Anger

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 White Oleander (1999)

  If I had a father who worked nights for the railroad, I might have had a mother who would listen for the click of the door when he came home, and I would hear her quiet voice, their muffled laughter through the thin walls of the house. How soft their voices would be, and sweet, like pigeons brooding under a bridge. If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare. Under the bed, a darker current wove itself into the night. My mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifted and heaved, like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. I would allow no more words. From now on, I only wanted things that could be touched, tasted, the scent of new houses, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give me the way rooftops of stucco apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give me the boy playing electric guitar, my foster home bed at the end of Ripple Street, and the shape of Yvonne and her baby that was coming. She was the hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer. Across the room, Yvonne cried out. Her pillow fell on the floor. I got it for her. It was spongy with sweat. She sweated so much at night, I sometimes had to help her change the sheets. I put the pillow behind her dark hair, pushed the soaked strands from her face. She was hot as a steaming load of wet laundry. The guitar unraveled a song I could only occasionally recognize as “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.” “Astrid,” Yvonne whispered. “Listen,” I said. “Someone’s playing guitar.” “I had the worst dream,” she mumbled. “People kept stealing my stuff. They took my horse.” Her felted paper horse, white with gold paper trappings and red silk fringe, sat on the dresser, front leg raised, neck curved into an arch that echoed the frightened curve of her eyebrows. “It’s still there,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I then gave up my list of friends and my attempts to save myself. If Poinsot did not want to help me, no other Frenchman would. Furthermore, it was more and more dangerous to go out. As the community was taking its time with its reply, the raids in the streets were becoming more and more frequent and efficient. The German police were being helped by the French: unpleasant mistakes had to be avoided. So we retreated into our homes and closed our shops. The ghetto became like a desert. But the police knew the Jewish homes. Through habit and a certain respect for formalities, they still knocked on the doors and cried “Police!” The Germans then followed or simply waited in the street near their big closed vans. I was still indignant enough to want to reject this new image of France. After all, were not the policemen just as French as Racine and Descartes? I was out when they raided our Passage. Our neighbor had been dragged out of his bed in the middle of a fit of malaria and had continued to rave in delirium in the stairway. When he saw the uniforms, he began to sing the “Marseillaise”; the policemen were annoyed because they thought he was being sarcastic and began to beat him up while he stood stiffly at attention. The situation was becoming disastrous. The raiders carried off all men indiscriminately, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick. A few young girls disappeared. The families of the hostages begged and prayed and wept. Something had to be done about those who were already in the camps. When they saw that no help would come from anywhere and that ostrich tactics led only to disaster, the leaders of the community got in touch with the Germans. Later, they were violently criticized for this; at the time, however, we heaved a sigh of relief. I have enough other reasons to feel strongly against our middle class and can dare to say this. The ghetto was there, easy to cut off and surround with a handful of men, and open to any attack. The Germans could kill, rape, and loot as they pleased. Those who protest today are the ones who found refuge in homes in the European quarters, but could one hope to hide the whole ghetto? The little hucksters, saddlers, tailors, bakers, and cobblers had no connections. Something had to be done. The Germans agreed to stop the raids and to allow us to organize a medical service that would exempt the sick and the aged from labor camps. In exchange, the leaders had to supply a given contingent of workers. At last we thought we would be able to leave our anguished seclusion. I must admit that, at the time, we found this arrangement preferable to the day-to-day terror of random police raids.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This insidious and argumentative form of racial prejudice, disguised as objectivity, was tolerated by my upper-middle-class Jewish classmates. It is true that they were spared certain humiliations. They were assured that such criticism did not apply to them. Anyway, doesn’t every human community have its faults? Apparently, I was too touchy and saw anti-Semitism everywhere. But the point was that my classmates did not suffer enough from it in material terms. There were, of course, little annoyances sometimes in the street. On a peaceful day, for instance, a drunkard might shout: “Death to the Jews!” Or the ticket collector, harassed by the crowd, might say: “These Jews are all alike.” Or inscriptions might be scrawled every once in a while on the walls of the old cemetery: “Down with the Jews!” Or again, uncomplimentary references might appear in the press, and one would then have to face smiling and unexpected remarks such as: “Really, you must admit that...” But as, in the long run, the families of my classmates were allowed to go about their own business, they were convinced they were on the winning side. They did not even seem to experience any spiritual anxiety. They were of European culture, going back at least one generation, and the nearness of Europe and the apparent solidarity of the modern world comforted them; several times a year, they went abroad, pampered their digestive systems in various spas, and did most of their business with European firms. It is only fair to add that the Western world really did mean something to them. To us, the pauper Jews, it had brought the end of feudalism as well as movies and cars and doctors; but it also meant that small hucksters were chased around by cops and humiliated each time they came into contact with the authorities. Pogroms never swept so far as the residential sections where Jewish, Moslem, and Christian homes stood side by side; but our huge ghetto, neglected by the anti-Semites because of its sordid misery, was always in mortal danger. Any battered-in door might reveal Jews behind it. We had never been away from the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and we felt cut off from the rest of the world, abandoned to all the local catastrophes. I was neither as polite nor as secure as my middle-class brethren. I was impulsive and badly behaved, and allowed neither jokes nor mealy-mouthed insinuations to be made. I am willing to admit that my anxiety often increased my suspicion, and I frequently suspected people of meaning more than they said; but what they said was quite unbearable enough for any ordinary pride, and I had the greatest contempt for my Jewish classmates, for their tolerance and so-called fair play, as if fair play did not imply equality for both players.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Despite her wounded feelings and her distrust of Ernest, therapy had become more interesting for Myrna; even during her working hours she found herself anticipating the upcoming session. The ploy about having overheard a conversation in the lavatory had worked well, she thought, and she intended to continue inventing devices that would allow her to use some part of the overheard dictation each hour. Next week it would be his label of “whining.” “My sister told me on the phone the other day,” she said disingenuously, “that my parents often called me ‘Miss Whiner’ when I was small. That hits home somehow. You said I should try to use this safe place here in your office to explore things I can’t talk about elsewhere.” Ernest nodded vigorously. “So I was wondering whether you think I whine a lot.” “What do you mean by ‘whine,’ Myrna?” “Well, you know—complain, speak in a whiny voice, talk in a way that makes people want to get away from me. Do I?” “What do you think, Myrna?” “I don’t think so. And your opinion?” Unable to procrastinate indefinitely, or to lie, or to tell the truth, Ernest squirmed. “If by ‘whine’ you mean you tend to complain about your situation repetitively and unproductively—then, yes, I’ve heard you do that.” “An example, please.” “I promise to answer that,” said Ernest, deciding it was time for a process comment, “but let me say something first, Myrna. I’m struck by the change in you these last weeks. It’s been so fast. You aware of it?” “Change how?” “How? In almost every way. Look at what you’re doing—you’re direct, focused, challenging. Like you say, you’re keeping it in the room; you’re talking about what’s taking place between us. ” “And that’s good?” “It’s great, Myrna. I’m delighted to see it. To be honest, there were times in the past when I felt you hardly noticed I was in the room with you. When I say it’s great, I mean you’re moving in the right direction. But still you seem so—what should I say? So one-sided, so—well, acerbic, as though you’re continually angry with me. Am I off base?” “I don’t feel angry with you, just frustrated with my whole life. But you said you’d give me examples of my whining.” Suddenly this woman who had been too slow for him was becoming almost too fast. Ernest had to concentrate all his attention on their discourse. “Not so fast. I’m not buying into that word, Myrna. I feel you’re trying to brand me with it. I said ‘repetitious,’ and I’ll give you an example of that: your feelings about your CEO. How he’s not efficient, how he should make the company leaner, how he should fire incompetent workers, how his softheartedness is going to cost you big money in your stock options—that’s the kind of thing I mean.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  But during his absence, things changed. The central issue was circumcision. Did male gentile converts need to be circumcised in order to be in the community “in Christ”? Some were being persuaded that the answer was yes. We do not know precisely who Paul’s opponents were. But if those gentile converts were former God-worshipers, we can easily imagine them being pulled in two different directions—toward traditional Judaism by the synagogue and toward Christian Judaism by Paul. We do know that the opposition to Paul in Galatia was fierce. We know from the letter that his opponents challenged his authority and impugned his credentials as an apostle. They also appealed to the authority of sacred scripture, the Jewish Bible, which was also Paul’s Bible. Indeed, they had the Bible on their side. In Genesis, God’s covenant with Abraham emphatically required circumcision: “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised” (17:10). Circumcision is mentioned another five times in the next four verses in Genesis. So it had been for males entering the Jewish covenant with God ever since. Who was Paul to set aside the clear command of the Bible? Especially since he was proclaiming a Jewish Messiah? The fierceness of the conflict is pointed to by the fierceness of Paul’s response. Galatians is the most polemical of his letters—and for Paul, that’s saying a lot. It is his only letter that does not begin with a thanksgiving. Instead, he immediately counters his opponents attack upon his authority: “Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (1:1). Then indignation, accusation, and condemnation pour out: I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, let that one be accursed! (1:6–9) Soon thereafter he calls them “foolish Galatians” and wonders if they have become possessed: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” (3:1). Near the end of the letter, his passion surfaces again: Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you…. I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. (5:2, 10)

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Over the next couple of days I ruminated about the sequence of events. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. Once again I had played the balloon-headed Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy invariably pulls away at the last second. By the time our next session rolled around, my anger matched Irene’s. That session was less like therapy than a wrestling match. It was the most serious fight we had had. The accusations gushed out of her: “You’ve given up on me! You want me to compromise by killing vital parts of myself!” I made no pretense of empathizing or understanding her position, “I’m sick and tired,” I told her, “of your minefields. I’m sick and tired of your setting tests for me that more often than not I fail. And of all the tests, this is the dirtiest, most treacherous one. “We have too much work to do, Irene,” I finished, taking a line from her dead husband. “We don’t have time for this bullshit.” It was one of our best hours. At its end (after, of course, another skirmish about ending on time and her accusing me of throwing her out of the office) our therapeutic alliance was stronger than ever. Neither in my textbooks nor in my supervision or classroom teaching would I ever dream of advising a student to tangle angrily with a patient; yet such a session invariably moved Irene forward. It was the metaphor of the black ooze that guided these efforts. By making contact, emotional contact, by wrestling with her (I speak figuratively, though there were times when I felt we were on the brink of a physical struggle), I was proving again and again that the black ooze was a fiction that neither tarred, nor repelled, nor endangered me. Irene clung so strongly to the metaphor that she was convinced each time I approached her rage that I would either abandon her or die. Finally, in an effort to demonstrate once and for all that her anger would neither destroy me nor drive me away, I laid down a new therapy ground rule: “Whenever you really explode at me, we will automatically schedule an extra appointment that week.” This act proved highly effective; in retrospect, I consider it inspired. The black-ooze metaphor was particularly powerful because it was overdetermined: it was a single image that satisfied and expressed several different unconscious dynamics. Grief rage was one important meaning. But there were others; for example, the belief that she was poisonous, contaminated, fatally jinxed. “Anyone,” she said to me one session, “who sets foot in the black ooze is signing their own death warrant.” “So you dare not love again because you can offer only a Medusa-love that would destroy anyone who approaches you?” “All the men I’ve loved have died—my husband, my father, my brother, my godson, and Sandy, whom I’ve not yet told you about—a mentally ill boyfriend who twenty years ago committed suicide.”

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. iii. 8.) Pilate many times pleaded with the Jews, desiring that Jesus might be released, which Matthew witnesses in very few words, when he says, Pilate seeing that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made. He would not have spoken thus, if Pilate had not striven much, though how many efforts he made to release Jesus he does not mention. REMIGIUS. It was customary among the ancients, when one would refuse to participate in any crime, to take water and wash his hands before the people. JEROME. Pilate took water in accordance with that, I will wash my hands in innocency, (Ps. 26:6.) in a manner testifying and saying, I indeed have sought to deliver this innocent man, but since a tumult is rising, and the charge of treason to Cæsar is urged against me, I am innocent of the blood of this just man. The judge then who is thus compelled to give sentence against the Lord, does not convict the accused, but the accusers, pronouncing innocent Him who is to be crucified. See ye to it, as though he had said, I am the law’s minister, it is your voice that has shed this blood. Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us and on our children. This imprecation rests at the present day upon the Jews, the Lord’s blood is not removed from them. CHRYSOSTOM. Observe here the infatuation of the Jews; their headlong haste, and destructive passions will not let them see what they ought to see, and they curse themselves, saying, His blood be upon us, and even entail the curse upon their children. Yet a merciful God did not ratify this sentence, but accepted such of them and of their children as repented; for Paul was of them, and many thousands of those who in Jerusalem believed. LEO. (Serm. lix. 2.) The impiety of the Jews then exceeded the fault of Pilate; but he was not guiltless, seeing he resigned his own jurisdiction, and acquiesced in the injustice of others. JEROME. It should be known that Pilate administered the Roman law, which enacted that every one who was crucified should first be scourged. Jesus then is given up to the soldiers to be beaten, and they tore with whips that most holy body and capacious bosom of God. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. iii. in Cæna Dom.) See the Lord is made ready for the scourge, see now it descends upon Him! That sacred skin is torn by the fury of the rods; the cruel might of repeated blows lacerates His shoulders. Ah me! God is stretched out before man, and He, in whom not one trace of sin can be discerned, suffers punishment as a malefactor.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Historians today tell how, one afternoon, as the red and purple dusk lingered on, the big Junker planes of the Nazis started landing on El-Aouina Airfield. I did not see the aircraft, and nobody told me about it. I believe that I was reading my newspaper that evening, just as I am today. Later, I learned that a few wise people had left the country in time; the army, it seems, had arranged a train service for those wishing to join the Allied Forces. I never had any connections in the army and was living in the closed world of the Jewish artisans. But even if I had known of the Junkers’ landing, I would not have realized the necessity of escaping. In fact, I understood so little that I was convinced that, between the Jews, the Germans, and the French, it was all a matter of pride. When Pétain came to power in France, the new anti-Semitic laws were applied to us but with some delay. When the decrees were published, I was not so much struck by the material side of the catastrophe as disappointed and angry. It was the painful and astounding treason, vaguely expected but so brutally confirmed, of a civilization in which I had placed all my hopes and which I so ardently admired. With a crash, the reassuring idea that colonial Frenchmen and those from metropolitan France were not the same was now demolished. The whole of Europe had revealed its basic injustice. I was all the more hurt in my pride because I had been so uncautious in my complete surrender to my faith in Europe. I reacted impetuously and without a moment’s thought. I did not wait to find out how the new laws were to be applied. Instantly I wrote a letter of resignation which I handed to the principal of the school. I have no idea what he thought of the young man who was handing in his resignation from a so unimportant post with the grandest of manners. I still felt a pupil’s respect for him, and my indignation and the difficulty of explaining myself all gave me an appearance of great solemnity. In any case, he played the part I expected of him perfectly. This retired commander of a Spahi regiment, tall and straight in spite of his age, impressed us by his physical presence and his firm and elegant muscles which he carefully kept in condition on the tennis courts.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One day, and I recall it with terror, my exasperation almost made me lose my head. We were climbing the steps to the new science wing in our school. Behind me, I could hear a political discussion between Dunand, one of the few French Socialists in our class, and Papachino, a French boy of Italian origin. Those whose naturalization is recent or whose family background is vague are always more involved in race prejudice and more nationalistic than others. I detested Papachino, with his head that leaned over on one shoulder, and his yellow face full of a snarling craftiness. Although the discussion was violent, I was not paying much attention to it, until suddenly the word Jew struck my ear. I might be anywhere in the world, surrounded by respect and confidence and enjoying every honor, but the slippery sound of the word would still make me prick up my ears and listen. Papachino’s bitter, whining voice concluded: “It is they who are ruining France.” In a second, I had whipped around and grabbed him by the neck with my tense fingers. I was two steps above him, and my rigid fist forced him to look up as I strangled him in his own shirt collar: “Repeat that! Repeat it, and I’ll throw you over the railing.” He hesitated, wondering whether to take it as a joke or to be angry. “Say it again,” I repeated, furious. Around us, everything had stopped. The look on my face could not have been very reassuring. From above, I could see Papachino’s eyes rolling in his motionless face as he tried to measure the fall in the stairwell. He must also have felt the trembling of my hand around his neck, as I could too, and he muttered: “You’re mad... you’re mad...” I let go, suddenly afraid myself; my fear was greater than my anger. Dunand had said nothing during all this scene. I only noticed the color come back to his cheeks as he smiled and said, at last: “Chicken shit!” Papachino was stammering, trying to explain what he had meant and what he had not. I turned my back on him and went on up the stairs, without quite understanding my sudden exasperation. But I could not be continually defending myself against the constant hostility and slyness, the very atmosphere of the place. Every time a native, whether Jewish or Moslem, said something silly, our mathematics teacher, a fat and placid Alsatian, would declare in a radio-announcer’s voice: “This is the Voice of Africa calling!” He thought he was funny, and the Europeans laughed noisily while the others smiled to show their willingness to play the game. We would then stare at each other and swallow our pride.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Any mention of the possibility of her meeting another man was a minefield. For the most part she was contemptuous of the men she met and angry at me for suggesting she examine her judgmentalism. Any practical suggestion I offered ignited a major eruption. “If I want to date,” she said furiously, “I can figure out how to do it! Why pay you good money for dating advice when my friends can give me the same thing?” She grew angry if I offered concrete suggestions about anything: “Stop trying to ‘fix’ things!” she said. “That’s what my father tried to do my whole life.” She was angry at my impatience with her slow progress and at my failing to acknowledge the efforts she had made to help herself (but never mentioned to me). Irene wanted me strong and healthy. Any infirmity—a sprained back, a knee injury requiring meniscus surgery, a cold, a case of flu—elicited much annoyance. I knew that she was apprehensive as well, but she kept that well concealed. Most of all, she was angry at my being alive when Jack was dead. None of this was easy for me. I have never relished angry confrontations and, in my personal life, generally avoid angry people. Because I am a deliberate thinker and writer, and confrontation tends to slow my thoughts, I have throughout my career declined public debate and discouraged all inquiries about my becoming a departmental chairman. So how did I cope with Irene’s anger? For one thing, I leaned on the old therapy adage that one must separate role and person. Often much of a patient’s anger toward a therapist is related to his or her role, not person. “Don’t take it personally,” young therapists are taught. Or at least, don’t take everything personally. Make an attempt to discriminate between what belongs to your person and what to your role. It seemed self-evident that much of Irene’s anger belonged elsewhere—life, destiny, God, cosmic indifference—but she simply discharged it upon her nearest target: me, her therapist. Irene knew that her anger oppressed me and let me know in many ways. One day, for example, when my secretary called her to reschedule an appointment because I had to see the dentist, Irene replied, “Oh, well, seeing the dentist is probably a pleasure for him compared to seeing me.” But perhaps the main reason I was not ground down by Irene’s rage was that I always knew that it masked her profound sadness, despair, and fear. When she expressed anger toward me, I sometimes responded with reflexive irritation and impatience, but more often with compassion. Many of Irene’s images or phrases haunted me. One, in particular, set up housekeeping in my mind and never failed to soften my experience of her grief rage. It was in one of her airport dreams (during the first two years after her husband’s death, she often wandered through airports in her dreams).

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “No; I disagree. You’re totally overlooking the training of therapists! That’s what training in my field is all about—to acquire sensitivity, empathy—to be able to enter the world of another, to experience what the patient experiences.” I was irritated all right. And I had learned not to hold back. We worked much better together when I just cut loose with my feelings. Irene could come into my office so depressed she could hardly speak. But once we tangled about something, she inevitably became enlivened. I knew I was assuming Jack’s role here. He was the only one ever to stand up to her. Her icy demeanor was daunting to others (her surgery residents referred to her as “the Queen”), but Jack never deferred to her. She told me he took no pains to conceal his feelings, often walking out of the room muttering, “I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Not only was I irritated at her insistence that only bereaved therapists can treat bereaved patients but I was also angry at Eric for reinforcing her view that bereavement is never-ending. That idea was part of an ongoing debate between me and Irene. I was taking a well-established, sound position, namely, that the work of mourning consists of gradually detaching oneself from the one who died and redirecting one’s energy toward others. Freud first elaborated this understanding of grief in 1915 in Mourning and Melancholia, and since then this approach has been supported by much clinical observation and empirical research. In my own research, completed just before I took on Irene’s case, every single widow and widower I studied gradually detached from the dead spouse and then reinvested in something or someone else. And that was true for even those who had had the most loving of marriages. In fact, we found strong evidence that many of the widows who had had the best marriages went through the bereavement and detachment process more easily than those who had had a deeply conflicted one. (The explanation for this paradox lay, it seemed to me, in “regret”: for those who had spent their lives married to the wrong person, bereavement was more complicated because they also had to grieve for themselves, for their many squandered years.) Since Irene’s marriage appeared to me to have been exceptionally loving and supportive, I had initially predicted a relatively uncomplicated bereavement. But Irene was highly critical of most traditional attitudes about bereavement. She hated my comments about detachment and dismissed my research out of hand: “We bereaved have learned to give the answers investigators want. We have learned that the world wants us to recover quickly and that it becomes impatient with those who cling too long to losses.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I heard Silvana come in, settle on her bed. “You thought you were something special, eh? Some hot shit. Now you see, you’re no better than us. You better shut up, or you’ll end up at Mac.” She tossed a dinner roll onto my blanket. I ate it in two bites. It was so good, I almost cried. “What’s Mac?” I asked. I heard her exasperated sigh. “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.” “Least they get breakfast,” I said. Silvana chuckled in the dark. A car went by outside, its headlights painting the ceiling in moving shadows. “Were you ever there?” I asked. “Nidia,” she said. “Even she said it was tough, and she’s a loca . Better shut up and take it like everybody else. Remember, eighteen and out.” But I was only fifteen. NOW KIKI TORREZ was the pet, the one who sat on Amelia’s right and ate scraps off her plate like a dog. I was both envious and disgusted. It was Kiki who turned the pages of the Argentine scrapbooks and ate butter cookies, while I washed Amelia’s dirty underwear by hand in the sink, scrubbed her bathtub, ironed her clothes and her lace-edged linens, and if I got any idea to ruin anything out of spite, then no dinner. She played us off one another. I stole a can of yams one night, and she made Kiki tell her who did it. I lost more weight, my ribs stuck out like the staves of a boat. I was beginning to understand how one human being could kill another. “You should take in girls,” I heard her tell her friend Constanza one day while I was polishing the silver. “It’s easy money. You can remodel. I’m remodeling the bathroom next.” I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw. Finally in the darkness of March, after weeks of near-daily phone calls, Ms. Cardoza dumped me and I got a new caseworker, an angel of the Lord called Joan Peeler. She was young, wore black, and had long hair dyed rock ’n’ roll red. She had four silver rings on each hand. She looked more like a poet than a government drone. When it was time to go for our visit, I asked if she knew any coffeehouses. She took me to one on Vermont. We ducked in past a few outside tables occupied by shivering smokers trying to stay dry, and into the warm, humid interior. Immediately, I was overcome by memories, the black walls and fragrance of hippie soup, the table by the cash register cluttered with handbills and flyers and free newspapers.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  On the other side, two aging rockers in leather and studs ate their burgers; one was talking on a cell phone. It was like some kind of era-by-era fashion layout, Mohawks and ducktails and dreadlocks, polyester and platforms. “I’m not paying to play with twelve other bands. What, are you retarded?” Niki was saying. “They’re supposed to pay you, not the other way around.” I sketched the blond bass player as he guiltily tongued his chin stud from the inside. The brunet spasmodically tapped on the water glasses with his knife. “You gotta play where they pay. Where you from anyway, Fresno?” “But it’s like the Roxy, you know?” the taller blond said. He was obviously the spokesman, the eloquent one. Lead guitar. “The Roxy. It’s like the…” “The Roxy,” the other blond said. I finally worked up the nerve to open the first letter, slitting the beautiful envelope with the Denny’s dinner knife. Inside was a series of ink drawings done in Paul’s unmistakable comic book style, bold blacks and whites: Paul, walking lonely comic book streets. Paul, sitting at a Nighthawks café. He sees a blond girl on the street with short chopped-up hair and follows her, only to have her turn out to be somebody else. Would he ever see her again? the last caption read, as he drew at his desk, the wall covered with pictures of me. The second envelope held a comic strip story of a prison break, three boys blasting their way out through steel doors with rocket launchers. They steal a car, the signs say Leaving L.A. They tear across the desert in the night. Next there’s a street sign in broken mosaic, it says St. Marks Place. Angular hipsters in black pass a doorway, 143. The Statue of Liberty in the background wears shades, it’s reading a comic book. I folded the drawings, slipped them back into the envelope decorated with lightning bolts, stars, and a girl on a white horse in a comic book sky. Hold for Astrid Magnussen. If only I’d known that he would. And now it was too late. I looked at Sergei across the table in Rena’s kitchen. He could care less about my boyfriend in New York. He didn’t even care about his girlfriend in the next room. He was just like one of Rena’s white cats—eat, sleep, and fornicate. Since the night I’d seen them together on the couch, he was always watching me with his hint of a grin, as if there were some secret we shared. “So how is your boyfriend?” he asked. “Big? Is he big?” Niki laughed. “He’s huge, Sergei. Haven’t you heard of him? Moby Dick.” Olivia had told me all about men like Sergei. Hard men with blue veins in their sculpted white arms, heavy-lidded blue eyes and narrow waists. You could make a deal with a man like that. A man who knew what he wanted. I kept my eyes on my broccoli and cheese.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But this new organization of my life failed to obtain the approval of two people, Ginou and my father. Ginou was disappointed at seeing me give up the plan to study medicine, and I was disappointed and annoyed to see how little she understood me. I tried to explain to her, rather emphatically, how important philosophy had become in my life, though I avoided referring, at the time, to the financial difficulties I would have encountered if I had chosen to pursue my studies in any other field. Finally, I shrank from telling her that my future wife should not think so much of money matters, though I realized that this was what preoccupied her. With my father, on the other hand, I did not have to beat about the bush in this manner. In his case, money matters were discussed at once and we quarreled in the most spectacular manner. At that time, he was beginning to take to drink and we had already, for some time, been trying to find an excuse for a fight. He used to come home rather unsteady on his feet, his eyes popping out of his head, and ready for a fight. Behind his back, my mother would gesture to me, urging me to be respectful with him and not too demanding. I think he could sense her gestures and, far from getting angry, even seemed to find them a flattering recognition of his all-powerful status as head of the family. But I was exasperated by this very connivance between my parents, and refused to follow my mother’s urging. When I announced to my father my decision, he said to me: “How about us?” That was the best way to make me angry. I already felt all too guilty about not helping them, and his insistence on this duty seemed utterly hateful to me. Had I not been so torn by contradictory emotions, I might have tried to reason with him, perhaps even have suggested to him that he would be getting a better deal in the long run if he only remained patient for a while, since I would be earning much more once my studies were completed. But I no longer even thought of justifying myself, and my decision had not been taken in the light of any such considerations. On the contrary, I was anxious to break away from this unbelievable tyranny of the family, and I found nothing to say to him that would not hurt him. I therefore answered that I was not bound to work for him or for these children that I had not begotten; besides, money was the least of my considerations. So we returned to our endless arguments: “Money? I couldn’t care less...”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I think you were trying to manipulate me. See how I would react. Giving me a test.” “No wonder you exploded. Maybe it’ll help if I tell you exactly what was going on inside of me today after I got the news of Morton’s death.” I told her how I canceled the rest of my schedule but decided to see her, and why. “I couldn’t cancel it—not after your courage in always coming here no matter what. But,” I continued, “I still had to face the question of how to be with you and deal with my loss at the same time. “So what options did I have today, Irene? To shut down and withdraw from you? That would have been worse than canceling. To try to stay close and honest with you and not tell you about it? Impossible—a recipe for disaster: I learned long ago that when two people have something big between them and don’t talk about it, they don’t talk of anything else of importance either. This area here”—I gestured toward the air space between us—“we need to keep it clean and free, and that’s my job as well as yours. So that’s why I told you what was happening to me straight. Straight as I could—no manipulation, no test, no ulterior motive.” Once again Irene nodded to let me know that I had made a reasonably intelligent response. Later in the session, just before we ended, Irene apologized for her remark. The following week she told me of describing the incident to a friend who was aghast at her cruelty toward me, and apologized once again. “No apology was needed,” I reassured her, and I meant it, really meant it. In fact, in a curious way I had welcomed her telling me I sure as hell could see her: it was enlivening; it was real; it brought me closer to her. It was the truth about how she felt toward me. Or part of the truth—and I hoped the time would come when I would hear the rest of it. Irene’s rage, which I first encountered in our second month of therapy, was deep and pervasive. Though it flared only occasionally into the open, it always rumbled just below the surface. At first I wasn’t much concerned about it. My research had reassured me that such anger was no more worrisome than persistent guilt or regret or denial and would soon dissipate. But in this instance, as often in my work with Irene, the research was misleading.

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

  JEROME. By His armies we understand the Romans under Vespasian and Titus, who having slaughtered the inhabitants of Judæa, laid in ashes the faithless city. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. The Roman army is called God’s army; because The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; (Ps. 24:1.) nor would the Romans have come to Jerusalem, had not the Lord stirred them thither. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) Or, The armies of our King are the legions of His Angels. He is said therefore to have sent His armies, and to have destroyed those murderers, because all judgment is executed upon men by the Angels. He destroys those murderers, when He cuts off persecutors; and burns up their city, because not only their souls, but the body of flesh they had tenanted, is tormented in the everlasting fire of hell. ORIGEN. Or, the city of those wicked men is in each doctrine the assembly of those who meet in the wisdom of the rulers of this world; which the King sets fire to and destroys, as consisting of evil buildings. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) But when He sees that His invitation is spurned at, He will not have His Son’s marriage-feast empty; the word of God will find where it may stay itself. ORIGEN. He saith to His servants, that is, to the Apostles; or to the Angels, who were set over the calling of the Gentiles, The wedding is ready. REMIGIUS. That is, the whole sacrament of the human dispensation is completed and closed. But they which, were bidden, (Rom. 10:3.) that is, the Jews, were not worthy, because, ignorant of the righteousness of God, and going about to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God. The Jewish nation then being rejected, the Gentile people were taken in to the marriage-feast; whence it follows, Go ye out into the crossings of the streets, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the wedding. JEROME. For the Gentile nation was not in the streets, but in the crossings of the streets. REMIGIUS. These are the errors of the Gentiles. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or; The streets are all the professions of this world, as philosophy, soldiery, and the like. And therefore He says, Go out into the crossings of the streets, that they may call to the faith men of every condition. Moreover, as chastity is the way that leads to God, so fornication is the way that leads to the Devil; and so it is in the other virtues and vices. Thus He bids them invite to the faith men of every profession or condition. HILARY. By the street also is to be understood the time of this world, and they are therefore bid to go to the crossings of the streets, because the past is remitted to all.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But Irene didn’t respond. After we had sat together in silence a couple of minutes, I prodded: “Where do your thoughts go?” “I was wondering how old he was.” “Seventy. He was just about to retire from his medical practice.” I paused and waited. For what? Perhaps just the common decency of a brief condolence. Or even an expression of gratitude for my willingness to see her despite my grief. Silence. Irene sat unspeaking, her eyes apparently fixed on a small pale coffee stain on the carpet. “Irene, what’s happening in the space between us today?” Without fail I asked this question every session, in accordance with my conviction that nothing took precedence over exploring our relationship. “Well, he must have been a nice man,” she said, her eyes never moving. “Otherwise you wouldn’t feel so sad.” “Oh, come on, Irene. The truth. What’s going on inside?” Suddenly she looked up, her eyes blazing. “My husband died at forty-five, and if I can go into the OR every day and operate on my patients and run my office and teach my students, then you sure as hell can come in here and see me!” It wasn’t her words that stunned me but the sound of them. That harsh, deep timbre was not Irene. It was not her voice. It was like the preternaturally guttural voice of the young girl in The Exorcist. Before I could remark on it, Irene leaned down to pick up her purse. “I’m leaving!” she said. My calf muscles tensed—I believe I was preparing myself to tackle her if she bolted for the door. “Oh, no, you’re not. Not after that. You’re staying right here and talking this out.” “I can’t. Can’t work, can’t stay here with you. Not fit to be with anyone.” “There’s only one rule here in this office: that you say exactly what’s on your mind. You’re doing your job. You’ve never done it better.” Dropping her purse on the floor, Irene slumped back in her chair. “I told you that after my brother died I always ended my relationships with men the same way.” “How? Tell me again.” “They’d have some mishap, some problem, maybe get sick, and I’d get nasty and cut them out of my life. A quick surgical incision! I cut clean. And I cut sharp.” “Because you’d compare their problem to the immensity of losing Allen? That would make you bitter?” She nodded her appreciation. “That was most of it, I’m pretty sure. Also that I just didn’t want them to matter to me. I didn’t want to hear about their puny problems.” “And with me today?” “Color it red! Rage! I wanted to throw something at you!” “Because it felt like I was comparing my loss with yours?”

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  These conditions have created a new class of lousy sexual prospects that I like to call The Ones Who Never Got Away. I remember when Frank Ocean’s Blonde dropped in 2016, listening to it in Bushwick Inlet Park, on the jumbo rocks that line the East River. My phone lit up; someone I’d slept with four years ago had liked my tweet—our first communication in four years. A month before that, a different man from my past, who I’ll call Brad, commented on a dog-filtered selfie I’d posted on Snapchat: “10/10.” Brad, who I’d never had sex with or even met in person, had been lurking on the fringes of my life for over three years, after we’d matched on Tinder and talked briefly. The conversation had come to a screeching halt after he texted me footage of his penis ejaculating, unprompted. But that summer of Blonde, years later, this man was still around, even if virtually, even though I’d never met him and/or seen his non-dick parts. I didn’t know why or how I was still connected to him on any social media platform; I remembered unfriending him on Facebook and blocking him on Instagram. Brad is one of The Ones Who Never Got Away. While I never ended up sleeping with Brad, I’ve slept with plenty of Ones Who Never Got Away years after things “ended.” Most people dating today have a similar cast of characters—people who keep popping up in their lives, people who never go away. They stay, and they stay, and they stay, because where there is a 1 percent chance of something happening, there is staying. Staying looks like heart-ing an Instagram from sixty-three weeks ago, like texting “you in the city?” to someone you matched with years ago but never actually met. Staying is so easy. The prospect of closing off a romantic opportunity—or looking like you care enough to delete, block, or unfollow—can feel so daunting that I somehow stayed Snapchat friends with gross Brad. The phenomenon of sloppy endings is not new. But the phenomenon of people enduring and enduring—people who’ve been gifted the shelf life of freeze-dried astronaut snacks—is. This contemporary technological hellscape has made it possible to collect people you can never quite lose, contributing to a frenzied climate of infinite sexual possibilities and infinite ways to burn out. Too often, we go back to them when we’re at our lowest, desperate for connection we aren’t getting elsewhere. In addition to deftly storing people from our past, people we would do well to forget, smartphones have also exposed us to more harassment, more losers, and more indignities, like discovering our ex has redownloaded Tinder, even though he said he “needed a breather from dating.” However, while dating app culture has created new problems, it cannot be blamed for all the bad sex we have. The apps have made it easier to have bad sex, but only because they made it easier to have sex at all.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The man keeps trying to explain to her that she doesn’t understand the question, and she keeps trying to explain to him how her proposals are going to solve everything and make the program a roaring success. Eventually, exasperated, he turns on her. “You’re just not listening!” Back comes the answer, pitch-perfect for the character: “I totally am listening! What it is—you guys aren’t saying the right stuff!” I was reminded of that moment when reflecting on the ways in which the four gospels have routinely been ignored by people trying to construct a vision of the atonement, trying to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death. The long tradition of in-house church discussions about such things, swapping theories and schemes for how precisely to understand what happened on Good Friday, has emerged—especially in popular culture—from a world where it was assumed, as we saw earlier, that the point of Christianity was how to go to heaven granted that we are all sinners deserving hell. That is the agenda: How do we get to that goal? The four gospels have very little to say about this topic. Almost nobody talks about “going to heaven.” When Jesus talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” he doesn’t mean a place called “heaven,” but the rule of “heaven,” that is, God’s reign, coming to birth on earth . Almost nobody in the gospels warns about “going to hell.” The dire warnings in the four gospels are mostly directed toward an imminent this -worldly disaster, namely, the fall of Jerusalem and other events connected with that. There are occasional sayings that go beyond that, such as Matthew 10:28 and its parallel in Luke 12:4–5, but this dimension seems to be taken for granted rather than made central. And despite a wealth of detail in the buildup to Jesus’s death, so much detail in fact that the gospels have sometimes been described as “Passion narratives with extended introductions,” the four writers do not seem particularly concerned with building into their accounts any kind of answer to the expected question of how this death somehow enables sinners to be forgiven and to go to heaven after all. One can imagine a conversation between the four evangelists who wrote the gospels and a group of “evangelists” in our modern sense who are used to preaching sermons week by week that explain exactly how the cross deals with the problems of “sin” and “hell.” The four ancient writers are shaking their heads and trying to retell the story they all wrote: of how Jesus launched the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and how his execution was actually the key, decisive moment in that accomplishment.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare legs in cutoffs. But I couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?” “Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.” I couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio. “And where were you?” My mother was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this.” Everything she knew about me, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg. “Imagine my life, for a moment,” she said, quietly, cupping her long fingers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?” I didn’t want to understand, but I remembered Caitlin, tugging, always tugging, Assi, juice! Juice! Her imperiousness. On the other side of the fence, past my mother’s head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are like. What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?” She sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.” “You were in love with him.” “Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled at me. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.” I felt sick. I had no trouble believing it, seeing it. I saw it all too clearly. And I understood why she never told me about this, had simply, kindly, refrained. “So you left me there.” “I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon.