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 The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I recall that I once failed to show a proper respect for the Holy Sabbath, by making one of my servants sweep the house after nones on a Saturday.’ ‘Oh!’ said the friar. ‘This, my son, is a trifling matter.’ ‘No, father,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘you must not call it trifling, for the Sabbath has to be greatly honoured, seeing that this was the day on which our Lord rose from the dead.’ Then the friar said: ‘Have you done anything else?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for I once, without thinking what I was doing, spat in the house of God.’ The friar began to smile, and said: ‘My son, this is not a thing to worry about. We members of religious orders spit there continually.’ ‘That is very wicked of you,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for nothing should be kept more clean than the holy temple in which sacrifice is offered up to God.’ In brief, he told the friar many things of this sort, and finally he began to sigh, and then to wail loudly, as he was well able to do whenever he pleased. ‘My son,’ said the holy friar. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Oh alas, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘I have one sin left to which I have never confessed, so great is my shame in having to reveal it; and whenever I remember it, I cry as you see me doing now, and feel quite certain that God will never have mercy on me for this terrible sin.’ ‘Come now, my son,’ said the holy friar, ‘what are you saying? If all the sins that were ever committed by the whole of mankind, together with those that men will yet commit till the end of the world, were concentrated in one single man, and he was as truly repentant and contrite as I see you to be, God is so benign and merciful that He would freely remit them on their being confessed to Him; and therefore you may safely reveal it.’ Then Ser Ciappelletto said, still weeping loudly: ‘Alas, father, my sin is too great, and I can scarcely believe that God will ever forgive me for it, unless you intercede with your prayers.’ To which the friar replied: ‘You may safely reveal it, for I promise that I will pray to God on your behalf.’ Ser Ciappelletto went on weeping, without saying anything, and the friar kept encouraging him to speak. But after Ser Ciappelletto, by weeping in this manner, had kept the friar for a very long time on tenterhooks, he heaved a great sigh, and said: ‘Father, since you promise that you will pray to God for me, I will tell you. You are to know then that once, when I was a little boy, I cursed my mother.’ And having said this, he began to weep loudly all over again. ‘There now, my son,’ said the friar, ‘does this seem so great a sin to you?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  16. In this mid-twelfth-century Psalter written in St Albans Abbey probably for Christina of Markyate herself, Christina poses with Christ in an historiated initial – poised for a sainthood that she never achieved. As a girl, Christina invented for herself ceremonies to express her marriage to the Church, but, later, her family married her off against her will, under pressure from Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who had himself shown a less than episcopal interest in her. She eventually ran away from her husband (a protégé of the Bishop) and entered spiritual living arrangements with successive celibates, one of whom was the formidable figure of Abbot Geoffrey de Gorron of St Albans. Out of the huge resources of one of England’s wealthiest Benedictine abbeys, Geoffrey lavished gifts on Christina which included founding a whole nunnery for her at Markyate, over which she presided as prioress (plus male hermit companions). Evidently possessed of considerable sexual or emotional charisma, she sparked deep divisions between admirers and scandalized detractors in the Abbey. Abbot Geoffrey’s death broke her power at St Albans; under the more discreet leadership of Geoffrey’s nephew Abbot Robert, the Abbey began to recover. His successor wrote Christina out of St Albans’ history and fostered a new cultic enthusiasm for an ancient and safely male companion of the Abbey’s martyr-saint Alban, Amphibalus by name and probably fictional by nature. A syneisactic prioress had failed to make it through to sainthood. [46] The general official change of mood in the twelfth century about marriage is patent, with much more concern to make sure that the sexual activity now assumed to be a normal part of marriage was directly concerned with conception. By the fourteenth century, confessional practice in England was including questions to make sure that couples were not making efforts to impede conception during marital sex. [47] More than that, the medieval Western Church embarked on a policy (widening in scope into the period of the Reformation and beyond) of dissolving marriages that had not been sexually consummated – at least when the parties wished that to happen. Cases of spiritual marriage continued to be found in the medieval Latin West; but by effectively making marriage dependent on sexual consummation, the Church hierarchy swung the balance decisively back towards sex in the old debate as to whether sexual intercourse or assent was the essence of marriage. The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on marriage has made this explicit right down to modern times, with consequences that we will follow (below, Chapter 19). [48] The new emphasis on the centrality of marital and procreational sex naturally gave a new currency to Paul’s theological insistence on the marital debt of husband and wife in 1 Corinthians 7, which has so often proved an embarrassment to Christian societies with other social priorities. It is not a coincidence that the majority of canon lawyers in the medieval Western Church from Gratian onwards championed the Pauline marital debt within marriage. Just as in the time of Augustine and Jerome, such emphases left untidy questions about the status of the Virgin Mary’s marriage to Joseph, as they always must, but canon lawyers were doing their best to be faithful to the Pauline principle in the face of opposition both from landed nobility and many of their theological colleagues. [49]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth. [128] Right or not, Mather was expressing a radical turnaround in the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations. Back in England, the Oxford don Richard Allestree anticipated Mather’s remarks by observing in 1673 that, amid his devotional publishing (he was the anonymous author of the wildly successful Whole Duty of Man ), he considered that women had hearkened to his message far more than men, and that ‘the reputation of Religion is more kept up by women than men’. Like Astell a few decades later, Allestree regretted Protestantism’s rejection of the ‘angelical’ state of celibacy – as a result some suspected that, behind the anonymity of his prolific works, a female author was concealed. [129] By the seventeenth century, even Counter-Reformation clergy began to look past the misogynistic clichés of the past and notice that women were easier to teach than men – and might even shame men into behaving better. [130] As women appeared to show themselves more devout than their menfolk (and, gratifyingly to ministers and priests, often more appreciative of the clergy’s toil), centuries of disparaging theological comments based on medical discussion of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender began to look less convincing. So, in quiet ways, a radical reconstruction of the relationship of the sexes was unfolding, although in the process it opened up a more precise divide between male and female identity. The joint story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation embraces successful female subversions of patriarchy and discreet adaptations of public ideals to reality. It is a dialogue between theology and circumstance: sometimes Christian theory transformed situations, while sometimes theologians found ways of dealing with and explaining situations in danger of escaping their control. At the end of it, around 1700, Western Christianity was becoming a worldwide religion in both its confessional forms, thanks to the expansion of colonial empires. It was discovering how disconcertingly different other long-successful societies might be throughout the world. Christianity was also about to find itself much less able to set agendas in matters of sexuality, gender and marriage. Part Five NEW STORIES

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "Use this please. Just yell when you're ready." There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: "If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store." Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. "Old Glass Cunt," he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights. He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants. Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skul-less, eyes like burning pus. "Something wrong?" said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste. The nurse turned to him: "Are you waiting for something special?" she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. "Why no...." "You can go then," she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door. "Do I have another appointment?' She looked at him in disapproving surprise: "You'll be notified of course." She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. "Some- thing wrong ?" Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals. "Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl's face like a great dangling tit. "Fuck off you!" Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen's spayed animal brown eyes. "Oh! I wouldn't be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You're hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute." 'What do you mean by that?" Carl demanded. "Oh nothing. Nothing at all." "Well, Carl," the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl's mouth.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self- deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks. . .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amid Mark’s general lack of comment on Jesus’s parentage, there is one remarkable moment where he ventriloquizes the people of Jesus’s home town as offensively calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ as well as brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. This phrase ‘son of Mary’ would normally indicate that the addressee’s father was unknown. Matthew, Luke and an echo of the story in John all briskly alter the alarming usage to highlight Joseph, only Matthew keeping any reference at all to Mary; but Matthew and Luke then provide two different accounts of the circumstances of Jesus’s birth in their Infancy Narratives. [8] In Matthew, Joseph is the main actor, and in Luke, Mary. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s initial horror at Mary’s pregnancy; he has to be instructed by an angel in a dream not to follow his instinct to repudiate his young betrothed, for this child is the Messiah (Matt. 1.18–22). Matthew, of all the Gospel writers, is the most concerned to link Jesus’s ministry to the Judaic past, and his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention. Luke seems more indirect than Matthew, but when in his story the angel Gabriel tells Mary of her pregnancy, she immediately asks him how that can be, since she has no husband (Luke 1.34). In fact, Luke goes much further than Matthew. Among the songs he incorporates into his Infancy Narratives are two hymns of victory, still commonly used in the various Christian regular daily rounds of worship called ‘Offices’. One is attributed to John the Baptist’s father Zacharias (the canticle ‘Benedictus’ used for instance in Anglican Morning Prayer), and the other to Mary herself (the ‘Magnificat’ of Anglican Evensong). Not all their content is relevant to their present context, and it has been plausibly suggested that they are martial songs borrowed from the Maccabean period more than a century before, but their general message of renewal and the overthrow of existing power suits Luke’s purpose. [9] Significant therefore is Mary’s proclamation in the Magnificat that God ‘has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ’ (Luke 1.48). Those Revised Standard Version translations underplay the shock value of these words to their early Christian readers. ‘Low estate’ renders tapeinōsis , which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation’, ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē , which starkly means ‘female slave’, and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great o theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope o Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a o hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate o translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian o mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism o (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body. 147

• From The Girls (2016)

  “You told me you were going to Connie’s all summer,” my mother said. Almost shouting. “You said it so many times. Right to my face. And guess what? I called Arthur. He says you haven’t been there in months. Almost two months.” My mother looked like an animal then, her face made strange with rage, a gaspy run of tears. “You’re a liar. You lied about that. You’re lying about this, too.” Her hands were clenched hard. She kept lifting them, then dropping them at her sides. “I was seeing friends,” I snapped. “I have other friends besides Connie.” “Other friends. Sure. You were out screwing some boyfriend, God knows what. Nasty little liar.” She was barely looking at me, her words as compulsive and fevered as the muttered obscenities of a pervert. “Maybe I should take you down to the juvenile detention center. Is that what you want? It’s clear to me I just can’t control you anymore. I’ll let them have you. See if they can straighten you out.” I wrenched away, but even in the hallway, even with my door closed, I could still hear my mother at her bitter chant. —Frank was called in as reinforcement: I watched from the bed as he took my bedroom door off its hinges. He was careful and quiet, though it took him a while, and he eased the door out of the frame as if it were made of glass instead of cheapo hollow-core. He placed it against the wall gently. Then hovered for a moment in the now empty doorway. Rattling the screws in his hands like dice. “Sorry about this,” he said, like he was just the hired help, the maintenance man carrying out my mother’s wishes. I didn’t want to have to notice the actual kindness in his eyes, how immediately it drained my hateful narration of Frank of any real heat. I could picture him in Mexico for the first time, slightly sunburned so the hair on his arm turned platinum. Sipping a lemon soda while overseeing his gold mine—I pictured a cave whose interior was cobblestoned in stony growths of gold. I kept expecting Frank to tell my mother about the stolen money. Pile on more problems to the list. But he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen that she was already angry enough. Frank kept up a silent vigil at the table during her many phone calls with my father while I listened from the hallway. Her high-pitched complaints, all her questions squeezed to a panicked register. What kind of person breaks into a neighbor’s house? A family I’d known my whole life? “For no reason,” she added shrilly. A pause. “You think I haven’t asked her? You think I haven’t tried?” Silence. “Oh, sure, right, I bet. You want to try?” And so I was sent to Palo Alto. —I spent two weeks at my father’s apartment.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you. Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe. —All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes. “ There isn’t any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things. I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn’t know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak—the silence was knit with so much. —I prepared inwardly for Russell’s advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him. I’d been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house—the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It’s strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged goodbye when I left, like she didn’t mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back. Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me—it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns. “Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It’s not some stranger’s body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s Evie.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Like you could have done it, too.” I inhaled sharply. The pathetic betrayal: Sasha had told Julian everything I’d said. “So show us,” Zav said, turning back to Sasha. I was already invisible again. “Show us the famous tits.” “You don’t have to,” I said to her. Sasha flicked her eyes in my direction. “It isn’t a big deal or anything,” she said, her tone dripping with cool, obvious disdain. She plucked her neckline away from her chest and looked pensively down her shirt. “See?” Julian said, smiling hard at me. “Listen to Sasha.” —I had gone to one of Julian’s recitals when Dan and I were still close. Julian must have been nine years old or so. He was good at the cello, I remembered, his tiny arms going about their mournful adult work. His nostrils rimed with snot, the instrument in careful balance. It didn’t seem possible that the boy who had called forth those sounds of longing and beauty was the same almost-man who watched Sasha now, a cold varnish on his eyes. She pulled her shirt down, her face flushed but mostly dreamy. The impatient, professional tug she gave when the neckline caught on her bra. Then both pale breasts were exposed, her skin marked by the line of her bra. Zav exclaimed approvingly. Reaching to thumb a rosy nipple while Julian looked on. I had long outlived whatever usefulness I had here. 196911I got caught; of course I did. Mrs. Dutton on her kitchen floor, calling my name like a right answer. And I hesitated for just a moment—a stunned, bovine reaction to my own name, the knowledge that I should help the fallen Mrs. Dutton—but Suzanne and Donna were far ahead, and by the time I jarred back into that realization, they had almost disappeared. Suzanne turned back just long enough to see Mrs. Dutton clamp a trembling hand on my arm. —My mother’s pained and baffled declarations: I was a failure. I was pathological. She wore the air of crisis like a flattering new coat, the stream of her anger performed for an invisible jury. She wanted to know who had broken into the Dutton house with me. “Judy saw two girls with you,” she said. “Maybe three. Who were they?” “Nobody.” I tended my rigid silence like a suitor, full of honorable feelings. Before she and Donna disappeared, I tried to flash Suzanne a message: I would take responsibility. She didn’t have to worry. I understood why they’d left me behind. “It was just me,” I said. Anger made her words garbled. “You can’t stay in this house and spout lies.” I could see how rattled she was by this confusing new situation. Her daughter had never been a problem before, had always zipped along without resistance, as tidy and self-contained as those fish that clean their own tanks. And why would she bother to expect otherwise or even prepare herself for the possibility?

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  In his exhaustive search for some conceivable good to be found in his bad act, Augustine finally comes up with a psychological clue: Whatever his motive for acting with the gang, he would not have done the same thing all by himself. Does that suggest some good hidden in the bad? He finds a psychological parallel that may help him toward an explanation. People normally laugh when together, not when alone—or, as Bergson put it, anyone who laughs alone is imagining the company of others (Le Rire 1). There is something essentially social about laughter. Companionship (consortium) is the good in the morally indifferent act of laughing. Could that have been the good paradoxically prompting him to the bad act of theft? Yes, he concludes: “The mutual provocation of my partners in crime provided the friction that ignited my desire to act thus” (T 2.16). He began his discussion with the observation that theft is obviously wrong, since even thieves do not want to be stolen from. He will later dwell on the bonds of good that unite even robber bands; they insist on just distribution of the “take” from their robberies (CG 19.12). Consortium and amicitia (friendship) are key values in Augustine’s eyes. His later companionship with heretics will prolong his own adherence to error. He will make amicitia the base of all Christian communities. He will even dispute Cicero’s definition of the state, saying that “things loved in common” are the basis of all politics, not mere abstract justice. So a persistent love of fellowship was the falsely conceived good behind his motiveless act in the pear orchard. Augustine has solved his own psychological mystery without having to resort to the Manichean heresy, which holds that evil is a positive (choosable) substance. But more. People notice that there is a parallel between this “first sin” of The Testimony and Adam’s fall in the garden of Eden. Though the gang hauls off a “huge load” (onera ingentia) of pears from the orchard, Augustine talks of only one tree—like the tree of the apple in Eden. He goes out of his way to say the pears were not beautiful, marking a contrast with the fruit in Eden, where the tree “was pleasant to the eyes” (Genesis 3.6). But a further parallel, the key one, has not been noticed, I think. Eve falls for the serpent’s lies in Genesis; but Saint Paul’s First Letter to Timothy (which Augustine thought was authentically Pauline) says that “Adam was not deceived” (2.14). Why did Adam commit the original sin if he was neither desirous of the fruit in itself nor deceived about any power it might give him? The problem is exactly Augustine’s in his own little orchard.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  He sipped. It didn’t burn as much as it had before. “Did you hear me?” She whispered, “Yes, I did, sir.” He moved close. She smelled the liquor. “I don’t want a whisper.” He invaded her space. Got real personal. “I want the boardroom beast. I want the wild wife that can’t get what she needs from her husband. I want the bitch that I know you can be. Can you give me that voice?” Her voice reached a higher decibel. “Yes, you can get that woman, sir.” “Well, why do you want to be a part of this?” he growled. “Because my husband can’t fuck, sir,” she shouted. Pretty lost his composure. “Huh?” She stood proud even though she gave away part of her family’s secret. “He cannot fuck, sir.” “So, why me?” She gave no eye contact. The schoolgirl in her came out. “I said, why me, bitch!” Her answer was short and aggressive. “Because you’re black, sir.” He pointed toward the door. “There are a few black men out there. You could have any one of them. Why did your husband call me into his office?” “Because I asked him to.” She paused. Irritation flared. “Sir.” “And how do you know me?” “I don’t.” “Well, why did you ask for me?” “Because you are the one that they call Pretty, sir.” “Who are they?” She stepped out of character. “Does it matter who they are?” “I ask the questions, bitch!” She fell back into place. “I’m sorry, sir.” She warmed to his commands. She ate his voice. “The they that I refer to is my good friend Mrs. Charleston, sir.” Pretty coughed. He knew Mrs. Charleston as the lady with the unenviable task of time sheets. She was in Human Resources. She was Oriental and built like a sumo wrestler. How she knew his nickname was Pretty, he didn’t know. “I know Mrs. Charleston. And she told you what?” “She told me that they call you Pretty, sir.” “Do you know why they call me Pretty?” “I can guess. But I would love for you to show me why they call you Pretty, sir.” Pretty moved to her ear. He tugged it his way before words found the inside. “I’ll show you why, but not here.” Her body language showed hesitation. He took it as defiance. They got their signals crossed. “We fuck at my place.” He checked his watch. His tone was disrespectful. “I parked in back. Tell Geronimo that you’ll be back in a couple of hours.” He pulled her near. “No questions. We do it my way. Understand?” His question was obviously rhetorical, because he didn’t wait for an answer. He strolled out. Her horse turned into a pumpkin.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  When I walked into the house I could hear voices coming from upstairs. I climbed to the top of the steps where my mom’s bedroom was. Her door was open and immediately I realized that was where the voices were coming from. There was my moms, and she had left her bedroom door open not thinking that her little teenager would be home early, and I watched her. I stood there and watched her. At that particular time she just happened to be tricking with two men at the same time. If one was in her mouth, the other was in her cunt. If one was in her cunt, the other was in her ass, or some type of sexual combination. One would have thought my moms was made out of rubber the way they had her stretched and positioned all over the place. The shit looked like it hurt the way they were blowin’ her back out. I don’t know why, but I just continued to stand there watching. I couldn’t move. Then all of a sudden my mother turned around and faced the door. I guess she just had a feeling that someone was watching her. Someone was watching her. That someone was me, her daughter. I’ll never—I mean, never—forget the look in her eyes when they locked with mine. By then I think the tears that had welded in my eyes were running down my cheeks. Without saying a word, I curved around to the left, where my bedroom was, went into my room, and slammed the door behind me. I made it over to my trash can just in time to throw up. I had already thrown up twice at school. But then it was because my stomach was sick, this time it was because my heart was. Of course, Naomi continued fucking those two men. She had to. Everybody knows if dem niggas don’t bust a nut, a ho don’t get paid. Once the two trick niggas finally left, I heard the front door close, and then I heard Naomi come back upstairs. Please don’t come in my room, I remember thinking. Please don’t come in my room. I was embarrassed for her. I knew my moms was a whore, everybody knew she was a whore, but to see it with my own eyes was just too much for me to take. My moms didn’t come into my room, but I could have sworn I heard her standing outside my door. She never came in, though.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  After an inward snort about “normal comparison group,” I read on and found that, as usual in new fields of clinical medicine, there were far more questions than answers, and it was unclear what any of these findings really meant: they could be due to problems in measurement, they could be explained by dietary or treatment history, they could be due to something totally unrelated to manic-depressive illness; there could be any number of other explanations. The odds were very strong, however, that the UBOs meant something. In a strange way, though, after reading through a long series of studies, I ended up more reassured and less frightened. The very fact that the science was moving so quickly had a way of generating hope, and, if the changes in the brain structure did turn out to be meaningful, I was glad that first-class researchers were studying them. Without science, there would be no such hope. No hope at all. And, whatever else, it certainly gave new meaning to the concept of losing one’s mind. Clinical Privileges [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven’t found it. So despite the fact that most people that I have told have been very understanding—some remarkably so—I remain haunted by those occasions when the response was unkind, condescending, or lacking in even a semblance of empathy. The thought of discussing my illness in a more public forum has been, until quite recently, almost inconceivable. Much of this reluctance has been for professional reasons, but some has resulted from the cruelty, intentional or otherwise, that I have now and again experienced from colleagues or friends that I have chosen to confide in. It is what I have come to think of, not without bitterness, as the Mouseheart factor. Mouseheart, a former colleague of mine in Los Angeles, was also, I thought, a friend. A soft-spoken psychoanalyst, he was someone I was in the habit of getting together with for a morning coffee. Less frequently, but enjoyably, we would go out for a long lunch and talk about our work and our lives. After some time, I began to feel the usual discomfort I tend to experience whenever a certain level of friendship or intimacy has been reached in a relationship and I have not mentioned my illness. It is, after all, not just an illness, but something that affects every aspect of my life: my moods, my temperament, my work, and my reactions to almost everything that comes my way. Not talking about manic-depressive illness, if only to discuss it once, generally consigns a friendship to a certain inevitable level of superficiality. With an inward sigh, I decided to go ahead and tell him.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  7-17-75Patient has elected to resume lithium because of the severity of her depressive episodes. Will begin with lithium 300mg. BID [twice a day]. 7-25-75Vomiting. 8-5-75Tolerating lithium. Feeling depressed at realization she was more hypomanic than she believed. 9-30-75Patient has stopped lithium again. Very important, she says, to prove she can handle stress without it. 10-2-75Persists in not taking lithium. Already hypomanic. Patient well aware of it. 10-7-75Patient has resumed lithium because of increased irritability, insomnia, and inability to concentrate.Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once the symptoms of an illness improve or go away, it becomes even more difficult. In my case, once I felt well again I had neither the desire nor incentive to continue taking my medication. I didn’t want to take it to begin with; the side effects were hard for me to adjust to; I missed my highs; and, once I felt normal again, it was very easy for me to deny that I had an illness that would come back. Somehow I was convinced that I was an exception to the extensive research literature, which clearly showed not only that manic-depressive illness comes back, but that it often comes back in a more severe and frequent form. It was not that I ever thought lithium was an ineffective drug. Far from it. The evidence for its efficacy and safety was compelling. Not only that, I knew it worked for me. It certainly was not that I had any moral arguments against psychiatric medications. On the contrary. I had, and have, no tolerance for those individuals—especially psychiatrists and psychologists—who oppose using medications for psychiatric illnesses; those clinicians who somehow draw a distinction between the suffering and treatability of “medical illnesses” such as Hodgkin’s disease or breast cancer, and psychiatric illnesses such as depression, manic-depression, or schizophrenia. I believe, without doubt, that manic-depressive illness is a medical illness; I also believe that, with rare exception, it is malpractice to treat it without medication. All of these beliefs aside, however, I still somehow thought that I ought to be able to carry on without drugs, that I ought to be able to continue to do things my own way.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “So we can open it up.” “I’ll get them,” Connie said. “Don’t miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry’s attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine. That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces. They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I’d seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-iam, like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr. “He’s always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing’s different. He can’t even drive anymore, I don’t think.” This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter’s face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn’t have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell? “It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.” “Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn’t turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.” “He’s proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That’s what’s crazy.” The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The corridor with blue lights, which had stuck itself to his memory? The thought that there is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason? Yes, yes, of course, that, too. But that—that’s only a general thought. There’s something else. What is it? An insult, that’s what. Yes, yes, insulting words hurled right in his face by Homeless. And the trouble is not that they were insulting, but that there was truth in them. The poet no longer looked around, but, staring into the dirty, shaking floor, began muttering something, whining, gnawing at himself. Yes, poetry . . . He was thirty-two years old! And, indeed, what then? So then he would go on writing his several poems a year. Into old age? Yes, into old age. What would these poems bring him? Glory? ‘What nonsense! Don’t deceive yourself, at least. Glory will never come to someone who writes bad poems. What makes them bad? The truth, he was telling the truth!’ Riukhin addressed himself mercilessly. ‘I don’t believe in anything I write! . . .’ Poisoned by this burst of neurasthenia, the poet swayed, the floor under him stopped shaking. Riukhin raised his head and saw that he had long been in Moscow, and, what’s more, that it was dawn over Moscow, that the cloud was underlit with gold, that his truck had stopped, caught in a column of other vehicles at the turn on to the boulevard, and that very close to him on a pedestal stood a metal man, 4 his head inclined slightly, gazing at the boulevard with indifference. Some strange thoughts flooded the head of the ailing poet. ‘There’s an example of real luck . . .’ Here Riukhin rose to his full height on the flatbed of the truck and raised his arm, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man who was not bothering anyone. ‘Whatever step he made in his life, whatever happened to him, it all turned to his benefit, it all led to his glory! But what did he do? I can’t conceive . . . Is there anything special in the words: “The murky snowstorm . . . ”? I don’t understand! . . . Luck, sheer luck!’ Riukhin concluded with venom, and felt the truck moving under him. ‘He shot him, that white guard shot him, smashed his hip, and assured his immortality . . .’ The column began to move. In no more than two minutes, the completely ill and even aged poet was entering the veranda of Griboedov’s. It was now empty.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I was stirred by the alcohol, the burn in my chest I exaggerated until I became moved by an authority not my own. I stood up. The boys didn’t notice. They were talking about a movie they had seen in San Francisco. I recognized the title—they hadn’t shown it in town because it was supposed to be perverted, though I couldn’t remember why. When I finally watched the movie, as an adult, the palpable innocence of the sex scenes surprised me. The humble pudge of fat above the actress’s pubic hair. How she laughed when she pulled the yacht captain’s face to her saggy, lovely breasts. There was a good-natured quality to the raunch, like fun was still an erotic idea. Unlike the movies that came later, girls wincing while their legs dangled like a dead thing’s. Henry was fluttering his eyelids, tongue in an obscene rictus. Aping some scene from the movie. Peter laughed. “Sick.” They wondered aloud whether the actress had actually been getting fucked. They didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there. “You can tell she liked it,” Henry said. “Ooh,” he crowed in a high feminine voice. “Ooh, yeah, mmm.” He banged the slot machine with his hips. “I saw it, too.” I spoke before thinking. I wanted an entry point in the conversation, even if it was a lie. They both looked at me. “Well,” Henry said, “the ghost finally speaks.” I flushed. “You saw it?” Peter seemed doubtful. I told myself he was being protective. “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty wild.” They exchanged a glance. Did I really think they’d believe I had somehow gotten a ride to the city? That I’d gone to see what was, essentially, a porno? “So.” Henry’s eyes glinted. “What was your favorite part?” “That part you were talking about,” I said. “With the girl.” “But what part of that did you like best?” Henry said. “Leave her alone,” Peter said mildly. Already bored. “Did you like the Christmas scene?” Henry continued. His smile lulled me into thinking we were having a real conversation, that I was making progress. “The big tree? All the snow?” I nodded. Almost believing my own lie. Henry laughed. “The movie was in Fiji. The whole thing’s on an island.” Henry was snorting, helpless with laughter, and cut a look at Peter, who seemed embarrassed for me, like you would be embarrassed for a stranger who tripped on the street, like nothing had ever happened between us at all. I pushed Henry’s motorcycle. I hadn’t expected it to tip over, not really: maybe just wobble, just enough to interrupt Henry so he’d be scared for a second, so he’d make some jokey exclamations of dismay and forget my lie. But I had pushed with real force. The motorcycle fell over and crunched hard on the cement floor. Henry stared at me. “You little bitch.” He hurried to the downed motorcycle like it was a shot pet. Practically cradling it in his arms.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I pretended Mitch wasn’t there, though I could feel his gaze, his mouth as slack as the open trunk of a car. I was skittish when Suzanne tried to push apart my legs, but she smiled up at me, so I let her. Her tongue was tentative, first, then she used her fingers, too, and I was embarrassed at how wet I was, the noises I made. My mind fritzing from a pleasure so foreign I didn’t know how to name it. Mitch fucked us both after that, like he could correct our obvious preference for each other. Sweating hard, his eyes crimping with effort. The bed moving away from the wall. When I woke up in the morning and saw the soiled twist of my underwear on Mitch’s tile floor, such helpless embarrassment bubbled up in me that I almost cried. —Mitch drove us back to the ranch. I was silent, looking out the windows. The passing houses seemed long dormant, the fancy cars shrouded in their putty-colored covers. Suzanne was sitting in the front. She turned around to smile at me from time to time. An apology, I could tell, but I was stone-faced, my heart a tight fist. A grief that I didn’t fully indulge. I was shoring up the bad feelings, I suppose, like I could preempt sorrow with my bravado, with the careless way I thought about Suzanne to myself. And I’d had sex: so what? It was no big deal, another working of the human body. Like eating, something rote and accessible to everyone. All the pious and pastel urgings to wait, to make yourself into a present for your future husband: there was relief in the plainness of the actual act. I watched Suzanne from the backseat, watched her laugh at something Mitch said and roll down the window. Her hair lifting in the rush. —Mitch pulled up at the ranch. “Later, girls,” he said, raising a pink palm. Like he’d taken us for ice cream, some innocent outing, and was returning us to the cradle of our parents’ house. Suzanne had gone immediately in search of Russell, cleaving from me without a word. I realized later that she must have been giving Russell a report. Letting him know how Mitch had seemed, whether we’d made him happy enough to change his mind. At the time, I only noticed the abandonment. I tried to busy myself, peeling garlic in the kitchen with Donna. Smashing cloves between the flat blade of a knife and the counter like she showed me. Donna slid the radio knob from one end of the dial to the other and back, getting varying degrees of static and alarming strains of Herb Alpert. She gave up finally and returned to jabbing at a mess of black dough. “Roos put Vaseline in my hair,” Donna said. She gave a shake and her hair barely moved. “It’s gonna be real soft when I wash it.” I didn’t answer.