Surprise

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 Erotic Engine (2011)

  Bunimovitz sees two ways for adult companies to go. Small companies can specialize, offering niche products via niche technologies. Delivering the right product via the right medium will still prove popular. For a major company like Private Media, though, there is no longer a single “next big thing” in communications technology. Instead, there are lots and lots of small things, all of which matter. “I’m looking at my business and I’m saying, my goal over the next year is to make sure that we are in every channel and in every territory,” he said. “That makes your life very simple. You look at your business and say, ‘Where are we now geographically and channel-wise? Where are we not? These are the holes in my lineup? I’ll plug those holes.’ It’s a very simple business plan.” A business plan that may well once again show the path to the future for mainstream media companies. PART FOUR The Strange Future of Mass Communication [image file=image_rsrc1FT.jpg] FOURTEEN [image file=image_rsrc1FU.jpg] Words Get in the WayChange begets change. Ilan Bunimovitz’s plan to be everywhere brought to mind another conversation I had had on the other side of the world at a much larger pornography event that happens each year in Las Vegas: the Adult Entertainment Expo, which is sponsored by the trade magazine Adult Video News. Every January, the kings and queens of the porn industry step out from the “Adults Only” section of the video store to enjoy a few minutes of mainstream fame. The AVN Expo is the world’s biggest convention for adult entertainment fans. The four-day extravaganza draws thirty thousand people to the Sands Expo and Convention Center. For these few days, the face of pornography shifts from a creepy old man in a raincoat to a glamorous celebrity in a gown. It is a surreal mix of crudeness, business and technology, with booths pitching everything from 3D video technology to UV teeth-whitening services. Christian organizations hand out temporary tattoos that say “Jesus Loves Pornstars,” and vanity publishers sell books on building self-esteem. The sensory overload circulating around the floor is unlike anything else. Many journalists have written accounts of their visits to this expo—one of the funniest and most perceptive has to be David Foster Wallace’s essay “Red Son Rising,” in his collection Consider the Lobster—though most focus exclusively on the floor dedicated to fans and performers. The AEE, though, is actually several events in one: at the fan expo, tens of thousands of porn enthusiasts line up for a chance to meet the objects of their desire. The clichés here abound, from the porn actress posing with a fan, whom I overheard saying, “You touch my tits, I break your fingers,” to the sex-toy vendor wearing a T-shirt that said, “We treat objects like women,” to the crowd of men gathered around the one screen in the whole place showing a football game rather than trailers for the latest porn releases.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  As my due date neared, I confided in Jessica, the woman who would be assisting our birth, that I was worried I wouldn't be able to make milk, as I had heard of women who couldn't. She smiled and said, *You've made it already.* Seeing me unconvinced, she said, *Want me to show you?* I nodded, shyly lifting a breast out of my bra. In one stunning gesture, she took my breast into her hand-beak and clamped down hard. A bloom of custard-colored drops rose in a ring, indifferent to my doubts.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She didn’t say much more than that; I should get to know him for myself, she said. And so Roy and I had arranged a visit; I would fly to D.C. for the long weekend, we would see the sights, it would be a wonderful time. Only now, as I searched the emptying gate at National, Roy was nowhere to be found. I called his house and he answered, sounding apologetic. “Listen, brother—you think maybe you can stay in a hotel tonight?” “Why? Is something wrong?” “Nothing serious. It’s just, well, me and the wife, we had a little argument. So having you here tonight might not be so good, you understand?” “Sure. I—” “You call me when you find a hotel, okay? We’ll meet tonight and have dinner. I’ll pick you up at eight.” I checked into the cheapest room I could find and waited. At nine, I heard a knock. When I opened the door, I found a big man standing there with his hands in his pockets, an even-toothed grin breaking across his ebony face. “Hey, brother,” he said. “How’s life?” In the pictures I had of Roy, he was slender, dressed in African print, with an Afro, a goatee, a mustache. The man who embraced me now was much heavier, over two hundred pounds, I guessed, the flesh on his cheeks pressing out beneath a thick pair of glasses. The goatee was gone; the African shirt had been replaced by a gray sports coat, white shirt, and tie. Auma had been right, though; his resemblance to the Old Man was unnerving. Looking at my brother, I felt as if I were ten years old again. “You’ve gained some weight,” I said as we walked to his car. Roy looked down at his generous belly and gave it a pat. “Eh, it’s this fast food, man. It’s everywhere. McDonald’s. Burger King. You don’t even have to get out of the car to have these things. Two all–beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese. The Double Whopper with cheese.” He shook his head. “They tell me I can have it right away. My way! Fantastic!” He threw back his head to laugh, a magical, inward sound that made his whole body shake, as if he couldn’t get over the wonders this new life had to offer. It was infectious, his laughter—although I wasn’t laughing as we made our way to dinner. His Toyota was too small for his bulk—he looked like a kid in a carnival bumper car—and it didn’t seem as if he’d yet mastered a stick shift or the rules of the road, including the speed limit. Twice we almost collided with oncoming cars; once, at a turn, we careened over a high curb. “You always drive this way?” I shouted over the music blasting out of his tape deck. Roy smiled, shifting into fifth. “I’m not so good, eh? Mary, my wife, she’s always complaining, too. Especially since the accident …” “What accident?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Why had she summoned me? I wondered as we pulled into the station. Was she in trouble? We had arranged that she would meet my train with the convent car, but I did not see her on the platform; nor was she in the entrance hall after I had handed in my ticket. Then, suddenly, I caught sight of a nun standing beneath the old-fashioned wall clock, wearing one of those modern habits that gave her the appearance of an Edwardian nurse. There was something familiar about her, but she was far, far too thin. That could not be Rebecca. I looked around again, but found my gaze drawn back to that modest figure, whose eyes were meekly cast down on the tiled floor. The nun looked up and her face brightened with delighted recognition as she gave me a small, discreet wave. And for a moment, my heart stopped. Gone was the serene Madonna. This nun looked as though she had just been released from a concentration camp or was in the final stages of cancer. Her face had shrunk, so that she looked all eyes, which now seemed huge and protuberant. There were cavernous hollows beneath her sharply etched cheekbones. As she crossed the hall toward me I was appalled to see how skeletal her legs were. She was about five foot ten inches, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. But when she spoke, her voice was the same, and I had to face it: this was indeed Rebecca, but dreadfully, frighteningly altered. Quickly, I pulled my own face into what I hoped was an answering smile. “I didn’t recognize you for a moment in your new habit,” I murmured as we exchanged the nunlike kiss, pressing each other’s cheeks smartly, one after the other. I kept smiling. “It’s lovely to see you.” “And so good of you to come.” Together we crossed the station forecourt and got into the car. “This is a first,” I said, in what I hoped was a cheery tone of voice. “How long have you been allowed to drive? We could have done with this car in Oxford. Think of the lovely trips we could have taken!” “To the Cotswolds . . . Blenheim . . . How is it all? I do miss it.” Rebecca inched through the traffic and we started the forty-minute drive to the convent. “Oh, it’s all much the same,” I replied. “Though of course, it isn’t the same being outside.” “You sound as though you’ve just got out of prison!” We laughed uneasily, our eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. “But it’s all so different inside these days,” she continued. “The car, the habit—those are the most obvious changes, and we have more baths, more talking. We can make our cells into bed-sitting-rooms and give each other cups of Nescafé.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Pat Califia is a sadist who has written articulately and at length about her prediliction, questioning the meaning of sexual behavior and the unexpected surprises inherent in sex. She writes about this, and then adds, “My primary interest in S/M is in hurting people.” Her primary interest in sex is hurting people. The honesty startles me, and I resent it, because I would rather stay in a more comfortable philosophical universe of therapeutic relationships, would rather consider the troubling aspects of power-based sex with my intellectual tools. I prefer to think of S/M as being largely about metaphors of control and power, submission and surrender, but I am repeatedly reminded that it’s also about pain and fear. S/M notes, evokes, and uses pain and fear along with a lot of other physical and emotional states, but the pain is central, nevertheless. Califia, along with a number of other people who identify both as masochists and sadists, suggests that she is put together a little differently from the rest of us. She believes the neurological tissues of the brain, the endorphin-producing cells themselves, are wired into the body’s sexual response in a specific way. No doubt rough sex stimulates endorphins and creates a state of catharsis. Califia wonders if her physical sexual response is chemically and neurologically wired into the body’s reaction to pain and fear. In this way, the sexual delights of pain are just that and nothing more: Pain is delightful only in the context of sex, and sex is not delightful without pain. Sex is pain, in this sense; it can’t be separated out. To deny a person with this need pain is to deny them sex altogether. Some S/M practitioners brag a bit of their superior characters, their evolved understanding of relationships born from such intense exploration of the nature of trust. Practitioners sometimes compare the stimulus of their practice to any high-risk venture, compare a whipping to, say, free climbing, bungee jumping, or hang gliding. Conquering the fear of what one can and cannot do, can and cannot stand. Tolerating pain gives people pride in their self-control. Pain gives people permission to scream and cry. Spanking, of course, is almost less a kind of pain than a confrontation with the emotional baggage of childhood. Some kinds of pain function as psychological discipline, some kinds as punishment, some kinds simply heighten other, more socially acceptable sensations.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  One of the sets of stereotypes that hovers around prostitution is the set relating to clients. Depending on the basic emotions you bring to the subject in the first place, you might tend to see the john as a slovenly loser, a cold manipulator, a sorry old fellow. Many women, I suspect, assume johns as a group are cruel and hostile toward all women. No one really knows—no one’s done that research, either. I know of one book about johns, called Lovers, Friends, Slaves: The Nine Male Sexual Types, written by Martha Stein in 1974, a book talked about and passed around by prostitutes. Martha Stein was a social worker who admits she knew little of sex, and nothing of cunnilingus, until she saw two whores perform it on each other. She became friends with a prostitute through her work, and eventually began observing exchanges through one-way mirrors and peepholes, sometimes actually hiding in the bedroom closet. She frequently tape-recorded the sessions, and kept track of the clients’ statistics—age, body type, religion, amount of money spent, common topics discussed, sexual fantasies, and details of their sexual behavior and orgasms. Over four years, Stein claims to have watched 1,242 men with dozens of different women. Her methodology is suspect at best, although not original. Spying is an ancient way for novice prostitutes to be trained, and spyholes for rent to voyeurs are nothing new. Still, I can’t help but enjoy such an exquisite betrayal of the contract. Stein found surprises in her observed population of mostly upper-class professional white men. Ten percent “exhibited homosexual impulses”; four percent cross-dressed during sex; forty-three percent wanted to perform cunnilingus. (A number of others said they were interested but too shy.) One-third wanted anal stimulus or penetration. One-fourth had some kind of sexual dysfunction such as impotence. Almost every one wanted fellatio. Some men sought in the whore a kind of “hostess,” a lubricant for business entertainment. Others wanted an adventure, and saw prostitutes as being open to “exotic” or “kinky” sex. Some men wanted largely to talk about their personal lives, listen, and give advice. Others preferred cuddling and sometimes cried. Stein was surprised to find all her stereotypes defused. She found happy, attractive, healthy, prosperous prostitutes, many of whom worked part-time as whores and in their other lives were students or housewives. She also found happy, healthy clients. All the women claimed to have good personal sex lives, and any pimping was merely a matter of one whore referring a client to another whore or vice versa. She eventually came to admire and support the profession, seeing in it a twin to her own. Stein also found that many of the clients had the same stereotypes of prostitutes as she did and were genuinely puzzled by the women’s normality, so much so that sometimes the women would make up stories about sordid and abusive pasts just to satisfy them.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He threw her the pack, threw her some matches. She lit a cigarette. “When was the last time you saw Ida and Vivaldo? Tell me the truth.” “Tonight.” “And you’ve been spending all this time—every time you come in here in the early morning—with Ida and Vivaldo?” She was frightened again, and she knew that her tone betrayed her. “Yes.” “You’re lying. Ida hasn’t been with Vivaldo. She’s been with Ellis. And it’s been going on a long time.” He paused. “The question is— where have you been? Who’s been with Vivaldo while Ida’s been away—till two o’clock in the morning?” She looked at him, too stunned for an instant, to calculate. “You mean, Ida’s been having an affair with Steve Ellis? For how long? And how do you know that?” “How do you—not know it?” “Why—everytime I saw them, they seemed perfectly natural and happy together——” “But many of the times you say you’ve been with them. you couldn’t have been with them because Ida’s been with Steve!” She still could not quite get it through her head, even though she knew that it was true and although she knew that precious seconds were passing, and that she must soon begin to fight for herself. “How do you know?” “Because Steve told me! He’s got a real thing about her, he’s going out of his mind.” Now, she did begin to calculate—desperately, cursing Ida for not having given her warning. But how could she have? She said, coldly, “Ellis at the mercy of a great passion—? don’t make me laugh.” “Oh, I know you think we’re made of the coarsest of coarse clay, and are insensitive to all the higher vibrations. I don’t care. You can’t have been seeing much of Ida—that I know. Have you been seeing much of Vivaldo? Answer me, Cass.” She said, wonderingly—for it was this she could not get through her head: “And Vivaldo doesn’t know——” “And you don’t, either? You’re the only two in town who don’t. What mighty distractions have you two found?” She winced and looked up at him. She saw that he was controlling himself with a great and terrible effort; that he both wanted to know the truth, and feared to know it. She could not bear the anguish in his eyes, and she looked away. How could she ever have doubted that he loved her! “Have you been seeing a lot of Vivaldo? Tell me.” She rose and walked to the window. She felt sick—her stomach seemed to have shrunk to the size of a small, hard, rubber ball. “Leave me alone. You’ve always been jealous of Vivaldo, and we both know why, though you won’t admit it.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But this Easter, I did not attempt the trek to Mevagissey. If anybody at Lamledra noticed this, they all tactfully forbore to mention it. I was surprised, even slightly shocked, that such a final break with religion had affected me so little. From the Harts’ atheist stronghold, the events of that first Holy Week—the suffering and death of Jesus and his rising from the tomb—seemed an obvious fiction, a mere myth, an arbitrary sequence of improbable events that bore no relevance to life in the twentieth century. But in the convent, when we had lived that myth step by step, moment by moment, from Ash Wednesday through the long journey of Lent all the way to Golgotha, the myth had meant something entirely different. Holy Week, the culmination of Lent, had always been a special time. We had sung the whole of the divine office every day, instead of chanting an abridged version. Each novice had to sing a chapter from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The plaintive cadences of the Gregorian chant had penetrated our hearts; then there had been the drama of the Easter Vigil. I had never seriously questioned the myth itself because the liturgy, the fasting, and the strict silence of the convent during these days had re-created it, so that in some sense, whatever had happened in Jerusalem two thousand years before was not as important as the fact that the events had somehow been brought to life here and now. But without these rituals, the myth was dead. If you wanted to preserve your faith, the trick clearly was to keep practicing. If you stopped and looked at those rites and stories from the outside, they seemed absurd. Ludicrous, in fact. “Isn’t it Easter tomorrow?” one of the guests asked at supper. “Don’t talk about Easter and all that boring stuff!” Jacob commanded. Everybody laughed but broke off raggedly, looking rather warily at me. “Karen, do you insist on doing the washing up, so that Nanny can come upstairs with me?” “Yes, of course,” I said, grateful for the diversion. “As long as you don’t use the dishwasher,” Herbert muttered darkly. “I absolutely forbid anybody to use that dishwasher. It’s an absurd waste of—” “Karen, do you absolutely insist?” “Karen.” Jean Floud, the mistress of Newnham College, leaned across the table. “I’ve got to go back to Cambridge tomorrow. I’ll be leaving pretty early. If you’d like to come with me, I could drop you off at Mevagissey for Mass.” My heart sank. I really didn’t feel like making a public announcement of my loss of faith. “Well, Jean, it’s very kind—” I began. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t take her to Mass,” Jenifer exclaimed, helping people to more lasagna. “She always comes home in such a bad temper!” She dropped a second helping on my plate. “Do I really, Jenifer?” I was astonished. “Yes, you do! I must say I don’t approve of a religion that makes people so gloomy.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  To see her dance the polka, I could faint with radiant love, May the Monument a hornpipe dance, If ever I cease to love! May we never have to pay the Income Tax, If ever I cease to love!’We finished with a flourish, and I attempted a twirl - then froze. Kitty had left the door ajar, and Walter stood at it watching us, his eyes as wide as if he had had some sort of fright. I felt Kitty’s gaze follow mine; she gripped my arm, then dropped it sharply. I thought wildly of what he might have seen. The words of the song were foolish but, unmistakably, we had sung them to one another, and meant them. Had we also kissed? Had I touched Kitty where I shouldn’t have?While I still wondered, Walter spoke. ‘My God,’ he said. I bit my lip - but he didn’t frown, or curse, as I expected. Instead he broke into a great beaming smile, and slapped his hands together, and stepped into the room to seize us both excitedly by the shoulders.‘My God - that’s it! That’s it! Why, oh why, didn’t I see it before! That is what we have been looking for. This, Kitty’ - he gestured to our jackets, our hats, our gentlemanly poses - ‘this will make us famous!’ And so the day that I became Kitty’s sweetheart was also the day that I joined her act, and began my career - my brief, unlooked-for, rather wonderful career - on the music-hall stage. Chapter 5 [image "007" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_007_r1.jpg] At first, the prospect of joining Kitty upon the stage, in a profession for which I had never been trained, never yearned, and had - as I thought - no special talent, filled me with dismay.‘No,’ I said to Walter that afternoon, when at last I understood him. ‘Absolutely not. I cannot. You, of all people, should know what a fool I would make of myself - and of Kitty!’But Walter wouldn’t listen.‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘How long have we been looking for something that will lift the act above the ordinary, and make it really memorable? This is it! A double act! A soldier - and his comrade! A swell - together with his chum! Above all: two lovely girls in trousers, instead of one! When did you ever see the like of it before? It will be a sensation!’‘It might be a sensation,’ I said, ‘with two Kitty Butlers in it. But Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley, her dresser, who never sang a song in her life -’‘We have all heard you sing,’ said Walter, ‘a thousand times - and very prettily, too.’‘Who never danced -’ I went on.‘Pooh, dancing! A bit of shuffling about the stage. Any fool with half a leg can do it.’‘Who never raised her voice before a crowd -’‘Patter!’ he said carelessly. ‘Kitty can take care of the patter!’I laughed, in sheer exasperation, then turned to Kitty herself.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Despite agreeing with Sedgwick’s assertion that “women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0,” it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body. Many women I know have reported something of the same, even though they know this is the most ordinary of miracles. As my body made the male body, I felt the difference between male and female body melt even further away. I was making a body with a difference, but a girl body would have been a different body too. The principal difference was that the body I made would eventually slide out of me and be its own body. Radical intimacy, radical difference. Both in the body, both in the bowl. I kept thinking then about something poet Fanny Howe once said about bearing biracial children, something about how you become what grows inside you. But however “black” Howe might have felt herself becoming while gestating her children, she also remained keenly aware that the outside world was ready and waiting—and all too willing—to reinforce the color divide. She is of her children, and they are of her. But they know and she knows they do not share the same lot. This divide provoked in Howe the sensation of being a double agent, especially in all-white settings. She recalls how, at gatherings in the late ’60s, white liberals would openly converse “about their fear of blacks, and their judgments of blacks, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing.” This scene was not limited to the ’60s. “This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or the other, that will warn the people there ‘which side I am on,’” Howe says. “On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage.” Harry lets me in on a secret: guys are pretty nice to each other in public. Always greeting each other “hey boss” or nodding as they pass each other on the street. Women aren’t like that. I don’t mean that women are all back-stabbers or have it in for each other or whatnot. But in public, we don’t nod nobly at each other. Nor do we really need to, as that nod also means I mean you no violence. Over lunch with a fag friend of ours, Harry reports his findings about male behavior in public. Our friend laughs and says: Maybe if I looked like Harry, I’d get a “hey boss” too!

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant—a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable—but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the notice board, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the notice board on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room. So now I found that whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St. Anne’s into line with the sixties. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens. But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St. Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalene and Balliol. The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St. John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St. Anne’s fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success; because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St. Anne’s regularly came out on top of the Norrington Scale, the league table that charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 75 C. W e a l s o f i n d t h a t i n c l u d e d a m o n g t h e s o u l s o f t h e b l e s s e d a r e many who, by the strict rules of Inferno 4, ought not to be here. Perhaps, like figures from the Old Testament, they had “implicit faith.” D. T h e “ s u r p r i s i n g s a v e d ” i n c l u d e : 1. T h e E m p e r o r T r a j a n . M e d i e v a l l e g e n d h e l d t h a t t h e p r a y e r s o f Pope Saint Gregory the Great had revived him from the dead long enough to convert. 2. T h e E m p e r o r C o n s t a n t i n e . H i s g o o d i n t e n t i o n s b o r e e v i l f r u i t , but he is in heaven. 3. M o s t i n t e r e s t i n g o f a l l i s R i p h a e u s o f T r o y , a m i n o r c h a r a c t e r from Book II of the Aeneid whom Dante places among the saved. a. T h i s p l a c e m e n t i s e s p e c i a l l y p r o b l e m a t i c w h e n w e consider that Virgil and Aeneas dwell in the first circle of the Inferno, among the righteous pagans. b. W h y s h o u l d a m i n o r c h a r a c t e r l i k e R i p h a e u s b e a m o n g the blessed when neither the Aeneid’s hero nor its author belongs to that company? E. T h e p o e m i s s u g g e s t i n g t h a t , u l t i m a t e l y , t h i s q u e s t i o n m o v e s u s beyond what humans are capable of grasping. Neither the mercy nor the justice of God is perfectly transparent to us. F.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company 39 B. C a s e l l a , a n o l d m u s i c i a n f r i e n d o f Dante’s, sings one of the “oldies but goodies” for Dante, putting to music one of Dante’s own poems in Canto 2. 1. C a t o r e b u k e s h i m a n d s a y s t h a t t h e p i l g r i m m u s t m o v e o n . 2. W e l e a r n t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f g o i n g f o r w a r d r a t h e r t h a n backward. C. I n C a n t o 3 , D a n t e m e e t s M a n f r e d ( d . 1 2 6 6 ) , a b a s t a r d s o n o f t h e Emperor Frederick II and a violent arch-Ghibelline. 1. M a n f r e d w a s k i l l e d a t t h e B a t t l e o f B e v e n e n t o , a G u e l f victory. 2. M a n f r e d w a s a n e n e m y o f D a n t e ’ s f a m i l y a n d p a r t y . T h e Guelf victory at Bevenento led directly to the Alighieri family’s return to Florence. 3. I t i s a r e a l s u r p r i s e t o s e e h i m a m o n g t h e s a v e d . 4. W e l e a r n o f t h e p o w e r o f a f i n a l c o n v e r s i o n a t t h e e n d o f l i f e . 5. W e a l s o l e a r n t h a t s a l v a t i o n d o e s n o t d e p e n d o n f a m i l y affiliation. Readings: William Cook and Ronald Herzman, The Medieval World View, Chapters 7–9. Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 1–3. Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, Chapter 12.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. (Lev. 25:8–12) Jesus’s hearers would have understood the Isaiah passage in this sense. They would have been eager to know how exactly he supposed these great prophecies would be fulfilled. As so often, however, Jesus’s message seems to be that they are being fulfilled—but not in the way people had imagined. Yes, God is taking charge. Yes, the great jubilee year is dawning, the time of release, of forgiveness. But it won’t work out the way they had expected. In a shocking reversal, amounting almost to a slap in the face to his hearers (including, we assume, his own family), Jesus declares that the people who will benefit from this great act of God will not, after all, be the people of Israel as they stand. This is what he says next to his hearers in the synagogue that day: Everyone remarked at him; they were astonished at the words coming out of his mouth—words of sheer grace. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they said. “I know what you’re going to say,” Jesus said. “You’re going to tell me the old riddle: ‘Heal yourself, doctor!’ ‘We heard of great happenings in Capernaum; do things like that here, in your own country!’ “Let me tell you the truth,” he went on. “Prophets never get accepted in their own country. This is the solemn truth: there were plenty of widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a great famine over all the land. Elijah was sent to none of them, only to a widow in the Sidonian town of Zarephath. “And there were plenty of people with virulent skin diseases in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was healed—only Naaman, the Syrian.” When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue flew into a rage. (Luke 4:22–28)

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “You’ll have to find your own way,” she explained. “Find your own special thing to do with him. He tends to put us all into watertight compartments, and won’t let anyone ever encroach on somebody else’s territory. I believe this kind of ritual behavior is quite common with autistic children. Nanny is the only one who is allowed to read to him; he and I play backgammon—or try to.” She gave a short bark of a laugh. “He usually loses his temper. And he’ll help me in the garden or we’ll go for a walk. Just now, he’s out with my husband, who takes him for long drives. Though that’s not ideal really,” she added. “Herbert is not the world’s best driver. Anyway”—she brightened—“I’m sure you’ll find something. It’s really not difficult—not as hard as it sounds. He’s basically very open and loving. He generally adores grown-ups. He’ll be very eager to be your friend.” I hoped so. “What about other children?” I asked. “Does he have friends at school, for instance?” Jenifer shook her head. “No. Children worry him. Jacob is very tall for his age, you see, and he gets alarmed when little people scurry about. They’re too noisy. And I suppose they’re a bit frightened of him, and he senses that.” She stretched out her thin, brown legs and contemplated her feet, clad in clumsy men’s sandals. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never sent him away. To a home or hospital.” She frowned, and her tone darkened. “Lots of people said that we should do that, but it’s ludicrous!” She seemed to be rehearsing an argument that she had had many times before. “We manage very well. With Nanny—and now that you’re coming it will be even better. We can’t just send him away. That seems terribly irresponsible. And in his own way, he’s happy here—as happy as he can be. He adores Nanny and he has lots of special adult friends. We’ve got a house in Cornwall, where we spend the Easter and summer vacs, and that’s marvelous for him. It’s a huge house, right on a cliff, and he feels free there. You must come down. We have interesting people to stay.” A key rattled in the front door and I looked up apprehensively. “He’ll be very shy at first,” Jenifer warned me. “He might even throw a tantrum. Just take no notice.” I swallowed hard and assumed what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. “Mummy!” There was a peremptory cry from the hall, a jumble of footsteps, and then Jacob exploded into the room. I was quite unprepared for him, and the artificial smile I had carefully put on turned involuntarily to one of genuine pleasure. Jacob was beautiful. Tall and slim, his skin delicately tanned, an elegantly structured face, and tousled blond curls. But also formidable: he slammed the door and looked warily around him. “Who is that?” He spoke quietly, separating each word with care.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The people who will benefit will be the outsiders, the wrong people, the foreigners. Even, perhaps, the commander of the enemy army. Naaman the Syrian, to whom Jesus refers as the one man who was healed by the prophet Elisha, was the commander of the army that, in the old story, had been attacking the Israelites (2 Kings 5). Startling though this is, it fits with everything else we know about Jesus’s public teaching. “Love your enemies,” he told his followers (Matt. 5:44), and he elaborated the point from a dozen different angles. Forgiveness was at the heart of his message. This was a striking departure from the otherwise universal practice of Jewish martyrs, for whom it was a point of honor to call down heaven’s curses upon their torturers and executioners. The grisly story of the torture and death of seven brothers and their mother in 2 Maccabees includes the threats they uttered against King Antiochus: After him they brought forward the sixth [brother]. And when he was about to die, he said, “Do not deceive yourself in vain. For we are suffering these things on our own account, because of our sins against our own God. Therefore astounding things have happened. But do not think that you will go unpunished for having tried to fight against God!” . . . [The seventh brother said:] “But you, unholy wretch, you most defiled of all mortals, do not be elated in vain and puffed up by uncertain hopes, when you raise your hand against the children of heaven. You have not yet escaped the judgment of the almighty, all-seeing God. For our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of ever-flowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgment of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance.” (7:18–19, 34–36) By contrast, both Jesus himself and the first martyr, Stephen, prayed for God’s mercy on their killers: “Father,” said Jesus, “forgive them! They don’t know what they’re doing!” (Luke 23:34) Then Stephen knelt down and shouted at the top of his voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Once he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:60) But, as we’ve just seen, when Jesus expanded on his own jubilee program (Luke 4:24–27), he explained that this wasn’t about God simply forgiving Israel its debts and punishing its ancient or contemporary enemies, the pagan nations all around. Rather, this was a message that would be good news—for those pagan nations themselves!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  23:24–30), about a seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26–29), and about a vineyard where the tenants refuse to give the owner the fruit (Mark 12:1–12), is allowing these ancient echoes to take root in the fertile and scripture-soaked minds of his hearers, to try to get through to them the message that what they have longed for is happening at last, but it doesn’t look as they thought it would! God is at last doing the great new thing he’s always promised for Israel—but the wrong people seem to be getting the message, and many of the right people are missing it entirely! The parables, in fact, are told as kingdom explanations for Jesus’s kingdom actions. They are saying: “Don’t be surprised, but this is what it looks like when God’s in charge.” They are not “abstract teaching,” and indeed if we approach them like that, we won’t understand them at all. Specialists who have studied the way in which Jesus’s language works describe a “speech-act” effect, whereby telling a story creates a new situation, a new whole world. That was indeed what Jesus was aiming to do, and by all accounts he was succeeding. But what such specialist studies do not always point out is what this new world actually was. It was the new world in which God was in charge at last, on earth as in heaven. God was fixing things, mending things, mending people, making new life happen. This was the new world in which the promises were coming true, in which new creation was happening, in which a real “return from exile” was taking place in the hearts and minds and lives both of notorious sinners and of people long crippled by disease. The famous parable of the sower has another dimension too. We find first a story (“Once there was a sower . . . ,” vv. 1–9), then a question as to what it means (“Why are you speaking to them . . . ,” vv. 10–17), and then a point-by-point explanation (“This is what the sower story is all about . . . ,” vv. 18– 23). Again, learned readers in our own day have shaken their heads. That’s not how parables ought to work, they say. All you need is the story—the short bit at the front, in which the sower sows his seed. That extra explanation—that’s an allegory, not a parable! Jesus, such scholars go on, couldn’t or wouldn’t have said it. After all, an explained parable is about as much use as an explained joke. Someone else, some flat-footed “redactor,” obviously added the “explanation” at a later stage. Again, that’s an interesting point, but a wrong conclusion.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Once, following a long lull, I found a way to get back into the Fold five or six times after I smashed my head into a parking meter in Philadelphia. I was thirteen or fourteen. We were staying at the Barclay Hotel; as a treat I was allowed to drink some watered-down wine with lunch. I drank more of it than the adults knew and found myself acting wild and flaily on the street during our afternoon walk. I ran ahead, hid between two cars, intending to spring out on everyone. I sprang, shouting, “Boo!” But my mouth and the side of my face met a parking meter that I had forgotten was there. The collision made an enormous bony sound in my head. The meter had only a minute or two left, I noticed, staggering; the red thought-balloon saying EXPIRED was just about to dawn. I saw a pattern of squirming diamonds that would have made very nice Wiener Werkstatte wrapping paper. Twenty minutes later, as the bed made sloppy figure eights around the hotel room (where I had been left to convalesce), I pinched my swollen lip and noticed that all traffic noise stopped. I realized I was in the Fold. I walked downstairs to the motionless hotel bar and back to the kitchen and ate two huge shrimp that a motionless cook or cook’s helper held as he arranged a shrimp cocktail. I was amazed at how good the cocktail sauce tasted. I sucked on a piece of lime and threw it out in a can behind the bar. I felt steadied. I went out into the lobby and sat down next to a woman on a couch and smelled the collar of her coat deeply. At first I thought it smelled like pickles, and then I realized that it smelled like cigarette smoke, and I was very surprised to think that pickles and cigarette smoke were allied smells. (Is that what people mean by a “sour” smell?) Then I went back upstairs and pinched my lip again the same way I had, a little to the right of center, until it hurt a lot, to turn the Barclay Hotel and the rest of the planet back on, and I went to sleep. I still feel bad about stealing those shrimp—not only because of the theft, but because the kitchen helper may to this day be troubled by that bit of strangeness all those years ago, when he had held one in each hand and had them suddenly disappear.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In a shocking reversal, amounting almost to a slap in the face to his hearers (including, we assume, his own family), Jesus declares that the people who will benefit from this great act of God will not, after all, be the people of Israel as they stand. This is what he says next to his hearers in the synagogue that day: Everyone remarked at him; they were astonished at the words coming out of his mouth—words of sheer grace. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they said. “I know what you’re going to say,” Jesus said. “You’re going to tell me the old riddle: ‘Heal yourself, doctor!’ ‘We heard of great happenings in Capernaum; do things like that here, in your own country!’ “Let me tell you the truth,” he went on. “Prophets never get accepted in their own country. This is the solemn truth: there were plenty of widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a great famine over all the land. Elijah was sent to none of them, only to a widow in the Sidonian town of Zarephath. “And there were plenty of people with virulent skin diseases in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was healed— only Naaman, the Syrian.” When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue flew into a rage. (Luke 4:22–28) The people who will benefit will be the outsiders, the wrong people, the foreigners. Even, perhaps, the commander of the enemy army. Naaman the Syrian, to whom Jesus refers as the one man who was healed by the prophet Elisha, was the commander of the army that, in the old story, had been attacking the Israelites (2 Kings 5). Startling though this is, it fits with everything else we know about Jesus’s public teaching. “Love your enemies,” he told his followers (Matt. 5:44), and he elaborated the point from a dozen different angles. Forgiveness was at the heart of his message. This was a striking departure from the otherwise universal practice of Jewish martyrs, for whom it was a point of honor to call down heaven’s curses upon their torturers and executioners. The grisly story of the torture and death of seven brothers and their mother in 2 Maccabees includes the threats they uttered against King Antiochus: After him they brought forward the sixth [brother]. And when he was about to die, he said, “Do not deceive yourself in vain. For we are suffering these things on our own account, because of our sins against our own God. Therefore astounding things have happened.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The Needle Man nodded and left us. He never showed gratitude. I connected him with Rumpelstiltskin and with Gollum in The Hobbit . We already had five or six packets of needles that we had bought from him, so my father handed this one to me. “Maybe you can think of something to do with them,” he said. And I did think of something, as a matter of fact. I got a fresh spool of thread from the sewing basket. I opened the packet of needles, which had a convenient front flap like a book of matches. The needles were arranged by size and resembled the pipes in a pipe organ; they were pinned with exactitude through two folds of blue foiled paper—a hand-held cathedral. I chose a medium needle, threaded it, and spent most of the afternoon sewing my rope-climbing calluses together in various ways. When the needle was partway through a callus I tapped its tip to feel the tension within the thickened skin; the sensation was usually painless. I waggled my fingers with two needles poked into them in the mirror, pretending I was being tortured. When I had pushed a needle all the way through, the thread that followed was almost ticklish; my nerves were being stimulated in a way that left them uncertain about what was inside and what was outside. It was as if I could hear the thread tugging through the holes in my skin rather than feel it. I sewed all eight fingertips in series and walked around the house moaning and looking for an audience; then I played something very simple by Bach on the piano—the additional presence of the thread in the moment of contact with each piano key, and the restricted range my fingers had, made the music seem unusually pointed and intelligent and pure. I played better, more high-steppingly, more like Glenn Gould, with sewn hands (though with many more wrong notes)—just as show horses were (I had read somewhere) made by unethical trainers to strut prize-winningly with mustard and chains in their fetlocks. I was my own marionette. I stopped the Bach in the middle and closed the piano lid. And as I closed the lid I knew what I was meant to do. I snipped all the thread from my hands and amassed a load’s worth of dirty clothes from the floor of my room (supplemented by several towels) and I started a large warm wash with the lid open and the interlock jammed. While the wash churned through its preliminaries, I chose a new needle, threaded it, and pushed it through the thus-far-unsewn callus at the base of my left hand’s middle finger.