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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It took something of an effort to look at myself in the mirror which usually gave me such quick, uncomplicated pleasure. As I stood washing my face with extreme gentleness, even the fronds of the sponge seeming rough on my puffed and tender skin, I found it took that kind of mastery to meet my eye in the shaving-mirror that I had needed, as a child, to look at certain pictures not manifestly horrible in themselves but subtly repulsive or awesome through some accretion of mood. My grandfather had at Marden a portrait of his aunt, Lady Sybil Gossett, by Glyn Philpot. It showed an ivory-faced society woman, of the kind perplexingly referred to as ‘a famous beauty’, with bobbed fair hair and large, lugubrious eyes. She wore a misty pale blue frock, cut very low at the bosom, and sat back in a little chair beside a tub of mauve hyacinths. Her melancholy, so intense it seemed almost depraved, and the vulgar sensuality of the colour scheme, were deeply terrible to me as a child, and I could not bear being alone in the dining-room where she hung. It was a family joke that I was ‘snubbing Sybil’ by having always to eat with my back to her, and I was not unpleased to be the victim of so abnormal and aesthetic an emotion. At times I would steel myself and look. It was just like now, keeping my eyes fixed there until the spirit-lamp of rationality guttered, my gaze flicked away in fear. James had said humorously that I wouldn’t like having my beauty spoiled, and though it could all be remedied I found my injured appearance unbearable. My vanity, which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity, was shown up for what it was; I bit Phil’s head off when he blandly suggested that I didn’t look too bad. For a while I became the sort of person that someone like me would never look at. After a few days I took a turn around the block with Phil. Accustomed to daily exercise, I now experienced an aching restlessness which mingled with the pain of my bruises and bones. I couldn’t make my limbs comfortable, and had to get out. It was a bright, blowy tea-time. Already people were coming home, the traffic was building up at the lights. The pavements were normal, the passers-by had preoccupied, harmless expressions. Yet to me it was a glaring world, treacherous with lurking alarm. A universal violence had been disclosed to me, and I saw it everywhere—in the sudden scatter across the pavement of some quite small boys, in the brief mocking notice of me taken by a couple of telephone engineers in a parked van, in the dark glasses and cigarette-browned fingers of a man—German?

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio. The same was true of nearly everyone I knew. At Yale, these things were true of no one. Even my service in the Marine Corps was pretty common in Ohio, but at Yale, many of my friends had never spent time with a veteran of America’s newest wars. In other words, I was an anomaly. That’s not exactly a bad thing. For much of that first year in law school, I reveled in the fact that I was the only big marine with a Southern twang at my elite law school. But as law school acquaintances became close friends, I became less comfortable with the lies I told about my own past. “My mom is a nurse,” I told them. But of course that wasn’t true anymore. I didn’t really know what my legal father—the one whose name was on my birth certificate—did for a living; he was a total stranger. No one, except my best friends from Middletown whom I asked to read my law school admissions essay, knew about the formative experiences that shaped my life. At Yale, I decided to change that. I’m not sure what motivated this change. Part of it is that I stopped being ashamed: My parents’ mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them. But I was concerned most of all that no one understood my grandparents’ outsize role in my life. Few of even my closest friends understood how utterly hopeless my life would have been without Mamaw and Papaw. So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Yet there’s something else. As I realized how different I was from my classmates at Yale, I grew to appreciate how similar I was to the people back home. Most important, I became acutely aware of the inner conflict born of my recent success. On one of my first visits home after classes began, I stopped at a gas station not far from Aunt Wee’s house. The woman at the nearest pump began a conversation, and I noticed that she wore a Yale T-shirt. “Did you go to Yale?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “but my nephew does. Do you?” I wasn’t sure what to say. It was stupid—her nephew went to school there, for Christ’s sake—but I was still uncomfortable admitting that I’d become an Ivy Leaguer. The moment she told me her nephew went to Yale, I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student, or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents? If the former, I could exchange pleasantries and talk about New Haven’s beauty; if the latter, she occupied the other side of an invisible divide and could not to be trusted.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Bob Hamel, my stepdad and eventual adoptive father, was a good guy in that he treated Lindsay and me kindly. Mamaw didn’t care much for him. “He’s a toothless fucking retard,” she’d tell Mom, I suspect for reasons of class and culture: Mamaw had done everything in her power to be better than the circumstances of her birth. Though she was hardly rich, she wanted her kids to get an education, obtain white-collar work, and marry well-groomed middle-class folks—people, in other words, who were nothing like Mamaw and Papaw. Bob, however, was a walking hillbilly stereotype. He had little relationship with his own father and had learned the lessons of his own childhood well: He had two kids whom he barely saw, though they lived in Hamilton, a town ten miles south of Middletown. Half of his teeth had rotted out, and the other half were black, brown, and misshapen, the consequence of a lifetime of Mountain Dew consumption and presumably some missed dental checkups. He was a high school dropout who drove a truck for a living. We’d all eventually learn that there was much to dislike about Bob. But what drove Mamaw’s initial dislike were the parts of him that most resembled her. Mamaw apparently understood what would take me another twenty years to learn: that social class in America isn’t just about money. And her desire that her children do better than she had done extended past their education and employment and into the relationships they formed. When it came to spouses for her kids and parents for her grandkids, Mamaw felt, whether she knew it consciously, that she wasn’t good enough. When Bob became my legal father, Mom changed my name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel. Until then, I’d borne my father’s first name as my middle name, and Mom used the adoption to erase any memory of his existence. She kept the D to preserve what had by then become a universal nickname—J.D. Mom told me that I was now named after Uncle David, Mamaw’s older, pot-smoking brother. This seemed a bit of a stretch even when I was six. Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn’t Donald. Our new life with Bob had a superficial, family-sitcom feel to it. Mom and Bob’s marriage seemed happy. They bought a house a few blocks away from Mamaw’s. (We were so close that if the bathrooms were occupied or I felt like a snack, I’d just walk over to Mamaw’s.) Mom had recently acquired her nursing license, and Bob made a great salary, so we had plenty of money. With our gun-toting, cigarette-smoking Mamaw up the street and a new legal father, we were an odd family but a happy one. My life assumed a predictable cadence: I’d go to school and come home and eat dinner. I visited Mamaw and Papaw nearly every day.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After a few moments Gavin came amiably through. ‘Gavin, you must think me the most frightful fool.’ ‘Good heavens …’ he laughed. ‘About Charles Nantwich—I hadn’t the faintest idea the other evening what you were talking about.’ ‘Oh, yes.’ ‘I have now, though. It’s so ghastly—have you known for ages?’ ‘Mm—quite some time. I mean that whole episode is more or less forgotten now, it was what?—thirty years ago. You must feel pretty awful about it, I suppose.’ ‘You’re right. And was grandpa really the driving force of all this sort of anti-gay thing?’ ‘I’m afraid he probably was. With the Home Secretary, I suppose, and the police.’ ‘I’m so appalled by people knowing all this, and me going prancing around making passes at anything in trousers and not having the remotest inkling. And Charles and his friends leading me on …’ Gavin laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know what to say to him, either of them. Is Philippa aware of all this?’ ‘She might be. She probably wouldn’t take it as seriously as you. I guess it was before either of you was born—I mean it’s another world, thank heavens ,’ he hastily emphasised. ‘But if you met Charles Nantwich, who’s the dearest and most extraordinary old boy, you would see that it isn’t another world. He was sent to prison and it’s obviously scarred him or whatever— and he was set up by some pretty policeman, and that’s really not another world, Gavin, it’s going on in London now almost every day.’ After a moment Gavin said: ‘I have met him actually; I think it was more than just the soliciting, there was a conspiracy charge and they raked up all sorts of other stuff. I heard about it originally from old Cecil Hughes when we were doing the London Bridge project. As you perhaps know, Lord Nantwich’s house has a remarkable first-century Roman pavement under it.’ ‘Yes, I’ve seen it—why didn’t I ask you if you knew it?’ ‘Cecil took me to see it then. It’s exceptionally beautiful, don’t you think, with the swimming figures and the Thames deity? It really ought to be removed to somewhere safe.’ ‘I don’t see Charles taking to that idea. But it must be rather damp.’ ‘It’s not only that,’ Gavin said in a strange, camp tone of voice. ‘There are other things. I remember Cecil and I had the distinct impression that orgies or something went on down there: there were candles and old leather-bound books going mouldy, and the queerest smell. And of course those outrageous Otto Henderson doodles on the walls. I must say it was more than a touch embarrassing—though Cecil I think quite enjoyed it.’ ‘I wish I’d talked to you before.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had appeared on one or two uncool telly programmes, supporting a talentless "star" through various sickly ballads; and his record of seasonal music reached No 3 in the album charts in the lead-up to Christmas '71. For a moment there was talk of his having his own show, and our house was in the grip of misery for a fortnight. But the screen-tests didn't go well, he was too shy and serious; he came home hopping with shame and relief. I fantasised about his having a success that transformed our rather careful lives, but I loved him best for what he loved best, the patience-shredding hours by the piano, my mother stoutly accompanying, as he worked and worked on a song or a recitative. None of this meant much to my schoolfriends stuck in Mudd and Slade. After the Matthew Passion one of them gave a strangulated parody of my father's performance, not from malice but it brought tears to my eyes. A doubt had been entered, that could never wholly be expelled, that he was a figure of fun. Of course he didn't always have the alien rectitude of the concert platform. He loved getting out of his frac. At home he was a quiet ironist, closer with my brother Charlie than with me, though I was the one who inherited his habit of sitting and gazing into the middle distance. A tiny bedroom had become his office and often you would pass the door and see him leaning at the window, watching the wind over the common. hundreds of hours I sat pretending to read, but sharing music with him, anything recorded by Beecham, whilst he read the score or peered into infinity through the blank above the picture-rail. When I first brought Graves home he won my father's heart by his morbidly detailed knowledge of Delius, but then risked losing it by conducting when a record was on. I had to take him for a walk to the trig-point to explain my father's conviction that if Sir Thomas had already conducted it there was no need for anyone else to. In our second year at school Graves and I shared a study-bedroom. He was too camp and snobbish to be popular, but I had fallen swiftly under his influence and he had correspondingly formed a keen dependence on me. No one else made any claim on us, and though part of me longed to be billeted with one of the fabulous Raleigh rebels, I consigned that plan to my thriving fantasy folder, and settled in with Graves and his record collection instead.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was tensed and fit for it, but could not help curling up. I saw two things: my beautiful new copy of The Flower Beneath the Foot had been jerked from my pocket in the scuffle. It was just in front of my eyes, standing on end, its pages fanned open. There was a peculiar silence of several seconds, in which I thought they might be calling it off. I read the words ‘perhaps I might find Harold …’ two or three times. That must have been enough to show how I cared for it. A boot slammed down on it, buckling the binding, and then again and again, grinding the pages into the warmsmelling spilt rubbish, scuffing to pulp the lachrymose saint on the wrapper. The second thing, as my head was jerked back by the hair, my cheek squashed and grazed on the ground, was a boot drawn back, very large and hard, then slamming towards my face. ‘But darling, I was going to give it to you.’ James was terribly upset about the book. ‘I haven’t got one with the wrapper. It was probably worth £100—more, if it was as mint as you say.’ He sat beside me on the sofa, holding my hand. It was rather awful to see him so cheated of his treasure, his aghast look of cupidity and disbelief. ‘I’m afraid the dustmen will have cleared it away by now.’ I spoke thickly, as though I were very drunk. By a miracle I had only lost one tooth, but as it was right in the front it gave me the fatuous air of a defaced advertisement. My left cheek was purple, my mouth swollen and lopsided, and my left eye narrowed to a gluey slit in a bed of tenderest black, like an exposed mollusc. Over the bridge of my beautiful nose, broken and cut, an apache stripe of dressing was stuck. My James was so movingly practical over all this, not repelled, even slightly in his element, somehow vindicated. Deliberately or not, he kept making me laugh, which I could hardly bear, with my bludgeoned head, cracked ribs, and the bruises and contusions on my side and my legs. I had always had such good health—never a broken bone, never a filling, all the household ailments checked off in childhood—that James had had no occasion to prescribe to me for more than a hangover. Because we were always so private with each other he seemed almost to be play-acting when he sounded me and felt me expertly with his still mottled, childish hands, and took my pulse and gave me tiny, painkilling pills.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I think I preferred the envy unvoiced. I sidled into the entry across the page. ‘… Surgery. Then to swim—40 lengths, exhausted but good. Hung around in the showers—full of mutants & geriatrics. About to go when that heavenly Maurice came in & took the shower next to mine. His skin, close to, exquisitely fine & silky—& his great lazy cock, half-erect, with that thick vein meandering down it, the dull purple head when he pulled back the skin … Extase! Then on call. Out at once to a basement flat that time forgot, the stinking dereliction most people know nothing about. Miserable, thousand-year-old husband & wife—she senile, he incontinent. She had slipped on the stairs, he cdn’t lift her, pissing himself. A great fat dog that kept getting in the way. Huge malodorous furniture, photographs, war-time wireless. I was so businesslike—its utter & absolute seriousness to them. Once I was outside in the car again I breathed freely—feelings of pity & misery, but no longer moony about Maurice. And this was only the beginning of a really useful night.’ This touched me far more than the attacks on me—which I read as a kind of flattery—and humbled me with a true sense of my uselessness. James was like Charles in this: without in the least intending it they exposed my egoism by the example of their goodness, by all their sweet, philanthropic sublimations. There was the jolt of the lift being called, and its whining descent. I jumped up and put the diary back, but not quite in line, so that it would be clear that I had looked at it. I nipped into the kitchen for the Guardian, sprawled on the sofa and then—since there was something farcical and implausible in this—decided I would be asleep. I pretended to surface as James came in: ‘Dearest! Sorry, I’m so tired—frightful night. Down the Shaft till all hours.’ He didn’t seem too thrilled about this. ‘I hope it was fun.’ ‘Up to a point. I went with my little Philpot but ran into Arthur …’ ‘So you had them both, I imagine?’ ‘Well …’—I left it in the realm of possibilities. He slammed around the kitchen, ground more coffee, put bread in the toaster almost as if to complain that I should have done all this for him already; but to fend off what had to be said, too. ‘You’d better tell me what happened,’ I said. He hugged me suddenly and hard. ‘Yes; do you mind if I tell you the whole thing? At the risk of sounding rather foolish.’ ‘My darling.’ ‘Let’s go in the other room.’ We did so and he opened one of the big windows on the faint summer roar, and walked about and gazed into the rooms across the road while I sat attentively. ‘I suppose I’ve been feeling a bit wretched lately,’ he said, and then stopped. ‘What sort of wretched?’

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I went to my desk. He closed the office door behind him. I sat down, blew my nose and wiped my face. I stared into space for several minutes, every now and then dwelling on the tingling sensation in my buttocks. I typed the letter again and took it into his office. He didn’t look up as I put it on his desk. I went back out and sat, planning to sink into a stupor of some sort. But a client came in, so I couldn’t. I had to buzz the lawyer and tell him the client had arrived. “Tell him to wait,” he said curtly. When I told the client to wait, he came up to my desk and began to talk to me. “I’ve been here twice before,” he said. “Do you recognize me?” “Yes,” I said. “Of course.” He was a small, tight-looking middle-aged man with agitated little hands and a pale scar running over his lip and down his chin. The scar didn’t make him look tough; he was too anxious to look tough. “I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me,” he said. “I never thought I’d be in a lawyer’s office even once, and I’ve been here three times now. And absolutely nothing’s been accomplished. I’ve always hated lawyers.” He looked as though he expected me to take offense. “A lot of people do,” I said. “It was either that or I would’ve shot those miserable blankety-blanks next door and I’d have to get a lawyer to defend me anyway. You know the story?” I did. He was suing his neighbors because they had a dog that “barked all goddamn day.” I listened to him talk. It surprised me how this short conversation quickly restored my sensibility. Everything seemed perfectly normal by the time the lawyer came out of his office to greet the client. I noticed he had my letter in one hand. Just before he turned to lead the client away, he handed it to me, smiling. “Good letter,” he said. When I went home that night, everything was the same. My life had not been disarranged by the event except for a slight increase in the distance between me and my family. My behind was not even red when I looked at it in the bathroom mirror. But when I got into bed and thought about the thing, I got excited. I was more excited, in fact, than I had ever been in my life. That didn’t surprise me, either. I felt a numbness; I felt that I could never have a normal conversation with anyone again. I masturbated slowly, to put off the climax as long as I could. But there was no climax, even though I tried for a long time. Then I couldn’t sleep.

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

  Further, Cyprian says (Ad Pompon, de Virgin., Ep. lxii), “By their very intercourse, their blandishments, their converse, their embraces, those who are associated in a sleep that knows neither honor nor shame, acknowledge their disgrace and crime.” Therefore by doing these things a man is guilty of a crime, that is, of mortal sin. I answer that, A thing is said to be a mortal works. /sin in two ways. First, by reason of its species, and in this way a kiss, caress, or touch does not, of its very nature, imply a mortal sin, for it is possible to do such things without lustful pleasure, either as being the custom of one’s country, or on account of some obligation or reasonable cause. Secondly, a thing is said to be a mortal sin by reason of its cause: thus he who gives an alms, in order to lead someone into heresy, sins mortally on account of his corrupt intention. Now it has been stated above ([3537]FS, Q[74], A[8]), that it is a mortal sin not only to consent to the act, but also to the delectation of a mortal sin. Wherefore since fornication is a mortal sin, and much more so the other kinds of lust, it follows that in such like sins not only consent to the act but also consent to the pleasure is a mortal sin. Consequently, when these kisses and caresses are done for this delectation, it follows that they are mortal sins, and only in this way are they said to be lustful. Therefore in so far as they are lustful, they are mortal sins. Reply to Objection 1: The Apostle makes no further mention of these three because they are not sinful except as directed to those that he had mentioned before. Reply to Objection 2: Although kisses and touches do not by their very nature hinder the good of the human offspring, they proceed from lust, which is the source of this hindrance: and on this account they are mortally sinful. Reply to Objection 3: This argument proves that such things are not mortal sins in their species. Whether nocturnal pollution is a mortal sin?Objection 1: It would seem that nocturnal pollution is a sin. For the same things are the matter of merit and demerit. Now a man may merit while he sleeps, as was the case with Solomon, who while asleep obtained the gift of wisdom from the Lord (3 Kings 3:2, Par. 1). Therefore a man may demerit while asleep; and thus nocturnal pollution would seem to be a sin.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The famous actress whose stunning conversion is memorialized in an impromptu aside of John Chrysostom was not the only woman of her time to seek a repentance that was destined to reverberate in the collective imagination of Christians. Sometime around AD 400, far from the glamours of the Antiochene stage, another woman, Taïsia, made a spiritual turn that was just as stark, if less immediately celebrated. Her story is related with brief but brutal realism in one of the most primitive documents of monastic wisdom, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Orphaned in her youth, Taïsia turned her home into a guesthouse along the fringes of the settled world, in the pioneer country of Egyptian monasticism, at the desert outpost of Scetis. Known for her generosity with the brothers, her stores were gradually exhausted, and in desperate seasons she did what many ancient women, faced by the mundane brutalities of a subsistence order, might have done. She profited with her body. The Sayings add no drama, subtract no shame from this bare fact: “She was led to prostitution.” But the mere act of narrating a woman’s passage from respectable poverty to sexual humiliation was an epochal novelty. In nearly a thousand years of the written word, there is little to match the simple authenticity of this humble lapse. More dramatic still, Taïsia was to find an escape from prostitution, no less miraculous than the “devices of virtue” that saved the heroines of romance. But unlike the imaginary girls of romance, Taïsia’s body was not spared that “one single abuse” whose avoidance was the deepest convention of romance.47

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the waning years of the fourth century, an anonymous Christian lawyer assembled a small handbook juxtaposing Mosaic and Roman law, with the evident purpose of emphasizing the commonalities between them. Although the governance of sex presented inauspicious prospects for such a comparison, the author was not deterred. He presented the Levitical prohibition on same-sex coupling (in an Old Latin translation), which dictated the death penalty for both partners when “a man lies with a man as with a woman.” On the Roman side of the ledger, matters were far less clear. The author of the compilation could cite two rules preserved in the late legal collection known as the Sentences of Paul. “Anyone who will have corrupted a free male against his will is to suffer capital punishment. Anyone who will have submitted, of his own volition, to shameful and impure violation, will be deprived of half his property.” The Sentences of Paul, composed around AD 300, accurately reflected the foundations of classical law, which still prevailed when the author wrote his comparison of Mosaic and Roman law in the 390s. The violation of free boys was fearsomely punished, and sexual passivity incurred severe public penalties. Roman law was inspired by norms of masculinity; it guarded the impenetrability of the Roman youth and debilitated the pathicus. The Mosaic law sits across a conceptual divide so vast from the aims of Roman policy, and derives from a juridical regime so alien from the techniques of Roman jurisprudence, that the Christian author of this tract has made the best of a very bad job.8 He must have sensed it. For this unflappable compiler appended a recent enactment of the emperor Theodosius I, the only contemporary inclusion in his handbook, a decree that, in his judgment, “followed the spirit of the Mosaic Law to the fullest.” In 390, Theodosius had issued a law declaring, “We cannot allow the city of Rome, the mother of all virtues, any longer to be polluted by the contaminating emasculation of men’s sexual honor, and the rude vigor handed down from the ancient founders to be depleted by a people weakened in softness, becoming an insult to ages past and present.” The law explicitly punished men who suffered their bodies to be used like the flesh of women, but the focus of imperial energy was specific and revealing. “Having dragged out all—it is embarrassing to say—from the male brothels, let the flames of vengeance expiate their crime with the populace watching, so everyone will know that the soul of a man is to be treated by all as an inviolable precinct.” Such florid effusions are characteristic of late imperial statecraft. But the public incineration of the male prostitutes of Rome is almost totally unaccountable in terms of ordinary Roman policy.9

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  FROM SHAME TO SIN: THE PENITENT PROSTITUTESThe famous actress whose stunning conversion is memorialized in an impromptu aside of John Chrysostom was not the only woman of her time to seek a repentance that was destined to reverberate in the collective imagination of Christians. Sometime around AD 400, far from the glamours of the Antiochene stage, another woman, Taïsia, made a spiritual turn that was just as stark, if less immediately celebrated. Her story is related with brief but brutal realism in one of the most primitive documents of monastic wisdom, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Orphaned in her youth, Taïsia turned her home into a guesthouse along the fringes of the settled world, in the pioneer country of Egyptian monasticism, at the desert outpost of Scetis. Known for her generosity with the brothers, her stores were gradually exhausted, and in desperate seasons she did what many ancient women, faced by the mundane brutalities of a subsistence order, might have done. She profited with her body. The Sayings add no drama, subtract no shame from this bare fact: “She was led to prostitution.” But the mere act of narrating a woman’s passage from respectable poverty to sexual humiliation was an epochal novelty. In nearly a thousand years of the written word, there is little to match the simple authenticity of this humble lapse. More dramatic still, Taïsia was to find an escape from prostitution, no less miraculous than the “devices of virtue” that saved the heroines of romance. But unlike the imaginary girls of romance, Taïsia’s body was not spared that “one single abuse” whose avoidance was the deepest convention of romance.47

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The expansion of private force at the expense of public power was gradational, but no less dramatic for that fact. Already in the reign of Theoderic in Italy, generally one of the most traditional of the successor kingdoms, we find the king excusing justifiable homicide in the case of adultery on the grounds that it was simply a law of nature for men to defend their wives with the same violence that “bulls,” “rams,” and “stallions” controlled their mates, whereas the failure to do so would “redound to a man’s eternal shame”! Here, in early sixth-century Italy, was a society that still possessed a relatively strong apparatus of public law. A generation later, during the regency of Theoderic’s grandson, an edict was issued in the name of defending civilitas, civility. It compasses a number of sexual regulations. A man convicted of adultery was deprived of all rights of legitimate marriage himself; if rich, he lost half his property, and if poor, he was exiled. No man was to be joined to two wives at the same time, which was lust or cupidity, and in either case was to cost a man all of his property. If a man dishonored his marriage by being joined to a concubine, the woman was punished. A freeborn concubine was to be yoked to the slavery of the man’s wife; a slave who engaged in such disgrace was subjected to a penalty of the mistress’s choosing, “excepting the penalty of blood.” What is notable about this promulgation is not the headlong intrusion of moralism into lawgiving, but the subtle disappearance of old modes of regulation, in which status above all framed the dynamics of power between state and society. A century later, in the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the mix of Christian moralizing and public pronouncement had continue to progress. Men who “lie with men” were to be castrated and placed under ecclesiastical supervision. For the first time we hear that a woman who “plays the role of a prostitute” was condemned to three hundred lashes and exiled from her city; so serious was the lawmaker that judges who were negligent in the enforcement of these measures were themselves to receive one hundred lashes and a fine of thirty gold coins. In the Byzantine world, older frameworks organized around status maintained their strength even in the Justinianic dispensation, and only in the Ecloga of the eighth century do we find a total breakdown of the old order. Gone is the ancient rubric of the lex Iulia. All extramarital sex is punished. Men are lashed for “fornication,” twice as harshly if they are married when they commit the offense; sex with one’s own slave is subject to public penalties. In these early medieval law codes, both eastern and western, we find Christian values fully expressed within the scaffolding of a new public order, one that owes less than might be imagined to ancient traditions even in so conservative a domain as juristic culture.6

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I opened the cupboard to get my leather jacket; it hung there obscurely beside Cherif’s vulgar coat, which still gave off the expensive new smell of opera cloakrooms. My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love. Out in the street, shouldering my bulky hold-all, unshaven, whistling that trite song that was played over and over in the Cassette, the song the man had whistled on my neck the day I arrived, "See Me Tonight"—"seamy tonight" I thought each time—I came round a corner and saw Paul leaving an old house across the way. Again, the fleeting impulse to go on as if I hadn't seen him: I was too scruffy, too seamy, really. "I say," he called out. "Good morning, Paul." "You look as if you're eloping." "Only as far as the washerama, I'm afraid." "I've just been to see Pauwels about the frame. He's got to get the right gilt to match. I've given him the photograph to go on for the design." "Oh good." It was almost as if my approval were being sought. "Where is the laundry thing by the way?" I gestured generally towards the area of the shopping streets. "Isn't it rather a bore?" "It's not especially fascinating." Though there had been some nice working lads there last time, folding up old-fashioned winter drawers. "If you don't mind the walk, you could do it at our house. Lilli's always got the machine going." "It's sweet of you. But there's such a lot," I said, stooping and shrugging under the burden. "It's not all mine," I warned candidly. "And there's something I want to show you too," he said. We walked on in silence for a while, adjusting to being outdoors together for the first time. I felt more observant, filled with a slightly precious regard for my surroundings, as though Paul owned the place and were graciously making it available. "I was quite wrong the other day," he said, clearly himself unmindful of the splendour of the main square. "I'm sorry. I could see you thinking something wasn't right." "Was I? I'm sure there's no need to apologise." "There is because I was being inconsistent. You asked me about the white pictures and I got snappy about sex and said that artists' private lives didn't matter or should be kept secret and then I started testing you with questions which are actually all to do with the artist's private life." "I think I thought," I said carefully, "that you felt a special respect for this artist, because of having known him." "Well, that's perfectly true," he said, "though not exactly the point." He looked at me shrewdly.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  This wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but it highlights the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility: I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor. There are lessons to draw here, among them what I’ve noted already: that one consequence of isolation is seeing standard metrics of success as not just unattainable but as the property of people not like us. Mamaw always fought that attitude in me, and for the most part, she was successful. Another lesson is that it’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with—like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong. Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift. In the past few years, I’ve vacationed in Panama and England. I’ve bought my groceries at Whole Foods. I’ve watched orchestral concerts. I’ve tried to break my addiction to “refined processed sugars” (a term that includes at least one too many words). I’ve worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends. None of these things is bad on its own. In fact, most of them are good— visiting England was a childhood dream; eating less sugar improves health. At the same time, they’ve shown me that social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining—my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For Clement, Christian marriage had received a special dispensation. “For the others, marriage achieves a concord through the shared experience of plea sure, but for the phi los o phers [Christians] it leads to a concord ac- cording to the Word.” Christian marriage had as little to do with plea sure as possible. “A love of plea sure, even if pursued within marriage, is irregu- lar, unjust, and irrational.” Clement addressed those who argued that mar- riage, and its tame pleasures of the bed, were according to nature. His en- dorsement of the view was tepid. “Even if this is true, it is still shameful that man, created by God, should be more uncontrolled than the beasts.” Th e furthest Clement would go was to admit that “nature, as in the case of food, so in the case of lawful marriage, allots to us what is proper, useful, and seemly, that is, to seek after procreation.” Clement believed that in Christian marriage the couple’s sexual intimacy would be aimed exclusively at procreation, so that it could even escape the nets of desire and plea sure. Marriage according to the Word was no sin because it off ered a mysterious exemption from the normal pangs of desire that motivated sex. Th ese senti- ments appear most clearly in Clement’s Miscellanies, which transmit his deepest teachings. “With marriage, food, and other things, let us do nothing  FROM SHAME TO SIN from desire, but only will those things that are necessary. For we are not children of desire, but of will. And so the man who marries for procreation should practice continence, not even desiring his wife, whom he should love. Procreation should be sought with a reverent and controlled will.” For Clement, proper sex was solemn, cool, ratiocinative. Marriage itself was encratic.  Th e Christian could achieve the transformation of natural desire into rational will. Clement believed that Moses had prohibited an Israelite man from violating a captive woman for a period of thirty days so that the “physical impulse could be scrutinized and mastered into a rational appe- tite.” Th e coming of Christ had “completely destroyed the works of desire— greed, striving, vainglory, lust for women, pederasty, gluttony, indulgence, and the like.” Clement envisioned a sort of self- transformation that was alien to the philosophical tradition. “Man’s capacity for continence, as far as the Greek phi los o phers regard it, is said to be a matter of striving against desire and not serving it in its deeds.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If the argument suggested by the title, From Shame to Sin, is not about linguistic transformation, neither is it about a shift from external social judgment to an internal, psychologizing morality (such a book might be called From Shame to Guilt). It is true that, by our period, “sin,” in both Latin and Greek, has the full sense of “moral transgression,” with a strong sense of culpability that must necessarily look inward for a blameworthy faculty. But the mistake would be to imagine that the cluster of terms governing the idea of “shame” was somehow exclusively external. Shame, in the Greco-Roman culture of the high empire, shuttled between external judgment and internal affect; its very nature lay in the inseparable connection between the two. Robert Kaster’s definition of pudor perfectly captures its essence: “a displeasure with oneself caused by vulnerability to just criticism of a socially diminishing sort.” In other words, shame was an emotion or emotional state experienced by an individual because of the potentially valid disapproval of the moral community. For instance, a Latin encyclopedist of the high empire recorded a philosopher’s definition of pudor and aischynē alike as “fear of justified reproach.” Shame, in the Roman Empire, was necessarily an interpersonal concept, dependent on the potential judgment of the moral community.4 The demands of honor and shame also varied in the expectations they placed on the individual, according to the individual’s place within the moral community. Herein lies the internal logic of shame as a moral sanction. Shame is not only a regulative emotion that mediates between the individual’s self-surveillance and the community’s power to render moral judgment; shame governs the moral expectations immanent in the structure of the moral community itself. Shame was a profoundly social concept, mediated always by gender and status. In the sexual life of the Roman Empire, it would be impossible to overstate the decisive influence of social position in the determination of sexual boundaries. Slavery, absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life, gave sharp meaning to the concepts of honor and shame; slavery is an inherently degrading institution, which by its very nature deprives the slave of direct, individual access to social honor. “Slaves had no sense of pudor at all, perhaps because they were not usually conceived as having an interior ethical life, and certainly because they could not suffer social diminution.” The free, by contrast, and especially the wellborn, were thought to embody social honor and to exhibit a finely wrought sense of shame proper to their station in life.5

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Indeed, for several weeks the time rushed by, and it was really only in the final month, when freedom grew palpably close, that every minute took on a crabwise, cunctatory manner, came near to stalling altogether. I was haunted then by an image, a visionary impression of young spring greenery—birches and aspens—quickened by breeze but seen as if through frosted glass, blurred and silent. But by then a real atrocity had happened, something more than my freedom had been taken away from me. My early days there called on my resilience. It was like being pitched again into the Gothic and arcane world of school, learning again to absorb or deflect the vengeful energies which governed it. But a difference soon emerged, for while the schoolboys were bound to struggle for supremacy, and in doing so to align themselves with authority, thus becoming educated and socially orthodox at once, we in the prison were joined by our unorthodoxy: we were all social outcasts. The effects of this were often ambiguous. Many of the distinctions of the outside world survived: respect for class, disgust at certain violent or inhumane crimes, and the ostracising of those who had been convicted of them. But at the same time, since we were all criminals, a layer of social pretence had been removed. There could be no question of pretending one was not a lover of men; and since many of the inmates of my wing were sex criminals—or ‘nonces’ in the nonce-word of the place—there was between us a curiously sustaining mood of sympathy and understanding. Of course guilt and shame were not magically annulled by this, but a goodish number of us—by no means all first offenders—had been caught for soliciting or conspiring to perform indecent acts, or for some intimacy (often fervently reciprocated) with underage boys. And many of the prisoners themselves, of course, were little more than children, old enough only to know the dictates of their hearts and to be sent to prison. The place was fuller than it ever had been with our people, as a direct result of the current brutal purges, and many were the tales of treachery and deceit, of bribed and lying witnesses, and false friends turning Queen’s Evidence, and going free. Such tales circulated constantly among us—and I added my own mite to this worn and speaking currency. My case, on account I suppose of my title, had been the subject of more talk than most—though nothing like as much as that of Lord Montagu, which shows all the signs of iniquity and hypocrisy evident in the handling of my arrest and prosecution, but wickedly aggravated by police corruption. In the prison my fellows felt sure that we two must be acquainted, and imagined us, I think, swopping young men’s phone numbers in the bar of the House of Lords.

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

  I answer that, Disgrace is seemingly opposed to honor and glory. Now honor is due to excellence, as stated above ([3449]Q[103], A[1]), and glory denotes clarity ([3450]Q[103], A[1], ad 3). Accordingly intemperance is most disgraceful for two reasons. First, because it is most repugnant to human excellence, since it is about pleasures common to us and the lower animals, as stated above ([3451]Q[141], AA[2],3). Wherefore it is written (Ps. 48:21): “Man, when he was in honor, did not understand: he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them.” Secondly, because it is most repugnant to man’s clarity or beauty; inasmuch as the pleasures which are the matter of intemperance dim the light of reason from which all the clarity and beauty of virtue arises: wherefore these pleasures are described as being most slavish. Reply to Objection 1: As Gregory says [*Moral. xxxiii. 12], “the sins of the flesh,” which are comprised under the head of intemperance, although less culpable, are more disgraceful. The reason is that culpability is measured by inordinateness in respect of the end, while disgrace regards shamefulness, which depends chiefly on the unbecomingness of the sin in respect of the sinner. Reply to Objection 2: The commonness of a sin diminishes the shamefulness and disgrace of a sin in the opinion of men, but not as regards the nature of the vices themselves. Reply to Objection 3: When we say that intemperance is most disgraceful, we mean in comparison with human vices, those, namely, that are connected with human passions which to a certain extent are in conformity with human nature. But those vices which exceed the mode of human nature are still more disgraceful. Nevertheless such vices are apparently reducible to the genus of intemperance, by way of excess: for instance, if a man delight in eating human flesh, or in committing the unnatural vice. OF THE PARTS OF TEMPERANCE, IN GENERAL (ONE ARTICLE)We must now consider the parts of temperance: we shall consider these same parts (1) in general; (2) each of them in particular. Whether the parts of temperance are rightly assigned?Objection 1: It would seem that Tully (De Invent. Rhet. ii, 54) unbecomingly assigns the parts of temperance, when he asserts them to be “continence, mildness, and modesty.” For continence is reckoned to be distinct from virtue (Ethic. vii, 1): whereas temperance is comprised under virtue. Therefore continence is not a part of temperance. Objection 2: Further, mildness seemingly softens hatred or anger. But temperance is not about these things, but about pleasures of touch, as stated above ([3452]Q[141], A[4]). Therefore mildness is not a part of temperance. Objection 3: Further, modesty concerns external action, wherefore the Apostle says (Phil. 4:5): “Let your modesty be known to all men.” Now external actions are the matter of justice, as stated above ([3453]Q[58], A[8]). Therefore modesty is a part of justice rather than of temperance.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  She represents the cross- pollination of Christianity and philo- sophical paganism in the fourth century. Th e word “repentance” is glaringly absent (instead she “becomes chaste”), but the mood is entirely Christian. “I purify my mind. I fl ee Aphrodite, I prefer the clemency of Athena.” Th e speech spoke of prostitution in terms of “pollution,” and there was a clear re- ligious subtext to the speech: the prostitute fl ed Aphrodite, preferring chaste Athena. Even so, Libanius could not resist insinuating that Aphrodite was wrongfully accused of perversion. Th e prostitute wanted to set up a law tell- ing women in prostitution that they had the capacity to become pure and to fl ee— a full generation before Th eodosius II would actually do so. Th e speech was a fi ctional school exercise, to be sure, but nevertheless represents a re- markable statement from a late pagan intellectual eager to defend the sexual integrity of his religion. Th e speech might be considered a pagan apology, written in response to the avant- garde of Christian sexuality.  In short order the literary potential of the penitent prostitute was recog- nized and elaborated, and she was translated from the desert to the city,  FROM SHAME TO SIN where she could be made to bear heavier symbolic associations. She was transformed into a fi gure capable of symbolizing the fundamental truths of sin and salvation, but of doing so in familiar and deeply resonant literary terms. Almost as soon as dramatic stories about the salvation of society’s lowest began circulating in the Christian empire, the penitent prostitute was reworked, as a literary fi gure, into a romantic antiheroine. In late antiq- uity no less than four penitent prostitutes would become major literary stars, destined for fame and popularity across the Middle Ages and into the mod- ern world. Th e impresarios of the Christian imagination realized that in the fi gure of the penitent prostitute they had not only the raw material for a Christian allegory but a plot that could express the brave new order of sex- ual morality. Th e lives of the penitent prostitutes were worked into antiro- mances, inverting a rich fi ctional tradition to express an entirely new logic of sexual morality, a new relationship between the sexual self and society. In one case we possess both the early and the more developed version of the same story, which allows us to take mea sure of the literary make over accomplished by late antique authors equally conversant with the wisdom literature of the desert and the conventions of ancient romance. Th e prosti- tute converted by Serapion and enclosed in a cell was bound to enjoy a most extravagant afterlife. Th us far we have refrained from calling her Th ais.