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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  We said “exit” because at the moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn’t think of the French for exit. Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the blinding light of day. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we hit the sidewalk we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes, and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself. He must have been sore as hell. Later, thinking back on it, I couldn’t blame him for it. But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull cap on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. I looked at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For a full minute we stood there laughing right in the poor bugger’s face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that for a moment he didn’t know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest. When he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop. By this time some preservative instinct warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the coat sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: “No, no! I won’t run!”—“Come on!” I yelled, “we’d better get out of here. That guy’s mad clean through.” And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would carry us. On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during my brief sojourn in Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down. Trying to extricate myself I got caught, along with a friend of mine, in the very neck of the bottle. Jacksonville, where we were marooned for about six weeks, was practically in a state of siege. Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into Jacksonville. The YMCA, the Salvation Army, the firehouses and police stations, the hotels, the lodging houses, everything was full up. Complet absolutely, and signs everywhere to that effect. The residents of Jacksonville had become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were walking around in coats of mail. It was the old business of food again. Food and a place to flop. Food was coming up from below in trainloads—oranges and grapefruit and all sorts of juicy edibles. We used to pass by the freight sheds looking for rotten fruit—but even that was scarce.

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

  If so, the other people must, at least for that moment, be greater than they. No one, therefore, must be able in any sense to affect God, for that would be to make such a person greater than God; and so God had to be completely beyond all feeling. The other Greek school was the Epicureans. They held that the gods lived in perfect happiness and blessedness. They lived in what they called the intermundia , the spaces between the worlds; and they were not even aware of the world. The Jews had their different God, the Stoics had their feelingless gods, and the Epicureans had their completely detached gods. Into that world of thought came Christianity with its incredible conception of a God who had deliberately undergone every human experience. Plutarch, one of the most religious of the Greeks, declared that it was blasphemous to involve God in the affairs of this world. Christianity depicted God as not so much involved but as identified with the suffering of this world. It is almost impossible for us to realize the revolution that Christianity brought about in the relationship of men and women to God. For century after century, they had been confronted with the idea of the untouchable God; and now they discovered a God who had gone through all that they must go through. (b) That had two results. It gave God the quality of mercy . It is easy to see why. It was because God understands . Some people have lived sheltered lives; they have been protected from the temptations that come to those for whom life is not easy. Some people are placid and find it easy to control their emotions; others have a passionate nature that makes life more dangerous. The person who has lived the sheltered life and who has the more easy-going nature finds it hard to understand why the other person slips up. Such people are faintly disgusted and cannot help condemning what they cannot understand. But God knows . ‘To know all is to forgive all’ – of no one is that truer than of God. Professor John Foster of Glasgow University told how he came into his home in this country one day in the 1930s to find his daughter, who was listening to the radio, in tears. He asked her why and found that the news bulletin had contained the sentence: ‘Japanese tanks entered Canton today.’ Most people would hear that with at the most a faint feeling of regret. Politicians may have heard it with grim foreboding; but to most people it did not make very much difference. Why was John Foster’s daughter in tears? Because she had been born in Canton. To her, Canton meant a home, a nurse, a school, friends. The difference was that she had been there .

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  with her left hand. She smiled at me from time to time and then looked out at the street again, deep in thought. It was quiet in the shop except for soft voices coming from the little radio which stood beside Penelope, as usual, and these voices, which at first I could hardly make out but which soon became almost too distinct, cast such a spell over me that I entirely forgot the engravings lying before me, and stood there as still as if on no account must I let a single syllable emerging from the rather scratchy radio set escape me. I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer of 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on a special transport. They mentioned a number of cities—Vienna, Munich, Danzig, Bratislava, Berlin—but only when one of the couple said that her own transport, after two days traveling through the German Reich and the Netherlands, where she could see the great sails of the windmills from the train, had finally left the Hook of Holland on the ferry Prague to cross the North Sea to Harwich, only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well. I was too alarmed by this sudden revelation to be able to write down the addresses and phone numbers given at the end of the program. I merely saw myself waiting on a quay in a long crocodile of children lined up two by two, most of them carrying rucksacks or small leather cases. I saw the great slabs of paving at my feet again, the mica in the stone, the gray-brown water in the harbor basin, the ropes and anchor chains slanting upwards, the bows of the ship, higher than a house, the seagulls fluttering over our heads and screeching wildly, the sun breaking through the clouds, and the red-haired girl in the tartan cape and velvet beret who had looked after the smaller children in our compartment during the train journey through the dark countryside. Years later, as I now recalled again, I still had recurrent dreams of this girl playing me a cheerful tune on a kind of bandoneon, in a place lit by a bluish nightlight. Are you all right? I heard a voice say suddenly, as if from very far away, and it took me some time to remember where I was and realize that Penelope might have felt concerned by my sudden seizure. I remember telling her that it was nothing, that my thoughts were elsewhere, in the Hook of Holland as a matter of fact, whereupon Penelope raised her face slightly with an understanding smile, as if she herself had often been obliged to wait in that cheerless harbor. One way to live cheaply and without tears? she then immediately asked, tapping the tip of her ballpoint pen on the crossword in her folded newspaper, but just as I was about to confess that I had never been able to solve even the simplest clues in these tortuous English puzzles she said, Oh, it’s rent free! and scribbled the eight letters swiftly down in the last empty spaces on the grid. When we had parted I sat for an hour on a bench in Russell Square under the tall plane trees, which were still leafless. It

• From The Girls (2016)

  stars were hidden by fog. There were a few stools in the bar and not much else. The usual patchwork of rusted signs, a pair of humming neon eyes over the door. Someone in the kitchen was smoking cigarettes—the sandwich bread was humid with smoke. We stayed awhile after we’d finished eating. Sasha looked fifteen, but they didn’t care. The bartender, a woman in her fifties, seemed grateful for any business. She looked worked over, her hair crispy from drugstore dye. We were almost the same age, but I wouldn’t glance into the mirror to confirm the similarities, not with Sasha beside me. Sasha, whose features had the clean, purified cast of a saint on a religious medal. Sasha swiveled around on her stool like a young child. “Look at us.” She laughed. “Partying hard.” She took a drink of beer, then a drink of water, a conscientious habit I’d noticed, though it didn’t prevent a visible slump from taking over. “I’m kind of glad Julian’s not here,” she said. The words seemed to thrill her. I knew by then not to spook her, but instead to give her space to dawdle toward her actual point. Sasha kicked the bar rail absently, her breath beery and close. “He didn’t tell me he was leaving,” she said. “For Humboldt.” I pretended surprise. She laughed flatly. “I couldn’t find him this morning and I just thought he was like, outside. That’s kind of weird, right? That he just took off?” “Yeah, weird.” Too cautious, maybe, but I was wary of inciting a righteous defense of Julian. “He texted me all sorry. He thought we’d talked about it, I guess.” She sipped her beer. Drawing a smiley face in the wood of the bar with a wet finger. “You know why he got kicked out of Irvine?” She was half- giddy, half-wary. “Wait,” she said, “you’re not gonna tell his dad, are you?” I shook my head, an adult willing to keep a teenager’s secrets. “Okay.” Sasha took a breath. “He had some comp teacher he hated. He was kind of a jerk, I guess. The teacher. He didn’t let Julian turn in this paper late, even though he knew Julian would fail without a grade for it. “So Julian went to the guy’s house and did something to his dog. Fed

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  or because he was one of those bachelors who retain something boyish about them all their days. As far as I remember, I was overcome for a considerable time by my amazement at the unexpected return of Austerlitz. In any case, I recollect that before approaching him I had been thinking at some length about his personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the horror-stricken expressions on both their faces. I believe it was mainly the rucksack, which Austerlitz told me later he had bought for ten shillings from Swedish stock in an army surplus store in the Charing Cross Road just before he began his studies, describing it as the only truly reliable thing in his life, which put into my head what on the surface was the rather outlandish idea of a certain physical likeness between him and the philosopher who died of the disease of cancer in Cambridge in 1951. Wittgenstein always carried a rucksack too, in Puchberg and in Otterthal, when he went to Norway, Ireland, or Kazakhstan, or home to his sisters to spend Christmas with them in the Alleegasse. That rucksack, which his sister Margarete once told him in a letter was almost as dear to her as himself, went everywhere with him, even, I believe, across the Atlantic on the liner Queen Mary, and then on from New York to Ithaca. And now, whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher, a man locked into the glaring clarity of

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation18 ● Finally, to have land and many descendants would be considered a blessing in Abraham’s culture, but the promise is that he will also be a blessing to all the families of the earth. How that could happen through an obscure traveling herder is anything but clear. ● The surprise is that Abraham and Sarah set out. They take the risk and go to see what the future might hold. ‹ A gentle sense of irony enters the story here through a series of missteps on the part of Abraham. He seems to overshoot the land where God wants him to live. In the span of just a few verses, he wanders into and out of the Promised Land, then into a series of troubles in Egypt. ● In an attempt to protect himself and Sarah from the Egyptians, he tells her to say that she is his sister rather than his wife. But as soon as the Egyptians arrive, they take Sarah into the king’s royal harem. ● The Egyptians treat Abraham well, but his scheme to protect himself has put Sarah at risk. And his attempt to secure his own future actually threatens the future, because without Sarah, the promise of descendants will not be realized. ● T o get things back on track, God afflicts the king’s household with plagues, which the king realizes were somehow triggered by Sarah. When he learns that Sarah is Abraham’s wife, he sends her back to her husband, then sends them both out of Egypt. After this comedy of errors, they make their way back to the Promised Land. ● This humor in the story is part of the characterization of Abraham. So often, he is remembered as an exemplar of faith, and it’s clear that his willingness to step into an unknown future is a major part of the story. But at the same time, Abraham is a person who can seem woefully shortsighted. His actions create as many problems as they solve. This humorous side makes Abraham all the more engaging. The Promise and Conflict ‹ In chapter 15, an episode takes place that heightens the tension between faith in an expansive future and realism about limits in the present. By this point in the narrative, time has passed, and Abraham still has no children of his own. God might have called him with the promise of becoming a great nation, but so far, God has not followed through.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  Time passed, and the son reached his fourteenth year. His features and his manners were gentle and refined, and he recalled to his mother that cherished husband she had loft. She had kept a Corean harp and two swords fashioned by Kunimune, a celebrated ancient Japanese armourer, which her parents had given her when she left them. When she felt sad she used to play on the harp to distract herself and her dear son. In this manner they lived in their secluded hut. The destiny of man is surely inconstant and full of surprise. Senpatji Akanashi was banished by his master for some trifling offence; and, after travelling through several Provinces, he settled in a town near the hut in which the mother and son were living. They never met each other, and had no suspicion that they existed at such proximity. But one day Senpatji was invited by his friend Kurobatji Toriyama to hunt birds. On their way back they chanced to pass the widow's cottage, and heard the sound of the Corean harp which the mother was playing. They were charmed by this music and stopped to listen. Slipping through a hole in the hedge, they even peeped through a crack in the bamboo wall. A very beautiful woman of about thirty-five was playing the harp. She seemed to belong to some famous family of the high nobility, and to have disguised herself to live in this wretched hovel. Sitting by her side was her son Shynosuke, Studying the writing in a book which his mother had written herself. He was extremely handsome. The interested spectators were surprised to find such distinguished persons in this lonely village. They caused the door to be opened, and Stood for some minutes at the entrance to apologise for their intrusion. After a short visit they went away. Senpatji was Struck by the beauty of the young boy; he returned to the hut and became the intimate friend of its inhabitants. Little by little Senpatji and Shynosuke conceived a deep love for each other, and Senpatji took both mother and son with him to his town and there maintained them. In this way a year went peacefully. Then the mother noticed that Senpatji was very like the man who had killed her husband. One day she questioned him concerning his family and past life; then she became certain that he was the assassin of her husband, the father of her son. Next day she said to the boy: 'Senpatji killed your father before you were born. He was compelled to do so by the command of his master, who was also your father's master; but he is none the less your father's murderer. Kill him, and avenge your father.'

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

  If John wrote long after the Synoptists, we could, of course, not expect from him a repetition of the story already so well told by three independent witnesses. But what is surprising is the fact that, coming last, he should produce the most original of all the Gospels. The transition from Matthew to Mark, and from Mark to Luke is easy and natural; but in passing from any of the Synoptists to the fourth Gospel we breathe a different atmosphere, and feel as if we were suddenly translated from a fertile valley to the height of a mountain with a boundless vision over new scenes

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The usher board made its way to the pulpit, going up both aisles with a little more haste than is customarily seen in church. Truth to tell, they fairly ran to the minister's aid. Then two of the deacons, in their shiny Sunday suits, joined the ladies in white on the pulpit, and each time they pried Sister Monroe loose from the preacher he took another deep breath and kept on preaching, and Sister Monroe grabbed him in another place, and more firmly. Reverend Taylor was helping his rescuers as much as possible by jumping around when he got a chance. His voice at one point got so low it sounded like a roll of thunder, then Sister Monroe's “Preach it” cut through the roar, and we all wondered (I did, in any case) if it would ever end. Would they go on forever, or get tired out at last like a game of blindman's bluff that lasted too long, with nobody caring who was “it”? I'll never know what might have happened, because magically the pandemonium spread. The spirit infused Deacon Jackson and Sister Willson, the chairman of the usher board, at the same time. Deacon Jackson, a tall, thin, quiet man, who was also a part-time Sunday school teacher, gave a scream like a falling tree, leaned back on thin air and punched Reverend Taylor on the arm. It must have hurt as much as it caught the Reverend unawares. There was a moment's break in the rolling sounds and Reverend Taylor jerked around surprised, and hauled off and punched Deacon Jackson. In the same second Sister Willson caught his tie, looped it over her fist a few times, and pressed down on him. There wasn't time to laugh or cry before all three of them were down on the floor behind the altar. Their legs spiked out like kindling wood. Sister Monroe, who had been the cause of all the excitement, walked off the dais, cool and spent, and raised her flinty voice in the hymn, “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, worn and sad, I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad.” The minister took advantage of already being on the floor and asked in a choky little voice if the church would kneel with him to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. He said we had been visited with a mighty spirit, and let the whole church say Amen. On the next Sunday he took his text from the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, and talked quietly but seriously about the Pharisees, who prayed in the streets so that the public would be impressed with their religious devotion. I doubt that anyone got the message—certainly not those to whom it was directed. The deacon board, however, did appropriate funds for him to buy a new suit. The other was a total loss.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I believe that my talent with a foreign language was the only quality I had that impressed Dolores. Her mouth was too taut and her tongue too still to attempt the strange sounds. Admittedly, though, her English, like everything else about her, was absolutely perfect. We indulged in a test of strength for weeks as Dad stood figuratively on the sidelines, neither cheering nor booing but enjoying himself greatly. He asked me once if I “er liked errer my mother.” I thought he meant my mother, so I answered yes—she was beautiful and gay and very kind. He said he wasn't talking about Vivian, he meant Dolores. Then I explained that I didn't like her because she was mean and petty and full of pretense. He laughed, and when I added she didn't like me because I was so tall and arrogant and wasn't clean enough for her, he laughed harder and said something like “Well, that's life.” One evening he announced that on the next day he was going to Mexico to buy food for the weekend. There was nothing unusual about his pronouncement until he added that he was taking me along. He filled the shocked silence with the information that a trip to Mexico would give me an opportunity to practice Spanish. Dolores' silence might have been brought on by a jealous reaction, but mine was occasioned by pure surprise. My father had not shown any particular pride in me and very little affection. He had not taken me to his friends or to southern California's few points of interest. It was incredible that I was to be included in something as exotic as a trip to Mexico. Well, I quickly reasoned, I deserved it. After all, I was his daughter and my vacation fell far short of what I had expected a vacation to be. Had I protested that I would like Dolores to go along, we might have been spared a display of violence and near tragedy. But my young mind was filled with self, and my imagination shivered at the prospect of seeing sombreros, rancheros, tortillas and Pancho Villa. We spent a quiet night. Dolores mended her perfect underwear, and I pretended to read a novel. Dad listened to the radio with a drink in his hand and watched what I now know was a pitiful spectacle . In the morning, we set out on the foreign adventure. The dirt roads of Mexico fulfilled all my longing for the unusual. Only a few miles from California's slick highways and, to me, tall buildings, we were bumping along on gravel streets that could have competed in crudeness with the worst paths in Arkansas, and the landscape boasted adobe huts or cabins walled with corrugated metal. Dogs, lean and dirty, slunk around the houses, and children played innocently in the nude or near nude with discarded rubber tires.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I let myself be convinced and then the mark began to drag the Northern whites. He told me that they made Negroes sleep in the street in the North and that they had to clean out toilets with their hands in the North and even things worse than that. I was shocked and said, ‘Then I don't want to sell my land to that white man who offered seventy-five thousand dollars for it.’ Just Black said, ‘I wouldn't know what to do with that kind of money’ and I said that all I wanted was to have enough money to buy a home for my old mom, to buy a business and to make one trip to Harlem. The mark asked how much would that cost and I said I reckoned I could do it on fifty thousand dollars. “The mark told me no Negro was safe with that kind of money. That whitefolks would take it from him. I said I knew it but I had to have at least forty thousand dollars. He agreed. We shook hands. I said it would do my heart good to see the mean Yankee go down on some of ‘our land.’ We met the next morning and I signed the deed in his car and he gave me the cash. “Black and I had kept most of our things in a hotel over in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When the deal was closed we walked to our car, drove across the state line and on to Hot Springs.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Here are three examples that are not from the historical Jesus but from later tradition speaking through him: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1); “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Mark 13:30); “truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. 10:23). In any case, if Jesus said any of these things, he was flatly wrong—off by two thousand years, and still counting. His being right or wrong about the end of God’s Kingdom did not damage his fundamental message, which was not about the end but about the start of God’s Kingdom. I also wonder whether discussing the Kingdom’s end was, and still is, a refuge from facing the Kingdom’s start; whether debating the Christian future was, and still is, a strategy for avoiding the Christian present. If we can postpone the entire eschatological challenge of God’s Kingdom to a future, unilateral, divine intervention in heaven, we can avoid the challenge of a present, bilateral, divine and human collaboration on Earth. Second, with regard to nonviolent resistance: For Jesus, as previously for John, I distinguish between human and divine violence. How do I know that the Kingdom movement was not at least planning physical human violence? I give the same answer as for John above. Pilate judged Jesus to be a revolutionary, and therefore he required an official, legal, and public execution of Jesus. But Jesus was nonviolent rather than violent, and therefore there was no need to round up any of his followers. Pilate got it exactly correct. Josephus, in Jewish Antiquities from the end of the first century, and Tacitus, in Annals from the start of the second century, define “Christians” as followers of a “Christ.” They agree that Jesus had been executed, but both immediately note that, despite that, his movement continued and spread: When Pilate, upon hearing him [Jesus] accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. . . . And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. (JA 18.63–64) Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. (Annals 15:44) In both of these texts, there is a certain implicit surprise that executing the leader failed to finish off the movement.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The windows and my grogginess had distorted their features. I had thought they were adults and maybe citizens of Brobdingnag, at least. Standing outside, I found there was only one person taller than I, and that I was only a few years younger than any of them. I was asked my name, where I came from and what led me to the junkyard. They accepted my explanation that I was from San Francisco, that my name was Marguerite but that I was called Maya and I simply had no place to stay. With a generous gesture the tall boy, who said he was Bootsie, welcomed me, and said I could stay as long as I honored their rule: No two people of opposite sex slept together. In fact, unless it rained, everyone had his own private sleeping accommodations. Since some of the cars leaked, bad weather forced a doubling up. There was no stealing, not for reasons of morality but because a crime would bring the police to the yard; and since everyone was underage, there was the likelihood that they'd be sent off to foster homes or juvenile delinquent courts. Everyone worked at something. Most of the girls collected bottles and worked weekends in greasy spoons. The boys mowed lawns, swept out pool halls and ran errands for small Negro-owned stores. All money was held by Bootsie and used communally. During the month that I spent in the yard I learned to drive (one boy's older brother owned a car that moved), to curse and to dance. Lee Arthur was the only boy who ran around with the gang but lived at home with his mother. Mrs. Arthur worked nights, so on Friday evening all the girls went to his house for a bath. We did our laundry in the Laundromat, but those things that required ironing were taken to Lee's house and the ironing chore was shared, as was everything else. On Saturday night we entered the jitterbug contest at the Silver Slipper, whether we could dance or not. The prizes were tempting ($25 to first couple, $10 to second and $5 to third), and Bootsie reasoned that if all of us entered we had a better chance. Juan, the Mexican boy, was my partner, and although he couldn't dance any better than I, we were a sensation on the floor. He was very short with a shock of straight black hair that swished around his head when he pivoted, and I was thin and black and tall as a tree. On my last weekend at the yard, we actually won the second prize. The dance we performed could never be duplicated or described except to say that the passion with which we threw each other around the small dance area was similar to the zeal shown in honest wrestling matches and hand-to-hand combat.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I wondered how long Jamie had pined for Megan the scientist. Probably for a long time. Maybe they had even started an affair while we were together and he had fantasized about her, wished he could be with her instead of me. But now that he was with her, I had become her and she had become me. We’ve all heard of men who leave their wives for a mistress, only to miss the comfort and predictability of their wife. But I felt certain that this wasn’t the case. He wasn’t missing my predictability. He was wanting me because he could no longer have me. He could tell I was gone and that was a new spell for him. 40.In the morning my phone rang again from the same number that had rung twice the night before. I hadn’t checked the message yet. “Hello, is this Lucy?” It was a male voice. “Yes,” I said. “Who is this?” “This is Arnold Schuman. Claire’s husband.” “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know Claire was still married.” Then I covered my mouth with my hand. Fuck. Who knew what he knew about her dating life? “Well, the papers haven’t been finalized yet, but yes, for all intents and purposes we are no longer together,” he said. “Oh, okay, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Is everything okay with Claire?” “As a matter of fact no, not right now. Last night she made an attempt on her life. She’s in the psych ward.” “Oh my God,” I said. “It was really bad,” he said. “She took a handful of pills and then tried to hang herself from her closet doorknob. Luckily the kids weren’t there, but some man showed up and broke in. He found her and got her to the hospital. Her boyfriend or something, I’m not sure.” I wondered for a moment which of her men had saved her life. Was it David? Best Buy Dude? Even if it was Ponytail Man, I was genuinely grateful for his existence. “Oh no, poor Claire. I’m so sorry.” “He didn’t take her cell phone so I went to her place and grabbed it to see if I could reach out to some of her friends. I heard your message. Sounds like you aren’t in great shape either.” “I’m totally fine. Fuck, what hospital is she at?” “She’s at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital,” he said. “She is allowed visitors from ten to three. I just saw her for the first time this morning and she is doing well, all things considered. But I think she could really use a shred of normalcy right now, and a friend. She really hates it there, but she’s not getting out anytime soon. I’m going to try to get her to go to treatment for drugs and depression following her stay. Apparently she’d been taking pills again.”

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  There would be no need for me to speak to the guard since the motor was running, but I had to wait until he looked into the car and gave me the signal to continue. He was busy talking to people in a car facing the mountain I had just conquered. The light from his hut showed him bent from the waist with his upper torso completely swallowed by the mouth of the open window. I held the car in instant readiness for the next lap of our journey. When the guard unfolded himself and stood erect I was able to see he was not the same man of the morning's embarrassment. I was understandably taken aback at the discovery and when he saluted sharply and barked “Pasa” I released the brake, put both feet down and lifted them a bit too sharply. The car outran my intention. It leaped not only forward but left as well, and with a few angry spurts propelled itself onto the side of the car just pulling off. The crash of scraping metal was followed immediately by a volley of Spanish hurled at me from all directions. Again, strangely enough, fear was absent from my sensations. I wondered in this order: was I hurt, was anyone else hurt, would I go to jail, what were the Mexicans saying, and finally, had Dad awakened? I was able to answer the first and last concern promptly. Buoyed by the adrenaline that had flooded my brain as we careened down the mountainside, I had never felt better, and my father's snores cut through the cacophony of protestations outside my window. I got out of the car, intending to ask for the policías, but the guard beat me to the punch. He said a few words, which were strung together like beads, but one of them was policías. As the people in the other car fumbled out, I tried to recover my control and said loudly and too graciously, “Gracias, señor.” The family, some eight or more people of every age and size, walked around me, talking heatedly and sizing me up as if I might have been a statue in a city park and they were a flock of pigeons. One said “Joven,” meaning I was young. I tried to see which one was so intelligent. I would direct my conversation to him or her, but they shifted positions so quickly it was impossible to make the person out. Then another suggested “Borracho.” Well, certainly, I must have smelled like a tequila farm, since Dad had been breathing out the liquor in noisy respirations and I had kept the windows closed against the cold night air. It wasn't likely that I would explain that to these strangers even if I could. Which I couldn't. Someone got the idea to look into the car, and a scream brought us all up short. People—they seemed to be in the hundreds—crowded to the windows and more screams erupted.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  We indulged in a test of strength for weeks as Dad stood figuratively on the sidelines, neither cheering nor booing but enjoying himself greatly. He asked me once if I “er liked errer my mother.” I thought he meant my mother, so I answered yes—she was beautiful and gay and very kind. He said he wasn't talking about Vivian, he meant Dolores. Then I explained that I didn't like her because she was mean and petty and full of pretense. He laughed, and when I added she didn't like me because I was so tall and arrogant and wasn't clean enough for her, he laughed harder and said something like “Well, that's life.” One evening he announced that on the next day he was going to Mexico to buy food for the weekend. There was nothing unusual about his pronouncement until he added that he was taking me along. He filled the shocked silence with the information that a trip to Mexico would give me an opportunity to practice Spanish. Dolores' silence might have been brought on by a jealous reaction, but mine was occasioned by pure surprise. My father had not shown any particular pride in me and very little affection. He had not taken me to his friends or to southern California's few points of interest. It was incredible that I was to be included in something as exotic as a trip to Mexico. Well, I quickly reasoned, I deserved it. After all, I was his daughter and my vacation fell far short of what I had expected a vacation to be. Had I protested that I would like Dolores to go along, we might have been spared a display of violence and near tragedy. But my young mind was filled with self, and my imagination shivered at the prospect of seeing sombreros, rancheros, tortillas and Pancho Villa. We spent a quiet night. Dolores mended her perfect underwear, and I pretended to read a novel. Dad listened to the radio with a drink in his hand and watched what I now know was a pitiful spectacle. In the morning, we set out on the foreign adventure. The dirt roads of Mexico fulfilled all my longing for the unusual. Only a few miles from California's slick highways and, to me, tall buildings, we were bumping along on gravel streets that could have competed in crudeness with the worst paths in Arkansas, and the landscape boasted adobe huts or cabins walled with corrugated metal. Dogs, lean and dirty, slunk around the houses, and children played innocently in the nude or near nude with discarded rubber tires. Half the population looked like Tyrone Power and Dolores Del Rio, and the other half like Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou, maybe only fatter and older.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Whereas before I had always experienced classical orchestral music through a radio or record player (this was long before any of us had stereo systems), from which the music all came out in an undifferentiated composite sound, for the first time I was able to appreciate the almost geographical as well as tonal difference between the woodwinds and the cellos, the brass and the violas, and so on. It was disconcerting to begin with, but ultimately revelatory. So, when people object that they haven’t “heard” the gospels before in the way I am now going to suggest, the best answer is to invite them to listen more closely and to see if the things they have always “heard” in the gospels might actually be enhanced, given more depth and body, in this new multilayered reading. My point here is that without these four “speakers” all properly adjusted we simply won’t hear the music the four gospels are playing. The Gospels as Biographies The tune to which we are listening, throughout all this, is of course the great tune of the life of Jesus himself. Gone are the days when scholars could confidently proclaim that the gospels are not “biographies.” (This was another Bultmannism. The great but misguided German, anxious that one might turn “faith” into a “work” by anchoring it in history, was doing his best to steer people away from looking at the gospels as “biographies”—a tendentious suggestion that subsequent research has rejected.) True, the gospels are not, as C. S. Lewis pointed out tartly many years ago, what you’d expect from a Victorian Life and Letters of Yeshua bar-Yosef in three volumes with photographs. They omit a great deal, notably of course the silent years between age twelve (and even then we just get one story) and about age thirty. But when you compare the gospels with ancient Greek or Roman “biographies,” they match up quite well. That doesn’t mean that everything is in chronological order, still less of course that they offer a straight transcription of what you’d have seen and heard if you’d set up a video camera in Nazareth or Capernaum or even in the high priest’s chamber during that final fateful night. No history, no biography, ever tells you everything. All history selects and arranges, not to falsify but to highlight what is significant. And when, in Greco-Roman biography, the death of the central figure is particularly important, it is given special treatment. Think of Socrates or Julius Caesar. The four gospels, then, are not merely “passion narratives with extended introductions,” as one of Bultmann’s predecessors had suggested. They are not merely reflections of the faith of the later church projected onto a screen that the earliest evangelists themselves knew to be fictional. They present themselves as biographies, biographies of Jesus.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The point the gospel writers are eager to get across—that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is in fact the climax of the story of Israel, even though nobody was expecting such a thing and many didn’t like the look of it when it was presented to them—is something that, like the risen Jesus himself, is visible to the eye of faith. The story makes sense as a whole or not at all. John: Creation and New Creation The paradox we saw in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that the events involving Jesus are to be seen as the fulfillment of the story of Israel, but that this “fulfillment” is not what Israel was expecting or wanting—is stated sharply right at the start of John’s gospel. John’s prologue (1:1–18) takes us back to the first books of the Bible, to Genesis and Exodus. He frames his simple, profound opening statement with echoes of the creation story (“In the beginning...,” leading up to the creation of humans in God’s image) and echoes of the climax of the book of Exodus (“The Word became flesh, and lived among us,” 1:14, where the word “lived” is literally “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent,” as in the construction of the tabernacle for God’s glory in the wilderness). This, in other words, is where Israel’s history and with it world history reached their moment of destiny. But Israel, the people whose very backbone was Genesis and Exodus, were looking the other way: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:11). Yes, some did accept him, and they were given “the right to become God’s children” (1:12), not because of human ancestry or effort, but because of God’s strange mercy. So John too sees the story of Jesus as the paradoxical climax of the story of Israel. That is why, of course, the theme of Jesus’s messiahship is highlighted repeatedly—along with the constant question as to whether someone like Jesus can really be the one for whom Israel had been longing: “We’ve found him!” said Philip. “The one Moses wrote about in the law! And the prophets, too! We’ve found him! It’s Jesus, Joseph’s son, from Nazareth!” “Really?” replied Nathanael. “Are you telling me that something good can come out of Nazareth?” (1:45–46) The theme continues through the whole book. Jesus says and does things that declare that he is in fact the one to whom Israel’s scriptures all point, like many streams converging into a mighty river. But most of his contemporaries had in mind a different kind of river. “You study the Bible,” Jesus says, “because you suppose that you’ll discover the life of God’s coming age in it.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  My initial avoidance of the label “woman” was fostered even further by my decision to transition in “boy mode,” a strategy that many trans women feel is the safest and most effective. Essentially, this meant that I underwent electrolysis and hormone replacement therapy while continuing to live my life as a “man”: wearing the same jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, flannel shirts, and sweat-jackets I always wore and acting pretty much the same as I always had. The idea is that you simply go about your life until you reach the point where most people begin to assume that you are female despite your (tom)boyish gender presentation; some trans women refer to this as the point when they lose the ability to “pass” as a man. At the start of my transition, I had the same assumptions that most people have about gender: I believed that there were obvious, concrete differences between women and men. Thus, I figured that I would have to spend a good deal of time during my transition being “in between” genders—too physically ambiguous for people to classify as either female or male. But that didn’t really happen. To my surprise, people almost always made the call one way or another, even though their conclusion as to my gender often differed from person to person. For instance, it was common for me to go into a store and have an employee say, “Can I help you, sir?” Then a few minutes later, as I was leaving, a different employee might say, “Have a good day, ma’am.” After about a month or two of never knowing whether any given person was gendering me as female or male, I experienced a dramatic change. It felt like the world suddenly shifted around me. Almost overnight, I sensed that everything was very different. At first, I suspected that this feeling was coming from within me, perhaps a psychological or emotional change related to my being on female hormones. But then I realized that it wasn’t me, but rather the rest of the world, that was acting differently. In public, strangers began standing much closer to me. Women seemed to let their guard down around me. Men, for no apparent reason, would smile at me. Everybody spoke to me differently, interacted with me in different ways. I realized that I had passed through some sort of threshold and suddenly everybody saw me as female.

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

  These were the wonders of the new Italian art; but they had as little interest for the German monk as the temples and statues of classical Athens had for the Apostle Paul. When Luther came in sight of the eternal city he fell upon the earth, raised his hands and exclaimed, "Hail to thee, holy, Rome!145 Thrice holy for the blood of martyrs shed here." He passed the colossal ruins of heathen Rome and the gorgeous palaces of Christian Rome. But he ran, "like a crazy saint," through all the churches and crypts and catacombs with an unquestioning faith in the legendary traditions about the relics and miracles of martyrs.146 He wished that his parents were dead that he might help them out of purgatory by reading mass in the most holy place, according to the saying: "Blessed is the mother whose son celebrates mass on Saturday in St. John of the Lateran." He ascended on bended knees the twenty-eight steps of the famous Scala Santa (said to have been transported from the Judgment Hall of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem), that he might secure the indulgence attached to this ascetic performance since the days of Pope Leo IV. in 850, but at every step the word of the Scripture sounded as a significant protest in his ear: "The just shall live by faith" (Rom. 1:17).147 Thus at the very height of his mediaeval devotion he doubted its efficacy in giving peace to the troubled conscience. This doubt was strengthened by what he saw around him. He was favorably struck, indeed, with the business administration and police regulations of the papal court, but shocked by the unbelief, levity and immorality of the clergy. Money and luxurious living seemed to have replaced apostolic poverty and self-denial. He saw nothing but worldly splendor at the court of Pope Julius II., who had just returned from the sanguinary siege of a town conducted by him in person. He afterward thundered against him as a man of blood. He heard of the fearful crimes of Pope Alexander VI. and his family, which were hardly known and believed in Germany, but freely spoken of as undoubted facts in the fresh remembrance of all Romans. While he was reading one mass, a Roman priest would finish seven. He was urged to hurry up (passa, passa!), and to "send her Son home to our Lady." He heard priests, when consecrating the elements, repeat in Latin the words: "Bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain; wine thou art, and wine thou shalt remain." The term "a good Christian" (buon Christiano) meant "a fool." He was told that "if there was a hell, Rome was built on it," and that this state of things must soon end in a collapse.