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 Bluets (2009)

  50. The confusion about what color is, where it is, or whether it is persists despite thousands of years of prodding at the phenomenon. And literally prodding: in his zeal, in the “dark chamber” of his room at Trinity College, Newton at times took to sticking iron rods or sticks in his eyes to produce then analyze his perceptions of color. Children whose vision has been damaged have been known to smash their fingers into their eyes to recreate color sensations that have been lost to them. ( That’s the spirit! ) 51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, the Encyclopedia says.—Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise? 52. Try, if you can, not to talk as if colors emanated from a single physical phenomenon. Keep in mind the effects of all the various surfaces, volumes, light-sources, films, expanses, degrees of solidity, solubility, temperature, elasticity, on color. Think of an object’s capacity to emit, reflect, absorb, transmit, or scatter light; think of “the operation of light on a feather.” Ask yourself, what is the color of a puddle? Is your blue sofa still blue when you stumble past it on your way to the kitchen for water in the middle of the night; is it still blue if you don’t get up, and no one enters the room to see it? Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess “color.” You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we “get around” in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering. 53. “We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object”—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there—not just yet. I believed in you. 54. Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or “felt,” what we saw. (Aristotle pointed out that this hypothesis runs into trouble at night, as objects become invisible despite the eyes’ purported power.) Others, like Epicurus, proposed the inverse—that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out toward the eye, as if they were looking at us (and surely some of them are). Plato split the difference, and postulated that a “visual fire” burns between our eyes and that which they behold. This still seems fair enough.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I would like simply to talk to him about the days I have spent with Henry. After Henry, analysis is distasteful to me. I begin with docility but I feel a growing resistence. I admit to Allendy that I do not hate him but that I enjoyed, in a female way, his having succeeded in making me cry. “You proved stronger than I. I like that.” However, as the hour progresses I begin to feel that he is arousing difficulties which I could easily live down, that he reawakens my fears and doubts. For that, I hate him. As he reads my dreams he notes that they are written with a more than masculine directness. Now I find him probing the masculine elements in me. Do I love Henry because I identify myself with him and his love and possession of June? No, this is false. I think of the night Henry taught me to lie over him and how I disliked it. I was happier when I lay under him, passively. I think of my uncertainty with women, not being sure of the role I want to play. In a dream it is June who has a penis. At the same time, I admit to Allendy, I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character. (I was remembering Stephen in The Well of Loneliness , who was not beautiful, who was even scarred in the war, and who was loved by Mary.) This would be a relief from the torment of lack of confidence in my womanly powers. It would eliminate all concern with my beauty, health, or sexual potency. It would make me confident because everything would depend on my talent, inventiveness, artistry, in which I believe. At the same time I realized that Henry loved me for these last things, too, and I was becoming accustomed to it. Henry, also, gives a smaller importance to my physical charms. I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself. I don’t really need you, Allendy! Whenever he asks me to close my eyes and relax and talk, I go on with my own analysis. I say to myself, “He is telling me little that I do not know.” But this is not true, because he has made clear to me the idea of guilt. I understood suddenly why both Henry and I wrote love letters to June when we were falling in love with each other. He has also made clear the idea of punishment. I take Hugo to the rue Blondel and incite him to infidelity to punish myself for my own infidelities. I glorify June to punish myself for having betrayed her. I elude Allendy’s further questions. He fumbles. He

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I did not know then what to think of Zionism, but such a rapid condemnation hurt me, and the implied threat particularly shocked me. Nevertheless, I felt that Ben Smaan’s advances and generosity were sincere. His contact with the Socialist youth movement had given him a broad-minded humanism and the idea of the necessity of a social as well as a political liberation. 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.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  John had once asked her, when she was small, what she would do if she met her “other mommy.” “I’d put one arm around Mom,” she had said, “and one arm around my other mommy, and I’d say ‘Hello, Mommies.’ ” She had never, not once, mentioned her other father. I have no idea why but the picture in her mind seemed not to include a father. “What a long strange journey this has been,” the letter from Florida read. She burst into tears as she read it to me. “On top of everything else,” she said through the tears, “my father has to be a Deadhead.” Three years later the final message arrived, this one from her sister. Her sister wanted her to know that their brother had died. The cause of death was unclear. His heart was mentioned. Quintana had never met him. I am not sure of the dates but I think he would have been born the year she was five. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him. This call to say that he had died may have been the last time the sisters spoke. When Quintana herself died, her sister sent flowers. I 24 find myself leafing today for the first time through a journal she kept in the spring of 1984, a daily assignment for an English class during her senior year at the Westlake School for Girls. “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats,” this volume of the journal begins, on a page dated March 7, 1984, the one-hundred-and-seventeenth entry since she had begun keeping the journal in September of 1983. “In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life: Pass into nothingness.” This March 7, 1984, entry continues, moves into a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger and their respective understandings of the abyss, but I am no longer following the argument: automatically, without thinking, appallingly, as if she were still at the Westlake School and had asked me to take a look at her paper, I am editing it. For example: Delete commas setting off title “Endymion.” “Tell,” as in “a line that seems to tell my present fear of life,” is of course wrong. “Describe” would be better. “Suggest” would be better still. On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it. I try it: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre. I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  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.” After that, the druggist was silent, and the silence at once regained control of the whole room, as if it were empty. He stood up and began to walk, so that I was able to see that he limped painfully, another undeniable proof of his father’s senility. His hip went askew, like a rowboat in a heavy sea, so that his shoulder and head slumped as if he were about to fall over backwards. (But the principal had told me to take him as an example.) With difficulty, he reached toward a desk drawer, pulled a business card out, and came back, lifting his twisted foot as if it were a foreign body and dropping it again heavily, while his whole body was drawn perilously in its wake. It hurt me to watch him. Monsieur Bismuth refrained from saying anything more. I had not opened my mouth, but my mind was all in a turmoil. In the silence, the telephone rang once, its ringing like a single pearl. We both stared at it, but it failed to ring again: it was nothing, the telephone merely dreaming. But what were Monsieur Bismuth’s dreams? Perhaps he had also hoped to become a physician. I don’t know why I was later convinced that this had been what he was daydreaming about on that occasion of my first visit. He had now picked up his pen again and was writing on the card. The trembling of his hands, it seemed, was caused by the same thing as his limping. He handed me the card and, without arising from his chair, held out his hand for me to shake. I returned along the passage, upset and dissatisfied. All the noises of the drugstore surged toward me as in a dream, but even these and the excitement of the many customers failed to rouse me from my painful thoughts. To the lights and the luxury of the store, I paid less attention now than earlier. I might have lacked the material means to continue my studies. But now, as soon as the means were assured me, I felt it would be an injustice if I were not granted freedom to pursue them as best I wished.

• From Vox (1992)

  Bad .” “Doesn’t sound good.” “So I painted it when I moved in,” she said. “I painted it a color called Paper Lantern—and I put on two coats. Someone said, ‘You know that you’re painting over metallic wallpaper, that’s going to come through-hoo,’ but I just couldn’t make myself steam off all that old paper—the design would imprint itself in my psyche if I did that, it would rise up when I’m eighty years old, on my death bed. So I just painted it over, with two heavy coats. And the first year it was fine. But then we had that killer summer, and somehow the humidity sweated the metallic pattern back out, so that now you can make out the split-rail fence and the wagon wheel. But it’s very faint. Now in fact I kind of like it. But I really should repaint it. So in the shower I had this image of painting the hall wall with a roller. What a waste of time. And then I thought, wait, I have the money, this time I’ll hire people to paint it for me. And so three painters materialized, and then suddenly there was a large hole in the wall, about three feet off the floor, big enough so that I could fit through so that my legs were standing in the front hall and yet my head and upper body were in the living room. The hole was finished off and lined with sheepskin. I had nothing on. My hands were resting on two full paint cans. But the strange thing was the cans of paint were warm . There was one painter doing the living room, and the other two were doing the hall, where my lower body was. The painter I could see didn’t seem to notice me. He was painting a wall with his back to me. The painters in the hall were using rollers, but they were those little detail rollers that you use for trim work, that are about three inches wide, the darlingest little rollers, that can go everywhere . Somehow I knew that one of these hall painters was mistakenly using the wrong color, it’s a color I used in the living room, called Opulent Opal—apparently he’d taken the wrong can of paint from his truck. Very careless. The other one was more conscientious—he was using the glossy Paper Lantern on the trim. These are Sherwin Williams’s paint names, not mine, by the way. Anyway I called out, ‘Ah, people, sirs? Please be sure to use the right color! There is a potential for confusion!’ But they were talking and they didn’t hear me.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Most of the gay and bisexual girls I met had gone through a period of trying to pass as straight, sometimes experimenting with lesbianism under cover of heterosexuality. A bisexual high school senior in San Francisco, for instance, would go to an all-ages club so she could make out with other girls on the dance floor. “They were doing it mostly to get attention from boys,” she recalled. “Whereas I wasn’t. But they didn’t know that. So it was really great.” Later, she went further, bringing a second girl into bed with her boyfriend; by her freshman year of college, she was dating a woman. In general, girls have become more open to same-sex attraction in recent years, more accepting of sexual fluidity. In the early 1990s, for instance, only 3 percent of women who identified as heterosexual in The Sex Lives of College Students reported some same-sex experience; by 2008 nearly a third did (though, again, no distinction was drawn between girl-on-girl action performed mainly to titillate guys and the real thing). For Amber, flowing with the hetero current became increasingly difficult. She knew she did not—could not—feel about Jake, or any boy, the way her friends did. “They would pull out pictures of guys they met over the summer or on Facebook and be like, ‘Oh, he’s so hot, I just want him to fuck me,’” Amber said. “And I’d be like, ‘Um, yeah, me, too.’ That was all I could say. Or sometimes: ‘He’s really attractive.’ I never said a guy was hot or even good-looking. I never thought any of them were.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them. On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasn’t a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that “being found” (“I was found” had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving “too much to handle,” “too much and too soon,” that she needed to “step back,” “catch up for a while” with what she still considered her real life. In reply she received a letter from her mother saying that she did not want to be a burden and so had disconnected her telephone. This was the point at which it seemed clear that not one of us would escape those muddled impulses. Not Quintana’s mother, not Quintana’s sister, certainly not me. Not even Quintana. Quintana who referred to the shattering of her known world as “being found.” Quintana who had called Nicholas and Alexandra “Nicky and Sunny” and seen their story as “a big hit.” Quintana who had imagined The Broken Man in such convincing detail. Quintana who told me that after she became five she never ever dreamed about The Broken Man. A few weeks after her mother disconnected her telephone another message arrived, although not from her mother and not from her sister. She received a letter from her natural father in Florida. Over the time that passed between the time she knew herself to have been adopted and the time she was “found,” a period of some thirty years, she had many times mentioned her other mother. “My other mommy,” and later “my other mother,” had been from the time she first spoke the way she referred to her. She had wondered who and where this other mother was. She had wondered what she looked like. She had considered and ultimately rejected the possibility of finding out.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  His parables, his moral instructions, and his prophetic predictions all bear on that. We have no definition of what he meant by the phrase. His audience needed no definition. It was then a familiar conception and phrase. The new thing was simply that this kingdom was at last on the point of coming. We are not at all in that situation to-day. Any one who has tried to grasp the idea will have realized how vague and elusive it seems. It stands to-day for quite a catalogue of ideas. To the ordinary reader of the Bible, “inheriting the kingdom of heaven” simply means being saved and going to heaven. For others it means the millennium. For some the organized Church; for others “the invisible Church.” For the mystic it means the hidden life with God. The truth is that the idea in the sense in which Jesus and his audiences understood it almost completely passed out of Christian thought as soon as Christianity passed from the Jewish people and found its spiritual home within the great Graeco-Roman world. The historical basis for the idea was wanting there. The phrase was taken along, just as an emigrant will carry a water-jar with him; but the water from the well of Bethlehem evaporated and it was now used to dip water from the wells of Ephesus or from the Nile and Tiber. The Greek world cherished no such national religious hope as the prophets had ingrained in Jewish thought; on the other hand it was intensely interested in the future life for the individual, and in the ascetic triumph over flesh and matter. Thus the idea which had been the centre of Christ’s thought was not at all the centre of the Church’s thought, and even the comprehension of his meaning was lost and overlaid. Only some remnants of it persisted in the millennial hope and in the organic conception of the Church. The historical study of our own day has made the first thorough attempt to understand this fundamental thought of Jesus in the sense in which he used it, but the results of this investigation are not at all completed. There are a hundred critical difficulties in the way of a sure and consistent interpretation that would be acceptable to all investigators. The limits of space and the purpose of this book will not permit me to do justice to the conflicting views. I shall have to set down my own results with only an occasional reference to the difficulties that beset them. We saw in the previous chapter that the hope of the Jewish people underwent changes in the course of its history. It took a wider and more universal outlook as the political horizon of the people widened. It became more individual in its blessings. It grew more transcendent, more purely future, more apocalyptic and detached from present events, as the people were deprived of their political autonomy and health.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as “the novel I’m writing just to show you.” She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. “Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fictitious,” she advises the reader at the outset. “The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to “confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist,” her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.” At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.” So ended the novel she was writing just to show us. Show us what? Show us that she could write a novel? Show us why and how she would die? Show us what she believed our reaction would be? Now, they didn’t even care any more. No. She had no idea how much we needed her. How could we have so misunderstood one another? Had she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?

• From Henry and June (1986)

  question. I like the way he caresses me. He makes none of Henry’s obscene gestures, yet I feel the man whose planetary symbol is the Bull. I like it when we kiss standing up and I am made to feel small in his arms. He knows me better than I know him. I am baffled by his enigmatic character. I told him that I trusted him blindly, that we should just let things happen. I refused to analyze. This, he understood. From his house I went to a café on the corner, where I had asked Henry to meet me. Before I saw Allendy, I talked with Eduardo. And at eight-thirty I agreed to meet Hugo. When I saw Henry, I felt estranged from him. I hated my capriciousness. Now I must keep secrets from Henry, and I can no longer confide everything to Allendy because we are man and woman with passion growing between us. I have lost a father! I cannot tell him I still love Henry. Shall I try to be altogether truthful with Henry? Hugo plays his guitar tonight while I write and draws me to him with a new violence, roused by analysis. He has been writing profusely in his journal and talking expansively, and, at last, interestingly. Eduardo does not believe my confidences about Allendy. He thinks we have planned to save him by arousing his jealousy—my beloved pathological child, Eduardo, whom I will love in a certain way eternally. The only time we are happy together is when we retrogress to a magical sphere of beauty. He has wiped our sexual hours from his memory, but not my offense. He dreams that I will one day go to him and crawl on my knees, so that he can make me suffer for flaunting Henry before him. He fights me blindly, furiously, reproaching me for the night we went out to dance, for my trying to force him to be alive. At the same time his jealousy is obvious, and he shows Allendy a note in which I tell him I love him and will always love him, in a strange, mystical fashion. I rush to Allendy for help, because my apparent desire for Eduardo was expressed merely to efface the offense he cannot bear. I wanted him to have the last word, to feel that he had refused me, because he needs to feel his strength. But when Allendy shows me the tenderest, most protective love, I rebel against it. He wants to postpone personal intimacy for the sake of the analysis he feels I still need. As I fight off analysis, I betray exactly what he suspects: that I require extravagant, passionate demonstrations of love, not tenderness or protection. He has sensed that I want his love as a trophy, not for his very own self. Yet as soon as I write these words, I know they are not entirely true.

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

  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. The year Grandpa died, Mom decided I needed some legit spiritual direction. “It’s time for you to be baptized.” “Great! I want to pick my religion,” I responded. “Oh yeah? What do you want to be?” “Jewish.” I had no idea what that meant. But based on my limited social life, I thought Jewish people threw great parties. Overhearing this conversation from the living room, Grandma’s voice boomed, “No, you are Catholic.” Off I went to Father Elsinghorse. On obligatory holidays, Grandma cornered me with a comb and marched me to church, a disastrously boring experience. I longed to be flying through the neighborhood on my Huffy bike instead of being stuffed into a satin dress and shiny shoes—my personal hell. Luckily, Grandma didn’t like it much, either (despite her rosary habits), so the torture only occurred biannually. When it came to end-of-life directives, Grandma’s wishes were very clear. She wanted to be buried “like Tutankhamen,” only Grandma’s “tomb” would be her car, and it would contain her sewing machine. If the afterlife existed, she was assured to be independent and fashionable. My grandfather’s side of the family was a whole different bowl of holy water—pious believers, and devoted to public service. Ever guided by his evangelical Episcopalian faith, my great-great-grandfather Salmon P. Chase was the senator of Ohio, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and secretary of the treasury in Lincoln’s cabinet. He established our national banking system and slapped the slogan “In God We Trust” on our coins. While that phrase on money had a political purpose—implying that God was on the Union side of the Civil War—it was also meant to help save folks from becoming “heathens.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  It would be a month or so later, in Dallas, before the will and the determination and the resolution all failed her. When she called after twenty-four hours in Dallas she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears. In Dallas she had been introduced for the first time not only to her mother but to many other members of what she was now calling her “biological family,” strangers who welcomed her as their long-missing child. In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them. On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasn’t a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that “being found” (“I was found” had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving “too much to handle,” “too much and too soon,” that she needed to “step back,” “catch up for a while” with what she still considered her real life. In reply she received a letter from her mother saying that she did not want to be a burden and so had disconnected her telephone. This was the point at which it seemed clear that not one of us would escape those muddled impulses. Not Quintana’s mother, not Quintana’s sister, certainly not me. Not even Quintana. Quintana who referred to the shattering of her known world as “being found.” Quintana who had called Nicholas and Alexandra “Nicky and Sunny” and seen their story as “a big hit.” Quintana who had imagined The Broken Man in such convincing detail. Quintana who told me that after she became five she never ever dreamed about The Broken Man. A few weeks after her mother disconnected her telephone another message arrived, although not from her mother and not from her sister. She received a letter from her natural father in Florida.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  11 2. Philip Neri: Playful Pragmatist At some point, he also began to evangelize, using his wit and interest in human foibles to approach those he met through the city’s vibrant street life. But he was no street-corner preacher. Philip’s evangelizing was deeply personal, more conversational than instructional. Slowly, a group of laymen began to gather around him informally, working in the hospital wards as they could and praying with him in their free time. In 1548, the city was preparing for the upcoming jubilee year of 1550. People of all classes f locked there from faraway lands, crowding the city and straining its capacity. Many arrived sick or injured, and the existing hospices, hospitals, and monasteries couldn’t provide enough shelter, food, and care for them all. Philip and his confessor founded the Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity to provide for them. By the time the jubilee year came around, they were hosting some 500 pilgrims every day. Philip’s Ministry and the Early Oratory It may also have been around this time that Philip experienced something of a spiritual crisis. He felt a calling but was not sure in which direction. He knew the life of a monk wasn’t for him, nor the new religious orders, such as the Jesuits. In fact, throughout his career, Philip ardently resisted any attempts at curbing his individual freedoms. At the encouragement of his spiritual director, Philip entered the priesthood. He was ordained in 1551, when he was about 36, unusually old to embark on the career at that time. He moved into the community attached to San Girolamo della Carità and became a chaplain there, where he lived until pried out by papal order in his old age. Confessions and the spiritual direction he could impart with them became the backbone of Philip’s ministry. But his ministry was intensely personal, f lexible, and pragmatic. He continued to meet individuals where they were: on the street, in a tavern or square, and, increasingly, in his own humble rooms.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  much to Cheri’s astonishment. Desmond's had been started in quite a small way in a private house in the Avenue d’Alma, and now it sheltered frenzied and silent couples behind its heavy ashlar masonry, beneath ceilings decorated with swallows and hawthorn, and hemmed in by the bulrushes and flamingoes of its stained-glass windows. They danced at Desmond's, night and day, as people dance after war: the men, young and old, free from the burden of thinking and being frightened — empty-minded, innocent; the women, given over to a pleasure far greater than any more definite sensual delight, to the company of men: that is to say, to physical contact with them, their smell, their tonic sweat, the certain proof of which tingled in every inch of their bodies — the certainty of being the prey of a man wholly alive and vital, and of succumbing in his arms to rhythms as personal, as intimate, as those of sleep. “Desmond will have got to bed at three, or three-thirty,1” Cheri reckoned. “He’ll have had enough sleep.” But once again he let drop the hand he had stretched out to the telephone. He went down the stairs in double-quick time, aided by the springy thick pile that covered every floorboard in his house. As he passed by the dining-room he looked without anger at the five white plates set in a diadem round a black crystal bowl, in which floated pink water-lilies, matching the pink of the tablecloth; and he did not pause till face to face with the looking-glass, fixed to the back of the heavy door of the reception-room on the ground floor. He feared, yet was attracted by, this looking-glass, which drew what little light it had from the french windows immediately facing it across the corridor, their opaque blue panes further obscured by the dark foliage of the garden. Every time he bumped into his own image, Cheri was brought up sharp by a slight shock when he recognized it as his own. He never could understand why this glass did not reflect the faithful image of a young man of twenty-four. He could not detect the precise points where time, with invisible finger, marks first the hour of perfection on a handsome face, and then the hour of that more blatant beauty, the herald of a majestic decline. To Cheri’s mind, there could be no question of a decline, and he could never have noticed it on his own features. He had just happened to bump into a thirty-year-old Cheri and failed to recognize him; and he sometimes asked himself “What’s wrong with me?” as though he were feelling a little off-colour or had thrown his clothes on anyhow. Now he hurried past the reception-room door, and thought no more about it.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  2 But He replied to them, “ a When it is evening, you say, ‘ It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ 3 “And in the morning, ‘ It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and has a threatening look.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but cannot interpret the signs of the times? 4 “An evil and [morally] unfaithful generation craves a [miraculous] sign; but no sign will be given to it, except the sign of [the prophet] Jonah.” Then He left them and went away. [Jon 3:4 , 5 ] 5 When the disciples reached the other side of the sea, they realized that they had forgotten to bring bread. 6 Jesus said to them, “Watch out and be on your guard against the b leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” 7 They began to discuss this among themselves, saying, “He said that because we did not bring bread.” 8 But Jesus, aware of this, said, “You men of little faith, why are you discussing among yourselves that you have no bread? 9 “Do you still not understand or remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you picked up? 10 “Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many large baskets you picked up? 11 “How is it that you fail to understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” 12 Then they understood that He did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the [false] teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Peter’s Confession of Christ 13 Now when Jesus went into the c region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” [Mark 8:27–29 ; Luke 9:18–20 ] 14 And they answered, “Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah, or [just] one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed), the Son of the living God.” 17 Then Jesus answered him, “Blessed [happy, spiritually secure, favored by God] are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood (mortal man) did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. 18 “And I say to you that you are d Peter, and on this e rock I will build My church; and the f gates of Hades (death) will not overpower it [by preventing the resurrection of the Christ].

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

  The year Grandpa died, Mom decided I needed some legit spiritual direction. “It’s time for you to be baptized.” “Great! I want to pick my religion,” I responded. “Oh yeah? What do you want to be?” “Jewish.” I had no idea what that meant. But based on my limited social life, I thought Jewish people threw great parties. Overhearing this conversation from the living room, Grandma’s voice boomed, “No, you are Catholic.” Off I went to Father Elsinghorse. On obligatory holidays, Grandma cornered me with a comb and marched me to church, a disastrously boring experience. I longed to be flying through the neighborhood on my Huffy bike instead of being stuffed into a satin dress and shiny shoes—my personal hell. Luckily, Grandma didn’t like it much, either (despite her rosary habits), so the torture only occurred biannually. When it came to end-of-life directives, Grandma’s wishes were very clear. She wanted to be buried “like Tutankhamen,” only Grandma’s “tomb” would be her car, and it would contain her sewing machine. If the afterlife existed, she was assured to be independent and fashionable. My grandfather’s side of the family was a whole different bowl of holy water—pious believers, and devoted to public service. Ever guided by his evangelical Episcopalian faith, my great-great-grandfather Salmon P. Chase was the senator of Ohio, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and secretary of the treasury in Lincoln’s cabinet. He established our national banking system and slapped the slogan “In God We Trust” on our coins. While that phrase on money had a political purpose—implying that God was on the Union side of the Civil War—it was also meant to help save folks from becoming “heathens.” Grand Pop would have likely been horrified by my fluid, feral, and often fickle faith. Many decades later, I’m a deep seeker and a rigorous questioner. There’s so much I am open to learning, yet I have some clarity around what I do and don’t believe. For example, I don’t believe in divine judgment, punishment, or biblical folklore. I do believe in a loving energy that connects us all. I don’t believe that God is the sole provider of meaning or morals. Or that the divine is so delicate it can’t be challenged or questioned. I subscribe to the power of prayer (asking) and meditation (listening), and I feel comforted when I talk to angels, guides, and the God of my understanding—regardless of whether or not anyone or anything exists or can hear me. Simply put, it feels good to connect, and that’s enough for me. My therapist thinks it’s no surprise that I’ve struggled with faith, saying, “When you had a hard time trusting your original caretakers, it’s difficult to trust the bigger caretaker.” Drop that mic, Carole. That said, I’m finding that even the slightest willingness to trust in something greater helps me keep the door of faith open. Is my doubt gone? Hell no.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  When I was about fourteen I discovered that to think of love before going to sleep was to dream of it during the night. And this experience taught me something else; if I repeated any lesson just before going to sleep, I knew it perfectly next morning; the mind, it seems, works even during unconsciousness. Often since, I have solved problems during sleep in mathematics and in chess that have puzzled me during the day. * * * SCHOOL DAYS IN ENGLAND. Chapter III. In my thirteenth year the most important experience took place of my schoolboy life. Walking out one day with a West Indian boy of sixteen or so, I admitted that I was going to be “confirmed” in the Church of England. I was intensely religious at this time and took the whole rite with appalling seriousness. “Believe and thou shalt be saved” rang in my ears day and night, but I had no happy conviction. Believe what? “Believe in me, Jesus.” Of course I believe; then I should be happy, and I was not happy. “Believe not” and eternal damnation and eternal torture follow. My soul revolted at the iniquity of the awful condemnation. What became of the myriads who had not heard of Jesus? It was all a horrible puzzle to me; but the radiant figure and sweet teaching of Jesus just enabled me to believe and resolve to live as he had lived, unselfishly—purely. I never liked that word “purely” and used to relegate it to the darkest background of my thought. But I would try to be good—I’d try at least! “Do you believe all the fairy stories in the Bible!” my companion asked. “Of course I do”, I replied, “It’s the Word of God, isn’t it?” “Who is God?” asked the West Indian. “He made the world”, I added, “all this wonder”—and with a gesture I included earth and sky. “Who made God!” asked my companion. I turned away stricken: in a flash I saw I had been building on a word taught to me: “who made God?” I walked away alone, up the long meadow by the little brook, my thoughts in a whirl: story after story that I had accepted were now to me “fairy stories.” Jonah hadn’t lived three days in a whale’s belly. A man couldn’t get down a whale’s throat. The Gospel of Matthew began with Jesus’ pedigree, showing that he had been born of the seed of David through Joseph, his father, and in the very next chapter you are told that Joseph wasn’t his father; but the Holy Ghost. In an hour the whole fabric of my spiritual beliefs lay in ruins about me: I believed none of it, not a jot, nor a tittle: I felt as though I had been stripped naked to the cold.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Can you feel your legs—or at least part of them? Next try to locate your genitals. Note what happens as you focus upon them. Discussion If you have the notion that this exercise was a piece of cake or you believe that you have observed everything that lies within the boundary of your body in this first experiment, then you are almost certainly mistaken. You probably have begun to notice just how difficult it is to “simply” observe experience without judgment and evaluation. Body awareness is a skill that needs to build gradually over time. If we experience things too quickly and deeply, we might be overwhelmed, leading us to further suppress or dissociate. Most of the time, we substitute an idea or picture for actual direct experience. Until we become aware of these counterfeits for actual sensate feelings, it is hard to tune in to the wonderland below our skin. How can we know what we are missing if we never knew it existed in the first place? That is why we only gradually begin to experience the body directly. Although we may “know” where the parts of our bodies are, it may take some time to actually feel them. Even many dancers and athletes have trouble with this. For free, unforced, spontaneous functioning of your legs—and other parts of your body—you must have a direct felt experience of their tensions and position in relation to the rest of the body. I have worked with a number of professional dancers who, at first, find this extremely difficult; so please don’t be discouraged. If you practice this exercise daily in moderate amounts, skillfulness in sensory awareness will eventually come. It may be beneficial to understand that there is a fundamental difference between your mental image of yourself and your actual physical/bodily sense of yourself. Of course, some discrepancy is true for all of us. But, the “neurotic” personality creates and perpetuates its symptoms through an unconscious constricting (hypertonicity) or collapsing (hypotonicity) of the musculature. ‖ It is only through building a refined awareness and allowing the muscles and viscera spontaneous expression that we can begin to dissolve the “neurotic” and traumatic (split off) parts of ourselves and lay claim to a deeper, more authentic self. Because developing the capacity for awareness is tricky at first, it would be good for you to appreciate how universally difficult body sensing is and be both determined and patient. These exercises are worth spending hours on. But please don’t overdue it; fifteen or twenty minutes at a time is more than sufficient when you are beginning. Also, mini awareness excursions as you go about your day can be particularly revealing. You may find how everyday activities and routines affect your muscles, posture and breathing.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One day when he had just come into his room, I shot a question at him and he stopped, came over to me and put his arm on my shoulder as he answered. I don’t know how I knew; but by some instinct I felt a caress in the apparently innocent action. I didn’t like to draw away or show him that I objected; but I buried myself feverishly in the Trigonometry and he soon moved away. When I thought of it afterwards, I recalled the fact that his marked liking for me began after my fight with Jones. I had often been on the point of confessing to him my love-passages; but now I was glad I had kept them strenuously to myself, for day by day I noticed that his liking for me grew or rather his compliments and flatteries increased. I hardly knew what to do: working with him and in his room was a godsend to me; yet at the same time I didn’t like him much or admire him really. In some ways he was curiously dense; he spoke of the school life as the happiest of all and the healthiest; a good moral tone here, he would say, no lying, cheating or scandal, much better than life outside. I used to find it difficult not to laugh in his face. Moral tone indeed! when the Doctor came down out of temper, it was usually accepted among the boys that he had had his wife in the night and was therefore a little below par physically. Though a really good mathematical scholar and a first-rate teacher, patient and painstaking, with a gift of clear exposition, Stackpole seemed to me stupid and hidebound and I soon found that by laughing at his compliments I could balk his desire to lavish on me his unwelcome caresses. Once he kissed me, but my amused smile made him blush while he muttered shamefacedly, “You’re a queer lad!” At the same time I knew quite well that if I encouraged him, he would take further liberties. One day he talked of Jones and Henry H… He had evidently heard something of what had taken place in our bedroom; but I pretended not to know what he meant and when he asked me whether none of the big boys had made up to me, I ignored big Fawcett’s smutty excursions and said “No” adding that I was interested in girls and not in dirty boys. For some reason or other Stackpole seemed to me younger than I was and not twelve years older, and I had no real difficulty in keeping him within the bounds of propriety till the Math Exam.