Boredom

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 Another Country (1962)

  “You writing?” asked Lorenzo, still smiling. For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time. He carried a small notebook with him wherever he went and scribbled in it, and when he got drunk enough, read the results aloud. It lay before him, closed, on the table now. “I’m trying,” said Vivaldo. He looked above their heads at the window, out into the streets. “It’s a dead night.” “It sure is,” said Harold. He looked over at Vivaldo with his little smile. “Where’s your chick, man? Don’t tell me she’s got away.” “No. She’s uptown, at some kind of family deal.” He leaned forward. “We have a deal, dig, she won’t bug me with her family and I won’t bug her with mine.” Belle giggled again. Lorenzo laughed. “You ought to bring them together. It’d be the biggest battle since the Civil War.” “Or since Romeo and Juliet,” Belle suggested. “I’ve been trying to do that in a long poem,” Lorenzo said, “you know, Romeo and Juliet today, only she’s black and he’s white—” “And Mercutio’s passing,” grinned Vivaldo. “Yes. And everybody else is all fucked up—” “Call it,” suggested Harold, “Pickaninnies Everywhere.” “Or Everybody’s Pickaninnies.” “Or, Checkers, Anyone?” They all howled. Belle, still clinging to her thumbnail, laughed until tears rolled down her face. “You people are high!” said Vivaldo. This sent them off again. “Baby,” cried Lorenzo, “one day, you’ve got to tell me how you figured that out!” “You want to turn on?” Harold asked. It had been a long time. He had become bored by the people with whom one turned on, and really rather bored with marijuana. Either it did not derange his senses enough, or he was already more than sufficiently deranged. And he found the hangover crushing and it interfered with his work and he had never been able to make love on it. Still, it had been a long time. It was only ten past eleven, he did not know what he was going to do with himself. He wanted to enter into, or to forget, the chaos at his center. “Maybe,” he said. “Let me buy a round first. What’re you drinking?” “We could make it on back to my pad,” said Harold, scowling his little scowl. “I’m having beer,” said Lorenzo. His expression indicated that he would rather have had something else, but did not wish to seem to be taking advantage of Vivaldo. Vivaldo turned to Belle. “And you?” She dropped her hand and leaned forward. “Do you think I could have a brandy Alexander?” “God,” he said, “if you can drink it, I guess they can make it.” She leaned back again, unsmiling, oddly ladylike, and he looked at Harold. “Beer, dad,” Harold said. “Then we’ll split.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Zizi sees humans treadmill-running, bored out of their wits, in their pursuit of immortality at the price of living. The fountain of youth in the strict diets and bulging hysterical eyes and taut skins and guilt and shaming and foolish choices and inhumane priorities. Waking up early to witness a sunrise that will never be again versus going to the gym—something’s gone real wrong. Even worse, if one does not even see the sunrise as it is happening on one’s way to the gym (self-absorbed, high buildings, pollution fogs, whatever the reason). On one’s way to the fountain of youth, is one already dead? Are we scared of death or dying? Is the fear of dying the wrong side of the coin? Love for living the other side? What is the value in answering those questions anyway? RF. Zizi, how do we maintain our sense of wonder and curiosity without feeling exhausted? Why do we fear losing it? We try to hold on to it very strongly, every day, every moment we seek the unknown, we follow the unknown, we want more and more. How do we separate greed from wonder? Is this a question because we come from a place that we are no longer curious about? Have we lost curiosity in home? Zizi. It is time for that cigarette. The end of curiosity is death. Be exhausted. Be tired. Be curious at any price. It is sometimes okay to take a break and float in the mainstream using a traditional structure. Tradition has lots of wild within it, can offer a parachute just in case you needed it, a foundation to rest on—but never ever make it your home. Start by never living in the same place for more than two years. Always have guests, turn a blind eye to dirty dishes, and always ask why a certain law is in place and break it. RF. What do you say to my unrelenting need to do the dishes as soon as I finish lunch and/or before I go to bed? I just cannot sleep with dirty dishes in the sink. Zizi. You are a fool. That is what I would say. You are using the dishes as a distraction. Go for a walk and think carefully, what are you so afraid of? RF. What if curiosity is a commodity and the need to always be in awe is a sort of addiction?

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

  I spent the whole week longing for Friday, the weekend dreading Monday morning, and the whole term pining for the holidays. I knew that this was all wrong, and yet for the first time in my life I felt safe and ordinary. Nothing much happened to me during these years. I was no longer being carted off to hospital; I had no scandalously public failures; I was beginning to be like everybody else at last. And I have no doubt that, even though it was dull, this was a valuable period. It gave me some time out. I could rest and, as I thought, heal. As for prayer, God, holiness, all that seemed to have happened to somebody else. I sat through school prayers every morning in a daze of bored abstraction, incredulous that these ideas had once been so important to me. “How on earth did you stick it out in the convent?” my colleagues would ask me in astonishment. “You don’t seem religious at all!” A few members of staff were churchgoers, but they were in a minority. Many of the children I taught had never heard of basic Christian concepts. One day, my class of eighteen-year-olds seemed to be making very heavy weather of John Donne’s poem “Good Friday. 1613. Riding Westward.” Eventually, to my astonishment, one of them cried in bewilderment: “Miss Armstrong, what exactly did happen on Good Friday?” I used to look with pity at the young teacher who was the sole member of the religious department and taught only a tiny number of students at the advanced level. What a dead-end subject! In fact, however, in other parts of the world, this skeptical indifference was becoming eccentric and even old-fashioned. The countries of northern Europe were indeed responding to the peculiar strain of the late twentieth century by renouncing religion. For many, God had died in Auschwitz. The churches had been implicated in the Holocaust, and the traumatic experience of two world wars, fought on European soil, had left a legacy of unanswered questions. But other regions reacted differently. The United States, whose experience of the twentieth century had been more positive, was becoming more religious all the time: by the year 2000 it would be the second most religious country in the world after India. In the Middle East, as the Arab-Israeli conflict entered its third decade without hope of resolution, the secular ideologies of socialism and nationalism seemed increasingly bankrupt; after the wars of 1967 and 1973, there was a religious revival among both Israelis and Arabs, and on both sides, the new religiosity became sucked into the conflict.

• From Wild (2012)

  That’s how I felt by the time I dragged into the Shelter Cove Resort: spent and bored with the trail, empty of every single thing except gratitude I was there. I’d hopped another of my squares in the Oregon hopscotch. Shelter Cove Resort was a store surrounded by a rustic set of cabins on a wide green lawn that sat on the shore of a big lake called Odell that was rimmed by green forests. I stepped onto the porch of the store and went inside. There were short rows of snacks and fishing lures and a cooler with drinks inside. I found a bottle of Snapple lemonade, got a bag of chips, and walked to the counter. “You a PCT hiker?” the man who stood behind the cash register asked me. When I nodded, he gestured to a window at the back of the store. “The post office is closed until tomorrow morning, but you can camp for free at a spot we’ve got nearby. And there are showers that’ll cost you a buck.” I had only ten dollars left—as I’d now come to expect, my stops in Ashland and Crater Lake National Park had been pricier than I’d imagined they’d be—but I knew I had twenty dollars in the box I’d get the next morning, so when I handed the man my money to pay for the drink and the chips, I asked him for some quarters for the shower. Outside, I cracked open the lemonade and chips and ate them as I made my way toward the little wooden bathhouse the man had pointed out, my anticipation tremendous. When I stepped inside, I was pleased to see that it was a one-person affair. I locked the door behind me, and it was my own domain. I’d have slept inside it if they’d let me. I took off my clothes and looked at myself in the scratched-up mirror. It wasn’t only my feet that had been destroyed by the trail, but it seemed my hair had been too—made coarser and strangely doubled in thickness, sprung alive by layers of dried sweat and trail dust, as if I were slowly but surely turning into a cross between Farrah Fawcett in her glory days and Gunga Din at his worst.

• From Another Country (1962)

  There were a couple of people there whom he knew, though he usually avoided them; but he was on a tab tonight, as everyone, instinctively, seemed to know; and, anyway, no one in a bar on a Wednesday night was in a position to be choosy. Certainly not the three people whose table he joined, who were also running out of money and who were not on a tab. One of these was the Canadian-born poet, Lorenzo, moon-faced, with much curly hair; and his girl, a refugee from the Texas backwater, scissor-faced, with much straight hair, and a thumb-chewing giggle; and their sidekick, older, lantern-jawed, with tortured lips, who scowled when he was pleased—which was rare—and smiled a pallid smile when he was frightened—which was almost always—so that he enjoyed the reputation of being extremely good-natured. “Hi, Vi,” cried the poet, “Come on over and join us!” There was, indeed, nothing else to do, unless he left the bar; so he ordered himself a drink and sat down. They were all drinking beer, and most of their beer was gone. He was introduced, for perhaps the thirtieth time, to Belle and to Harold. “How are you, man?” Lorenzo asked. “Nobody ever sees you any more.” He had an open, boyish grin, and it summed him up precisely, even though he was beginning to be rather old for a boy. Still, and especially by contrast with his boy and his girl, he seemed the most vivid person at the table and Vivaldo rather liked him. “I’m up and I’m down,” Vivaldo said—and Belle giggled, chewing on her thumb—“and I’m turning into a serious person; that’s why you never see me any more.” “You writing?” asked Lorenzo, still smiling. For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time. He carried a small notebook with him wherever he went and scribbled in it, and when he got drunk enough, read the results aloud. It lay before him, closed, on the table now. “I’m trying,” said Vivaldo. He looked above their heads at the window, out into the streets. “It’s a dead night.” “It sure is,” said Harold. He looked over at Vivaldo with his little smile. “Where’s your chick, man? Don’t tell me she’s got away.” “No. She’s uptown, at some kind of family deal.” He leaned forward. “We have a deal, dig, she won’t bug me with her family and I won’t bug her with mine.” Belle giggled again. Lorenzo laughed. “You ought to bring them together. It’d be the biggest battle since the Civil War.” “Or since Romeo and Juliet,” Belle suggested. “I’ve been trying to do that in a long poem,” Lorenzo said, “you know, Romeo and Juliet today, only she’s black and he’s white—” “And Mercutio’s passing,” grinned Vivaldo. “Yes.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Machulis’s work is far enough out there that even Wired—a magazine that is supposed to deliver the future now—isn’t ready to acknowledge its existence. His machines exist in quasi-obscurity not only because they push the technological envelope but also because they tend to push the boundaries of the human comfort zone. The discomfort comes not from any physical horror or danger, but simply because touch-based inventions demand much more intimacy than most people have with their consumer electronics. One of the lessons of pornography, though, is that sexual applications can help make new technologies less alienating. Machulis is keenly aware that his experiments are still far from the mainstream. “When you have as many vibrators as I do, and you have the technological knowledge that I do, you get bored,” he told a crowd at the 2007 Arse Electronika expo in California. (If the name is not self-explanatory, Arse Electronika is a symposium that explores all aspects of the relationship between sex and technology.) That boredom has led to some interesting projects: • An exercise bicycle wired to a vibrator so that pedalling harder increases vibration. • The “Sex Box.” Microsoft’s video game platform, the X-Box, included a feedback system such that, when a player crashes a car, blows up an alien or otherwise does something momentous in a game, the controller vibrates. Machulis took out the vibration motors and hooked the system up to a sex toy. “That makes any single video game environment a sexual environment,” he said. • An experiment in “Twitterdildonics,” in which he created an interface between the micro-blogging website Twitter.com and a vibrator. He used the ASCII values of the text from Tweets as vibrational intensity indicators—the higher the ASCII number, the stronger the motion. (A discovery from this experiment: Tweets in languages that use non-American alphabets—Cyrillic, for instance—resulted in more intense experiences, as the ASCII values for these characters are much higher.) • A “force feedback reality” device, which uses a light sensor to control the intensity of the vibrator. Walking outside with the sensor in a shirt pocket caused the sunlight intensity to change as the cloth of the pocket shifted with each footstep— so the vibrator picked up on the gait of the user.

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

  And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Matthew 6:7–8 I love the word babbling. It is onomatopoeia, meaning the word itself sounds like what it means. Babble. Babababababble. Meaningless syllables strung together. It is thought that the Greek word here is also onomatopoeic: battalogeo means to stammer, chatter, or babble on. 3 It comes from a root word which—similar to the English word—sounds like baby noises. Imagine someone blah-blah-blahing long after you’ve tuned them out. That’s what Jesus is talking about here: people who pray long, flowery, wordy prayers with zero content. Their prayers are mere words, empty nonsense designed to impress or manipulate, not to communicate. Even God is bored by those prayers. Jesus says that pagans pray with this mindset, thinking that “they will be heard because of their many words” (verse 7). He would have been thinking of people outside the Jewish religion. Rather than believing in one God who loved His people and heard their prayers, they often believed in a pantheon of gods who could be convinced, manipulated, and even played against one another. Sometimes we pray that same way, though. We believe in one God, but we can still fall into the trap of thinking we can convince or manipulate Him into doing what we want. If we say enough things, if we use the right phrases, if we pay the price by praying enough, God will act on our behalf. As a parent, I know exactly when my kids are trying to do this to me. They aren’t doing it from an evil heart, and neither are we when we pray this way to God. I don’t respond well to it from my kids, though. First, because they don’t need to convince me to be good to them. That comes naturally to me. Second, because I find it slightly insulting that they think they can manipulate me into doing something (or that they need to). But again, we do this to God in prayer sometimes. Or we try to, anyway. We think—subconsciously, more than likely—that we can persuade God to do what

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

  The rain cropped at the tin roof above us. I longed to go home, for I had had a very tiring day, but I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like. The slightly wavering figure outlined itself upon the darkness before me. ‘Let me’ he said in a maudlin tone ‘confide in you the secret of my novelist’s trade. I am a success, you a failure. The answer, old man, is sex and plenty of it.’ He raised his voice and his chin as he said, or rather declaimed, the word ‘sex’: tilting his scraggy neck like a chicken drinking and biting off the word with a half-yelp like a drill-serjeant. ‘Lashings of sex’ he repeated more normally, ‘but remember’ and he allowed his voice to sink to a confidential mumble, ‘stay buttoned up tight. Eternal grandma strong to save. You must stay buttoned up and suffering. Try and look as if you had a stricture, a book society choice. What is not permissible is rude health, ordure, the natural and the funny. That was all right for Chaucer and the Elizabethans but it won’t make the grade today — buttoned up tightly with stout Presbyterian buttons.’ And in the very act of shaking himself off he turned to me a face composed to resemble a fly-button — tight, narrow and grotesque. I thanked him but he waved aside the thanks in a royal manner. ‘It’s all free’ he said, and leading me by the hand he piloted me out into the dark street. We walked towards the lighted centre of the town like bondsmen, fellow writers, heavy with a sense of different failures. He talked confidentially to himself of matters which interested him in a mumble which I could not interpret. Once as we turned into the Rue des Soeurs he stopped before the lighted door of a house of ill-fame and pronounced: ‘Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mob. Not any more, alas! For sex is dying. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other’s mouths, silent and passionless as seafruit. Oh yes! Indubitably so.’ And he quoted the Arabic proverb which he uses as an epigraph to his trilogy: ‘The world is like a cucumber — today it’s in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.’ We then resumed our stitching, crab-like advance in the direction of his hotel, he repeating the word ‘indubitably’ with obvious pleasure at the soft plosive sound of it.

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

  part, prayer will come naturally, and it will get easier the more you do it. What do you have to lose? Nothing but worry, feeling overwhelmed, hurts and wounds, and a lot of other things you’d rather not be carrying. 3. BOREDOM: I DON’T LIKE DOING IT. In general, we avoid boring activities, and we gravitate toward rewarding ones. That doesn’t mean we never do things that bore us—we do them all the time. We have to. Work, study, paying bills, mowing the lawn, and a thousand more things fill our time. We might wish we could avoid them, but we’re adults, so we don’t. Or we do, then we wish we hadn’t. Prayer should not be one of the things that we “have” to do. If it is, we’ll tend to avoid it. We’ll put it off. We’ll pray only when absolutely necessary. Many people see prayer as boring because they’ve been taught that we do it in order to receive some intangible, undefined benefit from God. It’s seen as a spiritual discipline that somehow helps us. Just do it, we’re told, whether you feel like it or not. I am firmly opposed to that approach to prayer. Now, we’ll talk in a moment about being disciplined and intentional about prayer. I understand the importance of pushing through the initial resistance your body and mind might have to prayer. Sometimes you do pray because you know you should, even when you don’t feel like it. But that doesn’t mean we have to force ourselves to pray all the time. Hopefully the benefits we covered in the first section helped excite you about prayer. Prayer produces results that are both internal and external, short-term and long-term, individual and corporate, mental and spiritual. Prayer changes you from the moment you start doing it and it continues to work long after you’ve stopped. When you realize the power of prayer, it goes from being boring to rewarding, from being a “have to” to a “love to.”

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

  Yet today, for some reason, Jenifer seemed unusually interested in my churchgoing. I told her briefly about Blackfriars, thinking that she could not possibly be interested, but she persisted: “So it doesn’t matter if the children at this family Mass are noisy or make a scene?” “No. But actually because they feel relaxed, they tend to behave fairly well,” I replied. “They seem to enjoy it.” “What is the sermon like?” Herbert asked. “There are some intelligent men there, I believe.” “Don’t talk about these boring things, Karen!” Jacob yelled, bringing his fork splat down on his plate and causing a brief volcanic eruption of gravy and cabbage. “Ssh . . . It’s interesting what Karen is saying, Jacob,” Jenifer protested, wiping gravy from her cheek. “It is interesting, up to a point,” Herbert conceded. “Remarkable that reasonably educated people can go on believing in the virgin birth or the Trinity. Might as well believe in the Olympian pantheon. I mean, why Jehovah rather than Apollo? Frankly, I think Apollo might be the more appealing option. ” I could see his point. Jehovah had done little enough for me. Perhaps I should give Apollo a try. “Catholicism doesn’t seem to have made you very happy,” Jenifer remarked, echoing my own thoughts and ducking as Jacob hurled a potato across the room. It spattered steamily on the large mirror, and there were exclamations of protest. “Jacob, eat up now!” “How could the Catholic Church possibly make anybody happy?” Herbert grinned at me. He enjoyed baiting me about the notorious abuses of history. “Centuries of oppression and fear. The Inquisition, the sale of indulgences . . .” “The immorality of the popes,” I threw in. “Book burning. Pogroms.” “Jesuits and equivocation!” “This conversation has been going on for too long! Talk about something else,” Jacob demanded at the top of his voice. “We don’t want to hear about churches and popes and all that stuff!” “All right.” Jenifer turned to him. “You start a conversation.” “Let’s talk about Bonfire Night.” 3 Jacob relaxed now that the conversation was within his range. The fifth of November was one of the landmarks of Jacob’s year. He started looking forward to it months in advance. At first he had been terrified by the noise of the fireworks and the lurid effigies of Guy Fawkes, but Nanny and his parents had managed to coax him out of his fears by making a little festival of it. “Daddy, tell about how it will get dark and you will light the bonfire.” “And the flames will start to crackle in the twigs,” Herbert obliged. “Snap, crackle, and pop!” “And you will be so excited, Jacob,” Jenifer put in, “when the fireworks start.” “Whoosh! But Karen, you may be a little bit frightened. Just at first.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  ESCHATOLOGY 227 7. An eschatology which is expressed in terms of historic development has no final consummation. Its consummations are always the basis for further develop- ment.The Kingdom of Godis always coming, but we can never say " Lo here." Theologians oftenassert that thiswould be unsatisfactory. "A kingdom of social righteousness can never be perfect; man remains flesh; new generations would have to be trained anew; onlyby a world-catastrophe can the Kingdom of glory be realized." Apparently we haveto postulate a static condition inorderto give our mindsa rest; an endless perspective of development is too taxing. Fortunately God isnottiredas easily as we. If he called humanity to a halt in a " kingdom of glory/' he wouldhaveon hishands somemillions of eagerspirits whom he has himself trained toceaseless aspiration and achievement, and they would be dying of ennui. Besides, what is the use of a perfect ideal which never happens? A progres- sive Kingdom of righteousness happens all the time in instalments, like ourown sanctification. Our race will come toanend indue time; the astronomicalclock is already ticking which will ring inthe end. Meanwhile we are on the march towardthe Kingdom of God, and getting ourreward by every fractional realization of it which makes us hungry formore.A stationary hu- manity would bea dead humanity. Thelife of the race is in its growth. Since atdeath we emigrate from the social life of mankind, the future life ofthe individual might seem to lie outside of the scope of our discussion.But in truth

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

  BOREDOM: I DON’T LIKE DOING IT. In general, we avoid boring activities, and we gravitate toward rewarding ones. That doesn’t mean we never do things that bore us—we do them all the time. We have to. Work, study, paying bills, mowing the lawn, and a thousand more things fill our time. We might wish we could avoid them, but we’re adults, so we don’t. Or we do, then we wish we hadn’t. Prayer should not be one of the things that we “have” to do. If it is, we’ll tend to avoid it. We’ll put it off. We’ll pray only when absolutely necessary. Many people see prayer as boring because they’ve been taught that we do it in order to receive some intangible, undefined benefit from God. It’s seen as a spiritual discipline that somehow helps us. Just do it, we’re told, whether you feel like it or not. I am firmly opposed to that approach to prayer. Now, we’ll talk in a moment about being disciplined and intentional about prayer. I understand the importance of pushing through the initial resistance your body and mind might have to prayer. Sometimes you do pray because you know you should, even when you don’t feel like it. But that doesn’t mean we have to force ourselves to pray all the time. Hopefully the benefits we covered in the first section helped excite you about prayer. Prayer produces results that are both internal and external, short-term and long-term, individual and corporate, mental and spiritual. Prayer changes you from the moment you start doing it and it continues to work long after you’ve stopped. When you realize the power of prayer, it goes from being boring to rewarding, from being a “have to” to a “love to.” 4. DISCOURAGEMENT: IT DOESN’T WORK. Have you ever weighed yourself after a workout and been frustrated that you didn’t shed any pounds after such intense exercise? Maybe you even went up half a pound because you guzzled a bottle of water. Mentally, you know it doesn’t work that way. Exercise isn’t just about burning calories in the moment. It’s about increasing your metabolism and overall health so that your body burns calories all day long. Plus, losing weight isn’t the only goal. You want your body to be healthy, not fit into some stereotype that society has created. You want to build muscle, stay flexible, and have good circulation. In other words, exercise accomplishes more than what you see reflected on the scale or in your mirror. It keeps working for you all day long, not just in the moment. And its benefits go beyond just weight loss.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  When you can begin to enjoy the small wonders of living daily in freedom, you will become able to look forward to larger pleasures. Awakening your sense of curiosity and your ability to fantasize and dream about the future requires exercising the imaginative muscles of your mind, which most likely were put to sleep by your cult. Most cults deride fun as frivolous and self-indulgent, or they turn it into work, learning, or spiritual or political growth. Either way, to have fun or enjoy yourself probably lost its meaning. The best remedy for boredom is education. Whether it is returning to school or exercising your mind through reading, lectures, or challenging experiences, awakening your ability to think and create encourages and enhances your selfconfidence and self-esteem. Start slowly, perhaps with a wish list of all the things you would like to do, have, or be. Then make another list of things that seem possible to achieve or obtain in the coming year, month, or week. Choose one item at a time that you can reasonably attain. Boredom ends with the realization that life-your lifehas value. That is a wonderful discovery to make. Feeling Like a FailurePeople who leave cultic situations frequently feel that they are failures for not having stayed. Typically cults blame their members for everything bad that happens, which is why former members tend to continue the practice of self-blame, as illustrated here: Janis M., Martin M., and their children were asked three times to leave the Community due to improper attitude, even though they were quite hardworking. Each time the family was ejected, virtually penniless, it worked to reestablish itself in the good graces of the leadership. Having spent more than twenty years in the cult, this family of ten found it challenging to adjust to regular society. They lacked marketable trades and skills and missed the group, which was like an extended family. Feelings of failure and hopelessness always led them back to the community. The final time the family was cast out, however, they did something different. They sought out others who had experienced a similar fate. Together with other excommunicated families, they found the support they needed to recover their independence and not go back. You may be experiencing significant low self-esteem or a lack of selfconfidence, and you maybe excessively self-critical and self-blaming. These are common attitudes for people who have been in cults. If you do not examine these attitudes, you may have trouble getting your life in order. It is helpful to keep a journal, perhaps using it at the end of the day, and record everything you did: the new feelings you felt, the people you talked to, and what you read or learned about the world and yourself. Each new experience presents an opportunity and a lesson for you: What did you learn? What would you do differently next time? How could you have avoided a problem or turned it around?

• From Less (2017)

  For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in an airport lounge is rivaled only by lying convalescent in bed. This particular boy, one-six-thousandth of whose life has already been squandered in this airport, has gone through every pocket of his mother’s purse and found nothing of interest but a keychain made of plastic crystals. He is considering the wastepaper basket—its swinging lid holds possibilities—when he notices, through the lounge’s window, the American. The boy has not seen one all day. He watches the American with the same detached, merciless fascination with which he has watched the robotic scorpions that circle the airport bathroom drain. Epically tall, brutally blond, the American stands in his beige wilted linen shirt and pants, smiling at the escalator-regulations sign. The sign, so scrupulously unabridged that it includes advice on pet safety, is longer than the escalator itself. This seems to amuse the American. The boy watches as the man pats every pocket on his person, then nods in satisfaction. He looks up at a closed-circuit television to follow the fleeting romances between flights and gates, then heads down to join a line. Though everyone has already passed through at least three checkpoints, a man at the head of the line has everyone take out their passport and boarding pass once more. This superfluous verification also seems to amuse the American. But it is warranted; at least three people are about to board the wrong flight. The American is one of them. Who knows what adventures awaited him in Hyderabad? We will never know, for he is shown to another gate: Thiruvananthapuram. He becomes absorbed in a notebook. Soon enough, a worker is rushing over to tap the American on the shoulder, and the foreigner pops up to rush for the flight that he is yet again about to miss. They disappear together down a foreshortened corridor. The boy, already attuned to comedy at his young age, presses his nose against the glass and awaits the inevitable. A moment later, the American springs back to grab the forgotten satchel and vanishes again, this time surely for good. The boy tilts his head as boredom begins to flood. His mother asks if he needs to wee, and he says yes, but only so he can see the scorpions again. “Here are the black ants; they are your neighbors. Nearby there is Elizabeth, the yellow rat snake, who is the parson’s special friend, although he says he is happy to kill her if you want him to. But then there will be rats. Do not be afraid of the mongoose. Do not encourage the stray dogs—they are not our pets. Do not open the windows, because small bats will want to visit you, and possibly monkeys. And if you walk at night, stomp on the ground to scare off other animals.” Less asks what other animals could there possibly be? Rupali answers, quite solemnly: “Let us never know.”

• From Less (2017)

  For a seven-year-old boy, the boredom of sitting in church is rivaled only by sitting in an airport lounge. This particular boy has been sitting with his Sunday-school book in his lap—a set of Bible stories with wildly inconsistent illustration styles—and staring at a picture of Daniel’s lion. How he wishes it were a dragon. How he wishes his mother had not confiscated his pen. It is a long stone room with a white wood ceiling; perhaps two hundred sandals are arrayed outside on the grass. Everyone is in their best clothes; his are exquisitely hot. Fans above nod back and forth, spectators at the tennis match of God and Satan. The boy hears the parson talking; he can think only of the parson’s daughter who, while only three, has completely captured his heart. He looks over, and she is on her mother’s lap; she looks back and blinks. But even more interesting is the window behind her, opening onto the road, where a white Tata is stuck in traffic, and there, clearly visible in its open window: the American! How incredible, he wants to tell everybody, but of course he’s forbidden to speak; it is driving him as mad as the parson’s temptress daughter. The American, the one from the airport, in the same beige linen as before. All around him, vendors are walking from car to car with hot food wrapped in paper, water, and sodas, and everywhere horns are musically honking. It feels like a parade. The American leans his head out the window, presumably to check the traffic, and then, for one, brief moment, his eyes meet those of the boy. What is contained in that blue gaze, the boy cannot comprehend. They are the eyes of a castaway. Headed to Japan. Then the invisible obstacle is removed, traffic begins to move forward, the American pulls himself back into the shadow of the car, and he is gone. Less at Last

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  We all wondered exactly who he was. But nobody knew. That wasn’t surprising. My grandmother had met thousands of people. The white guy was holding this big suitcase. He held that thing tight to his chest as he talked. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Ted.” And then I remembered who he was. He was a rich and famous billionaire white dude. He was famous for being filthy rich and really weird. My grandmother knew Billionaire Ted! Wow. We all were excited to hear this guy’s story. And so what did he have to say? We all groaned. We’d expected this white guy to be original. But he was yet another white guy who showed up on the rez because he loved Indian people SOOOOOOOO much. Do you know how many white strangers show up on Indian reservations every year and start telling Indians how much they love them? Thousands. It’s sickening. And boring. “Listen,” Ted said. “I know you’ve heard that before. I know white people say that all the time. But I still need to say it. I love Indians. I love your songs, your dances, and your souls. And I love your art. I collect Indian art.” Oh, God, he was a collector. Those guys made Indians feel like insects pinned to a display board. I looked around the football field. Yep, all of my cousins were squirming like beetles and butterflies with pins stuck in their hearts. “I’ve collected Indian art for decades,” Ted said. “I have old spears. Old arrowheads. I have old armor. I have blankets. And paintings. And sculptures. And baskets. And jewelry.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. “And I have old powwow dance outfits,” he said. Now that made everybody sit up and pay attention. “About ten years ago, this Indian guy knocked on the door of my cabin in Montana.” Cabin, my butt. Ted lived in a forty-room log mansion just outside of Bozeman. “Well, I didn’t know this stranger,” Ted said. “But I always open my door to Indians.” Oh, please. “And this particular Indian stranger was holding a very beautiful powwow dance outfit, a woman’s powwow dance outfit. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was all beaded blue and red and yellow with a thunderbird design. It must have weighed fifty pounds. And I couldn’t imagine the strength of the woman who could dance beneath that magical burden.” Every woman in the world could dance that way. “Well, this Indian stranger said he was in a desperate situation. His wife was dying of cancer and he needed money to pay for her medicine. I knew he was lying. I knew he’d stolen the outfit. I could always smell a thief.” Smell yourself, Ted. “And I knew I should call the police on this thief.

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

  The courtier Viel Castel recorded in his diary that Virginie “bore the burden of her beauty with insolence, and displayed it with effrontery.”29 He, like so many at court, was delighted by the “truly admirable” size of her bosom, and confessed that he tried hard to look under the sheer gauze covering to discern its shape. Virginie refused to wear a corset, that most requisite piece of nineteenth-century female attire, which turned the soft curves of the breasts into an impregnable fortress. She allowed her breasts to dangle freely. Viel Castel remarked that those breasts “seemed to throw out a challenge to all women.”30 But what Virginie boasted in the bosom she lacked between the ears. While successful royal mistresses were absorbed in their men, Virginie was absorbed only in herself. Most of her conversation revolved around her own glorious beauty. Napoleon himself confided to his cousin Mathilde that while Virginie was “very beautiful, she bores me to death.”31 Virginie’s looks could not, in the long run, make up for her stone cold selfishness. She lasted only a year. “I have hardly commenced my life and my role is already finished,” she lamented bitterly.32 Enchanting UglinessWhen George I left Hanover to claim the British throne in 1714, he brought as his mistresses two of the ugliest women his new subjects had ever seen. The tall, skinny one bore a weighty name—Ermengarda Melusina, countess of Schulenberg. She had lost her hair to smallpox and wore unattractive wigs and dumpy dresses. Her plainness was offset by kindness and loyalty but not by scintillating conversation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that while many found King George a dull man, Ermengarda was “duller than himself, and consequently did not find him so.”33 The short, fat mistress was Sophia Charlotte Kielmansegge. Though ridiculed for her girth, she had a sparkling personality and a thorough education, and loved sex. As her mother had been mistress to George I’s father, there was some speculation that George was having sex with his half sister. While the skeletal countess of Schulenberg was nicknamed “the Hop Pole,” the stout Madame Kielmansegge was tagged “Elephant and Castle.” Horace Walpole described her as having “two fierce black eyes, large and rolling, beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by stays.”34 Philip Dormer Stanhope, the future Lord Chesterfield, described both mistresses as “two considerable specimens of the King’s bad taste and strong stomach.”35 Referring to Madame Kielmansegge he added, “The standard of His Majesty’s taste as exemplified in his mistresses, makes all ladies who aspire to his favor, and who are near the suitable age, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeed, others burst.”36

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The whole street, it seemed to me, might as well be made of india rubber - there was such a passage of shouts and laughter and people and smells and dogs, from one house to its neighbours. I should not have minded it - after all, I had grown up in a street that was similar, in a house where cousins thundered up and down the stairs, and the parlour might be full, on any night of the week, with people drinking beer and playing cards and sometimes quarrelling. But I had lost the habit of enduring it; and now it only made me weary. Then again, there were so many people who came calling. There was, for example, Florence’s family: a brother and his wife and children; a sister, Janet. The brother was the oldest of the sons in the family portrait (the middle one was gone to Canada); he worked as a butcher, and sometimes brought us meat; but he was rather boastful - he had moved to a house in Epping, and thought Ralph a fool for remaining in Quilter Street, where the family had all grown up. I didn’t like him much. Janet, however, who called oftener, I took to at once. She was eighteen or nineteen, big-boned and handsome; a born barmaid I had thought her when studying her photograph - so I was rather tickled to learn that she worked as a tapstress in a City public-house, lodging with the family who ran it, in their rooms above the bar. Florence fretted over her like anything: their mother had died while the sisters were still quite young (their father had died many years before that), Florence had had all the raising of the girl to do herself and, like older sisters everywhere, was sure that Janet would be led astray by the first young man who got his hands on her. ‘She will marry without giving it a second’s thought,’ she said wearily to me, when Janet paid her first visit after I moved in. ‘She’ll be dragged down having babies all her life, and her good looks will be spoiled, and she’ll die worn out at forty-three, like our own mother did.’ When Janet came for supper, she stayed the night; then she would sleep up in Florence’s bed, and I’d hear their murmurs and their laughter as I lay in the parlour below - the sound made me terribly restless. But Janet herself seemed marvellously unsurprised to see me dishing up the herrings at the breakfast-table, or putting her brother’s linen, on a wash-day, through the mangle. ‘All right. Nancy,’ she would say - she called me ‘Nancy’ from the start. The first time we met I still had the bruise at my eye, and when she saw it, she whistled. She said, ‘I bet it was a girl done that - wasn’t it? A girl always goes for the eyes every time.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Después de nueve semanas, me he vuelto bastante buena en este juego. Danni continúa sugiriendo que aprenda póker o blackjack o incluso que comienza a jugar con personas de todo el mundo, pero no soy tan genial. Me gusta jugar sola. Solo algo para mantener mi cerebro ocupado. Han sido unas vacaciones agitadas. He ganado cerca de trescientos cinco juegos de cuatrocientos, y solo perdí esos porque seguía jugando demasiado tarde y me quedé dormida, haciendo que la batería muriera. En realidad me siento un poco patética cuando me permito pensar en cómo he pasado horas y horas en este hermoso verano. Pero cuando comienzo un nuevo juego, dejo de pensar al respecto. Escucho sonar la campana en la puerta del lobby, y miro hacia arriba, viendo a un hombre joven, en una camisa negra y jeans, entrar y dirigirse al escritorio del frente. Me deslizo de mi banco y me levanto. Siempre me pongo nerviosa cuando llegan clientes tan tarde. El motel se encuentra en una vieja carretera sin muchos negocios o luces. La mayoría de las personas se quedan con la interestatal, especialmente cuando está así de oscuro, y los que no lo hacen, me hacen dudar. Pero bueno, es negocios. —Hola. —Sonrío—. Bienvenido a The Blue Palms. Se acerca al mostrador, y mi sonrisa titubea, viendo el enorme tatuaje de alas en su cuello con las palabras El Demonio No Duerme en tinta negra. Esta es un área bastante conservadora. No puede ser local. —Hola. —Se encuentra con mis ojos pero solo por un segundo—. ¿Cuántas habitaciones vacías tiene? —Um… —Miro los cubículos y cuento las llaves para asegurarme—. Seis —le digo. Asiente, moviendo la mano hacia su bolsillo trasero por su cartera, asumo. —Tomaré cinco. Por una noche, por favor. ¿Cinco? No creo que hayamos estado así de cerca de Sin Vacantes desde que llegué aquí. ¿Para qué necesita todas esas habitaciones? No es que me esté quejando. Necesitamos el negocio. The Blue Palms, propiedad de mi amiga Danni y su familia, se encuentra casi en un camino desierto. La nueva interestatal que se terminó hace veinte años hace difícil el negocio. Las únicas personas que parecían saber dónde estábamos eran los locales, o las familias de los locales que viajaban para visitar, y los motociclistas en búsqueda de una experiencia más auténtica rodando por las antiguas carreteras. Sin embargo, me alegra haber venido a ayudar. Danni me había suplicado por años para que la visitara, y ha sido un viaje en el tiempo el pasar otro verano con ella. Ella y yo ganamos una beca para un campamento cuando teníamos doce, y nos hemos mantenido en contacto desde entonces. Siempre había querido conocer el lugar de donde provenían muchas de sus historias tontas y sexis. El cliente me da su identificación, y la tomo. —Gracias —digo, llevándola al teclado para registrar las habitaciones a su nombre. La puerta de repente se vuelve a abrir, la campana suena, y escucho una voz demandante gritar. —¡Necesitamos comida!

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Then I landed a job as a clerk-typist at a huge engineering and construction firm in the city, in the nuclear quality-assurance department, where I labored under a tsunami wave of triplicate forms and memos. It was very upsetting. It was also so boring that it made my eyes feel ringed with dark circles, like Lurch. I finally figured out that most of this paperwork could be tossed without there being any real … well … fallout, and this freed me up to write short stories instead. “Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.” So in addition to writing furtively at the office, I wrote every night for an hour or more, often in coffeehouses with a notepad and my pen, drinking great quantities of wine because this is what writers do; this was what my father and all his friends did. It worked for them, although there was now a new and disturbing trend—they had started committing suicide. This was very painful for my father, of course. But we both kept writing. I eventually moved out to Bolinas, where my father and younger brother had moved the year before when my parents split up. I began to teach tennis and clean houses for a living. Every day for a couple of years I wrote little snippets and vignettes, but mainly I concentrated on my magnum opus, a short story called “Arnold.” A bald, bearded psychiatrist named Arnold is hanging out one day with a slightly depressed young female writer and her slightly depressed younger brother. Arnold gives them all sorts of helpful psychological advice but then, at the end, gives up, gets down on his haunches, and waddles around quacking like a duck to amuse them. This is a theme I have always loved, where a couple of totally hopeless cases run into someone, like a clown or a foreigner, who gives them a little spin for a while and who says in effect, “I’m lost, too! But look—I know how to catch rabbits!” It was a terrible story. I wrote a lot of other things, too. I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down. But mostly I worked on my short story “Arnold.” Every few months I would send it to my father’s agent in New York, Elizabeth McKee. “Well,” she’d write back, “it’s really coming along now.” I did this for several years. I wanted to be published so badly.