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 Trash (1988)

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Version_2 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition River of Names Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee Mama Gospel Song I’m Working on My Charm Steal Away Monkeybites Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know Demon Lover Her Thighs Muscles of the Mind Violence Against Women Begins at Home A Lesbian Appetite Lupus Compassion INTRODUCTION Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories T he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed. Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history.

• From Trash (1988)

  Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition River of Names Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee Mama Gospel Song I’m Working on My Charm Steal Away Monkeybites Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know Demon Lover Her Thighs Muscles of the Mind Violence Against Women Begins at Home A Lesbian Appetite Lupus Compassion INTRODUCTION Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories T he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed. Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history. There is no story in which my family is not background, even as I have moved very far from both Greenville, South Carolina, and the poverty to which I was born. I remain my mother’s bastard girl, a woman who treasures her handmade family, my own adopted bastard child and the lover/partner who has nurtured and provoked me for more than fifteen years. We become what we did not intend, and still the one thing I know for sure is that only my sense of humor will sustain me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  said. “Next time I would do macaroons instead, coconut macaroons. Those mandarins were too hard to eat.” I was silent, shock making me wary. I slipped off my shoes and put them under my bed, side by side. I murmured good night, tilted my head to receive her kiss. “You want me to turn off the light?” my mother asked, pausing in the doorway. I shook my head. She shut the door gently. How conscientious she was, turning the handle so it clicked shut. I stared at my red feet, marked by the outline of my shoes. Thought about how strangled and strange they looked, all out of proportion, and who would ever love someone whose feet could look like this? — My mother spoke of the men she dated, after my father, with the desperate optimism of the born-again. And I saw the devout labor it took: she did exercises on a bath towel in the living room, her leotard striped with sweat. Licked her palm and sniffed to test her own breath. She went out with men whose necks raised boils where they cut themselves shaving, men who fumbled for the check but looked grateful when my mother removed her Air Travel Card. She found men like this and seemed happy about it. I’d imagine Peter, during our dinners with these men. Asleep with Pamela in a basement apartment in an unfamiliar Oregon town. Jealousy mingled strangely with a protectiveness for the two of them, for the child growing inside Pamela. There were only so many girls, I understood, that could be marked for love. Like that girl Suzanne, who commanded that response just by existing. — The man my mother liked best was a gold miner. Or that’s how Frank introduced himself, laughing, a scud of spit in the corner of his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, darlin’,” he said the first night, his big arm reining me toward him in a clumsy hug. My mother was giddy and a little drunk, as if life were a world where nuggets of gold were hidden in

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

  These discrepancies between what one is, what one is brought up to believe is the right way of behaving toward others, and what actually happens during these awful black manias, or mixed states, are absolute and disturbing beyond description—particularly, I think, for a woman brought up in a highly conservative and traditional world. They seem a very long way from my mother’s grace and gentleness, and farther still from the quiet seasons of cotillions, taffetas and silks, and elegant gloves that slid up over the elbows and had pearl buttons at the wrist, when one had no worries other than making sure that the seams in one’s stockings were straight before going to Sunday-night dinners at the Officers’ Club. For the most important and shaping years of my life I had been brought up in a straitlaced world, taught to be thoughtful of others, circumspect, and restrained in my actions. We went as a family to church every Sunday, and all of my answers to adults ended with a “ma’am” or a “sir.” The independence encouraged by my parents had been of an intellectual, not socially disruptive, nature. Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found. Navy Cotillion, candy-striping, and Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers could not, nor were they ever intended to be, any preparation or match for madness. Uncontrollable anger and violence are dreadfully, irreconcilably, far from a civilized and predictable world. I had, ever since I could remember, inclined in the direction of strong and exuberant feelings, loving and living with what Delmore Schwartz called “the throat of exaltation.” Inflammability, however, always lay just the other side of exaltation. These fiery moods were, at least initially, not all bad: in addition to giving a certain romantic tumultuousness to my personal life, they had, over the years, added a great deal that was positive to my professional life. Certainly, they had ignited and propelled much of my writing, research, and advocacy work. They had driven me to try and make a difference. They had made me impatient with life as it was and made me restless for more. But, always, there was a lingering discomfort when the impatience or ardor or restlessness tipped over into too much anger. It did not seem consistent with being the kind of gentle, well-bred woman I had been brought up to admire and, indeed, continue to admire.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  One good number and after that the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?” Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,” says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish. In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth. It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme. He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides.

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

  We were in an oceanfront restaurant in Malibu at the time, so—after a brief rundown on my manias, depressions, and suicide attempt—I fixed my eye on a distant pile of rocks out in the ocean and waited for his response. It was a long, cold wait. Finally, I saw tears running down his face, and, although I remember thinking at the time that it was an extreme response—particularly since I had tried to present my manias in as lighthearted a way as possible, and my depressions with some dispassion—I thought it was touching that he felt so strongly about what I had been through. Then Mouseheart, wiping away his tears, told me that he just couldn’t believe it. He was, he said, “deeply disappointed.” He had thought I was so wonderful, so strong: How could I have attempted suicide? What had I been thinking? It was such an act of cowardice, so selfish. I realized, to my horror, that he was serious. I was absolutely transfixed. His pain at hearing that I had manic-depressive illness was, it would seem, far worse than mine at actually having it. For a few minutes, I felt like Typhoid Mary. Then I felt betrayed, deeply embarrassed, and utterly exposed. His solicitude, of course, knew no bounds. Had I really been psychotic? If so, he asked in his soft voice, with seemingly infinite concern, did I really think, under the circumstances, that I was going to be able to handle the stresses of academic life? I pointed out to him, through clenched teeth, that I had in fact handled those particular stresses for many years, and, indeed, if truth be told, I was considerably younger than he was and had, in fact, published considerably more. I don’t really remember much of the rest of the lunch, except that it was an ordeal, and that at some point, with sarcasm that managed to pass him by, I told him that he ought not to worry, that manic-depressive illness wasn’t contagious (although he could have benefited from a bit of mania, given his rather dreary, obsessive, and humorless view of the world). He squirmed in his seat and averted his eyes. A boxed bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed red roses arrived at my clinic the next morning; an abject note of apology was tucked in at the top. It was a nice thought, I suppose, but it didn’t begin to salve the wound inflicted by what I knew had been a candid response on his part: he was normal, I was not, and—in those most killing of words—he was “deeply disappointed.”

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

  The fact that manic-depressive illness is a genetic disease brings with it, not surprisingly, very complicated and often difficult emotions. At one extreme is the terrible shame and guilt one can be made to feel. Many years ago, when I was living in Los Angeles, I went to a physician recommended to me by a colleague. After examining me, and after finding out that I had been on lithium for many years, he asked me an extended series of questions about my psychiatric history. He also asked me whether or not I planned to have children. Having generally been treated with intelligence and compassion by my various doctors up to that point, I had no reason to be anything but direct about my extensive history of mania and depression, although I also made it clear that I was, in the vernacular, a “good lithium responder.” I told him that I very much wanted to have children, which immediately led to his asking me what I planned to do about taking lithium during pregnancy. I started to tell him that it seemed obvious to me that the dangers of my illness far outweighed any potential problems that lithium might cause a developing fetus, and that I therefore would choose to stay on lithium. Before I finished, however, he broke in to ask me if I knew that manic-depressive illness was a genetic disease. Stifling for the moment an urge to remind him that I had spent my entire professional life studying manic-depressive illness and that, in any event, I wasn’t entirely stupid, I said, “Yes, of course.” At that point, in an icy and imperious voice that I can hear to this day, he stated—as though it were God’s truth, which he no doubt felt that it was—“You shouldn’t have children. You have manic-depressive illness.” I felt sick, unbelievably and utterly sick, and deeply humiliated. Determined to resist being provoked into what would, without question, be interpreted as irrational behavior, I asked him if his concerns about my having children stemmed from the fact that, because of my illness, he thought I would be an inadequate mother or simply that he thought it was best to avoid bringing another manic-depressive into the world. Ignoring or missing my sarcasm, he replied, “Both.” I asked him to leave the room, put on the rest of my clothes, knocked on his office door, told him to go to hell, and left. I walked across the street to my car, sat down, shaking, and sobbed until I was exhausted. Brutality takes many forms, and what he had done was not only brutal but unprofessional and uninformed. It did the kind of lasting damage that only something that cuts so quick and deep to the heart can do.

• From The Girls (2016)

  label. “She doesn’t like her tits,” Julian said, pulsing the back of her neck, “but I tell her they’re nice.” “Sasha!” Zav affected upset. “You have great tits.” I flushed, hurrying to finish the dishes. “Yeah,” Julian said, his hand still on her neck. “Zav would tell you if you didn’t.” “I always tell the truth,” Zav said. “He does,” Julian said. “That’s true.” “Show me,” Zav said. “They’re too small,” Sasha said. Her mouth was tight like she was making fun of herself, and she shifted in her seat. “They’ll never sag, so that’s good,” Julian said. Tickling her shoulder. “Let Zav see.” Sasha’s face reddened. “Do it, babe,” Julian said, a harshness in his voice making me glance over. I caught Sasha’s eye—I told myself the look in her face was pleading. “Come on, you guys,” I said. The boys turned with amused surprise. Though I think they were tracking where I was all along. That my presence was a part of the game. “What?” Julian said, his face snapping into innocence. “Just cool it,” I told him. “Oh, it’s fine,” Sasha said. Laughing a little, her eyes on Julian. “What exactly are we doing?” Julian said. “What exactly should we ‘cool’?” He and Zav snorted—how quickly all the old feelings came back, the humiliating interior fumble. I crossed my arms, looking to Sasha. “You’re bothering her.” “Sasha’s fine,” Julian said. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear—she smiled faintly and with effort. “Besides,” he went on, “are you really someone who should be lecturing us?” My heart tightened. “Didn’t you, like, kill someone?” Julian said.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth. It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme. He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides. And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters. “Would you let me have dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you.” It worked like a charm. I was not only fed... I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They couldn’t do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls. What happened to me between times was none of their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  my ardor and zeal (if indeed worthy of the name) have been so careless and languid, that I confess I have failed innumerable times to execute my office properly, and had not He, of His boundless goodness, assisted me, all that zeal had been fleeting and vain. Nay, I even acknowledge, that if the same goodness had not assisted me, those mental endowments which the Lord bestowed upon me would, at His judgment-seat, prove me more and more guilty of sin and sloth. For all these reasons, I testify and declare that I trust to no other security for my salvation than this, and this only, viz. that as God is the Father of mercy, He will show Himself such a Father to me, who acknowledge myself to be a miserable sinner. As to what remains, I wish that, after my departure out of this life, my body be committed to the earth (after the form and manner which is used in this Church and city), till the day of a happy resurrection arrive. As to the slender patrimony which God has bestowed upon me, and of which I have determined to dispose in this will and testament, I appoint Anthony Calvin, my very dear brother, my heir, but in the way of honor only, giving to him for his own the silver cup which I received as a present from Varanius, and with which I desire he will be contented. Everything else belonging to my succession I give him in trust, begging he will at his death leave it to his children. To the Boys’ School I bequeath out of my succession ten gold pieces; as many to poor strangers; and as many to Joanna, the daughter of Charles Constans, and myself by affinity. To Samuel and John, the sons of my brother, I bequeath, to be paid by him at his death, each four hundred gold pieces; and to Anna, and Susanna, and Dorothy, his daughters, each three hundred gold pieces; to David, their brother, in reprehension of his juvenile levity and petulance, I leave only twenty-five gold pieces. This is the amount of the whole patrimony and goods which the Lord has bestowed on me, as far as I can estimate, setting a value both on my library and mova-bles, and all my domestic utensils, and, generally, my whole means and effects; but should they produce a larger sum, I wish the surplus to be divided proportionally among all the sons and daughters of my brother, not excluding David, if, through the goodness of God, he shall have returned to good behavior.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  his poems, least of all on moral grounds; but this is precisely what happened. Prurient minds have read between his lines what he never intended to put there, and imagined offences of which he was not guilty even in thought.1279 And what made the case blacker against him was his subsequent Protestantism. Because he became a leader of the Reformed Church, free-thinkers and livers and the adherents of the old faith have brought up against him the fact that in the days of his worldly and luxurious life he had used their language, and been as pagan and impure as they. The book had scarcely begun its career, and the praises had scarcely begun to be received, ere Beza fell seriously sick. Sobered by his gaze into the eyes of death, his conscience rebuked him for his duplicity in receiving ecclesiastical benefices as if he was a faithful son of the Church, whereas he was at heart a Protestant; for his cowardice in cloaking his real opinions; for his negligence in not keeping the promise he had voluntarily made to the woman he had secretly married four years before; and for the general condition of his private and public life. The teachings of Wolmar came back to him. This world seemed very hollow;. its praises and honors very cloying. The call to a higher, purer, nobler life was heard, and he obeyed; and, although only convalescent, leaving father and fatherland, riches and honors, he fled from the city of his triumphs and his trials, and, taking Claudine Denosse with him, crossed the border into Switzerland,1280 and on Oct. 23, 1548, entered the city of Geneva. He was doubtless attracted thither because his intimate friend Jean Crespin, one of the witnesses of his secret alliance, was living there, likewise a fugitive for religion’s sake—and there lived John Calvin. From being the poet of the Renaissance, bright, witty, free, Beza, from the hour he joined the Reformed Church, became a leader in all its affairs and one of the chiefs of Protestantism.1281 § 168. Beza at Lausanne and as a Delegate to the German Princes. Beza’s earliest business after greeting Calvin was to marry in church Claudine Denosse. Then he looked around for an occupation that would support him. He considered for a time going into the printing business with Crespin, but on his return from a visit to Wolmar at Tübingen he yielded to the persuasions of Pierre Viret, who entertained him as he was passing through Lausanne, and on Nov. 6, 1549, became professor of Greek in the Academy there,1282and entered upon a course of great usefulness and influence.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  an Aramaic paraphrase of Genesis found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, has a colorful retelling of the story of Abram and Sarai in Egypt. First, Abram is warned in a dream that the Egyptians will try to kill him, and that Sarai must protect him by saying that he is her brother. The Egyptians are amazed at the beauty of Sarai and describe it to Pharaoh in detail. Sure enough, the pharaoh takes Sarai and tries to kill Abram, but Sarai says he is her brother. Then God afflicts Pharaoh with “a chastising spirit” so that he is unable to approach Sarai, much less have intercourse with her. Finally, Abram is asked to pray for the king, and only then do the Egyptians learn the cause of the affliction—that Sarai is Abram’s wife. Pharaoh’s outrage is tempered by the fact that he needs Abram to pray for him and expel the evil spirit, and so he sends Abram away with lavish gifts. In this form of the story, the primary concern again is that Sarai not be defiled, but the actual deception is placed in her mouth rather than in Abram’s, and it has an honorable and urgent motive. Fathers and Sons Another set of issues is raised in the Abraham cycle by the question of an heir who should inherit the promise. At first, Abraham worries that “the heir to my house is Eliezer of Damascus” (Gen 15:2). Then he has a child, Ishmael, by Hagar, Sarah’s slave girl. Here again there is an ethnographic aspect to the story: Ishmael becomes the ancestor of a desert tribe. Like the story of Jacob and Esau, the account of Ishmael explains how Israel was defined over against its neighbors by divine choices that seem quite arbitrary. But this story, too, raises moral questions, not only for modern sensibilities. The story is told twice, with variations, in Genesis 16 (J) and 21 (E). In the J account, the conflict between Hagar and Sarai arises when Hagar becomes pregnant and looks on Sarai with contempt. Abram makes no attempt to defend her but allows Sarai to do as she pleases, so that Hagar has to flee. The angel of the Lord intervenes and persuades Hagar to return, by promising that her son will have plentiful offspring, even though he will be “a wild ass of a man” and will live “at odds with his kin.” But Hagar is also told to submit to her mistress.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I thought of those skinny little runts, who look like bellhops and messenger boys, that one sees on pornographic post cards in little bookshop windows occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit the Rue de la Lune and other malodorous quarters of the city. I didn’t like very much the idea of advertising my physiog in the company of these élite. But, since I was assured that the photographs were for a strictly private collection, and since it was destined for Munich, I gave my consent. When you’re not in your home town you can permit yourself little liberties, particularly for such a worthy motive as earning your daily bread. After all, I hadn’t been so squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There were nights when I was so damned desperate, back there, that I had to go out right in my own neighborhood and panhandle. We didn’t go to the show places familiar to the tourists, but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more congenial, where we could play a game of cards in the afternoon before getting down to work. He was a good companion, the photographer. He knew the city inside out, the walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often, and the days of the Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the Jews during the reign of the Black Death. Interesting subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the things he was doing. He had ideas for scenarios too, astounding ideas, but nobody had the courage to execute them. The sight of a horse, split open like a saloon door, would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt; from the slaughterhouse at Villette he would jump into a cab and rush me to the Trocadéro Museum, in order to point out a skull or a mummy that had fascinated him. We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the 20th arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places were lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale, Place des Peupliers, Place de la Contrescarpe, Place Paul-Verlaine. Many of these places were already familiar to me, but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the rare flavor of his conversation. If today I should happen to stroll down the Rue du Château-des-Rentiers, for example, inhaling the fetid stench of the hospital beds with which the 13th arrondissement reeks, my nostrils would undoubtedly expand with pleasure, because, compounded with that odor of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odors of our imaginative voyages through the charnel house of Europe which the Black Death had created. Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual named Kruger, who was a sculptor and painter. Kruger took a shine to me for some reason or other; it was impossible to get away from him once he discovered that I was willing to listen to his “esoteric” ideas.

• From The Girls (2016)

  over at me. “Did he show you the fountain in the backyard?” she said. “He got it from Rome. Mitch’s place has high vibes,” she went on, “all the ions, ’cause of the ocean.” I reddened, trying to concentrate on separating the garlic from its woody husks. The buzz of the radio suddenly seemed nasty, polluting, the announcer talking too fast. They’d all been there, I understood, to Mitch’s strange house by the sea. I’d enacted some pattern, been defined, neatly, as a girl, providing a known value. There was something almost comforting about it, the clarity of purpose, even as it shamed me. I didn’t understand that you could hope for more. I hadn’t seen the fountain. I did not say so. Donna’s eyes were bright. “You know,” she said, “Suzanne’s parents are actually real rich. Propane or something. She never was homeless or anything, either.” She was working the dough on the counter as she spoke. “Didn’t end up in any hospital. Any of that shit she says. Just scratched herself up with a paper clip, on some freaky jag.” I was queasy from the stench of food scraps softening in the sink. I shrugged like I didn’t much care either way. Donna went on. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “But it’s true. We were up in Mendocino. Crashing with an apple farmer. She’d done too much acid, just started working away at herself with that clip until we made her quit. She didn’t even bleed, though.” When I didn’t respond, Donna slammed the dough into a bowl. Punching it down. “Think whatever you want,” she said. — Suzanne came into her bedroom later, while I was changing. I hunched myself protectively over my naked chest: Suzanne noticed and seemed ready to mock me but stopped herself. I saw the scars on her wrist but didn’t indulge the uneasy questions—Donna was just jealous. Never mind Donna and her stiff Vaseline hair, shanky and foul as a muskrat’s. “Last night was a trip,” Suzanne said. I pulled away when she tried to sling her arm around me.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  She and I shared the same sense of humor and were kindred spirits on account of each of us having recently broken up with a boyfriend. Her boss had a way of inviting us for drinks after work at the 99 Club, a pub frequented by Boston’s equivalent of Wall Street traders. It was a pleasant way to end the day before I headed to my evening classes at Boston University, where I was now enrolled. One afternoon, as he was leaving the office, he asked in an offhand way, “Want to catch a drink at the 99?” “Sure,” I replied, thinking I could have one quick drink before evening school. I walked into the pub. He was there at the bar, talking to the bartender, and he offered me a seat on the barstool next to him, a broad smile across his face. A drink was awaiting me. What I next remember is waking up in my own bed in the pitch black, naked, in pain and aware that a man was getting out of my bed. I was jolted out of my sleepiness and stared in shocked silence as the man slipped into his trousers, picked up his shoes, and tiptoed out of my bedroom. His gait, the eyeglasses—they told me who he was, the broker who had offered to buy me a drink. The apartment door shut behind him, and I lay motionless, racking my brain to try to recreate the events of the prior evening. For hours I lay awake—too stunned to cry, too mortified to call anyone. How did this happen? How could I have let it happen? The next morning, I was the first to arrive at the office, taking my place at the receptionist’s desk that faced the elevators, and thus allowed me to greet each person who arrived. Long after normal starting hours, the elevator door opened and out stepped the criminal of the prior evening. I grabbed a telephone as though I were engaged in conversation, refusing to look at him as he strode past my desk and on to his elegant office. Will he apologize to me? I wondered. How naïve I was to think there might be any remorse in that man. Did he think perhaps that I had no idea what had transpired, that I was dead to the world when he sneaked out of my apartment? I wanted to scream at him, to punch him in the face, but that would entail sharing my nightmare with the whole office. Would anyone even believe me? I had never heard of such a thing happening to a person—it would be my word against his—he the big producer versus me the pretty receptionist who wore miniskirts. A combination of shame and the fear of retaliation silenced me.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (3) Sometimes when a criminal was being led to judgment or to execution, a dagger, with point upwards, was fixed below his chin so that he could not bow his head to avoid being recognized, but had to keep it up so that all could see his face and know his dishonour. When that was done, the person was said to be tetrachēlismenos. In the end, we have to meet the eyes of God. We may avert our gaze from people we are ashamed to meet; but we are compelled to look God in the face. The American sociologist Kermit Eby writes in The God in You: ‘At some time or other, a man must stop running from himself and his God – possibly because there is just no other place to run to.’ To each one of us, there comes a time when we have to meet that God from whose eyes nothing can ever be concealed. THE PERFECT HIGH PRIEST Hebrews 4:14–16 Since then, we have a high priest, great in his nature, who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our creed. For we have not a high priest who is such that he cannot feel with us in our weaknesses; but one who has gone through every temptation, just in the same way as we have, and who is without sin. Let us then confidently approach his throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help as need demands. HERE, we are coming to closer grips with the great characteristic conception of Hebrews – that of Jesus as the perfect high priest. His task is to bring the voice of God to men and women, and to usher them into the presence of God. The high priest at one and the same time must perfectly know what it is to be human and also know God. That is what this epistle claims for Jesus. (1) This passage begins by stressing the sheer greatness and absolute deity of Jesus. He is great in his nature, not by worldly honours or by any external trappings but in his own essential being. He has passed through the heavens. That may mean one of two things. In the New Testament, the word heaven is used in different ways. It can mean the heaven of the sky, and it can mean the heaven of the presence of God. This may mean that Jesus has passed through every heaven that may be and is in the very presence of God. It can mean what Christina Rossetti meant in the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’ when she said: ‘Heaven cannot hold Him.’ Jesus is so great that even heaven is too small a place for him. No one ever stressed the sheer greatness of Jesus in the same way as the writer to the Hebrews. (2) Then he turns to the other side.

• From The Girls (2016)

  3 The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting—I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I’d tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he’d accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home. — I’d gone back a few days later—Connie’s father answered the door almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home. “Connie’s upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn’t pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence. Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking. “Nice makeup,” she said. “Did you do that just for me?” She threw

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  They were regarded with hatred and suspicion and contempt. In Sparta, xenos was the equivalent of barbaros, barbarian. One man writes complaining that he was despised ‘because I am a xenos’. Another writes that, however poor a home is, it is better to live at home than epi xenēs, in a foreign country. When clubs had their common meal, those who sat down to it were divided into members and xenoi. Xenos can even mean a refugee. All their lives, the patriarchs were foreigners in a land that was never their own. (b) In 11:9, he uses the word paroikein, to stay for a time, of Abraham. A paroikos was a resident alien. The word is used of the Jews when they were captives in Babylon and in Egypt. Anyone called paroikos was not considered much above a slave in the social scale and had to pay an alien tax. Such people were always outsiders and only became members of the community as a result of payment. (c) In 11:13, he uses the word parepidēmos. A parepidēmos was a person who was staying there temporarily and who had a permanent home somewhere else. Sometimes, the stay was strictly limited. A parepidēmos was someone in lodgings, someone without a home in a particular place at a particular time. All their lives, the patriarchs were men who had no settled place that they could call home. It is to be noted that, in the ancient world, to dwell in a foreign land was considered humiliating; a certain stigma was attached to the foreigner in any country. In the Letter of Aristeas, the writer says: ‘It is a fine thing to live and to die in one’s native land; a foreign land brings contempt to poor men and shame to rich men, for there is the lurking suspicion that they have been exiled for the evil they have done.’ In Ecclesiasticus (29:22–8), there is a wistful passage: Better is the life of the poor under their own crude roof than sumptuous food in the house of others. Be content with little or much, and you will hear no reproach for being a guest. It is a miserable life to go from house to house; as a guest you should not open your mouth; you will play the host and provide drink without being thanked and besides this you will hear rude words like these: ‘Come here, stranger, prepare the table; let me eat what you have there.’ ‘Be off, stranger, for an honoured guest is here; my brother has come for a visit, and I need the guestroom. ’ It is hard for a sensible person to bear scolding about lodging and the insults of the moneylender. At any time, it is an unhappy thing to be a stranger in a foreign land; but, in the ancient world, to this natural unhappiness there was added the bitterness of humiliation. All their days, the patriarchs were strangers in a strange land.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Lies, always lies! She was growing proficient at the glib kind of lying that pacified Ralph, or at all events left him with nothing to say, nonplussed and at a distinct disadvantage. She was suddenly seized with a kind of horror, she felt physically sick at what she was doing. Her head swam and she caught the jamb of the door for support—at that moment she remembered her father. 2Two days later as they sat alone in the garden at Morton, Stephen turned to Angela abruptly: ‘I can’t go on like this, it’s vile somehow—it’s beastly, it’s soiling us both—can’t you see that?’ Angela was startled. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ ‘You and me—and then Ralph. I tell you it’s beastly—I want you to leave him and come away with me.’ ‘Are you mad?’ ‘No, I’m sane. It’s the only decent thing, it’s the only clean thing; we’ll go anywhere you like, to Paris, to Egypt, or back to the States. For your sake I’m ready to give up my home. Do you hear? I’m ready to give up even Morton. But I can’t go on lying about you to Ralph, I want him to know how much I adore you—I want the whole world to know how I adore you. Ralph doesn’t understand the first rudiments of loving, he’s a nagging, mean-minded cur of a man, but there’s one thing that even he has a right to, and that’s the truth. I’m done with these lies—I shall tell him the truth and so will you, Angela; and after we’ve told him we’ll go away, and we’ll live quite openly together, you and I, which is what we owe to ourselves and our love.’

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Tamm says, “There is a clear separation between those ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Members are holy, special, chosen; outsiders are unholy, ignorant[, and] toxic.”514 She also explains that the group became all encompassing. “Contact with the outside world—often including family—is discouraged, and family is redefined as the group itself…The group assumes all roles—family, friends, church, home, work, community,” Tamm says.515 She also explains that members in the group were influenced to subordinate their thoughts and emotions to the dictates of the leadership. Tamm explains, “Subjugation and subservience is expected and obedience and control demanded.”516 Tamm further recalls how the group emotionally manipulated its members. She explains, “Conformity is enforced through notions of guilt, shame and failure, by both the leader and other members.”517 This drive for conformity can be seen as part of Lifton’s thought-reform process the group and its leader used to mold a mind-set. Harmful Consequences Tamm notes that the group diminished virtually anything that might reflect independence and promote self-esteem. She says, “Individual achievements [are] discouraged, downplayed and finally eradicated while the group’s achievements are encouraged, celebrated and memorialized.”518 The net result was that members of the Chinmoy group continually concentrated their energy and efforts on the guru’s goals, not their own. For example, Chinmoy “didn’t want his disciples to get an education,” Tamm said in an interview.519 She says that the net result of involvement with the Chinmoy group produced “narrow, claustrophobic existences whose singular purpose is the cult itself” and that “logical reason and facts [became] blurry and nonsensical.”520 Tamm’s mother was reportedly once told to have an abortion and put the guru first. And when Tamm became disillusioned, she was “banished.” Tamm says that Sri Chinmoy “sent a message to my parents that I should be evicted and not be spoken to.” Such family estrangements, which cult leaders order, can have devastating results. In Tamm’s case she attempted suicide.521 Can destructive cults change? After the death of the founding leader, many cults begin to disintegrate. Without their defining elements and driving forces, most cultic groups eventually fade away. But in some situations, especially when there is a large membership or substantial residue of remaining assets, the cult may continue under new leadership. Professor Benjamin Zablocki recognizes that some cults may evolve and eventually become generally accepted churches or denominations. Zablocki has defined a cult as “an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and demanding total commitment.”522 In his classic book The True Believer , Eric Hoffer w writes about a similar progression for some mass movements. Hoffer said that such movements go through stages of development. He called the initial and most volatile stage of that development the “active phase” and observed “there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion.”523 In this sense Hoffer, like Zablocki, provides for the possibility that controversial or revolutionary movements like destructive cults might eventually evolve into relatively reasonable and more mainstream movements.