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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Albert Memmi Paris, May 2013 Preface Here’s a French writer from Tunisia who is neither French nor Tunisian. He’s barely a Jew because, in a way, he doesn’t want to be one. The odd subject of this book is precisely the impossibility of being anything at all for a Tunisian Jew formed by French culture. The young man whose story is told here can define himself only by adding to the rejections of others his own rejections of the world. He is Jewish (with a Berber mother, which does not simplify things) and a Tunisian subject, that is to say a subject of the Bey of Tunis. But, as a pogrom during which Arabs massacre Jews shows him, he is not really Tunisian. His culture is French and he is the only one in his class who understands Racine properly. However, Vichy France delivers him to the Germans and Free France, when he wants to fight for her, asks him to change his Jewish-sounding name. There would be no question of being a Jew if, to be so, he didn’t need to accept a faith he does not share and traditions he views as ridiculous. What will he become in the end? One is tempted to say a writer as Mr. Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt proves that he is one, and also because a writer defines himself by his inability, nostalgic in fact, to blend into the anonymity of a class or race. In any case, there is no doubt that writing was the road to Damascus for this non-believing Paul. In terms of language at least, he wanted to be French. After reading about the father’s coughing fit, the mother’s dance, the son’s sexual initiation, the reader will surely conclude that Mr. Memmi is a novelist. But that’s not all he is. The mere fact of having described so precisely and sensitively the rending condition of a young Jew becoming aware through sheer intelligence and will of who he is, and is not, demonstrates a deeper choice. By writing about the difficulty of being a Jew, the author finally chooses to be one (and that’s good), replacing the traditional religious sensibility of his forebears with a sensibility that is more modern, dramatic, intelligent, loyal without illusions. This allows him to remain what he is while paying attention to the contradictions of others, French or Arab. Somehow, he will no longer deny anything in himself or others. The book, indeed, ends with the hero’s flight to South America. But that is novelistic artifice. This kind of hero never leaves or, if he does, leaves unchanged. All of us, French and born in North Africa, also remain who we are, faced with contradictions that today bloody our cities, and which we will not overcome by fleeing them, but by living them out. That is why I so much value Mr. Memmi’s beautiful book. Albert Camus PROLOGUE This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It flattens out Paul’s careful statement of the vocation of “the Jew” (to be the light of the world) into simply another aspect of the general truth that “all have sinned.” This in turn leaves 3:1–9 high and dry, or at least very difficult. This short passage consists of a rapid-fire series of questions and answers that make excellent sense if we read 2:17–29 in the way I am suggesting, but very little sense any other way. Again, many commentators and preachers have noticed this; some very careful and “conservative” expositors declare that the passage is too complex and puzzling to be much help. This in turn results in a failure to see what Paul is getting at in 3:21–26. Finally, the “problem” Paul is addressing is assumed to be simply human wrongdoing (“sin”). However, in Romans 1:18–23 and in the summary of that passage in 3:23 we find a deeper element as well. “Sin” is rooted in idolatry, the swapping of the divine Glory for images. Here Paul is exactly on the map of Second Temple Jewish writings. But many today, eager to talk about “sin,” have forgotten that it is the second-order problem. The root cause of the trouble is the worship of idols. These exegetical problems point to the underlying theological difficulties with the usual reading. This usual reading is all about how we get “right with God” in order to “go to heaven”; but Paul never mentions “going to heaven,” here or elsewhere in Romans, and the idea of being “right with God,” though related to Paul’s theme, is usually taken out of the specific context he intends. Ironically, the usual reading takes “going to heaven” (or some near equivalent) for granted and then complains if, instead, someone tries to reintroduce into these chapters the themes that Paul demonstrably is expounding. It all becomes so complicated, people grumble—when what they really mean is, “I am so used to reading this passage one way that I find it hard to switch and consider other options.” Further, the usual reading assumes that the problem Paul is facing is divine wrath and that in 3:24–26, and in particular with the key term hilastērion , he is explaining how this wrath is somehow dealt with. This is lexically possible, but there are four problems with it.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  In the “normal” group key parts of the brain worked together to produce a coherent pattern of filtering, focus, and analysis. (See left image below.) In contrast, the brain waves of traumatized subjects were more loosely coordinated and failed to come together into a coherent pattern. Specifically, they did not generate the brain-wave pattern that helps people pay attention to the task at hand by filtering out irrelevant information (the upward curve, labeled N200). In addition, the core information-processing configuration of the brain (the downward peak, P300) was poorly defined; the depth of the wave determines how well we are able to take in and analyze new data. This was important new information about how traumatized people process nontraumatic information that has profound implications for understanding day-to-day information processing. These brain-wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment. [image "Diagram comparing brainwave patterns in normal individuals (left) versus individuals with PTSD (right). The left side shows synchronized brainwave activity, while the right side displays less coordinated brainwaves, indicating difficulty filtering irrelevant information and attending to stimuli." file=image_rsrc781.jpg] Normal versus PTSD. Patterns of attention. Milliseconds after the brain is presented with input it starts organizing the meaning of the incoming information. Normally, all regions of the brain collaborate in a synchronized pattern (left), while the brainwaves in PTSD are less well coordinated; the brain has trouble filtering out irrelevant information and has problems attending to the stimulus at hand. Sandy McFarlane’s study reminded me of what Pierre Janet had said back in 1889: “Traumatic stress is an illness of not being able to be fully alive in the present.” Years later, when I saw the movie The Hurt Locker, which dealt with the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, I immediately recalled Sandy’s study: As long as they were coping with extreme stress, these men performed with pinpoint focus; but back in civilian life they were overwhelmed having to make simple choices in a supermarket. We are now seeing alarming statistics about the number of returning combat veterans who enroll in college on the GI Bill but do not complete their degrees. (Some estimates are over 80 percent.) Their well-documented problems with focusing and attention are surely contributing to these poor results. McFarlane’s study clarified a possible mechanism for the lack of focus and attention in PTSD, but it also presented a whole new challenge: Was there any way to change these dysfunctional brain-wave patterns? It was seven years before I learned that there might be ways to do that.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  My point here is not that some ways of addressing global terrorism are more morally justified or more effective than others. These are complex issues. Easy “solutions” are bound to be oversimplifications. I want to say simply this: that many have observed an apparent connection between ways in which people have described the meaning of Jesus’s death and ways in which others have seen fit to try to “solve” problems in the world. If God needs to punish, then perhaps we do as well. If God solves problems by using violence, maybe he wants us to do so too. However, the shift if not toward pacifism itself, then at least toward a strict limitation on military responses to global problems in certain sectors of public opinion in the Western world as a whole over the last century, has caused some in the churches to suggest views of the death of Jesus in which divine punishment plays no role at all. Some have even suggested that the connection between divine punishment and Jesus’s death is a comparatively modern invention, though in truth we can find the same theme stated (in a different context, as I shall show) in the Bible itself. We also find it in the early church fathers, and we should note that many of them were strongly opposed to the death penalty at a time when it was taken for granted in the violent world of the Roman Empire. We should not too quickly assume that theories of atonement are directly reflected in or reflective of social practice. All this points to the complexity of recent debates about the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion, about the “Why?” that haunts the whole subject. If certain “punishment” models of atonement are perceived to license abusive or aggressive behavior, whether in families or between nations, does that mean we should rule them out of order, even if they seem to be sanctioned by some passages of scripture? Or—to look at things from the other end of the telescope—if such models of atonement are deemed after all to be central to scripture and to the preaching of the gospel itself, so that to soft-pedal such ideas would be to give up on an element of vital spiritual power, ought we instead to regard the sort of objections I have described as a diabolical trick to distract the church from its core message? Sadly, these questions often get bundled up with other ones, including ones about cultural, political, and social problems. At that point, clear-headed fresh readings of scripture can be seen receding over the horizon. But if you take the first line—that “punishment” models of atonement are to be ruled out because of their horrible view of God or their equally horrible social consequences—what are the alternatives? Traditionally there have been two, both with strong claims to some kind of biblical basis.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  This made me wonder: Our patients had hallucinations—the doctors routinely asked about them and noted them as signs of how disturbed the patients were. But if the stories I’d heard in the wee hours were true, could it be that these “hallucinations” were in fact the fragmented memories of real experiences? Were hallucinations just the concoctions of sick brains? Could people make up physical sensations they had never experienced? Was there a clear line between creativity and pathological imagination? Between memory and imagination? These questions remain unanswered to this day, but research has shown that people who’ve been abused as children often feel sensations (such as abdominal pain) that have no obvious physical cause; they hear voices warning of danger or accusing them of heinous crimes. There was no question that many patients on the ward engaged in violent, bizarre, and self-destructive behaviors, particularly when they felt frustrated, thwarted, or misunderstood. They threw temper tantrums, hurled plates, smashed windows, and cut themselves with shards of glass. At that time I had no idea why someone might react to a simple request (“Let me clean that goop out of your hair”) with rage or terror. I usually followed the lead of the experienced nurses, who signaled when to back off or, if that did not work, to restrain a patient. I was surprised and alarmed by the satisfaction I sometimes felt after I’d wrestled a patient to the floor so a nurse could give an injection, and I gradually realized how much of our professional training was geared to helping us stay in control in the face of terrifying and confusing realities. Sylvia was a gorgeous nineteen-year-old Boston University student who usually sat alone in the corner of the ward, looking frightened to death and virtually mute, but whose reputation as the girlfriend of an important Boston mafioso gave her an aura of mystery. After she refused to eat for more than a week and rapidly started to lose weight, the doctors decided to force-feed her. It took three of us to hold her down, another to push the rubber feeding tube down her throat, and a nurse to pour the liquid nutrients into her stomach. Later, during a midnight confession, Sylvia spoke timidly and hesitantly about her childhood sexual abuse by her brother and uncle. I realized then our display of “caring” must have felt to her much like a gang rape. This experience, and others like it, helped me formulate this rule for my students: If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient’s past.

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

  AMBROSE. According to the letter of the law, a woman is compelled to marry, however unwilling, in order that a brother may raise up seed to his brother who is dead. The letter therefore killeth, but the Spirit is the master of charity. THEOPHYLACT. Now the Sadducees resting upon a weak foundation, did not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection. For imagining the future life in the resurrection to be carnal, they were justly misled, and hence reviling the doctrine of the resurrection as a thing impossible they invent the story, There were seven brothers, &c. BEDE. (ut sup.) They devise this story in order to convict those of folly, who assert the resurrection of the dead. Hence they object a base fable, that they may deny the truth of the resurrection. AMBROSE. Mystically, this woman is the synagogue, which had seven husbands, as it is said to the Samaritan, Thou hadst five husbands, (John 4:18.) because the Samaritan follows only the five books of Moses, the synagogue for the most part seven. And from none of them has she received the seed of an hereditary offspring, and so can have no part with her husbands in the resurrection, because she perverts the spiritual meaning of the precept into a carnal. For not any carnal brother is pointed at, who should raise seed to his deceased brother, but that brother who from the dead people of the Jews should claim unto himself for wife the wisdom of the divine worship, and from it should raise up seed in the Apostles, who being left as it were unformed in the womb of the synagogue, have according to the election of grace been thought worthy to be preserved by the admixture of a new seed. BEDE. Or these seven brothers answer to the reprobate, who throughout the whole life of the world, which revolves in seven days, are fruitless in good works, and these being carried away by death one after another, at length the course of the evil world, as the barren woman, itself also passes away. THEOPHYLACT. But our Lord shews that in the resurrection there will be no fleshly conversation, thereby overthrowing their doctrine together with its slender foundation; as it follows, And Jesus said unto them, The children of this world marry, &c. AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Ev. l. ii. cap. 49.) For marriages are for the sake of children, children for succession, succession because of death. Where then there is no death, there are no marriages; and hence it follows, But they which shall be accounted worthy, &c. BEDE. Which must not be taken as if only they who are worthy were either to rise again or be without marriage, but all sinners also shall rise again, and abide without marriage in that new world. But our Lord wished to mention only the elect, that He might incite the minds of His hearers to search into the glory of the resurrection.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The question, “What exactly happened?” is of course ambiguous. At one level the answer is relatively clear: betrayal, arrest, nighttime hearings, rough Roman justice, violence, beating, weeping, death, burial. But the question underneath that (as with almost all narratives, we should always be alert for the “underneath” bit, the probing of motives and meanings) is: What was going on in regard to God and the world? What did this mean for the fulfillment (or the failure) of Jesus’s hopes, of his kingdom announcement? How does this event either complete his work or destroy it? Had Jesus been intending to continue preaching, healing, and teaching for several more years, only to find himself caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was this horrible end somehow envisaged within his own vocational awareness? And, whatever answer we give to that, what can we say about the divine intention and indeed the divine accomplishment? This is the same double set of questions and answers that we find if we ask, “Why did Jesus die?” You can give historical reasons: the chief priests were angry because of what he did in the Temple; the Romans were suspicious that he might be some kind of rebel leader; the Pharisees hated him because his kingdom vision clashed at several points with their own. Or, still within historical reasons, you could say that Jesus died because his followers failed to defend him, and one of them actually betrayed him to the authorities. The question “Why,” even at the historical level, can get quite complicated. But we can also ask the theological “Why?” What was the divine reason? Already in Acts we find the strange combination: God meant it, but you (the Jewish leaders) were wicked in carrying it out by handing Jesus over to the pagans (2:23; 4:27–28). And here is the point: the Western church, looking for the “theological” answer to the question “Why?” (“How did Jesus’s death mean that sins could be forgiven so we could go to heaven?”), has largely ignored the historical answer, and indeed the historical questions. They have been regarded as irrelevant circumstantial details. But are they? The answer, clearly, is no. The historical questions and answers are the place to go if we want to find the theological answer. If we cannot see it there, that might be an indication that we are trying to answer the wrong question. If the gospels do not seem to be “saying the right stuff,” maybe it is our idea of the “right stuff” that needs adjusting. The main theme that makes this point graphically is the relationship, which we have already noted in relation to Jesus’s own understanding of his vocation, between the proclamation of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the crucifixion, on the other. In much reading, teaching, preaching, and indeed scholarship, these have appeared to be almost contradictory: the positive message and moment of the kingdom program followed by the negative and disastrous moment of the cross.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I translated this comment at once for Poinsot. After that, they both remained silent and waited again. I was trying to find some other verbal link between them when I suddenly felt with real anguish how impossible any communication would be. It was like an access of vertigo. When I find myself at the foot of a wall and look up at the top and see it rising above me endlessly toward the sky, I feel this same vertigo, as if the sky had suddenly become an abyss. The two parts of my being spoke two different languages and would never understand each other. Thus, I allowed the conversation to die. My mother retired into her kitchen, accustomed to being excluded. Poinsot calmly filled his pipe and waited for the end of the storm, without asking me any questions about my nervousness and my sudden silence. It had always been his habit to wait for me to reveal my preoccupations to him. But an explanation, this time, was beyond me. I felt as if walled in. Besides, he would interpret my explanations as useless histrionics, believing that the obstacle could be overcome if one found out first what the whole problem really was. But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? I was beginning to understand that, however much I might want to become a second Poinsot, the chances were stronger that I would become but another Marrou. Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. And it was Poinsot whom I chose passionately, with all the strength of my being. One day, as I entered a café, I suddenly saw myself in a mirror and was terribly scared. I was both myself and a stranger. The mirror ahead of me covered the whole wall, so completely that I could see no frame. Each day, I thus became more alien to myself. I had to stop watching myself, I had to step out of this mirror. Toward the end of my high-school years, I began to know what I did not want to become and, if only in a confused manner, what I wanted. I did not want to be Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, I wanted to escape from myself and go out toward the others. I was not going to remain a Jew, an Oriental, a pauper; I belonged neither to my family nor to my religious community; I was a new being, utterly transparent, ready to be completely remade into a philosophy instructor. It had to be done, and I would reconstruct the whole universe, with simple and clear elements, like all the philosophers who were my masters, and as Poinsot too had done.

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

  AMBROSE. Nor without meaning has one Evangelist spoken of a new tomb, another of the tomb of Joseph. For the grave is prepared by those who are under the law of death; the Conqueror of death has no grave of His own. For what fellowship hath God with the grave. He alone is enclosed in this tomb, because the death of Christ, although it was common according to the nature of the body, yet was it peculiar in respect of power. But Christ is rightly buried in the tomb of the just, that He may rest in the habitation of justice. For this monument the just man hews out with the piercing word in the hearts of Gentile hardness, that the power of Christ might extend over the nations. And very rightly is there a stone rolled against the tomb; for whoever has in himself truly buried Christ, must diligently guard, lest he lose Him, or lest there be an entrance for unbelief. BEDE. Now that the Lord is crucified on the sixth day and rests on the seventh, signifies that in the sixth age of the world we must of necessity suffer for Christ, and as it were be crucified to the world. (Gal. 6:14.) But in the seventh age, that is, after death, our bodies indeed rest in the tombs, but our souls with the Lord. But even at the present time also holy women, (that is, humble souls,) fervent in love, diligently wait upon the Passion of Christ, and if perchance they may be able to imitate Him, with anxious carefulness ponder each step in order, by which this Passion is fulfilled. And having read, heard, and called to mind all these, they next apply themselves to make ready the works of virtue, by which Christ may be pleased, in order that having finished the preparation of this present life, in a blessed rest they may at the time of the resurrection meet Christ with the frankincence of spiritual actions. CHAPTER 24 24:1–121. Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. 2. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. 3. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. 4. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: 5. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? 6. He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, 7. Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. 8. And they remembered his words,

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  This is a favorite of those of us who skew cerebral. When the mere thought of emotion sends us into panic, we go to where we feel safest: what we’ve learned in books. Examples of this include masking our own discomfort by aggressively spouting unsolicited advice or telling you the lesson in all of this. While we’re trying to be helpful, sometimes it’s just awkward. Look, it’s a bird! We may also try to suppress our own legitimate pain by quickly changing the subject. For example, if we don’t address our dying family member’s concerns (their end-of-life planning, final wishes, and who gets the good china), maybe everything will be just fine. Can we talk about something more positive, please?! But what we’re doing in these scenarios is denying the person a chance to unburden themselves and connect with us while they still have time to communicate. And it’s not just those who are dying who may need to talk. The same goes for those who have lost their loved one or are in the midst of another kind of crisis. Your husband was arrested for a DUI? Wow, can you believe this weather? The effect here is the same. By cutting off these conversations, you could be denying the chance to engage with your loved one around something that may truly matter to them. Minimizing. Or we deny, dismiss, or downplay the situation in an attempt to get things “back to normal.” Why are you making such a big deal out of this? You’re going to be fine. Maybe, maybe not. People who sustain the emotional equivalent of a gaping wound don’t feel fine. Insisting otherwise could feel like gaslighting. We would never do that intentionally, but regardless, the effect sucks. The message the person who’s grieving may receive is that their feelings are immature or illegitimate, leading to self-doubt and possibly shame for feeling the way they do. And then there are the Whoa-did-that-really-justhappen doozies. Grief faux pas that are so absurd, all you can do is laugh. On the morning of Dad’s celebration of life, one of his buddies FaceTimed my mom at 3:30 a.m. Nothing good happens at 3:30 a.m., folks. When the phone rings at that hour, someone is dead or in jail. In this case, Dad’s pal just wanted my mom to know that she and I “don’t look good.” Over a hundred people were traveling from around the country to honor Dad, and apparently we needed to doll up better. The last time I checked, funerals weren’t beauty pageants.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “It is absolutely necessary to live on Easy Street. It’s very important, and you’ll realize it, too.” But for whom this contempt? For those who failed to earn an easy living, or for his own philosophy of profit and earnings? At the time, I seemed to understand that he despised those whose earnings were small; on the whole, I agreed with him. Money was only one aspect of the glory that I hoped to win. In town, people were already complaining that the medical profession was overcrowded and that young doctors found it increasingly difficult to build up a practice. Pharmacies remained, however, an excellent business. Our middle class is too recent to have much respect for professional scales of values or for a disinterested vocation. It still understands only commercial success and, of course, this opinion of our middle class imposes itself on our other classes too. But even if Monsieur Bismuth was right, he now separated quite brutally two images that I had kept closely connected: the one, of my material success, of my studies, and the other, of myself in a white smock, the lancet in my hand as I accomplished a task that brought health to mankind and earned me its gratitude. At the same time, I was struck by Monsieur Bismuth’s happening to agree with my father, who so painfully and disturbingly insisted that one needs to earn as much as possible. I now accepted the advice, in spite of my incipient shame, simply because I felt that my noble mission justified it fully. But if I were to be deprived of the image of the white smock and of the meek and grateful poor, then I would be entirely lost and would find myself facing again my father’s bald and unqualified advice: “You have to make money.” If I adopted as my own all my father’s spoken daydreams, then I was really anxious to become a rich man or rather to break away from our poverty. But I had too closely bound the idea of money together with that of my future, of my most disinterested image of my own self. To my utter surprise, the pure and desirable light that had led me on now seemed to grow dim. So I was confused, and pushed the whole problem aside. We would see all this later, and I would see it too. But my admiration for my sponsor, spontaneously undivided though it had been, was now less clearly whole, and I began to resent in him this tyranny that annoyed me. “I’ll give you a letter to my bookstore. They’ll supply you with your schoolbooks.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  And that one day, I’d be able to access that room. Unbeknownst to me at the time, in the 1910 sermon delivered after King Edward VII died, an Oxford divinity scholar named Henry Scott Holland declared: Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. . . . There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again! It strikes me as a bit uncanny that I’d randomly come up with this idea, not aware that 62 years before my birth, when I was mere stardust, a random guy, across time and space, would float the same idea. Me in my bedroom surrounded by my stuffed animals, him addressing a congregation. Maybe there’s something to this hidden room theory. This felt like a sturdier explanation than what my grandma, who modeled a very eclectic kind of spirituality, might have taught me. One minute we were lighting candles and praying the rosary, the next we were writing down names of people who pissed us off and putting them in the freezer “to ice them out.” In second grade, she told me about hexes, and I remember trying to practice using them on the mean girls at school. My spells must have backfired, because everyone got boobs before me. One day, Grandma discovered that my mom had a tarot card deck. She immediately summoned me to hunt down the contraband and bring it to her—the devil cards must be cast out. Now mind you, this was a woman who smoked cigars and read the ashes to tell the future, but somehow tarot cards were a bridge too far. Questioning her faith or her superstitions was pointless. So, I army-crawled into Mom’s bedroom, located the enemy in question next to some incense and other suspicious paraphernalia, like lavender oil, and brought the deck to Grandma. She wrapped the cards in a silk scarf and carefully disposed of them, as if they were a military-grade IED. Grandma’s talk of hexes, ashes, and the rosary did nothing to help me have a clearer relationship with faith. Each of her whims seemed detached from any cohesive idea about spirituality. It was all very confusing, but life with Grandma was never dull and kinda fun, too.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  perfume she smelled in my house, to evoke memories. And she needs shoes, stockings, gloves, underwear. Sentimentality? Romanticism? If she really means it . . . Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings. When I tell Hugo the stories June has told me, he says they are simply very cheap. I don’t know. Then Eduardo spends two days here, the demoniac analyst, making me realize the crisis I am passing through. I want to see June. I want to see June’s body. I have not dared to look at her body. I know it is beautiful. Eduardo’s questions madden me. Relentlessly, he observes how I have humbled myself. I have not dwelt on the successes which could glorify me. He makes me remember that my father beat me, that my first remembrance of him is a humiliation. He had said I was ugly after having typhoid fever. I had lost weight and my curls. What has made me ill now? June. June and her sinister appeal. She has taken drugs; she loved a woman; she talks the cops’ language when she tells stories. And yet she has kept that incredible, out-of-date, uncallous sentimentalism: “Give me the perfume I smelled in your house. Walking up the hill to your house, in the dark, I was in ecstasy.” I ask Eduardo, “Do you really think I am a lesbian? Do you take this seriously? Or is it just a reaction against my experience with Drake?” He is not sure. Hugo takes a definite stand and says he considers everything outside of our love extraneous—phases, passionate curiosities. He wants a security to live by. I rejoice in his finding it. I tell him he is right. Finally Eduardo says I am not a lesbian, because I do not hate men—on the contrary. In my dream last night I desired Eduardo, not June. The night before, when I dreamed of June, I was at the top of a skyscraper and expected to walk down the façade of it on a very narrow fire ladder. I was terrified. I could not do it. She came to Louveciennes Monday. I asked her cruelly, just as Henry had, “Are you a lesbian? Have you faced your impulses in your own mind?”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  In the morning I awoke heavy, brittle. Henry sat in the garden. He had stayed on to talk. He was worried about the previous night. I just listened. He told me that he acted in his usual way. He said and did things he did not mean. “Did not mean?” I repeat. Yes, he had been carried away by his intention to dissimulate his love for me. He did not admire Hugo as much as he said, not nearly. The truth was he had been swept off his feet by my tirade. He wanted to embrace me. He had never seen me go to the bottom of a subject like that. Most of my thinking was like shorthand to him. He had fought against a feeling of admiration, jealousy of Allendy, also a perverse hatred of the person who can tell him something new. I had opened worlds to him. It occurred to me that he might be acting, one comedy following another, that now, for some reason, he was playing with me. I told him so. He said quietly, “So help me God, Anaïs, I never lie to you. I cannot help it if you will not believe me.” His explanation sounded weak. What need to dissimulate? I was taking care of Hugo’s blindness. Was it not, rather, that he enjoyed difficulties, that our last week of interpénétration, harmony, confidence, now brought on his usual perverse craving for discord. “No, Anaïs, I don’t want war. But I lost my confidence. You said that Allendy . . .” Oh, Allendy. So I had wounded him, started him off. Jealousy inspired him. I said, “I will not deprive you of the pleasure you find in jealousy by answering your questions.” Then he said something which moved me. It began: “What a man wants [what a man wants!] is to believe that a woman can love him so much that no other man can interest her. I know that’s impossible. I know that every joy carries its own tragedy.” Then we could again have openness? If I were truthful? “Listen,” I said awkwardly, “what a man wants is what I have given you to date, with an absolutism you could never imagine.” “That is wonderful,” he said, very tenderly, dazed. Our first duel had come to an end. There was a great deal of insanity in all this, more in his explanations than in his initial actions. Was this really a scene of jealousy or the first expression of his instability in human relationships, his unaccountableness? For once I stand before a nature more complicated than my own. It may be that we have become more interesting to each other at the expense of trust. He is glad to have seen me, like an instrument, giving out all its range of sounds. Humanly, I have lost something. Faith, perhaps. In place of that blind openness to him, I summon my cleverness.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Suppose someone thought of the mind as a place or as an instrument, like the retina of the eye, or the nose. And suppose he said: I understand what a cow is because I have a representation or picture of a cow in my mind. This picture is what makes him able to distinguish between what a cow is and what a horse is. The picture by which he understands what a cow is differs from the picture by which he understands what a horse is in ways exactly corresponding to the differences between horses and cows. Now one of the characteristic things about a picture is that it is first of all something in its own right—a piece of canvas or wood—and then it resembles something. Now it is just the things that the picture has in its own right that must be forbidden to the picture in the mind. If it were a picture on wood, it would not serve to distinguish a cow from a cow painted on wood; if it were made of cast iron it would not help to tell a cow from a cast iron lawn-cow. There is no mental stuff that the picture could be made of—it must have everything the cow has and nothing else. It cannot resemble a cow because anything except the sheer resemblance will be an alien element like wood or cast iron. It must be simply everything that a cow has and nothing else. And what is this except to be the nature of the cow? I have said a lot about the act of understanding, but this might seem a puzzling notion. Where is such an act to be found? What, for instance, connects a calculation on a bit of paper with an act of understanding, if there is such an act? To answer this question we may digress for a moment. St. Thomas connects understanding with knowing what a thing is, with knowing the quod quid est of a thing. To know the quod quid est of a thing means knowing the kind of questions which can be asked and which cannot be asked about it. This sense of the question “What is it?” is answered by trying to give a definition and the purpose of a definition is to give some account of the field of discourse to which the thing belongs, to know the definition is to know how to talk appropriately about the thing. It follows from this that the question “What is it?” is the one question which can never be inappropriate; there are indeed ways of answering the question which will be inappropriate—it would be wrong to expect an account of the ways in which we should talk about something of which we cannot talk because we do not understand it.

• From Bluets (2009)

  120. In the end, climactically rebuffed, young Werther shoots himself in the head while wearing a blue coat—a coat which is a replica of the one he was wearing the night he first danced with his beloved. It then takes him all night to die a bloody death that inspired a rash of copycat, blue-coated suicides all over Germany and beyond. Note that here, as elsewhere, seeing clearly seems to take Werther, and us, no further. 121. “Clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself,” wrote Joseph Joubert, the French “man of letters” who recorded countless such fragments in notebooks for forty years in preparation for a monumental work of philosophy that he never wrote. I know all about this passing for truth. At times I think it quite possible that it lies, as if a sleight of hand, at the heart of all my writing. 122. “Truth. To surround it with figures and colors, so that it can be seen,” wrote Joubert, calmly professing a heresy. 123. Whenever I speak of faith, I am not speaking of faith in God. Likewise, when I speak of doubt, I am not talking about doubting God’s existence, or the truth of any gospel. Such terms have never meant very much to me. To contemplate them reminds me of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey: you get spun around until you wander off, disoriented and blindfolded, walking gingerly with a hand stretched out in front of you, until you either run into a wall (laughter), or a friend gently pushes you back toward the game. 124. On this account I am prepared to call myself a “spiritual cripple,” as a Japanese critic once said of Sei Sh ō nagon, author of the famous Makura no S ō shi , or “Notes of the Pillow.” This critic was appalled by Sh ō nagon’s obsession with trivia, aesthetics, and gossip, her hostility toward men, and by her unbridled, unrepentantly malicious comments about others, especially those of lower classes. A few of the pillow book’s many lists: “Things that give a pathetic impression,” “Things without merit,” “People who seem to suffer.” 125. Of course, you could also just take off the blindfold and say, I think this game is stupid, and I’m not playing it anymore . And it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. And it was Poinsot whom I chose passionately, with all the strength of my being. One day, as I entered a café, I suddenly saw myself in a mirror and was terribly scared. I was both myself and a stranger. The mirror ahead of me covered the whole wall, so completely that I could see no frame. Each day, I thus became more alien to myself. I had to stop watching myself, I had to step out of this mirror. Toward the end of my high-school years, I began to know what I did not want to become and, if only in a confused manner, what I wanted. I did not want to be Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, I wanted to escape from myself and go out toward the others. I was not going to remain a Jew, an Oriental, a pauper; I belonged neither to my family nor to my religious community; I was a new being, utterly transparent, ready to be completely remade into a philosophy instructor. It had to be done, and I would reconstruct the whole universe, with simple and clear elements, like all the philosophers who were my masters, and as Poinsot too had done. It would be a tough struggle, though I felt that no struggle could really be too tough for me. I exaggerated the difficulties that lay ahead of me, but this was only to enhance my own heroic attitude. I organized my life accordingly, working out several basic plans, then developing the individual details, as do all great builders. In this manner, my first efforts were soon crowned with success. I filed an application for a job as supervisor of studies in a high-school dormitory for resident students. Our principal remembered his promise and, within a week, I received my appointment. I then wrote a letter to the Head of the Philosophy Department in Algiers, which was the nearest university, asking him in all simplicity for some assistance. Though a professor on a university faculty was, in my eyes, a very important person indeed, he wrote me a reply that was full of encouragement; he even promised to look over my essays.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He realized that the local middle-class had exactly the same appetites as all others of its kind and that there would come a day when it would have to be fought too. He had left the Socialists now that he saw that the local groups of the European parties could find neither response nor roots in the native population. The people of Tunisia needed their own party to fight for them and to express their own aspirations. Ben Smaan spoke with a confident faith in his mission that I envied. He knew the sufferings of his people and was working to alleviate them. He seemed to be in the right and his task was obvious. But what was my people? And what did it want? My violence in the discussion and my resistance melted to indecision and a feeling of not belonging anywhere when it came to actions. “You know what you are and what you want. You’re lucky. If you were asked point-blank what your main political aim is, you would say the withdrawal of the European colonials or at any rate their neutralization. But I have to stop and think. You very much want a return to the culture and language of the Arabs, but I now belong to Western culture and would be incapable of writing or expressing myself satisfactorily in Arabic. Still, the injustices and refusals of the West...” “But that only makes our task more urgent,” Ben Smaan insisted. “The more time we let pass, the more unlike ourselves we become. We must pull ourselves together and clearly define our program.” I was too shy to add that Moslem hostility would have to be dispelled and that there was also the hostility of the Jews who had been driven behind thick walls by centuries of fear. This reminded me of my never-concluded argument with my father: “They don’t like us,” he would say bitterly. “And do you like them?” “Why should I like people who hate me?” “Well, someone has to start...” My father would shrug his shoulders. I promised Ben Smaan now that I would think all this over. I talked to Bissor about it, hoping that he would come with me, but I only met with an immediate and obstinate refusal. “You don’t know them,” he said. “Ben Smaan represents nothing. Go to the Arab part of town and mix with those blindly fanatical crowds. Then come back and tell me if you still think one can work with them.” He reminded me of his own father’s death and of their shop that had been looted and burned. The whole of Bissor’s face, his hard and energetic jaw and his big and bright hazelnut eyes expressed complete refusal and an incomprehension that was almost despair. “We would only be polite to each other until the day when they will inevitably fall upon us again.

• From Bluets (2009)

  181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure . It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon , but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking. 182. In the Phaedrus , the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon . The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it—whether it cripples the mind’s power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness. Given the multiple meanings of pharmakon , the answer is, in a sense, a matter of translation. 183. Goethe also worries over the destructive effects of writing. In particular, he worries over how to “keep the essential quality [of the thing] still living before us, and not to kill it with the word.” I must admit, I no longer worry much about such things. For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. What does your poetry do? —I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language (John Ashbery). 184. Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times—now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river—how could either of us tell the difference? 185. Perhaps this is why writing all day, even when the work feels arduous, never feels to me like “a hard day’s work.” Often it feels more like balancing two sides of an equation—occasionally quite satisfying, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time. 186. Another form of aggrandizement: to make a substance into a god, even if one eventually condemns it as a false one. It was in an effort to puncture precisely this sort of embellishment that the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire opted to call his 1913 book of poems not L’eau de vie , but the more precise, much “cooler,” Alcools . 187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is.— Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He is not simple enough either. It is he who has made me complex, who has devitalized me, killed me. He has introduced a fictitious personage who could make him suffer torments, whom he could hate; he has to whip himself by hatred in order to create. I do not believe in him as a writer. He has human moments, of course, but he is a trickster. He is all that he accuses me of being. It is he who is a liar, insincere, buffoonish, an actor. It is he who seeks dramas and creates monstrosities. He does not want simplicity. He is an intellectual. He seeks simplicity and then begins to distort it, to invent monsters. It is all false, false.” I am stunned. I sense a new truth. I am not vacillating between Henry and June, between their contradictory versions of themselves, but between two truths I see with clarity. I believe in Henry’s humanness, although I am fully aware of the literary monster. I believe in June, although I am aware of her innocent destructive power and her comedies. At first she had wanted to fight me. She feared that I believed Henry’s version of her. She wanted to arrive in London instead of Paris and ask me to join her there. At the first sight of my eyes she trusted me again. She talked beautifully, coherently last night. She brought Henry’s weaknesses into cruel relief. She shattered his sincerity, his wholeness. She shattered my protection of him. I had achieved nothing, according to her. “Henry only pretends to understand, so he can then turn around and attack, destroy.” I will only know the truth through my own experience with each one. Hasn’t Henry been more human with me, and June more sincere? I, who partake of the nature of both, will I fail to destroy their poses, to seize their true essence? Allendy has deprived me of my opium; he has made me lucid and sane, and I am suffering cruelly from the loss of my imaginary life. June, too, has become sane. She is no longer hysterical or confused. When I realized this change in her today, I was dismayed. Her sanity, her humanness, that is what Henry wanted, and that is what he is being given. They can talk together. I have changed him, mellowed him, and he understands her better. Then she and I sit together, knees touching, and look at each other. The only madness is the fever between us. We say, “Let us be sane with Henry, but together let us be mad.” I walk into the chaos of June and Henry and find them becoming clearer to themselves and to each other. And I? I suffer from the insanity they are leaving behind. Because I pick up their tangles, their insincerities, their complexities. I relive them in my imagination.