Nonetheless, we read in the Book of Ben Sira (early second century BCE): “From a woman sin had its beginning and because of her we all die.”21 Even more egregiously, 1 Timothy 2:14 says: “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Such claims cannot be justified by exegesis of Genesis. Adam may not have been deceived by the snake, but he was deceived by Eve, and he was just as much a transgressor as she was. At this point, the text seems to be subordinated to the cultural prejudices of a later era. WOMEN IN THE HEBREW BIBLE There is a wide spectrum of material relating to women in the Hebrew Bible, too wide to review here in any detail.22 Much seems problematic from a modern viewpoint, although it may have been readily accepted in the ancient world.23 Women did not inherit, unless there were no sons, but in that case the inheritance passed to the daughters (Numbers 27). A woman’s religious vows could be nullified by her father or her husband (30:3–15). Polygamy was accepted down to the common era, although it is rarely attested in the postexilic era (roughly, after 500 BCE). Adultery was understood as having relations with the wife of another man. Both parties were liable to death (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22), but Proverbs 6:29–35 suggests that the aggrieved husband had some discretion in the matter: the man who commits adultery “will get wounds and dishonor, and his disgrace will not be wiped away. For jealousy arouses a husband’s fury, and he shows no restraint when he takes revenge. He will accept no compensation and refuses a bribe no matter how great.” According to Deuteronomy, a woman who was found not to be a virgin when she married was to be stoned (22:20–21). If a man falsely accused his bride of not being a virgin, he was to be fined one hundred shekels (which went to the woman’s father), but she would remain his wife and he could not divorce her (22:13–19). If a man lay with a woman who was engaged to be married to another man, both were liable to death, but if it happened in the open country where she could not cry for help, only the man was liable. If a man raped a virgin who was not engaged, he was to pay fifty shekels to the young woman’s father and marry her. He could not then divorce her (22:28–9). According to Exodus 22:17, the father could refuse to give the young woman to her rapist, but the rapist still had to pay the bride-price.

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

  the Third French Republic was swiftly dismantled and its secularist appeal to the values of 1789 was cast into discredit. A new government presided over those parts of France not directly occupied by the Nazis, from the spa town of Vichy. The aged national war hero who took over as Vichy head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, chose to cast his vigorous conservatism around an ideology of Catholic traditionalism, despite his own lack of any great devotional fervour. The official Church was delighted to back the new national slogan, Travail, famille, patrie (‘Work, family, country’), and the anti-Semitism of those defeated forty years before in the Dreyfus controversy (see p. 827) was not slow to ally itself with the much more radical anti-Semitism of the victorious Nazis. Only slowly did the Catholic hierarchy realize what a terrible mistake it had made; from the early days of defeat, younger and junior clergy tended to be much more suspicious of the Vichy regime, some of whose politicians combined pronounced anticlerical views with quasi-Fascist ideology. Gradually, as the exploitative character of German occupation became clear, national resistance grew. Catholics were prominent among the resisters, and many became heroically committed to the work of saving Jews from barbaric treatment and deportation for death. Yet it is an irony of the Vichy years that among the regime’s lasting memorials is one of the most beautiful works of modern Catholic liturgical music, Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, enfolding the plainsong melodies of the Requiem Mass in the most lush and haunting of French choral romanticism. This was commissioned by the Vichy government, from a devoutly Catholic composer, whose publisher was among Pétain’s most enthusiastic supporters. For many years after the war, the origins of Duruflé’s great work were conveniently shrouded in obscurity.64 At the centre of all this was Pope Pius XII. His part in the war has generated debate which is still not ended. Amid the noise of scholarly and less scholarly controversy, the Pope’s own ‘silence’ is still hard to miss. It has two sides, for he was silent to the German government when he learned of an army plot to assassinate Hitler in late 1939, and discreetly communicative to the Western Allies about what he knew of it, but as the Holocaust unfolded, he was silent also about the Jews. While a variety of Vatican agencies helped thousands of Jews to escape round-ups in Italy, the Pope only once nerved himself to make a public statement about their plight, in his Christmas radio broadcast in 1942. Even then, his mention of those ‘put to death or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their race or their descent’ failed to put a name to the chief sufferers. His third near-silence, that of any significant public reflection on his actions, and indeed some deliberate if understandable obfuscation, lasted through the thirteen years of his pontificate after the war had ended.65

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Everybody left the horeo, Lina. There's nothing now." "If I didn't hate that place, maybe I'd shed two tears." "Lina, there's something I have to explain to you . But Sourmelina was looking away, tapping her foot. "Maybe she ." . fell in." "... Something about Desdemona and me . "Yes?" "... My wife . "Was I right? They don't get along?" "No . . Desdemona . . Desdemona . . my wife . ." ." . . . . . ." . "Yes?" "Same person." He gave the signal. Desdemona stepped from be- hind the pillar. "Hello, Lina," my grandmother said. "We're married. Don't tell." And that was how it came out, for the next-to-last time. Blurted out by my yia yia, beneath the echoing roof of Grand Trunk, toward Sourmelina's cloche-covered ears. The confession hovered in the air a moment, before floating away with the smoke rising from her ciga- rette. Desdemona took her husband's arm. My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She'd come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina 85 I died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone's secrets, it was posthu- mously declassified, so that people began to speak of "Sourmelina's girlfriends." A secret kept, in other words, only by the loosest defini- tion, so that now— as I get ready to leak the information myself— feel only a slight twinge of filial guilt. Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it) : "Lina was one of those women they named the island after." As a girl in the horeo^ Sourmelina had been caught in compromis- ing circumstances with a few female friends. "Not many," she told me herself, years later, "two or three. People think if you like girls, you like every single one. I was always picky. And there wasn't much to pick from." For a while she'd struggled against her predisposition. "I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different." When Sourmelina was caught not with another girl but with a full-grown woman, a mother of two children, a scandal arose. Sourmelina's par- ents tried to arrange her marriage but found no takers. Husbands were hard enough to come by in Bithynios without the added liabil- ity of an uninterested, defective bride. Her father had then done what Greek fathers of unmarriageable girls did in those days: he wrote to America. The United States abounded with dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats, diamond jewelry— and lonely, immigrant bachelors. With a photograph of the prospective bride and a considerable dowry, her father had come up with one.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  overridden by rearing?" "I think that's pretty clear." As I lay there, letting Luce, in rubber gloves, do what he had to do, I got a sense of things. Luce wanted to impress the men with the importance of his work. He needed funding to keep the clinic run- ning. The surgery he performed on transsexuals wasn't a selling point over at the March of Dimes. To get them interested you had to pull at the heartstrings. You had to put a face on suffering. Luce was try- ing to do that with me. I was perfect, so polite, so midwestern. No unseemliness attached itself to me, no hint of cross-dresser bars or ads in the back of louche magazines. Dr. Craig wasn't convinced. "Fascinating case, Peter. No question. But my people will want to know the applications." "It's a very rare condition," Luce admitted. "Exceedingly rare. But in terms of research, its importance can't be overstated. For the rea- sons I outiined in my office." Luce remained vague for my benefit, but still persuasive enough for theirs. He hadn't gotten where he was without certain lobbyist gifts. Meanwhile I was there and not there, cringing at Luce's touch, sprouting goose bumps, and worrying that I hadn't washed properly. I remember this, too. A long narrow room on a different floor of the hospital. A riser set up at one end before a butterfly light. The photographer putting film in his camera. "Okay, I'm ready," he said. 421 I dropped my robe. Almost used to it now, I climbed up on the riser before the measuring chart. "Hold your arms out a little." "Like this?" "That's good. I don't want a shadow." He didn't tell me to smile. The textbook publishers would make sure to cover my face. The black box: a fig leaf in reverse, concealing identity while leaving shame exposed. Every night Milton called us in our room. Tessie put on a bright voice for him. Milton tried to sound happy when I got on the line. But I took the opportunity to whine and complain. "I'm sick of this hotel. When can we go home?" "Soon as you're better," Milton said. When it was time for sleep, we drew the window curtains and turned off the lights. "Good night, honey. See you in the morning." "Night." But I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about that word: "better." What did my father mean? What were they going to do to me? Street sounds made it up to the room, curiously distinct, echoing off the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “Very pretty.”I lowered my eyes and smoothed the skirt of my dress. “Pretty as Marilyn Monroe?”His big hands encircled my waist. He looked me up and down and turned me around. “Honey, you are prettier, much prettier than Marilyn Monroe. Don’t forget it.”“Thank you, Brother Cotton. I won’t forget. But who is Marilyn Monroe?”“Nobody you need to know. Now, go play.”“Tell me, please.”Brother Terrell cut me off. “We got business to discuss. Now go on back to your mama.”Brother Cotton slapped my bottom, end of discussion. I flounced from the room. Maybe I did look pretty. I ran to the bathroom, climbed on the side of the tub, balanced on the sink, and stretched to see my reflection in the mirror. Bangs lay pasted on my forehead in thin, sweaty strands. The rest of my hair was separated into ugly little dishwater-blond sausages. All that primping and I looked worse. I walked outside and kicked at a tree. Chapter NineEVERY DAY THERE WAS A LITTLE LESS OF BROTHER TERRELL. CHEEKBONES rose like canyon rims from the planes of his face. His Adam’s apple bobbed exposed and lurid above the pit at the base of his throat. A glimpse of him ambling to the bathroom in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms featured a clavicle that ran like a rail over the sinkhole of his chest. A boneyard of a man. What once were muscles had thinned to curtains of skin that hung from the sticks of his arms. I passed him in the hallway and shifted my eyes as he slunk by, his shoulder pressed against the paneled wall for support. I could not bear to look at him directly. His frailty encompassed a growing desperation that embarrassed me. He was naked in his need, and it was terrible to witness. He said he was fasting to hear from God, but it was the world after which he seemed to hunger. His eyes, round and swollen, slipped over every person, every object in the room, searching, searching, searching. It was as if he found himself locked outside life and looked for a way back in. On occasion he gathered the four of us kids close, Pam and Randall nestled under each arm, Gary crowding in. I pulled away, unable to laugh and snuggle and hold my hand out for the silver dollar he offered, terrified by his vulnerability.The house we had rented in Birmingham, Alabama, was still and quiet. Without the perpetual hum of Brother Terrell in motion, everything slowed down. The adults talked in worried, hushed voices, always about Brother Terrell. Had he eaten? Had he tried? Oh my God, what if he dies? The women made soups: vegetable, chicken noodle, beef stew.Betty Ann nagged. “You’ve got to eat something. You’re gonna kill yourself. It’s hard on the kids. Please. Eat.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  ¢ The Gospel of Thomas contains |14 sayings of Jesus, about half of which can be found in the New Testament. Scholars debate whether the Gospel of Thomas should be considered a Gnostic gospel or not. The deep mythologies that we find in other Nag Hammadi writings cannot be found in this gospel, but there are sayings in the gospel that make sense if we presuppose that a Gnostic myth lies behind them. e The death and resurrection of Jesus are not important for this gospel. What matters for this gospel is knowing who you really are: “If you know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty.” You're in poverty because you're in a material body, but 1f you know who you really are, you can find salvation. e In saying 28, Jesus tells the disciples that he will be revealed to them “When you undress without being ashamed and take your clothes and put them under your feet as little children and tramp on them.” The clothes are the material body; to see the salvation that Jesus can bring, we need to escape the body and trample on it. e Jesus is said to have come from the divine realm in this gospel and to be returning. This world itself is a material corpse that must be brought back to life. In saying 56, Jesus says, “The salvation that can come from this corpse of a world is by secret knowledge.” And in the first saying, he says, “The one who finds the meaning of these 119 Scanned by CamScanner words will not taste death.” Salvation will not come to this world: salvation comes from this world. ¢ The Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi present different views of Jesus from what came later to be accepted as orthodoxy. The authors of these texts maintained that they were written by the apostles of Jesus and that they represented the original form of Christian teaching. It’s widely recognized today, however, that these books don’t represent the views about Jesus among his earliest followers; instead, they are later developments of Christian thinking based on more philosophically sophisticated ideas. Suggested Reading Brakke, The Gnostics. Ehrman, After the New Testament. Ehrman and Plese, The Other Gospels. Harnack, Marcion. King, What Is Gnosticism? Meyer, 7he Nag Hammadi Scriptures. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. Questions to Consider 1. Summarize a Gnostic view of the world. 2. Do you think that any of the Gnostic gospels may provide accurate insights into the teachings of the historical Jesus? 120 Scanned by CamScanner What Happened to the Apostles? Lecture 19 was sent.” In early Christianity, “apostle” was a technical term for

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "It's not that." "What is it?" Desdemona looked into her husband's eyes. But it was Sourme- lina who explained it all. "Your wife and I?" she said in plain English. "We're both knocked up." 105 minoTflURS hich is something I'll never have much to do with. Like most hermaphrodites but by no means all, I can't have children. That's one of the reasons why I've never married. It's one of the reasons, aside from shame, why I decided to join the Foreign Service. I've never wanted to stay in one place. After I started living as a male, my mother and I moved away from Michigan and I've been moving ever since. In another year or two I'll leave Berlin, to be posted some- where else. I'll be sad to go. This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit. Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin. A word on my shame. I don't condone it. I'm trying my best to get over it. The intersex movement aims to put an end to infant gen- ital reconfiguration surgery. The first step in that struggle is to con- vince the world— and pediatric endocrinologists in particular— that hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased. One out of every two thou- sand babies is born with ambiguous genitalia. In the United States, with a population of two hundred and seventy-five million, that comes to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand intersexuals alive today. But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. And I hap- pen not to be a political person. I don't like groups. Though I'm a member of the Intersex Society of North America, I have never taken part in its demonstrations. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am. 106 The most famous hermaphrodite in history? Me? It felt good to write that, but I've got a long way to go. I'm closeted at work, re- vealing myself only to a few friends. At cocktail receptions, when I find myself standing next to the former ambassador (also a native of Detroit), we talk about the Tigers. Only a few people here in Berlin know my secret. I tell more people than I used to, but I'm not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I've just met. In other cases I keep silent forever.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Uh-uh." "How about here?" Suddenly it did hurt. A bolt, a cobra bite, beneath my navel. The cry I let out was answer enough. "Okay, okay, we're gonna go easy here. I just need to take a look. Lie still now." The doctor signaled the intern with his eyes. From either side they began to undress me. The intern pulled my shirt over my head. There was my chest, green and bleak. They paid no notice. Neither did I. Meanwhile the doctor had unfastened my belt. He was undo- ing the clasp of my khakis: I let him. Down came the pants. I watched as if from far away. I was thinking about something else. I was remembering how the Object would lift her hips to help me get her underpants off. That little signal of compliance, of desire. I was thinking how much I loved it when she did that. Now the intern was reaching under me. And so I lifted my hips. They took hold of my underpants. They tugged them down. The elastic caught on my skin, then gave. 395 The doctor bent closer, mumbling to himself. The intern, rather unprofessionally, raised one hand to her throat and then pretended to fix her collar. Chekhov was right. If there's a gun on the wall, it's got to go off. In real life, however, you never know where the gun is hanging. The gun my father kept under his pillow never fired a shot. The rifle over the Object's mantel never did either. But in the emergency room things were different. There was no smoke, no gunpowder smell, ab- solutely no sound at all. Only the way the doctor and nurse reacted made it clear that my body had lived up to the narrative require- ments. One scene remains to be described in this portion of my life. It took place a week later, back on Middlesex, and featured me, a suitcase, and a tree. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the window seat. It was just before noon. I was dressed in traveling clothes, a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. I was reaching out my window, picking berries off the mulberry tree that grew outside. For the last hour I'd been eating the berries to distract myself from the sound coming from my parents' bedroom. The mulberries had ripened in the last week. They were fat and juicy. The berries stained my hands. Outside, the sidewalk was splotched purple, as was the grass itself, and the rocks in the flower beds. The sound in my parents' bedroom was my mother weeping.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  yard sale scavengers pick over her personal possessions. There were weekend antiquers from the suburbs who brought their dogs along, and families down on their luck who roped chairs to the roofs of bat- tered cars, and discriminating male couples who turned everything over to search for trademarks on the bottom. Desdemona would have felt no more ashamed had she herself been for sale, displayed naked on the green sofa, a price tag hanging from her foot. When everything had been sold or given away, Milton drove my grandpar- ents' remaining belongings in a rented truck the twelve blocks to Seminole. In order to give them privacy, my grandparents were offered the attic. Risking injury, my father and Jimmy Papanikolas carried every- thing up the secret stairway behind the wallpapered door. Up into the peaked space they carted my grandparents' disassembled bed, the leather ottoman, the brass coffee table, and Lefty's rebetika records. Trying to make up with his wife, my grandfather brought home the first of the many parakeets my grandparents would have over the years, and gradually, living on top of us all, Desdemona and Lefty made their next-to-last home together. For the next nine years, Des- demona complained of the cramped quarters and of the pain in her legs when she descended the stairs; but every time my father offered to move her downstairs, she refused. In my opinion, she enjoyed the attic because the vertigo of living up there reminded her of Mount Olympus. The dormer window provided a good view (not of sultans' tombs but of the Edison factory), and when she left the window open, the wind blew through as it used to do in Bithynios. Up in the attic, Desdemona and Lefty came back to where they started. As does my story. Because now Chapter Eleven, my five-year-old brother, and Jimmy Papanikolas are each holding a red egg. Dyed the color of the blood of Christ, more eggs fill a bowl on the dining room table. Red 209 eggs are lined along the mantel. They hang in string pouches over doorways. Zeus liberated all living things from an egg. Ex ovo omnia. The white flew up to become the sky, the yolk descended into earth. And on Greek Easter, we still play the egg-cracking game. Jimmy Pa- panikolas holds his egg out, passive, as Chapter Eleven rams his egg against it. Always only one egg cracks. "I win!" shouts Chapter Eleven. Now Milton selects an egg from the bowl. "This looks like a good one. Built like a Brinks truck." He holds it out. Chapter Eleven prepares to ram it. But before anything happens, my mother taps my father on the back. She has a thermometer in her mouth.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  The current scholarly consensus is that the account of the conquest is largely a work of fantasy and that there was no large-scale massacre of the Canaanites.4 The story is now viewed as an ideological composition from the age of King Josiah, in the late seventh century BCE, aimed at justifying his expansionistic policies, or perhaps from even later, lending justification to the resettlement of the land after the Exile (which, as far as we know, did not involve violence).5 Fact or fantasy, these texts present a model for the ways Israel should relate to its neighbors. Ownership of the land is conferred by divine grant, not by ancestral occupancy or negotiation, and violence against rival claimants of the land is not only legitimate but mandatory. The fact that the conquest is not historical does not lessen the moral problem.6 The problem is not that it happened but that it was believed to have been commanded and condoned on divine authority. The paradigmatic potential of the story, as a model for future disputes about territory, is all too obvious. Immanuel Kant wrote, with reference to the sacrifice of Isaac, that “there are certain cases in which man can be convinced that it cannot be God whose voice he thinks he hears; when the voice commands him to do what is opposed to the moral law, though the phenomenon seem to him ever so majestic and surpassing the whole of nature, he must count it a deception.”7 In the case of the Canaanites, we have a clear conflict between a supposed divine command and what Kant would have called the moral law. Of course, we do not have to look to Kant for guidance on this matter. To say that the Israelites, as described in the Book of Joshua, failed to love their Canaanite neighbors as themselves, or even to respect them as human beings in the image of God, would be an understatement. Using biblical standards to critique the ethics of the conquest narrative would not be difficult. What is remarkable is how seldom it has been so critiqued until very recent times. Through the centuries, the biblical story of the conquest has served as a paradigm of colonial violence.8 If God has given a particular land to a people, then they are justified in taking possession of it by any means. The obvious contemporary example is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, justified, at least in some circles, by the traditional claim to the land on biblical authority. Not all Jews make that claim; Christian Zionists make it more emphatically than anyone. But the use of the conquest paradigm is by no means unique to modern Israelis.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  and thrusting cocoons in one another's faces and lying and haggling. Lefty's father had loved market season at the Koza Han, but the mer- cantile impulse hadn't been passed down to his son. Near the covered portico Lefty saw a merchant he knew. He pre- sented his sack. The merchant reached deep into it and brought out a cocoon. He dipped it into a bowl of water and then examined it. Then he dipped it into a cup of wine. "I need to make organzine from these. They're not strong enough." Lefty didn't believe this. Desdemona's silk was always the best. He knew that he was supposed to shout, to act offended, to pretend to take his business elsewhere. But he had gotten such a late start; the closing bell was about to sound. His father had always told him not to bring cocoons late in the day because then you had to sell them at a discount. Lefty's skin prickled under his new suit. He wanted the 30 transaction to be over. He was filled with embarrassment: embarrass- ment for the human race, its preoccupation with money, its love of swindle. Without protest he accepted the man's price. As soon as the deal was completed he hurried out of the Koza Han to attend to his real business in town. It wasn't what Desdemona thought. Watch closely: Lefty, setting his derby at a rakish angle, walks down the sloping streets of Bursa. When he passes a coffee kiosk, however, he doesn't go in. The pro- prietor hails him, but Lefty only waves. In the next street he passes a window behind whose shutters female voices call out, but he pays no attention, following the meandering streets past fruit sellers and restaurants until he reaches another street where he enters a church. More precisely: a former mosque, with minaret torn down and Ko- ranic inscriptions plastered over to provide a fresh canvas for the Christian saints that are, even now, being painted on the interior. Lefty hands a coin to the old lady selling candles, lights one, stands it upright in sand. He takes a seat in a back pew. And in the same way my mother will later pray for guidance over my conception, Lefty Stephanides, my great-uncle (among other things) gazes up at the unfinished Christ Pantocrator on the ceiling. His prayer begins with words he learned as a child, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, I am not worthy to come before Thy throne^ but soon it veers off, becoming personal . and then turn- with I don't know why Ifeel this way, ifs not natural . ing a little accusatory, praying Tou made me this way, I didn't ask to . but getting abject finally with Give me strength, think things like . Christos, don't let me be this way, ifshe even knew . . eyes squeezed shut, hands bending the derby's brim, the words drifting up with the in- . . . cense toward a Christ-in-progress.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. "It's like the paintings in the museum," she said. "Just an excuse to show people with no clothes." She insisted on leaving before Act II. At home, getting ready for bed, the four theatergoers went about their nightly routines. Desde- mona washed out her stockings, lit the vigil lamp in the hallway. Zizmo drank a glass of the papaya juice he touted as beneficial for the digestion. Lefty neatly hung up his suit, pinching each trouser crease, while Sourmelina removed her makeup with cold cream and went to bed. The four of them, moving in their individual orbits, pretended that the play had had no effect on them. But now Jimmy Zizmo was turning off his bedroom light. Now he was climbing into his single bed— to find it occupied! Sourmelina, dreaming of chorus girls, had sleepwalked across the throw rug. Murmuring strophes, she climbed on top of her stand-in husband. ("You see>" Zizmo said in the dark. "No more bile. It's the castor oil.") Upstairs, Desdemona might have heard something through the floor if she hadn't been pretending to be asleep. Against her will, the play had aroused her, too. The Mino- taur's savage, muscular thighs. The suggestive sprawl of his victims. Ashamed of her excitement, she gave no outward sign. She switched off the lamp. She told her husband good night. She yawned (also theatrical) and turned her back. While Lefty stole up from behind. 108 Freeze the action. A momentous night, this, for all involved (in- cluding me). I want to record the positions (Lefty dorsal, Lina couchant) and the circumstances (night's amnesty) and the direct cause (a play about a hybrid monster). Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it's my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates. Wouldn't I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep? And wouldn't there also be a play involved, and somebody dying onstage?

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Forty days is enough," said Lina, and went on eating. Only then could the babies be baptized. The next Saturday, Des- demona, seized with conflicting emotions, watched as the children's godfathers held them above the baptismal font at Assumption. As she entered the church, my grandmother had felt an intense pride. People crowded around, trying to get a look at her new baby, who had the miraculous power of turning even the oldest women into young mothers again. During the rite itself, Father Stylianopoulos clipped a lock of Milton's hair and dropped it into the water. He chrismed the sign of the cross on the baby's forehead. He submerged the infant under the water. But as Milton was cleansed of original sin, Desde- mona remained cognizant of her iniquity. Silently, she repeated her vow never to have another child. "Lina," she began a few days later, blushing. "What?" "Nothing." "Not nothing. Something. What?" "I was wondering. How do you ... if you don't want . she blurted it out: "How do you keep from getting pregnant?" . ." And Lina gave a low laugh. "That's not something I have to worry about anymore." "But do you know how? Is there a way?" "My mother always said as long as you're nursing, you can't get pregnant. I don't know if it's true, but that's what she said." "But after that, what then?" "Simple. Don't sleep with your husband." At present, it was possible. Since the birth of die baby, my grand- parents had taken a hiatus from lovemaking. Desdemona was up half the night breast-feeding. She was always exhausted. In addition, her perineum had torn during the delivery and was still healing. Lefty politely kept himself from starting anything amorous, but after the second month he began to come over to her side of the bed. Desde- mona held him off as long as she could. "It's too soon," she said. "We don't want another baby." 129 "Why not? Milton needs a brother." "You're hurting me." "I'll be gentle. Come here." "No, please, not tonight." "What? Are you turning into Sourmelina? Once a year is enough?" "Quiet. You'll wake the baby." "I don't care if I wake the baby." "Don't shout. Okay. Here. I'm ready." But five minutes later: "What's the matter?" "Nothing." "Don't tell me nothing. It's like being with a statue." "Oh, Lefty!" And she burst into sobs. Lefty comforted her and apologized, but as he turned over to go to sleep he felt himself being enclosed in the loneliness of fatherhood. With the birth of his son, Eleutherios Stephanides saw his future and continuing diminishment in the eyes of his wife, and as he buried his