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 Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Larry watched silently, uttering only one sentence: “Are you ready to go, Theresa?” Once we were on the highway, Theresa turned in her seat to glance at me, her bottom lip tucked under her large front teeth, her face happy, excited. Larry focused on the road. “What do you think of my new husband?” Theresa asked. Her eyes twinkled at me, and I realized she expected an answer. I leaned forward so I could get a better look at Larry’s taciturn profile. Theresa also examined him as if she were sizing up a pet she’d recently purchased and wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice. Larry was boring, I decided. The robotic Abraham Lincoln, my least favorite attraction at Disneyland, was more entertaining than Larry, who had inexplicably become part of my mother’s and my life through their mysterious marriage, which I was just now learning of. “Nice,” I said. My answer seemed to satisfy Theresa because she turned to face the road. “We just recently got love matched,” she remarked. “Oh,” I said. I knew love matched was the same as married. Their union was just another fragmentary incident for me, part of a string of sketchy situations that I’d come to accept in my short life. Larry drove with one hand and rested the other on the seat. Theresa’s fingers grazed his lightly. “I thought maybe we’d go to Fisherman’s Wharf,” he said, pulling his hand away to place it on the steering wheel. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf. The air smelled of the sea. Flocks of gulls glided on the wind current in the bright sky. Boats of various sizes bobbed in the marina. Other tourists like us strolled the walkway and creaking wooden wharfs. Until that rare visit with my mother and her new husband, I had no awareness of the experiment that was going on at Synanon. The reform, called Changing Partners, consisted of mass divorce followed by remarriage to a new partner. After Chuck Dederich took my young teacher Ginny to be his new wife, he wanted everyone in the community to start a new relationship. His first guinea pig was his daughter Jady. Having been displeased for quite a while with Jady’s husband, Dederich began to pressure her to divorce and marry someone else in the community whom Dederich felt more suitable for upper management grooming. With this first successful breakup, Dederich got other Synanon VIPs involved in divorcing and remarrying. As more couples followed suit, the ones who held out were pressured to leave their marriages and find someone new. It’s “no more trouble than casting off an old coat,” Dederich told members who balked at this drastic request. In the fall of 1977, Changing Partners became an official mandate. Whether members were happy with their present spouse or not, it was time to take a of leap faith.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Into the bar comes the villain, the “slave-whipping Mississippian,” ex-captain of Volunteers, handsome, swaggering, scowling Cassius Calhoun. After toasting “America for Americans, and confusion to all foreign interlopers—especially the d—d [an evasion that puzzled me sorely when I first stumbled upon it: dead? detested?] Irish!” he intentionally collided with Maurice the Mustanger (scarlet scarf, slashed velvet trousers, hot Irish blood), a young horse trader who was really a baronet, Sir Maurice Gerald, as his thrilled bride was to discover at the end of the book. Wrong thrills, like this, may have been one of the reasons that the Irish-born author’s fame waned so soon in his adopted country. Immediately after the collision, Maurice performed several actions in the following order: he deposited his glass upon the counter, drew a silk handkerchief from his pocket, wiped from his embroidered shirt-bosom “the defilement of the whiskey,” transferred the handkerchief from his right hand to his left, took the half-empty glass from the counter, swilled its remaining contents into Calhoun’s face, quietly redeposited the glass upon the counter. This sequence I still know by heart, so often did my cousin and I enact it. The duel took place there and then, in the emptied barroom, the men using Colt’s six-shooters. Despite my interest in the fight (… both were wounded … their blood spurted all over the sanded floor …), I could not prevent myself from leaving the saloon in my fancy to mingle with the hushed crowd in front of the hotel, so as to make out (in the “scented dark”) certain señoritas “of questionable calling.” With still more excitement did I read of Louise Pointdexter, Calhoun’s fair cousin, daughter of a sugar planter, “the highest and haughtiest of his class” (though why an old man who planted sugar should be high and haughty was a mystery to me). She is revealed in the throes of jealousy (which I used to feel so keenly at miserable parties when Mara Rzhevuski, a pale child with a white silk bow in her black hair, suddenly and inexplicably stopped noticing me) standing upon the edge of her azotea, her white hand resting upon the copestone of the parapet which is “still wet with the dews of night,” her twin breasts sinking and swelling in quick, spasmodic breathing, her twin breasts, let me reread, sinking and swelling, her lorgnette directed … That lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta. When Louise held it, it was directed toward the speckled shadows under the mesquites, where the horseman of her choice was having an innocent conversation with the daughter of a wealthy haciendado, Doña Isidora Covarubio de los Llanos (whose “head of hair in luxuriance rivalled the tail of a wild steed”).

• From Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006)

  He was a Republican; he had travelled; he knew the secrets of the theatres, restaurants, and newspapers; and he was acquainted with all the celebrities of the stage, whom he referred to familiarly by their Christian names. Before long Frédéric had confided his plans to him; he took a favourable view of them. Suddenly he broke off to examine the funnel, and then rapidly muttered a lengthy sum to himself, in order to discover “the force of each piston stroke, at so many a minute.” Having found the answer, he expatiated on the beauties of the landscape. He said how happy he was to have escaped from business. Frédéric felt a certain respect for him, and on a sudden impulse asked his name. The stranger replied all in one breath: “Jacques Arnoux, proprietor of L’Art Industriel, Boulevard Montmartre.” A servant with gold braid on his cap came up to him and said: “Would Monsieur please go below? Mademoiselle is crying.” He disappeared. L’Art Industriel was a hybrid establishment, comprising both an art magazine and a picture shop. Frédéric had seen the title several times in the window of his local bookshop, printed on huge prospectuses which bore the name of Jacques Arnoux in a prominent position. So, by the end of this section, we have met another of the novel’s principal characters, the art dealer and magazine editor Jacques Arnoux. His outfit— flashy, expensive, a bit Bohemian, complete with emeralds and red leather boots—is almost all we need to know, though we do get a little extra: the information that he is entertaining a group of passengers and sailors by publicly flirting with a peasant girl. He’s a show-off whose social status allows him to behave like that, just as his privilege permits him to offer cigars to the men. We’ve met men like this, high rollers, big spenders, simultaneously generous and coarse. And throughout the book we will watch him trying to buy attention, love, and forgiveness. Of course, he’s not embarrassed by Frédéric’s presence. They recognize each other. They are both from the same social class; hence, the conspiratorial winks and the fact that they go off together when Arnoux gets bored with his own antics. The moment almost streaks past us, but if it does, we miss seeing Flaubert’s notation of how the subtle markers of class govern every social situation, including the choice of whom one engages in casual conversation on a boat. The interchange adds another layer to our impression of Frédéric, who is not in the least put off by Arnoux’s flashiness, but is, on the contrary (as a young man like Frédéric would be), charmed and flattered when this worldly traveler and well-connected bon vivant consents to talk to him. And when he is moved to confide his own plans, of which Arnoux has a “favourable view,” we can practically hear the older man only half paying attention.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale had nothing to look at but his back and his ass. “Oh,” Roman said. “Oh, wow.” “What?” “The, ah, the space shuttle. It blew up.” “Shit. Move over.” Roman sat beside him, cross-legged. He took his glasses off and put them back on. Dan Rather was explaining, in the studio, that something went wrong one minute and twelve seconds after liftoff. Live at Cape Canaveral, a man at an outdoor desk tried to explain what had happened, talked about the big pieces of the craft that had fallen into the ocean. They showed the shuttle taking off this morning, and things went well for long enough that Yale was almost hopeful nothing would happen after all. And then it burst into a ball of smoke, two spiraling plumes. “My God, they had that teacher on there,” Yale said. “What?” “You know, there was that contest for a teacher to go to space. The woman. Oh God.” Roman said, “Huh. Yeah, I don’t really watch the news.” Yale wouldn’t have been as aware of it all himself if Kurt Pearce hadn’t been talking about it the other day—how now we were going to go back and forth to space all the time, how Kurt planned to live on the moon by the time he was twenty. Roman’s left knee was touching Yale’s right knee, or at least the cloth of his black jeans was brushing Yale’s khakis. Yale wondered if it was intentional, wondered if he would hurt Roman’s feelings by shifting away. Yale said, “Well it was a really big deal. Fuck.” “Do they have other space shuttles?” Roman said. “What do you mean?” “Like, do they have a fleet of these things, or is there just the one?” “There’s—” It seemed like an easy question, but Yale found he wasn’t sure of the answer. “There’s one at a time, right? This was the current one.” Yale found himself gulping the wine. It was only afternoon but it felt later. Roman’s curtains were all drawn, the blinds down behind them. Roman flopped back on the bed, legs still crossed, knee still pressing toward Yale, and balanced the wine on his belly with the aid of a finger hooked onto the cup’s rim. Yale took time to think out the whole thought, in words: He was not going to sleep with Roman. Not now, and not ever. Not now, because he might have been infected. Not ever, because he was supposed to be this guy’s mentor. He wasn’t sure what rules existed about grad student–professor relationships at Northwestern, but he imagined they did exist, and he imagined he’d be held to the same standards. Not ever, because he wasn’t interested in helping some confused virgin work out his sexuality. Not ever, because Roman, despite his pending PhD, wasn’t the brightest bulb, and that kind of thing mattered to Yale. “It’s hubris,” Roman said. “That’s what it is. Like, you listen to Nora’s life—that was so recent.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  After five years as the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour moved from her cozy apartments under the eaves of Versailles, directly above the king’s chambers, to palatial apartments on the ground floor, directly below them. Again, her suite was connected to the king’s with a secret staircase. In these grand rooms, she worked for thirteen years as the unofficial prime minister of France. Indeed, she had far more power than any of Louis’s ministers, as it was she who appointed them. In 1753 the marquis d’Argenson wrote, “The mistress is Prime Minister, and is becoming more and more despotic, such as a favorite has never been in France.”16 Hearing of Madame de Pompadour’s power, the renowned misogynist King Frederick the Great of Prussia was so offended he named his dog—a bitch—after her. According to Countess Lichtenau, the mistress of Frederick’s nephew and heir, the king “thought that it did not become the destined ruler of a great and powerful nation to be governed and duped by women and a set of idle parasites. Such creatures were generally connected with a gang of adventurers who had no other aim but that of creeping into favor of the ruling prince, under the protection of a clever courtesan, and as soon as they had obtained that favor they would interfere with the most serious and momentous concerns of the State.”17 Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy for Frederick when Madame de Pompadour used her power to spurn Prussia—France’s traditional ally—and side with Empress Maria Theresa of Austria during the Seven Years’ War (1757–1763). France’s support in this territorial catfight between Prussia and Austria was likely to tip the scales in favor of whichever side France weighed in on. And Frederick’s caustic comments about Madame de Pompadour convinced her to side with two other powerful women, Maria Theresa and Empress Elizabeth of Russia, after both of whom Frederick had named dogs as well. He sometimes called his brood of powerfully named bitches Petticoats I, II, and III. Frederick was delighted that when he snapped his fingers, Madame de Pompadour, Empress Maria Theresa, and Empress Elizabeth came running, and when they misbehaved he could beat them. But that was only the dogs. The women, claws unsheathed, pounced on him in concert. The Austrian alliance was not popular among the French people, who until quite recently had lost sons and fathers to Austrian guns and bayonets. But Madame de Pompadour convinced the king that Prussia had become too powerful under Frederick and that an alliance with Austria would create a better balance of European power. Madame de Pompadour became the unofficial minister of war, personally choosing the generals. Her choices were extremely limited. Generals had to be selected from the nobility, and many of the best French generals were either too old or too ill to participate. Some competent men were available, but these were not admirers of Madame de Pompadour, who insisted on appointing her friends.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  20. The Iberian Worldwide Empires in 1600 COUNTER-REFORMATION IN A NEW WORLD The Council of Trent said nothing in its official statements about the world mission of the renewed Catholic Church, but this mission became one of the most distinctive features of southern European Catholicism, a project of taking Christianity to every continent, which made Roman Catholicism Western Christianity’s largest grouping, and the Spanish and Portuguese languages the chief modern rivals to English as the mode of Western communication. Trent’s silence seems all the more surprising since Catholic world mission had been in operation for over half a century when the council met – this was not like the council’s silence on the menace of militant Calvinism, which had only emerged as a real threat just before its last session. Committees are even more prone than individuals to miss the point in the business in front of them, but it is worth observing that there was little that Rome could do about mission – at the beginning of the century, the papacy had signed away control of Catholic activity. Ignatius Loyola was characteristically more farsighted: it was no coincidence that Portugal was one of the first kingdoms on which he concentrated the efforts of his infant Society, founding as early as 1540 a headquarters in Lisbon and only two years later a Jesuit college for missionary training, set up with royal encouragement in the university town of Coimbra. A new world mission based on Portugal would more than compensate for his abortive plans for the Holy Land.

• From Beyond Belief

  and I were at the apartment one afternoon when Sarah Kitty suddenly came sprinting out of the dollhouse to investigate a newcomer, a boy around Justin’s age whom I had seen around the Base before. He had barely stepped into the living room when Sarah Kitty dashed up to him and climbed him as if he were a tree. He was screaming, partly in fear and partly in pain at having been scratched, so B. J. and I ran to grab her. Once we had her and our laughter under control, we stood staring at the boy, wondering who he was. Justin was home and made the introductions. “This is Sterling,” he said to me. “He’s your brother.” I knew that Justin had a friend named Sterling, but I didn’t know that he was actually his twin. He and his family had been living in L.A. for several years and were also members of the Sea Org. It took me a while to get used to the concept of having another brother. Although Sterling and Justin looked nothing alike, they both loved sports and got along fairly well. He even started picking me up from the nursery some nights and stayed until Pat arrived. Dad, Mom, or both left L.A. every Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. When they left, Justin and I liked to be outside to wave them off. I’ll never forget the Sunday when my parents were backing their car out of the garage and B. J. and I were riding the garage gate. My leg got caught in between the bars as it was sliding to the right to let the car out. Justin tried to pull me off, but I misunderstood his intention and thought he was teasing me as usual. The gate had no safety stop and my leg got stuck between the gate and the wall, and I was trapped. In unbearable pain, I started to scream my head off. My dad jumped out of the car and literally bent the metal bars with his bare hands to free my leg. I was crying uncontrollably as he carried me to the elevator and back upstairs. My parents called a local Scientology doctor, who instructed them to ask me to try to walk. When I couldn’t do it because of the pain, she told them that unfortunately my leg was probably fractured, and that I should get an X-ray in the morning. Mom and Dad stayed with me for as long as they could, but they had so many urgent phone calls from Int that they were unable to stay past dinner. Someone in charge insisted that they come back to the Base, even though he knew I was seriously injured. Orders had to be obeyed, and my parents reluctantly went. The ramifications for insubordination were significant and depended on the wrath and power of the person you disobeyed. My parents didn’t want to displease their senior and suffer the consequences.

• From Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

  “I can’t. My stomach hurts.” I bent low to scratch at a cluster of bites on my ankle. “I hate Russia, its dumb domes, its mosquitoes, its dancing bears.” In Russia, I was cold, nauseated, and so far away. Lonely and forgotten. I scratched until my ankles bled. My blood and skin mingled under my fingernails. Patrice rubbed my back in a circle and offered me a piece of dark chocolate. I closed my eyes and missed group, where I could cry, gnash, and let all the feeling pour of me. “I had some time to think while you were in Russia.” Alex and I were walking down Dearborn after a 5K race for the Legal Aid Society. My body was spinning in space, somewhere between Russia and Chicago, throbbing through the jet lag that made me feel drunk. “The thing is, I know you’re not the one.” He marched down Dearborn without breaking his stride or looking at me. No, no, no. I breathed through my nose to smooth out my voice. “What are you talking about?” “I just know. You’re not the person I’m supposed to be with.” My arms shook in the humid August air. I tasted the postrace banana I’d swallowed four blocks back. Sweat on my neck turned icy cold. In the lobby he stopped to check his mail, while I shivered like a stray cat by the elevators. Did he really need to get his Visa bill and the grocery store circular at this moment? When the elevator opened, I shuffled in, but he stepped back to wait for the next one. I brought the shards of all the dishes I broke that night to my Monday-morning group and dumped them in the center of the circle. Pieces of a ceramic Thanksgiving platter I bought at Walgreens, the IKEA glasses, the pale blue fruit bowl from the Tag outlet that I bought with Carlos. I’d shoveled them into a double-ply Macy’s shopping bag, which I hooked on my arm as I walked the mile from my apartment to group. The jagged edge of a dinner plate pierced the bag and tore the skin on my calf as I crossed Chicago Avenue. A stream of blood ran down my leg and into my black ballet flats. “He’s gone,” I said to this group that brought Alex into my life. Now I needed them to catch me because I was really falling. “I’m not ‘the one.’ ” Tears fell, soft and incessant. Patrice got out of her chair and pulled me to my feet. She wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry.” Dr. Rosen leaned toward me as if he was telling me a secret. “Mamaleh, he just got scared when you left for Russia.” No, he was gone for good. That bomb I’d once imagined beneath his smooth skin and beautiful ribs had detonated. I was in pieces.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  NINTH STORY The King of Cyprus is transformed, on receiving a sharp rebuke from a lady of Gascony, from a weakling into a man of courage. The queen’s final word of command was reserved for Elissa, who, without pausing to hear it, began all merrily as follows: It has frequently come about, young ladies, that a single word, uttered more often by chance than with studied intent, has sufficed to cure a person of something against which various strictures and any number of punishments have proved ineffectual. This fact is very well brought out in the story told by Lauretta, and I too propose to show it to you in another tale, which shall be very brief. For good stories may always come in useful, and you should lend them an attentive ear, no matter who does the telling. I say, then, that during the reign of the first king of Cyprus, 1 after the conquest of the Holy Land by Godfrey of Bouillon, it happened that a gentlewoman of Gascony made a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre, and having arrived in Cyprus on her return journey, she was brutally assaulted by a pack of ruffians. Her sorrow at this deed was inconsolable, and she resolved to go and lay a complaint before the King. But she was told that she would be wasting her time, for the King was of such a weak and craven disposition, that not only would he allow others’ wrongs to go unpunished by the law, but like a despicable coward he would suffer all manner of insults offered to his own royal person. So much so, indeed, that whenever anybody had an axe to grind, he would relieve his feelings by shaming or insulting the King. On hearing this, the woman lost all hope of being revenged, but she decided, as some small compensation for her woes, to taunt this king with his faint- heartedness. So she presented herself in tears before him, and said: ‘My lord, I do not come before you in the expectation of any redress for the wrong inflicted upon me. But by way of reparation for my injury, I beg you to instruct me how you manage to endure the wrongs which, as I am led to understand, are inflicted upon you, so that I might learn from you to bear my own with patience. God knows that, if I could, I would willingly make you a present of it, since you find these things so easy to support.’ The King, who until that moment had been so slow and passive, reacted as though he had been roused from sleep. Beginning with the injury done to this lady, which he avenged most harshly, he thenceforth became the implacable scourge of all those who did anything to impugn the honour of his crown.

• From The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (2020)

  Religion also had a role to play in the debate over “welfare reform,” but it was not as a simple force for sexual regulation. Rather, specifically Christian discourses were invoked on both sides of the debate. As none other than Senator Moynihan noted, some of the strongest opponents of the bill were religious groups. Moynihan opposed the bill because of the seriousness of the change it would make to the structure of the welfare state. And he was joined by many powerful Christian institutions: “[T]here is one unified voice [in opposition to the legislation]: that of every national religious group and faith-based charity. But we seem unable or unwilling to listen. They all oppose ending the entitlement. Catholic Charities USA and the Catholic bishops, especially the National Council of Churches, Bread for the World, have persisted in this matter. Other [nonreligious] organizations are once again silent.”43 This coalition between a mainline Protestant organization (National Council of Churches) a poverty-focused evangelical organization (Bread for the World), and Catholic authorities and organizations stands in striking contrast to the alliance that the Clinton administration and its supporters forged between conservative and evangelical Christians and secular claims about poverty, sex, race, and economics. In 1995, for example, Clinton made connections among religion, sexual morality, and neoliberal economics in a speech to the Progressive National Baptists.44 And throughout his advocacy of “welfare reform,” Clinton argued that the policy would help to inculcate order and discipline in the American family, invoking a powerful set of assumptions about family structure, ethical values, and the capitalist discipline of the Protestant ethic.45 When it came to the legislative debate, direct Christian influence proved less powerful than this linkage of conservative Christian rhetoric and a potent neoliberal belief that individuals must be responsible for their own welfare. One of the most poignant moments in the debate was in Senator Moynihan’s statement. He began with a quotation from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism about the moment in which “all hope has died” and went on to the make the point that “something fundamental” was about to happen with the passage of the bill: “What is about to happen is we are going to repeal title IV-A of the Social Security Act, the provision established in 1935 to that act, aid to families with dependent children.”46 Moynihan was one of the few participants in the debate to state directly the gravity of the proposed legislation, which contravened the New Deal emphasis on socializing risk so that no one would be left unprotected and destitute.47 The disjunction between Moynihan’s position on this particular policy and his contribution to the surrounding discourse, specifically to the connection between nonnormative family structure and economic issues, illustrates the ways in which contributions to a broader discourse have power well beyond the intentions or control of those who initially produce them.