Bewilderment

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 Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Presently the car dropped us and the soldier led me on foot through a straggle of small streets and alleys near the Rue Des Soeurs. If the object here was to make me lose myself it succeeded almost immediately. He walked with a light self-confident step, humming under his breath. Finally we debouched into a suburban street full of merchants’ stores and stopped before a great carved door which he pushed open after having first rung a bell. A courtyard with a stunted palm-tree; the path which crossed it was punctuated by a couple of feeble lanterns standing on the gravel. We crossed it and ascended some stairs to where a frosted electric light bulb gleamed harshly above a tall white door. He knocked, entered and saluted in one movement. I followed him into a large, rather elegant and warmly-lighted room with neat polished floors enhanced by fine Arab carpets. In one corner seated at a high inlaid desk with the air of a man riding a penny-farthing sat Scobie, with a scowl of self-importance overlapping the smile of welcome with which he greeted me. ‘My God’ I said. The old pirate gave a Drury Lane chuckle and said: ‘At last, old man, at last.’ He did not rise however but sat on in his uncomfortable high-backed chair, tarbush on head, whisk on knee, with a vaguely impressive air. I noticed an extra pip on his shoulder, betokening heaven knows what increase of rank and power. ‘Sit down, old man’ he said with an awkward sawing movement of the hand which bore a faint resemblance to a Second Empire gesture. The soldier was dismissed and departed grinning. It seemed to me that Scobie did not look very much at ease in these opulent surroundings. He had a slightly defensive air. ‘I asked them to get hold of you’ he said, sinking his voice to a theatrical whisper ‘for a very special reason.’ There were a number of green files on his desk and a curiously disembodied-looking tea-cosy. I sat down.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We returned to the change-room for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age. It was two o‘clock or later before we started on our journey home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty repeating only, now and then: ‘Poor Gully! What a thing to do!’, and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, but still uncertain.It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber.At length we reached Lambeth Bridge, where Kitty and I had stood only a few weeks before and gazed at the pleasure-boats below. Now, with our faces pressed to the carriage window, we saw it all transformed - saw the lights of the Embankment, a belt of amber beads dissolving into the night; and the great dark jagged bulk of the Houses of Parliament looming over the river; and the Thames itself, its boats all moored and silent, its water grey and sluggish and thick, and rather strange.It was this last which made Kitty pull the window down, and call to the driver, in a high, excited voice, to stop. Then she pushed the carriage door open, pulled me to the iron parapet of the bridge, and seized my hand.‘Look,’ she said. Her grief seemed all forgotten. Below us, in the water, there were great slivers of ice six feet across, drifting and gently turning in the winding currents, like basking seals.The Thames was freezing over.I looked from the river to Kitty, and from Kitty to the bridge on which we stood.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I turned to look at Kesey watching Neal Cassady. The look on his face. Sitting there in the dark with the last ditch disciples. His smile was crooked - an inside joke kind of smile. His eyes narrowed. He chuckled once or twice. Then I saw him rub his forehead - no doubt a migraine - but in the glow of Neal Cassady it looked to me more like a man trying to rub out time. The whole experience made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. How was it again I was in a room with Ken Kesey watching a video of Neal Cassady with a group of people who were “writers?” Who were we? After the video Ken talked a little and we asked him a few questions. Then he had to go to bed. It was 4:30 p.m. I felt like we’d failed at something but I had no idea what. The end of the year of Kesey culminated in a reading and reception for the book in Gerlinger Lounge at U of O. We all wore 1930s vintage clothing to mimic the characters in the book. We drank peppermint schnapps one at a time from Kesey’s flask, which sat up at the podium like a flag of his disposition. We’d been interviewed by People. We’d had a photo in Rolling Stone. There were a few parties after that. I barely remember them. My father actually flew up to Eugene from Florida to attend the reading. He sat in the audience in a $400 grey twill suit. He looked proud. Of something. In Kesey’s presence. When I was born, we lived in a house in the hills over Stinson Beach. 1963. Close enough to ride a bike to La Honda, where Kesey began his parties and acid tests the same year. When it was my turn to read I drank from the flask and looked out at the audience. My father’s steely architectural gaze. His unforgettable hands. Then I looked at Kesey. He pinched his own nipples and smiled and made me laugh. At the end of the reading my father shook Kesey’s hand and said “I’m a great admirer of yours.” I knew it was true. I watched their hands press together. When he met Kesey, my father’s voice tremored. In parting, Kesey said to my father, “You know, Lidia can hit it out of the park.” Having gotten as far as a tryout with the Cleveland Indians, that meant something to my father. The phrase, I mean. The relatively crappy novel that came out of us, Caverns, was inspired by an actual news clipping, an Associated Press story on October 31, 1964 entitled “Charles Oswald Loach, Doctor of Theosophy and discoverer of so-called ‘SECRET CAVE OF AMERICAN ANCIENTS,’ which stirred archaeological controversy in 1928.” Set in the 1930s, Loach is imagined as a convicted murderer who is released from San Quentin Prison, in the custody of a priest, to lead an expedition to rediscover the cave.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  In the last chapter, we discussed the premises that underlie our prayers: how we see God and ourselves. Now I’d like to look at how we see our circumstances. That’s called perspective . WORDS WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE In the chaos and contradictions of life, prayer helps us gain a perspective that is bigger than our own. There is an ancient book of poetry in the Bible called Job, named after its protagonist. Today, the story of Job is synonymous with suffering and patience. But in reality, Job’s story is more about perspective than patience. In chapters 1 and 2, we read how Job lost everything overnight. The text is clear that he wasn’t to blame. Things outside his control conspired to take away everything he had worked for and valued. The bulk of the book, chapters 3–37, is a series of poetic speeches or debates between Job and a few “comforters.” These friends are supposedly trying to make Job feel better. As is often the case when we try to help people going through pain, they should have just kept their mouths shut and sat with him in his pain because what they said only made things worse. By the end of their “advice,” Job might have been suffering for days, weeks, or even months. His friends had exhausted themselves trying to explain why it was all Job’s fault. He must have sinned, they argued, because (according to their theology and cosmology) bad things were always the consequences of bad actions. They defended God at the expense of Job. In the process, they actually undermined God’s sovereignty and blamed Job for things he never did. They had a wrong perspective: of Job, of suffering, of God, of sin, of wealth, and of just about everything else they pompously addressed. Their understanding made sense to them because they were looking at things from their limited, finite point of view. But God wasn’t impressed by their theology or cosmology. He doesn’t tend to appreciate humansplaining. Finally, in chapters 38–41, God speaks. These chapters are some of the finest examples of ancient poetry, not just in the Bible, but in world literature. For four solid chapters, God blasts Job’s friends for speaking “words without knowledge” (38:2). And He’s not referring to Twitter. God gives them example after example from nature that illustrates how small their perspective is, how limited their knowledge and power are. Speaking of oceans, God says this: Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, “This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt”?

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  And Justine? On the day this picture was taken, Clea’s painting was interrupted by a kiss, as Balthazar says. How am I to make this comprehensible when I can only visualize these scenes with such difficulty? I must, it seems, try to see a new Justine, a new Pursewarden, a new Clea.… I mean that I must try and strip the opaque membrane which stands between me and the reality of their actions — and which I suppose is composed of my own limitations of vision and temperament. My envy of Pursewarden, my passion for Justine, my pity for Melissa. Distorting mirrors, all of them.… The way is through fact. I must record what more I know and attempt to render it comprehensible or plausible to myself, if necessary, by an act of the imagination. Or can facts be left to themselves? Can you say ‘he fell in love’ or ‘she fell in love’ without trying to divine its meaning, to set it in a context of plausibilities? ‘That bitch’ Pombal said once of Justine. ‘Elle a l’air d’être bien chambrée!’ And of Melissa ‘Une pauvre petite poule quelconque …’ He was right, perhaps, yet the true meaning of them resides elsewhere. Here, I hope, on this scribbled paper which I have woven, spider-like, from my inner life. And Scobie? Well, he at least has the comprehensibility of a diagram — plain as a national anthem. He looks particularly pleased this morning for he has recently achieved apotheosis. After years as a Bimbashi in the Egyptian Police, in what he calls ‘the evening of his life’ he has just been appointed to … I hardly dare to write the words for I can see his shudder of secrecy, can see his glass eye rolling portentously round in its socket … the Secret Service. He is not alive any more, thank God, to read the words and tremble. Yes, the Ancient Mariner, the secret pirate of Tatwig Street, the man himself. How much the city misses him. (His use of the word ‘uncanny’!).…

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Elsewhere I have recounted how I answered a mysterious summons to find myself in a room of splendid proportions with my erstwhile pirate friend facing me across a desk, whistling through his ill-fitting dentures. I think his new assignment was as much a puzzle to him as it was to me, his only confidant. It is true of course that he had been long in Egypt and knew Arabic well; but his career had been comparatively obscure. What could an intelligence agency hope to get out of him? More than this — what did he hope to get out of me? I had already explained in detail that the little circle which met every month to hear Balthazar expound the principles of the Cabbala had no connection with espionage; it was simply a group of hermetic students drawn by their interest in the matter of the lectures. Alexandria is a city of sects — and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists.… What was it that riveted attention particularly on Nessim, Justine, Balthazar, Capodistria, etc.? I could not tell, nor could he tell me. ‘They’re up to something’ he repeated weakly. ‘Cairo says so.’ Apparently, he did not even know who his own masters were. His work was invisibly dictated by a scrambler telephone, as far as I could understand. But whatever ‘Cairo’ was it paid him well: and if he had money to throw about on nonsensical investigations who was I to prevent him throwing it to me? I thought that my first few reports on Balthazar’s Cabal would successfully damp all interest in it — but no. They wanted more and again more. And this very morning, the old sailor in the photograph was celebrating his new post and the increase of salary it carried by having a haircut in the upper town, at the most expensive of shops— Mnemjian’s. I must not forget that this photograph also records a ‘Secret Rendezvous’; no wonder Scobie looks distraught. For he is surrounded by the very spies into whose activities it is necessary to inquire — not to mention a French diplomat who is widely rumoured to be head of the French Deuxième.… Normally Scobie would have found this too expensive an establishment to patronize, living as he did upon a tiny nautical pension and his exiguous Police salary. But now he is a great man. He did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror as the hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full-scale haircut out of mere air — for Scobie’s glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling’s bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Does she realize that her grandmother was trying to protect her daughter by making her look like a boy and not a girl? Did she try to protect her daughter, and now her granddaughter, from sexual abuse? No one wanted to know. No one ever asked. I remain silent, asking myself if Lara is ready to question her family history. Our wish to know everything about our parents is a myth. Children are in fact often ambivalent about learning too much about their parents. They don’t want to know about their parents’ sexuality and often try to avoid knowing intimate things from their history. “I need to know what really happened,” Lara says decisively and points her finger at the girl in the picture. The girl in the picture smiles a fake smile. “My grandmother,” she says, touching her long straight hair, “was always so protective of me. She accused Ethan of abusing me, but then after my parents got divorced that was all forgotten. No one talked about it anymore. That was strange.” Lara looks severe. She suddenly seems much older than her twenty-nine years. She takes a brief glimpse at her watch, calculating how long we have until the end of the session. I know she needs time to think through her history. “When I lived with my grandmother she used to scare me,” she says. “She used to repeat that I had to be careful. She would tell me strange things, for instance, that I needed to wear underwear to bed, otherwise worms would get into my vagina. She would whisper it and I remember feeling nauseous. Every time she talked about my body she would start whispering. When it came to sex her boundaries were strange. She talked about inappropriate things as if they were normal and about normal things as if they were perverse. Her whispering made me feel dirty, as if she had dark secrets that came out at night, and then in the morning she would be my loving grandmother again.” “When you were ten years old and we played Little Red Riding Hood, you told me that the grandmother in the story had a lot of secrets,” I say. “‘You will see,’ you used to repeat, ‘you will see.’ But we never found out what those secrets were. Maybe you are ready now to ask the questions that were never asked.” LARA TRAVELS TO meet with her grandmother Masha. She wants to learn about Masha’s childhood and hopes to find her own answers there. Masha grew up in a chaotic household with very few resources. Her parents went to work early in the morning and came back late at night. Her oldest sister, who was thirteen, became her main caretaker. Masha told Lara that she always felt her mother didn’t want her, that deep inside, her mother regretted having so many children. Masha was a shy girl and a good student. Excelling at school was her way to feel special and worthy.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I guess so,” he says. “Growing up as an only child to parents in their mid-forties wasn’t easy, and for some reason, I always imagined I had a twin brother who died at birth. My mother used to get annoyed when I joked about it. She thought it was another of my crazy ideas about death. I secretly imagined we were both Noah. Noah One and Noah Two—like Thing One and Thing Two from the Dr. Seuss story.” “And you, are you Noah One or Noah Two?” I ask. “Of course I am Noah Two; do I look like a Noah One?” he replies playfully and adds, “It reminds me of Ronald One and Ronald Two from Marie’s life. Do you think she loved them equally? Don’t you think she married Ronald Two only because she missed her first Ronald and wished he were alive?” I listen to Noah and think about the lonely little boy that he once was, preoccupied with the idea of the death of his parents and what he calls his “bizarre fantasies” about a lost brother. There are so many gaps in his narrative, and in therapy we try to fill them in: to imagine who he used to be; to consider the meanings of his dreams and fantasies; to understand his childhood yearning for a brother and the anguish he constantly felt but couldn’t quite name. As time passes, Noah stops investigating obituaries and begins to talk more about his own psychic losses, his symbolic deaths. We talk about the imagined dead brother as representing the “dead” parts of himself, including his depressive withdrawal from the world, and the emotionally deadened aspects of his parents, both of whom are still involved in his life. His mother, especially, has always struck him as disconnected, as if she is emotionally invested in something she has left behind. One Saturday night, I receive an email from Noah. “Dr. Atlas,” he writes. “This morning, two shocking things happened. I couldn’t wait until our session to tell you.” The first is that his mother died early that morning. The second is that he has found his dead brother. “This morning,” his email continues, “as I hugged my father, he told me that there was one thing they never wanted to burden me with. He said, ‘We decided when you were little that you would never find out the secret until one of us died.’” The secret is that there was another son, about a year older, who died before Noah was born. His name was Noah. “My parents have reserved their burial plots next to a very small grave,” Noah goes on. “We will bury my mother there tomorrow afternoon. Noah One was buried there forty-four years ago, at the age of eight months, just a few months before I was born and named after him. They did not want to weigh me down with that, to cause me pain or devastation.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I was researching the topic of sexual abuse in childhood when I started seeing Lara. Beatrice Beebe, one of my mentors and an infant researcher at Columbia University, is known for saying “Research is me-search.” By that she means that all psychological research, even when we are not aware of it, is our quest to understand and heal ourselves and the people who raised us. Starting this research, I was not sure what I was looking for. What was it that I really needed to know about myself and about the world around me? What was my “me-search”? That is the question I have asked every student I have mentored since, with the genuine belief that deep inside we continuously try to resolve the mysteries of our own minds. Feelings are always the motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the world around us. I started my research interested in what the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called “the confusion of tongues.” Borrowing from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Ferenczi refers to the confusion between the language of tenderness that children speak and the language of passion that abusers introduce. The paradox of affection and exploitation is one of the most prevalent confusions related to sexual abuse, one that leaves children bewildered and tormented. Abusers don’t just threaten and scare children; they often provide affection, promise security, and make the child feel special. I focused my research on what children’s play could teach us about their emotional experiences and vulnerabilities, and I was particularly interested in documenting the playing out with children of fairy tales, stories that contain emotional material that carries universal meaning. I chose one fairy tale to research with my young patients: “Little Red Riding Hood.” About a week after my research proposal was approved, Lara walked into my office. She opened the session by saying, “Today I have an idea of what we could do.” She and I usually played “family” together. She would ask me to play the daughter so she could be the mother, and through that role-play I not only learned but also felt how painful it was to be a daughter in her family. Playing a daughter who, like herself, lived with her parents, Hanna and Jed, and with her half brother, Ethan, who was nine years older, allowed me to know what no one could tell me in words: that they were all confused and scared and that Lara was holding a family secret for all of them. “What is your idea?” I asked, and Lara surprised me with the answer: “Can we play Red Riding Hood together?”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Maybe it was my ongoing desire to share those thoughts with Lara that made me hope that she would contact me. I was researching the topic of sexual abuse in childhood when I started seeing Lara. Beatrice Beebe, one of my mentors and an infant researcher at Columbia University, is known for saying “Research is me-search.” By that she means that all psychological research, even when we are not aware of it, is our quest to understand and heal ourselves and the people who raised us. Starting this research, I was not sure what I was looking for. What was it that I really needed to know about myself and about the world around me? What was my “me-search”? That is the question I have asked every student I have mentored since, with the genuine belief that deep inside we continuously try to resolve the mysteries of our own minds. Feelings are always the motivations for intellectual investigations, even as we rationalize the world around us. I started my research interested in what the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called “the confusion of tongues.” Borrowing from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Ferenczi refers to the confusion between the language of tenderness that children speak and the language of passion that abusers introduce. The paradox of affection and exploitation is one of the most prevalent confusions related to sexual abuse, one that leaves children bewildered and tormented. Abusers don’t just threaten and scare children; they often provide affection, promise security, and make the child feel special. I focused my research on what children’s play could teach us about their emotional experiences and vulnerabilities, and I was particularly interested in documenting the playing out with children of fairy tales, stories that contain emotional material that carries universal meaning. I chose one fairy tale to research with my young patients: “Little Red Riding Hood.” About a week after my research proposal was approved, Lara walked into my office. She opened the session by saying, “Today I have an idea of what we could do.” She and I usually played “family” together. She would ask me to play the daughter so she could be the mother, and through that role-play I not only learned but also felt how painful it was to be a daughter in her family. Playing a daughter who, like herself, lived with her parents, Hanna and Jed, and with her half brother, Ethan, who was nine years older, allowed me to know what no one could tell me in words: that they were all confused and scared and that Lara was holding a family secret for all of them . “What is your idea?”

• From Less (2017)

  Arranged by Pegasus Verlag, in association with the Liberated University and the American Institute for Literature, as well as the U.S. Embassy, the scheduled reading takes place not in a library, as Less has expected, or in a theater, as Less has hoped, but in a nightclub. This also seems a “mental illness” to Less. The entrance is under U-Bahn tracks in Kreuzberg and must have been some kind of engineering shaft or East German escape route, for once Less is past the bouncer (“I am here the author,” he says, sure that this is all a mistake), he finds himself inside a great vaulted tunnel covered in white tile that sparkles with reflected light. Otherwise, the room is dim and full of cigarette smoke. At one end, a mirrored bar glows with glassware and bottles; two men in ties work behind it. One seems to be wearing a gun in shoulder holster. At the other end: the DJ, in a big fur hat. The loud thrum of minimal techno beats is in the air, and people on the floor wag back and forth in the pink and white lights. In ties, in trench coats, in fedoras. One carries a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Berlin is Berlin, Less supposes. A woman in a Chinese dress, her red hair held up in chopsticks, approaches him with a smile. She has a pale sharp powdered face, a painted beauty mark, and matte red lips. She speaks to him in English: “Well, you must be Arthur Less! Welcome to Spy Club! I’m Frieda.” Less kisses her on each cheek, but she leans in for a third. Two in Italy. Four in Northern France. Three in Germany? He will never get this right. He says, in German: “I am surprised and perhaps delighted!” A quizzical look, and laughter. “You speak German! How nice!” “Friend says I speak like a child.” She laughs again. “Come on in. Do you know about Spy Club? We throw this party once a month in some secret spot or another. And people come dressed! Either CIA or KGB. And we have themed music, and themed events, like you.” He looks again at the dancers, at the people gathered near the bar. In fur caps and hammer-and-sickle badges; in fedoras and trench coats; some, he thinks, seem to be carrying guns. “I see, yes,” he says. “Who are you dressing to be?” “Oh, I’m a double agent.” She stands back for him to admire her outfit (Madame Chiang Kai-shek? Burmese seductress? Nazi camp follower?) and smiles winningly. “And I brought this for you. Our American. That polka-dot bow tie is perfect.” From her purse she produces a badge and pins it to his lapel. “Come with me. I’ll get you a drink and introduce you to your Soviet counterpart.” Less pulls at his lapel so that he can read what is written there: YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She remembered looking in the mirror and the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I look like a boy,’ she sobbed. “‘Why did she do that?’ I asked, but my mother didn’t answer. I asked again, ‘Mom, why did Grandma do that to you when you were my age?’ “‘Sometimes it’s hard to understand Grandma,’ my mother answered. ‘She brought strange traditions from her country, from her own childhood, who knows.’” Lara and I are silent. I wonder if she has the same thought I have. Does she realize that her grandmother was trying to protect her daughter by making her look like a boy and not a girl? Did she try to protect her daughter, and now her granddaughter, from sexual abuse? No one wanted to know. No one ever asked. I remain silent, asking myself if Lara is ready to question her family history. Our wish to know everything about our parents is a myth. Children are in fact often ambivalent about learning too much about their parents. They don’t want to know about their parents’ sexuality and often try to avoid knowing intimate things from their history . “I need to know what really happened,” Lara says decisively and points her finger at the girl in the picture. The girl in the picture smiles a fake smile. “My grandmother,” she says, touching her long straight hair, “was always so protective of me. She accused Ethan of abusing me, but then after my parents got divorced that was all forgotten. No one talked about it anymore. That was strange.” Lara looks severe. She suddenly seems much older than her twenty-nine years. She takes a brief glimpse at her watch, calculating how long we have until the end of the session. I know she needs time to think through her history. “When I lived with my grandmother she used to scare me,” she says. “She used to repeat that I had to be careful. She would tell me strange things, for instance, that I needed to wear underwear to bed, otherwise worms would get into my vagina. She would whisper it and I remember feeling nauseous. Every time she talked about my body she would start whispering. When it came to sex her boundaries were strange. She talked about inappropriate things as if they were normal and about normal things as if they were perverse. Her whispering made me feel dirty, as if she had dark secrets that came out at night, and then in the morning she would be my loving grandmother again. ” “When you were ten years old and we played Little Red Riding Hood, you told me that the grandmother in the story had a lot of secrets,” I say. “‘You will see,’ you used to repeat, ‘you will see.’ But we never found out what those secrets were. Maybe you are ready now to ask the questions that were never asked.”

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

  But the most mismatched couple of all was without a doubt Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, called “Monsieur,” a transvestite who much preferred male lovers to female, and Elizabeth Charlotte, daughter of the elector of the Palatinate. Many at the French court sneered at an alliance with the elector, a man so poor he had to have his shoes patched. But German princesses were renowned for their fertility. Moreover, since the groom’s lover the chevalier de Lorraine was suspected of poisoning Monsieur’s beautiful first wife Princess Henrietta of England in a fit of jealousy, Louis XIV decided that an ugly second wife would stand a better chance of survival. In 1670 when the hopeful bride arrived in France to meet the husband she had already married by proxy, she found an effeminate fop wearing rouge, diamond earrings, cascading rows of lace and ruffles, dozens of clanking bracelets, beribboned pantaloons, and high-heeled shoes. His face was submerged in a frizzy black wig, and waves of his cologne almost suffocated her. When introduced, Monsieur swept into a bow, taking in at a glance his bride’s broad, good-natured German face, freshly scrubbed from her journey, her broad German rear end, and clothing of such rustic simplicity that her new French ladies-in-waiting were appalled. The horrified groom whispered to his gentlemen, “Oh! how can I sleep with that?”16 Rising from her curtsy, the bride was so shocked at her new husband’s appearance that she couldn’t utter a word of her prepared speech. She finally managed to force a smile. We can hear her muttering to herself behind a painted fan, “Oh! How can I sleep with that?” Elizabeth Charlotte endured a great deal during her thirty-year marriage that most royal brides were spared. Monsieur insisted on applying makeup to her face—perhaps in the hopes of rendering it more attractive—which she immediately scrubbed off. He often irked her by stealing her dresses and diamonds for himself and his male lovers. He enjoyed breaking wind—though perhaps that was the only thing they had in common. Elizabeth Charlotte, not wanting to touch him as she slept, positioned herself so far to the edge of the bed that she often fell off, waking up with a start. It is a testament to this couple’s royal self-discipline that the marriage produced three children, though the clanking saints’ medallions that Monsieur tied to his private parts may have had something to do with it. When he finally called a halt to unwelcome sexual relations, Elizabeth Charlotte was tempted to tell his lovers, “You are welcome to gobble the peas; I don’t like them.”17

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

  Charles II of England once said that his brother, the future James II, was given his mistresses by his priests as a penance. In a century that worshiped the soft flesh of breasts and hips and rounded arms, James liked extremely slim women. His mistress Arabella Churchill was a “tall creature, pale-faced, and nothing but skin and bone.”37 Courtiers cackled at her appearance until she fell off her horse in front of a crowd, displaying her magnificent legs. One awestruck witness marveled that “limbs of such exquisite beauty could belong to Miss Churchill’s face.”38 Though forced by the fashions of the time to conceal her most comely attributes inside yards of heavy skirts, Arabella often displayed the quick wit and lively intelligence which bound James to her through ten years and four children. James’s next mistress, sixteen-year-old Catherine Sedley, was equally skinny and pale but nearsighted and squint-eyed to boot. Though feisty and intelligent, she was clearly bewildered at having been chosen by James. “It cannot be my beauty for he must see I have none,” she remarked incredulously. “And it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.”39 Louis, dauphin of France, the heir of Louis XIV, enjoyed a shockingly plain mistress for several years until his death. Ungainly, with a thick neck, heavy lips, and a ski-slope nose, Emilie de Choin was described as having the deportment of a barrel. At a court known for its graceful, witty women, Mademoiselle de Choin looked like a pug and seemed to have the brains of one. Louis XIV’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte wrote that Mademoiselle de Choin had black rotten teeth that stank so much that one could smell them at the other end of the room. But, she added, “She had the hugest bosom I ever saw; those enormous charms of hers were the Dauphin’s delight.”40 To her horror, Elizabeth Charlotte witnessed the dauphin playing tunes with his fingers on Emilie’s breasts as if they were kettledrums. But good-natured Emilie made a pleasant home life for her royal lover, who had been unhappily married to two foreign princesses. Shrugging off his notorious tightfistedness, uncomplaining Emilie lived on a pension little better than that of a servant. Sometimes Louis would buy his mistress a small gift and then agonize for days over whether to give it to her or return it and get his money back. Yet rather than face the sacrificial altar a third time, Louis secretly married Emilie, the ugliest girl at court, and enjoyed playing her kettledrums until the day he died.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I started my research interested in what the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called “the confusion of tongues.” Borrowing from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Ferenczi refers to the confusion between the language of tenderness that children speak and the language of passion that abusers introduce. The paradox of affection and exploitation is one of the most prevalent confusions related to sexual abuse, one that leaves children bewildered and tormented. Abusers don’t just threaten and scare children; they often provide affection, promise security, and make the child feel special. I focused my research on what children’s play could teach us about their emotional experiences and vulnerabilities, and I was particularly interested in documenting the playing out with children of fairy tales, stories that contain emotional material that carries universal meaning. I chose one fairy tale to research with my young patients: “Little Red Riding Hood.” About a week after my research proposal was approved, Lara walked into my office. She opened the session by saying, “Today I have an idea of what we could do.” She and I usually played “family” together. She would ask me to play the daughter so she could be the mother, and through that role-play I not only learned but also felt how painful it was to be a daughter in her family. Playing a daughter who, like herself, lived with her parents, Hanna and Jed, and with her half brother, Ethan, who was nine years older, allowed me to know what no one could tell me in words: that they were all confused and scared and that Lara was holding a family secret for all of them. “What is your idea?” I asked, and Lara surprised me with the answer: “Can we play Red Riding Hood together?” I was stunned by the coincidence. How did she know that this was the fairy tale I had chosen for my research and that I had gotten the approval to start only the week before? The more experience I have with patients, the more I learn how unconsciously connected we are to the people around us. With Lara, it was the first time I’d experienced that, but it wouldn’t be the last. Since then I have had many uncanny coincidences with my patients. Through our dreams, reveries, and synchronicities we realize that we know more about one another than we are aware of. Lara smiled. “You are the daughter and I am the mother,” she said. I opened the closet. There were the new puppets I had just gotten: a girl with a red dress, a mother, a grandmother, and a wolf. “What about the grandmother and the wolf?” I asked. “Who plays them?” Lara paused. “We don’t need a wolf,” she said. “There are no wolves in our story.” A few weeks before my first session with Lara, I had met with her parents, Hanna and Jed.

• From Wild (2012)

  I hadn’t expected it to rain in the desert, and I certainly hadn’t expected it to snow. As with the mountains, there’d been no deserts where I grew up, and though I’d gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn’t really understand what deserts were. I’d taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain. What a mountain was and what a desert was were not the only things I had not expected. I hadn’t expected the flesh on my tailbone and hips and the fronts of my shoulders to bleed.O I hadn’t expected to average a bit less than a mile an hour, which is what, by my calculations—made possible by the highly descriptive guidebook—I’d been covering so far, lumping my many breaks in with the time I actually spent walking. Back when my hike on the PCT had been nothing but an idea, I’d planned to average fourteen miles a day over the course of my trip, though most days I’d actually walk farther than that because my anticipated average included the rest days I’d take every week or two, when I wouldn’t hike at all. But I hadn’t factored in my lack of fitness, nor the genuine rigors of the trail, until I was on it.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  And here’s something that’s hard to admit: If I take my body’s perspective on love seriously, it means that right now—at this very moment in which I’m crafting this sentence—I do not love my husband. Our positivity resonance, after all, only lasts as long as we two are engaged with each other. Bonds last. Love doesn’t. The same goes for you and your loved ones. Unless you’re cuddled up with someone reading these words aloud to him or her, right now, as far as your body knows, you don’t love anyone. Of course, you have affection for many, and bonds with a subset of these. And you may even be experiencing strong feelings of positivity now that will prime the pump for later, bona fide and bodily felt love. But right now—within this very moment that you are reading this sentence—your body is loveless. Moreover, love, as you’ve seen, obeys conditions. If you feel unsafe, or fail to find the time or contexts to truly connect with others, the delicate pas de deux of positivity resonance won’t commence. Beyond these obstacles, something more insidious may also be barring you from love. It’s your reaction to the L-word itself. Although you may be intrigued by the concept of positivity resonance, when it really comes down to it, you might hesitate to call that feeling love. You’d rather reserve this powerful word for your exclusive relationships—to describe your relationship to your spouse, your mother, or your kids—or at most for the micro-moments of positivity resonance you experience within those exclusive relationships. Some of my descriptions of love may have even drawn you to balk: Do I really need to call that moment of positive connection I just had with my coworker love? Was that love I just felt when I shared a smile with a complete stranger? Using the L-word to describe these sorts of connections makes you uneasy, uncomfortable. You’d prefer not to see them that way. Why not just say that you “got along” or “enjoyed each other’s company”? Does it really do any good to call this nonexclusive stuff love ?

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  thought is that all those in Jesus Christ merge into one per- sonality. Cf. i Cor. io17 is12- 13 Rom. i24> 6 Col. 315. There is little ground for a choice between the two ideas. Both are equally Pauline and equally suitable to the immediate context. Only in the fact that the second interpretation furnishes a sort of middle term between the assertion of v.16b that Christ is the seed, and that of v.29 that those who are Christ's are seed of Abraham is there a ground of preference for the second in- terpretation, and this only in case 16b is from Paul, ev X/oi<rra> *l77<ro£) is doubtless to be understood substantially as in v.26, describing Jesus Christ as the one in whom they live, by whom their lives are controlled, with the added suggestion that by this fact their standing before God is also determined. E!<; iotl Iv XptaTip 'IijaoO: so &TBCDKLP al pier. Syr. (psh.) Boh. (but some mss. omit ligarou) Clem. Athan. Guys. Euthal. Thdrt. al.; Iv e<rc£: FG 33, d e f g Vg. Or. Athan Bas. al.; !<rcl Xpicrcou T/jaou, omitting efe: KA, but A has Iv deleted after lot!. K is thus a witness to Iv X. I. as well as to the genitive. With practically all the witnesses, except A, attesting Iv X. I. against ft A for the genitive there can be no doubt that the reading of the latter is derivative, due to assimilation to v.29. Before <§at£, slq is clearly the original reading, changed by Western authorities to Iv, as in 3" %<; is changed to 8 by a part of the Western documents. 29. el Se ujuefc Xpwrroi}, apa rov 'A/3/oaap ffTrepfMa eVre, /car* en-ayyekfav /ckvpovdpoi,. "And if ye are Christ's, then are ye seed of Abraham, heirs according to promise." Se is con- timiative, the new sentence adding fresh inferences from what has already been said. The conditional clause, expressing in itself a simple supposition, refers, as is frequently the case, to something ^assumed to be true. IBM T 244. vpels ~Kpi<rTov is assumed to have been previously affirmed or implied, and doubtless in ek ev 'Xpicrrq* 'lyaov or in ev JLpKTrSt 'I^croO alone. Of these latter alternatives the second is more probable, since there is nothing to indicate that in this v. the apostle is intend- ing to carry forward the idea of the unity of believers in one body, or their equal standing before God. Had this been his purpose, he must have employed some such phraseology as that of i Cor. i212» 27, or Rom. I25, e. g., *fe [or eu a&pa] Iv Ill, 28-29 209

• From Less (2017)

  Less stands in the doorway, space helmet under his arm, a smile imprinted on his face. How many times has he been asked this question? Certainly enough for it not to sting; he has been asked it when he was very young, back in the Carlos days, when he could overhear someone explaining how Arthur Less was that kid from Delaware in the green Speedo, the thin one by the pool, or later, when it was explained he was the lover of Robert Brownburn, the shy one by the bar, or even later, when it was noted he was his ex-lover and maybe shouldn’t be invited over anymore, or when he was introduced as the author of a first novel, and then a second novel, and then as that fellow someone knew from somewhere long ago. And at last: as the man Freddy Pelu had been sleeping with for nine whole years, until Freddy married Tom Dennis. He has been all those things, to all those people who did not know who he was. “I said, who the hell are you?” No one out there in the theater will know who he is; when he will help H. H. H. Mandern, sick with food poisoning but unwilling to let down his fans, onto the stage, he will be introduced merely as “a huge fan.” When he leads that hour-and-a-half-long interview, filling it with extended descriptions when he sees the writer is failing, answering some questions from the audience when Mandern turns his weary eyes to Less, when he saves this event, saves this poor man’s career, still nobody will know who he is. They are there for H. H. H. Mandern. They are there for his robot Peabody. They have come dressed as robots or space goddesses or aliens because a writer has changed their lives. That other writer, sitting beside him, face partly visible in the open visor of a space helmet, is inconsequential; he will not be remembered; no one will know, or even wonder, who he is. And later tonight, when he boards a plane for Mexico City, and the young Japanese tourist beside him, hearing he is a writer, grows excited and asks who he is, Less, still in free fall from the broken bridge of his last hopes, will answer as he has so many times before. A magniloquent spoony. No rancor. No feelings at all. Arthur, you know my son was never right for you. “Nobody,” says our hero to the city of New York. Less Mexican Freddy Pelu is a man who doesn’t need to be told, before takeoff, to secure his own oxygen mask before assisting others.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Tonight, however, they were thrown open, and the curtains behind them were drawn quite wide. It was from here that the gay little melody was issuing: the parted drapes gave me a perfect view of the curious scene that was being enacted within. The player of the instrument - it was, I now saw, a mandolin - was a handsome young woman in a well-tailored jacket, a white blouse, a neck-tie, and spectacles; I put her down at once for a lady clerk or a college girl. As she sang, she smiled; and when her voice fell short of the higher notes, she laughed. She had tied a bunch of ribbons to the neck of her mandolin, and these shook and shimmered as she strummed it. The little group of people to whom she sang, however, were not quite so gay. A man, in a suit that was rather rough, sat beside her, nodding with a fixed and hopeful smile; on his knee he held a sweet little girl in a patched frock and apron, whose hands he made to clap in approximate time to the melody. At his shoulder leaned a boy, his hair shaved to a stubble around his narrow neck and his large, flushed ears. Behind him stood a tired-looking hard-faced woman - the man’s wife, I guessed - and she held another infant listlessly at her breast. The final member of the party, a stocky girl in a smartish jacket, was only partly visible beyond the edge of the curtain. Her face was hidden, but I could see her hands - which were slender and rather pale - with peculiar clarity: they held a card or a pamphlet, which they flapped in the still, warm air like a fan. All of these figures were gathered around a table, upon which stood a jar of flaccid little daisies and the remains of an economical supper: tea and cocoa, cold meat and pickle, and a cake. Despite the long faces and forced smiles, there was something celebratory about the scene. It was, I supposed, a sort of house-warming party - though I could not fathom the relationship between the lady mandolinist and the poor, drab little family to whom she played. Nor was I sure about the other girl, with the pale hands; she, I thought, could have belonged in either camp. The tune changed, and I could sense the family growing restless.