Confusion

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 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  What scares me is that I don’t think Cranium is just saying that stuff to get people whipped up. I think he really believes that he runs the best marketing team in the world, and that all of those big companies in Silicon Valley want him to come teach them about marketing. The headphones are painted bright orange and are customized with the HubSpot logo and each person’s last name. Cranium claims they’re a “limited edition” and worth $900. They’re incredibly tacky. No one in their right mind would wear them in public. “Yours are sitting here at my desk,” Trotsky writes to me. I’m a bit confused. A week ago Trotsky was telling me that I was on the verge of being fired, that I had dug myself into an impossibly deep hole and I had two strikes against me. I was probably also on thin ice, but he left that one out. A week ago, Trotsky was making me get on the phone so that he could dress me down in front of my children. Now we’re back to being pals, and he thinks I’m going to be motivated to come back to work because I’ll get a pair of Bose headphones, in orange. On the same day, Trotsky sends me a separate email saying he has even more big news. “You’ve got a new job,” he says. “Very high profile. Hugely important. On my team, but a new function. It’s awesome. Great way to wipe the slate clean with kick ass output. When can we talk?” I’m sitting in the writers’ room on the Sony lot. We’re working. It’s my last week in Los Angeles. I write back and tell him I’ll call him later in the day, but meanwhile what’s the new job? “We need to get a podcast off the ground. You will own it, entirely,” he writes. Doing a podcast isn’t exactly a leadership role at HubSpot, but it sounds fine to me. I know how to do a podcast. A few years ago I did a weekly podcast with a partner, and we drew a pretty good audience. I like interviewing people, and I’m not bad at it. “I even have a really nice professional-quality microphone,” I tell him when we get on the phone. “And some good headphones and some sound-canceling foam that I can put around the microphone. I have video stuff too if we want to do a video podcast. I know the guys at YouTube who work with the video bloggers. I can talk to them and get some advice for how to set things up. I’m thinking maybe we could do an opening segment where I riff on the news of the week in marketing, and then I can bring in a guest and do an interview.” There’s a pause, and then Trotsky explains that I’m not going to be the host of the podcast. The host is going to be Cranium.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission, and that you want to be part of that mission—that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places. How that differs from joining what might otherwise be called a cult is not entirely clear. What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist? At what point does a person go from being the former to the latter? The lines are fuzzy. Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults, the creation of special language being one example. At HubSpot, employees abide by precepts outlined in the company’s culture code, a document that codifies HubSpot’s unusual language and sets forth a set of shared values and beliefs. The culture code is a manifesto of sorts, a 128-slide PowerPoint deck titled “The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love.” The code’s creator is Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s co-founder. Inside the company he is always referred to simply by his first name, Dharmesh, and some people seem to view him as a kind of spiritual leader. Dharmesh claims it took him one hundred hours to make the slides. He sent me a link to the slide deck a few days after I interviewed with him and Halligan, I suppose as an inducement to join the company. He said it was a slide deck that “describes HubSpot’s culture.” The code depicts a kind of corporate utopia where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the group—“team > individual,” one slide says—and where people don’t worry about work-life balance because their work is their life. In creating this manifesto Dharmesh is actually conducting an interesting experiment. Corporate cultures usually evolve organically, but Dharmesh is trying to create a culture artificially and impose it on his organization. The use of the word we in the subtitle of the code—“Creating a company we love”—implies a sort of consensus. In reality, Dharmesh is creating a company that he loves and hoping to persuade his employees to love it along with him. The culture code asks, “What does it mean to be HubSpotty?” and then defines the meaning of that term explaining a concept that Dharmesh called HEART, an acronym that stands for humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent. These are the traits that HubSpotters must possess in order to be successful.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Instead of demonstrating his manhood on the battlefields of Vietnam, he became “part of a generation of men who actively rejected our childhood macho image of manhood—which seemed to us the cornerstone of racism, sexism, and militarism.” Exhorted to make love, not war, he became “an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movement,” and he joined the Peace Corps in Africa. But in opting out of the military he would discover that “something required of manhood seemed to have been bypassed, overlooked, even dodged.” Left “confused and frustrated,” Dalbey eventually conceded that “manhood requires the warrior.”21 Dalbey agreed with Bly that an unbalanced masculinity had led to the nation’s “unbalanced pursuit” of the Vietnam War, but an over-correction had resulted in a different problem: Having rejected war making as a model of masculine strength, men had essentially abdicated that strength to women. As far as Dalbey was concerned, the 1970s offered no viable model of manhood to supplant “the boyhood image in our hearts,” and his generation had ended up rejecting manhood itself. If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted. They were begging men to toughen up and take charge, longing for a prince who was strong and bold enough to restore their “authentic femininity.”22 Unfortunately, the church was part of the problem. Failing to present the true Jesus, it instead depicted him “as a meek and gentle milk-toast character”—a man who never could have inspired “brawny fishermen like Peter to follow him.” It was time to replace this “Sunday school Jesus” with a warrior Jesus. Citing “significant parallels” between serving Christ and serving in the military, Dalbey suggested that a “redeemed image of the warrior” could reinvigorate the church’s ministry to men: “What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.” Writing before the Gulf War had restored faith in American power and the strength of the military, Dalbey’s preoccupation with Vietnam is understandable, yet the pattern he established would endure long after an easy victory in the latter conflict supposedly brought an end to “Vietnam syndrome.” American evangelicals would continue to be haunted by Vietnam.23 There was one point on which Dalbey was more perceptive than many of his later imitators, and that was social class. The occasion that prompted this reflection was a midlife crisis of sorts that manifested in a failed attempt to buy a pair of cowboy boots.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  If you have chosen to study another religion, attend a worship service, and if you have friends who belong to this tradition, ask them to help you. Perhaps they will invite you to a seder, Eid, or Diwali. When Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), the distinguished Canadian scholar of comparative religion, was teaching Islamic studies at McGill University, he used to make his students observe the fast during Ramadan, celebrate Islamic holidays, and perform the prayers at the correct times—even get up for the dawn prayer—because he was convinced that it was impossible to understand another faith simply by reading books about it. Look into the history of the country or religious tradition you have chosen and find out more about its triumphs or failures. Look out for any mention of it in the news. You might find it helpful to consult a website, such as Search for Common Ground (www.sfcg.org), which gives regular updates on different countries, or subscribe to a periodical dealing with foreign affairs. The object of the exercise is “to make room for the other” in your mind. You will need to approach it with the “science of compassion.” When you come up against something difficult, keep on asking “But why?” Keep trying to understand the entire context of an event, pushing your mind forward so that you can imagine yourself in similar circumstances feeling the same way. Getting to know other peoples and traditions is not easy. There will always be things that we do not understand or find difficult to appreciate—just as we are sometimes puzzled by the behavior of our closest friends—but to experience the limits of our understanding, realizing how little we can know is itself a valuable experience. As you progress, you will probably become aware that everything is more complex than you thought. We tend to see other peoples in simplified snapshots similar to the sound bites of the evening news that stick stubbornly in our minds. People often assume, for example, that London is perpetually shrouded in fog, because they have seen too many television adaptations of Charles Dickens, and that it is always raining, even though London actually has less rainfall per year than Rome, Istanbul, or Sydney (though I fully admit most of it does fall in summer!). People also seem to think that Britons drink gallons of tea every day and reel back in astonishment when I refuse a cup—I have disliked the stuff all my life!

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Even before I can recite the lines I see them so that I could give them very slowly word for word, but my mind is so occupied in looking at my printed image that I have no idea of what I am saying, of the sense of it, etc. When I first found myself doing this I used to think it was merely because I knew the lines imperfectly; but I have quite convinced myself that I really do see an image. The strongest proof that such is really the fact is, I think, the following: "I can look down the mentally seen page and see the words that commence all the lines, and from any one of these words I can continue the line. I find this much easier to do if the words begin ill a straight line than if there are breaks. Example: Étant fait . . . . . Tous . . . . . A des . . . . . Que fit . . . . . Céres . . . . . Avec . . . . . Un fleur . . . . . Comme . . . . . (La Fontaine 8. iv.)" The poor visualizer says: "My ability to form mental images seems, from what I have studied of other people's images, to be defective, and somewhat peculiar. The process by which I seem to remember any particular event is not by x series of distinct images, but a sort of panorama, the faintest impressions of which are perceptible through a thick fog.—I cannot shut my eyes and get a distinct image of anyone, although I used to be able to a few years ago, and the faculty seems to have gradually slipped away.—In my most vivid dreams, where the events appear like the most real facts, I am often troubled with dimness of sight which causes the images to appear indistinct.—To come to the question of the breakfast-table, there is nothing definite about it. Everything is vague. I cannot say what I see. I could not possibly count the chairs, but I happen to know that there are ten. I see nothing in detail.—The chief thing is in general impression that I cannot tell exactly what I do see. The coloring is about the same, as far as I can recall it, only very much washed out. Perhaps the only color I can see at all distinctly is that of the tablecloth, and I could probably see the color of the wall-paper if I could remember what color it was."

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Your whole life has been true. It happened to you. All that time that you felt straight, when you dated men, when you married Brandon—all of what you felt was real. But this story you’re trying to tell, it’s not your story. I think you want your story to be a straight line, but it may not be. Then what is my story? Tell me. So what if you don’t “cohere,” or not all the time? Imagine the perspective of someone who meets you at a party. They see you dancing. It seems like you’re outgoing and fun. But a different person, let’s say someone who meets you at a coffee shop, might describe you as reserved or shy. You’re focused on your work; you don’t make eye contact. Both people can be right. Sometimes you’re this; sometimes you’re that. But that’s just mood, I said. That’s not my self. I know you want to think there’s a firm thing that’s “Molly.” Some core that you can understand and count on. But if there is a core to you, what exactly is it? This is more uncomfortable to think about. What part of you is stable, if you’re actually changing all the time? You didn’t used to be a mother, or a wife, or a restaurant owner. Now you are. That’s a lot of change. What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Problem: Even I do not believe that my experience is possible. Unless. Theory A: I was born gay, or bi, but I did not understand it until now. Or, Theory B: I changed, almost beyond my own recognition. Theory A fits the common understanding of sexual orientation. I saw a glimpse when I was twenty, with Laura, but I have been closeted for most of my life. I have deceived even myself. I clothed myself in layers of self-deception. (How on earth did I do it?) Even while telling myself that I loved Brandon to the exclusion of all others, loved him enough to marry him, somewhere deep within me lived this person who would give anything to fuck a woman. She’d stowed away inside my psyche for years, hiding belowdecks without making a sound. Theory B is of course simpler. I changed. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I read in Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts that Nelson’s mother once sent her a card to celebrate a poetry publication, and on the card was that famous Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nelson was unsettled by it. “I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories,” she writes. “As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it. This has always struck me as cause for lament, not celebration.”19

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Third, spend some time trying to define exactly what distinguishes you from everybody else. Delve beneath your everyday consciousness: Do you find your true self—what the Upanishads called the atman? Or does this self constantly elude you? Then ask yourself how you think you can possibly talk so knowingly about the self of other people. As part of your practice of mindfulness, notice how often you contradict yourself and act or speak in a manner that surprises you so that you say, “Now why did I do that?” Try to describe the essence of your personality to somebody else. Write down a list of your qualities, good and bad. And then ask yourself whether it really sums you up. Make a serious attempt to pin down precisely what it is that you love about your partner or a close friend. List that person’s qualities: Is that why you love him? Or is there something about her that you cannot describe? During your mindfulness practice, look around your immediate circle: your family, colleagues, and friends. What do you really know about each and every one of them? What are their deepest fears and hopes? What are their most intimate dreams and fantasies? And how well do you think they really know you? Meditate on Hamlet’s words to Guildenstern. How many people could say to you that you “pluck out the heart of my mystery”? In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant ways. How often do you belittle other people in your mind to make them fit your worldview? Notice how upsetting it is when you become aware that somebody is trying to manipulate or control you, or when somebody officiously explains your thoughts and actions to you, plucking out the heart of your mystery. THE EIGHTH STEPHow Should We Speak to One Another?Dialogue is one of the buzzwords of our time. There is widespread conviction that if only people would enter into dialogue, peace would break out. But there is very little Socratic dialogue in the world today. Our discourse tends to be aggressive, a tradition we inherited from the ancient Greeks. In the democratic assemblies of Athens, citizens learned to debate competitively, to marshal arguments logically and effectively, and to argue their case against one another in order to win. They practiced rhetorical ploys to undermine their opponents’ position and had no qualms about discrediting them and their cause in order to marginalize their policies. The object was to defeat one’s opponent: nobody was expected to change his mind, be converted to the other side, or enter empathetically into the rival viewpoint.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I’d pried myself out of a frame that didn’t fit, and now Nora and I would fit me for a new one. We worked to make the facts of me—a mother, a wife, someone who had lived her whole life in the straight world—square up alongside her. Could I be polyamorous? Could I be someone’s lover? Could I be queer? Who would decide? I wanted to put my ear to her body like a shell, let her echo tell me who I was. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Can I go down on you? I asked. It had taken weeks to work up the guts. She seemed to consider. I’m usually a top, she said. Not a stone top, not entirely. But a top. What do you mean by “stone top”? I said. I mean, I don’t really want to be touched. I don’t need it. I’d rather touch you. I’d rather give than receive. Is this queer sex? If she’s a top, do I have to be a bottom? What if I want to be both? What if I want to be neither? I said, I just want to be a person in bed with you. 16One afternoon, June came home pouting. When I asked what was wrong, she said a girl in her class had called her a baby. I murmured sympathies. I wanted to drive back to school and pummel the kid. What do you think? I asked her. Do you think you’re a baby? June shook her head, dragged the back of her hand across her dripping nose. She was not quite four years old. Then there you go, I said. You’re not a baby, Junie. You know who you are. Easier to say it to her than to say it to myself. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “Birth is not merely that which divides women from men,” writes author Rachel Cusk. “It also divides women from themselves. . . . Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.”25 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] September 7, 2012: I went into labor late on a Friday night. Each time a contraction came, I wrapped my arms around Brandon’s neck and clung to him, hung from his chest in a perverse and painful slow dance. At five the next evening, sixteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. Another twelve hours later—twenty-eight hours into labor—I was ten centimeters dilated. As the sun rose that Sunday morning, I started to push.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I remember my shock the first time I met a femme lesbian. It was at a potluck in grad school. This woman was the most mainstream-pretty of all of us, with wavy blond hair and lipstick, but that night she said something about her girlfriend, that their anniversary was coming up. It was so casual, the way she mentioned it, but she had to have known what it would signal. We’d had no clue. Oh my god! I’d blurted. You’re gay? Really? She smiled and gave a shrug. It was like witnessing a Martian landing. The year was 2002, and I was twenty-four years old. It had never occurred to me that a lesbian could look like the rest of us, that lesbians could be more than one thing, that anyone could. Now Nora’s friend called me femme. She did it in a chummy way: she was femme herself, and she was proud to claim it. I knew she meant to make me feel included, to welcome me to the club. But it didn’t make me feel included. I was and have been a lot of things, none of them settled: a straight woman, a not-straight woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife in a white lace dress, a woman separated from her husband, a woman dating a woman whom some might mistake for a man. Nora’s friend tried to give me language for myself, to make both of us more comfortable, but instead I felt like I’d been calf-roped. “The mistake,” writes theorist McKenzie Wark in a letter to writer Kathy Acker, “is to make a fetish of what differentiation produces: gay/straight; butch/femme; top/bottom, etc. Whenever these get hardened into something ‘natural,’ into the law, I get suspicious.”30 Harden, like the electric-blue curing light that a dentist uses to set a newly filled cavity. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] As a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry. My father’s best friend was a writer, and he gave me a couple of collections by Adrienne Rich. I don’t know if I knew then that Rich was a lesbian, or if I did, it didn’t mean much. But on the cusp of my thirty-seventh birthday, I took down one of the volumes and thumbed it open to “Splittings”: I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence. I had tried to quarantine a part of my life that frightened me. For nearly a year after jury duty, I had tried to push it away. This time I would do something different. I wouldn’t leave me behind. 19Brandon and I lived together for six weeks after I asked for a separation. We slept in the same bed, the way we’d done for a decade. We stopped fighting at home. I wouldn’t do it anymore, wouldn’t fight where June could hear us. We continued to fight, but in therapy.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Contrary to all statistical probability, then, there was an astonishing, positively imperative internal logic to his meeting me here in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, a place he had never before entered in his life. Having said this, Austerlitz fell silent, and for a while, it seemed to me, he gazed into the farthest distance. Since my childhood and youth, he finally began, looking at me again, I have never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to me. It hasn’t been easy to make my way out of my own inhibitions, and it will not be easy now to put the story into anything like proper order. I grew up, began Austerlitz that evening in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel, in the little country town of Bala in Wales, in the home of a Calvinist preacher and former missionary called Emyr Elias who was married to a timid- natured Englishwoman. I have never liked looking back at the time I spent in that unhappy house, which stood in isolation on a hill just outside the town and was much too large for two people and an only child. Several rooms on the top floor were kept shut up year in, year out. Even today I still sometimes dream that one of those locked doors opens and I step through it, into a friendlier, more familiar world. Several of the rooms that were not locked were unused too. Furnished sparsely with a bed or a chest of drawers, curtains drawn even during the day, they drowsed in a twilight that soon extinguished every sense of self- awareness in me. So I can recall almost nothing of my early days in Bala except how it hurt to be suddenly called by a new name, and how dreadful it was, once my own clothes had disappeared, to have to go around dressed in the English fashion in shorts, knee-length socks which were always slipping down, a string vest like a fishnet and a mouse-gray shirt, much too thin. I know that I often lay awake for hours in my narrow bed in the manse, trying to conjure up the faces of those whom I had left, I feared through my own fault, but not until I was numb with weariness and my eyelids sank in the darkness did I see my mother bending down to me just for a fleeting moment, or my father smiling as he put on his hat. Such comfort made it all the worse to wake up early in the morning and have to face the knowledge, new every day, that I was not at home now but very far away, in some kind of captivity. Only recently have I recalled how oppressed I felt, in all the time I spent with the Eliases, by the fact that they never opened a window, and perhaps that is why when I was out and about somewhere on a

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  “But to leave your home—your husband and your children,” her husband replies. “You haven’t thought of what people will say.” “I can’t consider that,” she says. “All I know is that this is necessary for me.” She leaves their apartment as the curtain falls, slamming the door behind her. The play raised a furor when it premiered in Copenhagen in 1879. Under protest, Ibsen rewrote the ending the following year for a production in Germany. In the altered version, the husband insists that his wife look in on their sleeping children before she leaves. He drags her to the bedroom doorway and says, “Look—there they are, sleeping peacefully and without a care,” he says. “Tomorrow, when they wake and call for their mother, they will be . . . motherless!” The young wife trembles. “Ah, though it is a sin against myself,” she cries, “I cannot leave them!” Then she collapses, and the play is over. Ibsen would shortly declare this revised ending a “barbaric outrage,” and he refused to allow its use in subsequent performances. But there it is anyway, still there, in the notes at the back of the edition at my local library: a woman talked down from the ledge of who she is. 18A friend tells me after the fact that she was jealous of me. She’s a mother of two, married to a man. I want to blow up my life and have a lover, she texts. Lol? Lol. Nora and I are in bed, and I have asked again to go down on her. She says she doesn’t come that way. Maybe I can just make you feel good, I say. She assents. I slide down the bed, my lips tracing a line along her belly. I take my time; after all this, I’m as unsure of me as she is. I’ve never been here before, and I want to look at her. Her pubic hair is thick and shiny black, its borders tidy as a putting green. The skin beneath it is purplish-brown, smooth as the inside of a cheek. I want to kiss her there like a mouth, gently, a first kiss. But I know I shouldn’t press my luck. So instead I begin in earnest, make my tongue flat and wide, and lap her like she’s an ice-cream cone. She sighs, a small moan, and I am levitating. She permits me a half-dozen passes, maybe ten seconds, and then she starts to giggle. She swats at my head. Not like that! She pants, her palm against my forehead. It’s too ticklish! She scoots up the bed, snaps her thighs back together. She’s adorable when she’s got the giggles, and I hate it. I’d had my mouth on her, and she’d laughed. I don’t know how to have sex with you, I say. And I feel like you won’t let me learn. Another way of putting it, which I did not say: I am learning who you are, and this isn’t working.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  before us as we turned a corner, every facade, every flight of steps looked to me both familiar and utterly alien. I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie, not on this first walk we took through the deserted park nor in the late afternoon, when we sat in the dimly lit kavarna of the Mésto Moskva under a picture of pink water lilies measuring at least four square yards. I remember, said Austerlitz, that we ordered an ice cream, or rather, as it turned out, a confection resembling an ice cream, a plaster- like substance tasting of potato starch and notable chiefly for the fact that even after more than an hour it did not melt. Apart from us the only customers in the Mésto Moskva were two old gentlemen playing chess at one of the tables at the back. The waiter who was standing by the net curtains, which were discolored with smoke, his hands behind his back and looking out, lost in thought, at the rubbish dump overgrown with giant hogweed on the other side of the road, was himself advanced in age. His white hair and moustache were carefully trimmed, and although he too wore one of those mouse-gray nylon coats it was easy to imagine him in deep black, well-cut tails, with a velvet bow tie above a starched shirtfront radiant with supernatural cleanliness, wearing shiny patent-leather shoes which reflected the lamplight of a grand hotel lobby. When he brought Marie a flat pack of forty Cuban cigarettes displaying a pretty palm-frond motif, and then gave her a light with an elegantly executed gesture, I could see that she greatly admired him. The Cuban tobacco smoke hung in blue drifts in the air between us, and some time went by before Marie asked what was in my mind, why I was so abstracted, so lost in thought; how could I have lapsed so suddenly from the happy mood which she had sensed in me yesterday? And all I could say was that I didn’t know. I think, said Austerlitz, I tried to explain that something or other unknown wrenched at my heart here in Marienbad, something very obvious like an ordinary name or a term which one cannot remember for the sake of anyone or anything in the world. I do not now recall in detail how we spent those few days in Marienbad, said Austerlitz. I know that I often lay for hours in the bubbling mineral baths and the retiring rooms, which did me good in one way but in another may have weakened the resistance I had put up for so many years against the emergence of memory. Once we went to a concert at the Gogol Theater, where a Russian pianist called Bloch played the Papillons and Kinderszenen to an audience of half a dozen. On the way back to the hotel Marie spoke, almost as a warning, so it seemed to me, said Austerlitz, of the clouding of Schumann’s mind as his madness came on and how at last, in the middle of

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Berlin argued that human convictions can be placed in three kinds of ‘baskets’: those that can be established by empirical observation; those that can be established by logical deduction; and a third basket ‘in which all those questions live which cannot easily be fitted into the other two’. 20 The third basket hence contains the moral, political, social and religious values and ideas that have shaped human culture and given human existence direction and purpose. Berlin writes: There is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favour of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ – each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. 21 One of the reasons why Berlin was so respected as an intellectual historian and philosopher was his willingness to acknowledge ambiguity and uncertainty – notice his use of the term ‘believe’ in the last few lines of this statement, where lesser philosophers or ideological activists might present these views as truths – something we know . The intelligent application of reason leads people to a plurality of defensible – yet unprovable – ideals or moral values, not to a single universal concept of ‘the good’. Berlin rejected the monist view that ‘all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors’. This, he believed, simply gave a spurious intellectual legitimacy to some form of totalitarianism: ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.’ 22 Berlin’s criticisms offer a powerful criticism of blind faith or obedience demanded by institutions, ideologies and charismatic individuals – including some that are clearly religious, but claim not to be. We have a further question to explore in conducting our mental experiment, which is perhaps the most important: are human beings capable of meaningful existence within this imagined world of certainties? Suppose we limit ourselves to such certainties: can they provide a basis for a good life? Shallow Certainties Don’t Allow Humans to Flourish Many philosophers argue that the best way of assessing beliefs is to consider their rationality. Do they make sense? Are there good reasons for thinking they are right, or at least defensible? This is entirely reasonable. But as I suggested earlier in this chapter, being right does not necessarily mean being relevant. Let me return to one of the certainties of our imagined world, noted earlier: ‘The whole is greater than the part.’ I can be absolutely sure of this truth.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  The entire building, from the outside more like a mansion house than anything else, therefore consists of four wings, each not much more than three meters deep, set around the courtyard in an almost Illusionist manner and without any corridors or passages in them. It is a style resembling the prison architecture of the bourgeois epoch, when it was decided that the most useful design for the penal system was to build wings of cells around a rectangular or circular courtyard, with catwalks running along the interior. And it was not just of a prison that the archives building in the Karmelitska reminded me, said Austerlitz; it also suggested a monastery, a riding school, an opera house, and a lunatic asylum, and all these ideas mingled in my mind as I looked at the twilight coming in from above, and thought that on the rows of galleries I saw a dense crowd of people, some of them waving hats or handkerchiefs, as passengers on board a steamer used to do when it put out to sea. At any rate, it was a little while before I managed to bring myself back to the present, and turned to the lodge near the entrance, from which the porter had been keeping an eye on me ever since I had crossed the threshold and, attracted by the light of the interior courtyard, had passed by him without noticing his presence. If you wanted to speak to this porter you had to lean a long way down to his window, which was so low that he appeared to be kneeling on the floor of his lodge. Although I had soon adopted the right position, said Austerlitz, I could not make myself understood, with the result that after launching into a long verbal torrent in which I could make out nothing but the words anglicky and Anglican, repeated several times with special emphasis, the porter eventually phoned to request assistance from one of the archive’s officials, who did indeed, at practically the next moment, while I was still filling in a visitor’s form at the desk opposite the lodge, materialize beside me as if she had, as they say, sprung out of the ground. Tereza Ambrosova—so she introduced herself to me, immediately asking in her slightly hesitant but otherwise very correct English what I wanted to know—Tereza Ambrosova was a pale woman of almost transparent appearance, and about forty years old.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] So what was it? Was I gay all along, or bi, and I’d just looked the other way? After nothing happened with Laura, hadn’t I been a little glad? Of course: that must have been when I went into the closet. People don’t just become gay. I must have repressed it, buried it so deep that even I couldn’t find it. As a child, I’d never believed what I heard other kids say about gay people going to hell. But the fact that people said it left a mark. It raised a fear, a prickly, painful thing, a splinter for other fears to snag on. I didn’t want to be gay. I thought, Who on earth would want to be gay? Though I knew that other people’s hatred was wrong, the splinter must have dug in fast, so deep I couldn’t see it. I felt a low humming relief, when I understood what it was to be gay, that I was not that. Early on in dating Brandon, when we swapped dating histories and have-you-evers, I’d told him about Laura, about how confusing and exciting it was, how sad and strange. It was no big deal for either of us: People are complicated, ha-ha! Now we’d been married for nearly a decade. Now I wanted Nora. All that time, had this been under the surface, waiting to surge up like magma, frothy and fast, solidifying where it met the air? If sexual orientation is something you’re born with, I must have always been gay, or bi, or whatever I was. But I’d thought being closeted meant, at the very least, that you knew what you were. That made sense to me: you hid because you had something to hide. I’d never felt I had anything to hide. I had felt straight, with one strange exception that never went anywhere. Laura had confused me because she was an anomaly. But once the confusion and the wanting subsided, I didn’t feel not-straight. I felt like there was simply something about her, an isolated case. Even after Laura, I knew my story. My story made sense. Is there another universe where the story could have gone otherwise? How good is my imagination?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Delve beneath your everyday consciousness: Do you find your true self—what the Upanishads called the atman? Or does this self constantly elude you? Then ask yourself how you think you can possibly talk so knowingly about the self of other people. As part of your practice of mindfulness, notice how often you contradict yourself and act or speak in a manner that surprises you so that you say, “Now why did I do that?” Try to describe the essence of your personality to somebody else. Write down a list of your qualities, good and bad. And then ask yourself whether it really sums you up. Make a serious attempt to pin down precisely what it is that you love about your partner or a close friend. List that person’s qualities: Is that why you love him? Or is there something about her that you cannot describe? During your mindfulness practice, look around your immediate circle: your family, colleagues, and friends. What do you really know about each and every one of them? What are their deepest fears and hopes? What are their most intimate dreams and fantasies? And how well do you think they really know you? Meditate on Hamlet’s words to Guildenstern. How many people could say to you that you “pluck out the heart of my mystery”? In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant ways. How often do you belittle other people in your mind to make them fit your worldview? Notice how upsetting it is when you become aware that somebody is trying to manipulate or control you, or when somebody officiously explains your thoughts and actions to you, plucking out the heart of your mystery. THE EIGHTH STEP How Should We Speak to One Another? Dialogue is one of the buzzwords of our time. There is widespread conviction that if only people would enter into dialogue, peace would break out. But there is very little Socratic dialogue in the world today. Our discourse tends to be aggressive, a tradition we inherited from the ancient Greeks. In the democratic assemblies of Athens, citizens learned to debate competitively, to marshal arguments logically and effectively, and to argue their case against one another in order to win. They practiced rhetorical ploys to undermine their opponents’ position and had no qualms about discrediting them and their cause in order to marginalize their policies. The object was to defeat one’s opponent: nobody was expected to change his mind, be converted to the other side, or enter empathetically into the rival viewpoint.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Given that a person may have a diversity of ‘social identities’, these different narratives or frameworks can seem contradictory, thus creating tension and uncertainty within the individual. 13 Sean McCloud, an American academic who specialises in the mass media representations of religion, similarly notes that ‘Americans live by picking, mixing and combining a variety of religious and cultural idioms (within a sphere of materials constrained by their social locations) to find what works for them in everyday life.’ 14 This is not, however, a new or specifically American phenomenon. In late classical antiquity, Roman imperial culture showed a remarkable ability to accommodate multiple narratives and cultural perspectives, despite the intellectual tensions that this often created. 15 The solution to this problem is not to integrate these narratives, but rather to respect their specific domains of application and validity. If our experience of life is disordered, perhaps we have to expect the same from our attempts to represent it. This ability to switch interpretative frames when moving from one area of social interaction to another (for example, from a laboratory to a synagogue to a local political committee) has its parallel in multicultural contexts, in which individuals feel that they ‘belong’ to multiple communities, each with its own identity and norms. Cross-cultural studies, however, have tended to focus on groups of individuals drawn from different contexts and failed to take account of single individuals who have internalised more than one culture. 16 Studies of the dynamics of ‘multiple cultures in the same mind’ suggests that people use a mechanism of ‘frame switching’, in which such an individual shifts between interpretive frames rooted in different cultures in response to cues originating within their social environment. The empirical study of how human beings construct their systems of meaning suggests that we have a remarkable capacity to hold together multiple narratives or pictures, even when these might seem to be disconnected, if not mutually exclusive. Individuals often develop accounts of life that are more complex, fragmentary and situational than the terms ‘religion’ or ‘worldview’ might suggest. 17 This does not mean that these personal (and idiosyncratic) constructions are perceived as incoherent; in fact, individuals often find them remarkably helpful in making sense of life and coping with its challenges. While some limit themselves to a single coherent master narrative, most people seem prepared to apply a range of narratives or frames selectively to different aspects of life, without a full resolution of their tensions and divergences, perhaps reflecting a realisation that no single big picture or grand story can address every aspect of the complexities of modern human existence. That’s why some Christians are capitalists, some socialists and others politically disengaged. Worldviews are often selectively appropriated, with certain themes foregrounded and others marginalised. Individuals tend to construct their own personalised versions of Big Pictures, adapting them to their circumstances and correlating them in different manners.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I discovered Bizet’s Carmen . I even liked the gummy pop of the Monkees’ music. They were easy to sing. And always Motown. If my mother was fire and my father was water, I was a little of each. My spirit found refuge in those watery realms. I too was looking for a vision that would lead me free of the domestic prison our home had become with my stepfather. Or rather, vision was looking for me, and I was still hiding and afraid. It carried responsibility. I was fire and I was confused about the fire in my body. I was told it was wrong by the church to feel desire, yet I pondered on how desire must have been created by the same god that I was told created everything in the world. Power and shame tumbled together. I created constantly. I drew, took photographs, and I loved to sing. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] In the house, everything stopped when we heard my stepfather’s car pull up into the drive after he got off work around four o’clock. Everyone hid outside or in their rooms. When I heard his car I’d turn off the record player, stop singing or dancing, and find a broom or a rag and clean, even though I had usually finished cleaning by then. One afternoon I forgot the time. I was singing along with an album spinning on my record player when the door of my bedroom burst open. My stepfather stood with his belt in his hand. He slackened and popped it forcefully. He forbade me ever to sing in the house again. Then he beat me. I stopped singing. I didn’t write. I kept sketchbooks, made designs, and my art was even picked for student exhibitions, but for all that imagination, I couldn’t imagine another way through, or a way out. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] I was excited to start all over in a new school at the beginning of my first year at Will Rogers High. And like every first day of school since kindergarten, I determined to do my best as I opened up my new pads of paper, sharpened my new pencils, lined up my new pens and packed them in my school bag. Several junior high classes fed into the school. It was massive. At every bell students jammed the halls, streaming to make it to the next class. Now and then I waved to someone I knew and added my greeting to the din of voices. I’d always liked the discipline and ritual of learning. To know something gave me more ability to move within my mind. There was more territory to contemplate. There were more doors. Where I got stuck was in wanting to perfect what I learned; instead, we had to keep going, imperfect, from one assignment or set of lessons to the next. There was always something more to know.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In any case, they react against particular conditions and assertions inside the Corinthian Christian community of which we know little, except as we glimpse them through Paul’s words. The glimpses reveal women who have independent wealth; women who have converted when their husbands have not; women who have similar roles of authority to men, and who assert themselves in public worship as filled with the Holy Spirit. Much of this goes against the conventions of both Jewish and Graeco-Roman society; it is justified by the unpredictable and hardly controllable presence of the Spirit active in the everyday lives of the assembly, to the extent that the Spirit will lead women as much as men to speak in languages beyond ordinary understanding, glossolalia . [12] The result in Paul’s texts is downright incoherent. His hierarchical gender definitions in 1 Cor. 11 are followed by a long discussion condemning long hair in men (‘degrading’) and insisting that women should publicly pray or prophesy only when veiled, among the justifications being that this is ‘because of the angels’ – a cryptic argument, but dependent on the common assumption in Judaism of the propensity of angels to lust after mortal women. A few chapters further on (1 Cor. 14.34–35) comes an emphatic assertion that women should simply keep silent in worship, ‘as in all the churches of the saints’. The inconsistency is so blatant that many commentators have seen the latter statement as a later insertion in the text, reflecting conflicts of a later generation; its placement in early manuscripts is significantly varied, perhaps indicating a degree of puzzlement about how to reconcile the two pronouncements. [13] The one unavoidable consistency between the two passages is their differential treatment of women and men, in line with the general tradition of Mediterranean society. That differential was then – and is now – in perpetual tension with the common inclusion of the sexes in baptism: a reflection of early Christianity’s perpetual ambiguity between presenting a radically new message and trying to ensure an appeal in that message to all levels of surrounding society. MARRIAGE

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Yes, with Raheem. He told me over the weekend that he wanted us to handle his account. He said that I was a big help in his decision to do business with us.” My boss leaned back in his leather chair and gave me this baffled look, and then he hit me with, “Who is Raheem?” “You introduced me to him last week,” I proclaimed, thinking my boss was losing his mind. “He was sitting right there on that couch.” I pointed. “He was tall, dark-skinned, bald head, trimmed goatee—a very handsome man. He was in here talking to you about business.” “I’m sorry, Ayeesha, but I have no idea who you’re talking about. I never met any Raheem, nor am I familiar with anyone with that name,” he said. I stood in my boss’s office dumbfounded. Didn’t anyone remember Raheem except me? “You’ve got to know him. I met him right here. He’s got to be real. I mean, we—” I stopped myself from blowing up my own spot in front of Mr. Robinson. “Raheem took me out to a ranch in Riverhead on Friday evening. He showed me his horses.” “Did you say a ranch in Riverhead?” Mr. Robinson said. Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to a picture sitting on my boss’s shelf. I’d never seen it there before, but it was familiar. It was a picture of Raheem. “That’s him! That’s Raheem!” I shouted, pointing to the picture. “My son?” “Your son?” “Yes. But his name isn’t Raheem. It’s Jerome, and he was killed three years ago. In fact, in Riverhead.” I looked at him like, What the fuck! “If you don’t mind me asking, how did he die?” I asked. “Jerome loved horses all his life. A week after his twenty-third birthday he was trampled by a stallion on a ranch in Riverhead. In fact, today would have been my son’s twenty-sixth birthday,” he proclaimed. “Ohmygod!” I muttered, with my hand cupped over my mouth. I felt like I was about to faint. How could it be? I asked myself. My nipples were still sore. It had seemed so real. “Ayeesha, you sure you’re okay? You need some time off? You need to go home?” he asked. “No, I’ll be fine,” I said, leaving his office. I was spooked. Had I been fuckin’ a spirit? A ghost? I didn’t know what to think. I made my way back to my desk trying to come up with a logical explanation for all this shit. The crazy dreams, the wild sex, and the fuckin’ horses! “Ayeesha, you okay?” Carol asked. I nodded. I was starting to get a headache. I went into my purse looking for something to take for my sudden headache. That’s when I pulled out the note Raheem had written me on Thursday: Meet me at the Sheraton Hotel, room 825, during your lunch.