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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The second, which could then always be known by default, was often not clearly distinguished in itself. When the time was too short, the first could not be isolated from the second at all. The second way was to accommodate the attention for a certain sort of signal, and the next moment to become aware in memory of whether it came before or after its mate. "This way brings great uncertainty with it. The impression not prepared for comes to us in the memory more weak than the other, obscure as it were, badly fixed in time. We tend to take the subjectively stronger stimulus, that which we were intent upon, for the first, just as we are apt to take an objectively stronger stimulus to be the first. Still, it may happen otherwise. In the experiments from touch to sight it often seemed to me as if the impression for which the attention was not prepared were there already when the other came." Exner found himself employing this method oftenest when the impressions differed strongly.[330] In such observations (which must not be confounded with those where the two signals were identical and their successiveness known as mere doubleness , without distinction of which came first), it is obvious that each signal must combine stably in our perception with a different instant of time. It is the simplest possible case of two discrepant concepts simultaneously occupying the mind. Now the case of the signals being simultaneous seems of a different sort. We must turn to Wundt for observations fit to cast a nearer light thereon. The reader will remember the reaction-time experiments of which we treated in Chapter III. It happened occasionally in Wundt's experiments that the reaction-time was reduced to zero or even assumed a negative value, which, being translated into common speech, means that the observer was sometimes so intent upon the signal that his reaction actually coincided in time with it, or even preceded it , instead of coming a fraction of a second after it, as in the nature of things it should. More will be said of these results anon. Meanwhile Wundt, in explaining them, says this: "In general we have a very exact feeling of the simultaneity of two stimuli , if they do not differ much in strength.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The whole idea of everybody wanting to be somebody new was an important insight in terms of liking God. God was selling something I wanted. Still, God was in the same boat as the guy selling the knives and Juliet promising to make Romeo new. Everybody exaggerates when they are selling something. Everybody says their product works like magic. At the time I understood God’s offer as a magical proposition, which it is. But most magical propositions are just tricks. The older you get, the harder it is to believe in magic. The older you get, the more you understand there is no Wizard of Oz, just a schmuck behind a curtain. I pictured my pastor as a salesman or a magician, trying to trick the congregation into believing Jesus could make us new. And, honestly, I felt as though he was trying to convince himself, as though he only half believed what he was saying. It’s not that Christian spirituality seemed like a complete con, it’s just that it had some of those elements. The message, however, was appealing to me. God said He would make me new. I can’t pretend for a second I didn’t want to be made new, that I didn’t want to start again. I did. There were aspects of Christian spirituality I liked and aspects I thought were humdrum. I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt I needed to make a decision about what I believed. I wished I could have subscribed to aspects of Christianity but not the whole thing. I’ll explain. I associated much of Christian doctrine with children’s stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children’s fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity. It also confused me that some people would look at parts of the Bible but not the whole thing. They ignored a lot of obvious questions. I felt as if Christianity, as a religious system, was a product that kept falling apart, and whoever was selling it would hold the broken parts behind his back trying to divert everybody’s attention. The children’s story stuff was the thing I felt Christians were holding behind their back. The Garden of Eden, the fall of man, was a pretty silly story, and Noah and the ark, all of that, that seemed pretty fairy-tale too.

• From The Hours (1998)

  You remember all that, don’t you?” He says, “Yes.” Then he says, “No.” “Which is it?” she asks. “Sorry. I seem to keep thinking things have already happened. When you asked if I remembered about the party and the ceremony, I thought you meant, did I remember having gone to them. And I did remember. I seem to have fallen out of time.” “The party and ceremony are tonight. In the future.” “I understand. In a way, I understand. But, you see, I seem to have gone into the future, too. I have a distinct recollection of the party that hasn’t happened yet. I remember the award ceremony perfectly.” “Did they bring your breakfast this morning?” she asks. “What a question. They did.” “And did you eat it?” “I remember eating it. But it’s possible that I only meant to. Is there a breakfast lying around here somewhere?” “Not as far as I can see.” “Then I suppose I managed to eat it. Food doesn’t matter much, does it?” “Food matters a great deal, Richard.” He says, “I don’t know if I can bear it, Clarissa.” “Bear what?” “Being proud and brave in front of everybody. I recall it vividly. There I am, a sick, crazy wreck reaching out with trembling hands to receive his little trophy.” “Honey, you don’t need to be proud. You don’t need to be brave. It’s not a performance.” “Of course it is. I got a prize for my performance, you must know that. I got a prize for having AIDS and going nuts and being brave about it, it had nothing to do with my work.” “Stop this. Please. It has everything to do with your work.” Richard draws and exhales a moist, powerful breath. Clarissa thinks of his lungs, glistening red pillows intricately embroidered with veins. They are, perversely, among his least compromised organs—for unknowable reasons, they have remained essentially unharmed by the virus. With that potent breath his eyes seem to focus, to gain greener depths. “You don’t think they’d give it to me if I were healthy, do you?” he says. “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” “Please.” “Well, then, maybe you should refuse it.” “That’s the awful thing,” Richard says. “I want the prize. I do. It would be far easier if one cared either more or less about winning prizes. Is it here somewhere?” “What?” “The prize. I’d like to look at it.” “You haven’t gotten it yet. It’s tonight.” “Yes. That’s right. Tonight.” “Richard, dear, listen to me. This can be simple. You can take simple, straightforward pleasure in this. I’ll be there with you, every minute.” “I’d like that.” “It’s a party. It’s only a party. It will be populated entirely by people who respect and admire you.” “Really? Who?” “You know who. Howard. Elisa.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God. On the other hand, however, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God. I felt like there was this war going on between us, the Christians, and them, the homosexuals and environmentalists and feminists. By going to a Unitarian church and truly loving those people, I was helping them, I was giving joy to their life and that didn’t feel right. It was a terrible place to be. This was, at the time, my primary problem with Christian faith. With all its talk about pure love, in the end it shook down to conditional love. Again, this is a provocative statement, but I want to walk you through the emotional process I went through. How could I merge the culture of the woods and the Unitarian church with Christian culture and yet not abandon the truth of Scripture? How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality? My answer did not come for many years, and as for that summer, I became very confused. I gave in to keep the peace. I stopped going to the Unitarian church, I shaved, I cut the hippy act and made friends, good friends, friends whom I loved and who loved me. From time to time I would overhear comments by my friends, destructive comments about the political left or about homosexuals or Democrats, and I never knew what to do with those comments. They felt right in my head but not in my heart. I went along, and, looking back, I think we all went along. Even the people who were making the comments were going along. What else was there to do? Truth is truth. [image "9780785263708_0230_002" file=Image00087.jpg] It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things. My realization came while attending an alumni social for Westmont College. I had never attended Westmont, but my friend Michelle did, and she invited me. Greg Spencer, a communications professor, was to speak, and Michelle thought I might enjoy the lecture. I did. More than I can say. The lecture was about the power of metaphor. Spencer opened by asking us what metaphors we think of when we consider the topic of cancer. We gave him our answers, all pretty much the same, we battle cancer, we fight cancer, we are rebuilding our white blood cells, things like that. Spencer pointed out that the overwhelming majority of metaphors we listed were war metaphors.

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

  Their submerged consciousness was of course seeing them, or the hand could not have written as it did. Colors are similarly perceived by the sub-conscious self, which the hysterically color-blind eyes cannot bring to the normal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on the anæsthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recollected to have been suffered, and complained of, as soon as the under self gets a chance to express itself by the passage of the subject into hypnotic trance. It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons , at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other , and share the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkable still, they are complementary . Give an object to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you remove it from the other or others. Barring a certain common fund of information, like the command of language, etc., what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of, and vice versa . M. Janet has proved this beautifully in his subject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as the type of the rest: In her trance he covered her lap with cards, each bearing a number. He then told her that on waking she should not see any card whose number was a multiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called 'post-hypnotic suggestion,' now well known, and for which Lucie was a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she was awakened and asked about the papers on her lap, she counted and said she saw those only whose number was not a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind. But the hand , when the sub-conscious self was interrogated by the usual method of engrossing the upper self in another conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap were those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick up all the cards which were there, picked up these and let the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things was suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normal Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. "What is the matter? I can't see!" the normal personage suddenly cried out in the midst of her conversation, when M. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to make use of her eyes. The anæsthesias, paralyses, contractions and other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem then to be due to the fact that their secondary personage has enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a function which the latter ought to have retained.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "How is it possible!" he said, with a desolate shake of his head... "In these few years!" "Child's play!" replied Herr Kesselmeyer in a good mood. »In four years one can very well be thrown to the dogs! When you think how merrily the Westfahl brothers were jumping around in Bremen a short time ago..." The Consul blinked at him, neither seeing nor hearing him. He had by no means expressed the real thought he was mulling over... Why, he wondered suspiciously yet uncomprehendingly, why all this now? B. Grünlich could have been where he is now two or three years ago; you could see that at a glance. But his credit had been inexhaustible, he had received capital from the banks, he had repeatedly received the signatures of solid houses like Senator Bock and Consul Goudstikker for his ventures, and his bills of exchange had circulated like cash. Why now, now, now - and the boss of the company Johann Buddenbrook knew well what he meant by this now - this collapse on all sides, This total withdrawal of all trust as if by agreement, this unanimous attack on B. Grünlich, neglecting every consideration, even every form of politeness? The Consul would have been far too naive if he had not known that the prestige of his own house after Grünlich's engagement to his daughter must have benefited his son-in-law as well. But had the latter's credit depended so completely, so blatantly, so exclusively on his? Was Grünlich himself nothing? And the inquiries made by the consul, the books he had examined?... Whatever happened, his resolution not to lift a finger in the matter stood firmer than ever. One should Greenish, putting aside every consideration, indeed every form of politeness? The Consul would have been far too naive if he had not known that the prestige of his own house after Grünlich's engagement to his daughter must have benefited his son-in-law as well. But had the latter's credit depended so completely, so blatantly, so exclusively on his? Was Grünlich himself nothing? And the inquiries made by the consul, the books he had examined?... Whatever happened, his resolution not to lift a finger in the matter stood firmer than ever. One should Greenish, putting aside every consideration, indeed every form of politeness? The Consul would have been far too naive if he had not known that the prestige of his own house after Grünlich's engagement to his daughter must have benefited his son-in-law as well. But had the latter's credit depended so completely, so blatantly, so exclusively on his? Was Grünlich himself nothing? And the inquiries made by the consul, the books he had examined?... Whatever happened, his resolution not to lift a finger in the matter stood firmer than ever. One should that after Grünlich's engagement to his daughter the prestige of his own house must also have benefited his son-in-law. But had the latter's credit depended so completely, so blatantly, so exclusively on his? Was Grünlich himself nothing?

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  How could I merge the culture of the woods and the Unitarian church with Christian culture and yet not abandon the truth of Scripture? How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality? My answer did not come for many years, and as for that summer, I became very confused. I gave in to keep the peace. I stopped going to the Unitarian church, I shaved, I cut the hippy act and made friends, good friends, friends whom I loved and who loved me. From time to time I would overhear comments by my friends, destructive comments about the political left or about homosexuals or Democrats, and I never knew what to do with those comments. They felt right in my head but not in my heart. I went along, and, looking back, I think we all went along. Even the people who were making the comments were going along. What else was there to do? Truth is truth. It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things. My realization came while attending an alumni social for Westmont College. I had never attended Westmont, but my friend Michelle did, and she invited me. Greg Spencer, a communications professor, was to speak, and Michelle thought I might enjoy the lecture. I did. More than I can say. The lecture was about the power of metaphor. Spencer opened by asking us what metaphors we think of when we consider the topic of cancer. We gave him our answers, all pretty much the same, we battle cancer, we fight cancer, we are rebuilding our white blood cells, things like that. Spencer pointed out that the overwhelming majority of metaphors we listed were war metaphors. They dealt with battle. He then proceeded to talk about cancer patients and how, because of war metaphor, many people who suffer with cancer feel more burdened than, in fact, they should. Most of them are frightened beyond their need to be frightened, and this affects their health. Some, feeling that they have been thrust into a deadly war, simply give up. If there were another metaphor, a metaphor more accurate, perhaps cancer would not prove so deadly. Science has shown that the way people think about cancer affects their ability to deal with the disease, thus affecting their overall health. Professor Spencer said that if he were to sit down with his family and tell them he had cancer they would be shocked, concerned, perhaps even in tears, and yet cancer is nothing near the most deadly of diseases. Because of war metaphor, the professor said, we are more likely to fear cancer when, actually, most people survive the disease.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  15 Community Living with Freaks BEFORE I LIVED IN COMMUNITY, I THOUGHT FAITH, mine being Christian faith, was something a person did alone, like monks in caves. I thought the backbone of faith was time alone with God, time reading ancient texts and meditating on poetry or the precepts of natural law and, perhaps, when a person gets good and godly, levitating potted plants or pitchers of water. It seems that way in books. I had read a Christian book about the betterment of self, the actualization of the individual in the personal journey toward God. The book was all about focus and drive and perspective. It was all stuff you did in a quiet room. None of it had anything to do with community. If other people were a part of the Christian journey, they had small roles; they were accountability partners or counselors or husbands or wives. I hadn’t seen a single book (outside the majority of books in the New Testament) that addressed a group of people or a community with advice about faith. When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul. I didn’t know what to think about the idea of living in community at first. I had lived on my own for about six years, and the idea of moving in with a bunch of slobs didn’t appeal to me. Living in community sounded so, um, odd. Cults do that sort of thing, you know. First you live in community, and then you drink punch and die. It was Rick’s idea, though, and he seemed fairly normal in all the other areas of his life. He never mentioned anything about a spaceship trailing behind a comet. He never asked us to store weapons or peanut butter, so I figured the thing about living in community was on the up-and-up. Just because something looks like a cult doesn’t mean it really is, right? The other thing is that, at the time, I was pushing thirty and still not married. When you are thirty and not married and you move in with a bunch of guys, you look like you have given up, like you are a bunch of losers who live together so you can talk about computers and share video games. If I lived in community, we would have to have about five raging parties just to shake the loser image. But I am not one to party. I like going to bed at nine and watching CNN till I fall asleep.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. A certain heretical sect of the Jews called Sadducees denied the resurrection, and said that there was neither angel nor spirit. These then coming to Jesus, craftily proposed to Him a certain tale, in order to shew that no resurrection should take place, or had taken place; and therefore there is added, And they asked him, saying, Master. And in this tale they lay down that seven men had married one woman, in order to make men draw back from belief in the resurrection. BEDE. (ubi sup.) And fitly do they frame such a fable in order to prove the madness of those who assert the resurrection of the body. Such a thing however might really have happened at some time or other among them. PSEUDO-JEROME. But in a mystical sense: what can this woman, leaving no seed of seven brothers, and last of all dying, mean except the Jewish synagogue, deserted by the seven-fold Spirit, which filled those seven patriarchs, who did not leave to her the seed of Abraham, that is, Jesus Christ? For although a Son was born to them, nevertheless He was given to us Gentiles. This woman was dead to Christ, nor shall she be joined in the resurrection to any patriarch of the seven; for by the number seven is meant the whole company of the faithful. Thus it is said contrariwise by Isaiah, Seven women shall take hold of one man; (Is. 4:1) that is, the seven Churches, which the Lord loves, reproves, and chastises, adore Him with one faith. Wherefore it goes on: And Jesus answering, said unto them, Do ye not therefore err, not knowing the Scripture, neither the power of God? THEOPHYLACT. As if He had said, Ye understand not what sort of a resurrection the Scriptures announce; for ye believe that there will be a restoration of our bodies, such as they are now, but it shall not be so. Thus then ye know not the Scriptures; neither again do ye know the power of God; for ye consider it as a difficult thing, saying, How can the limbs, which have been scattered, be united together and joined to the soul? But this in respect of the Divine power is as nothing. There follows: For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven; as if He had said, There will be a certain heavenly and angelic restoration to life, when there shall be no more decay, and we shall remain unchanged; and for this reason marriage shall cease. For marriage now exists on account of our decay, that we may be carried on by succession of our race, and not fail; but then we shall be as the Angels, who need no succession by marriage, and never come to an end.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I was picturing all the cool dancers, the girls in white shirts moving through the black light, the guys with the turntables in the loft, the big screen with the swirling images and all that energy coming out of the speakers, pounding through everybody’s bodies, getting everybody up and down, up and down. Nobody is going to confess anything, I thought. Who wants to stop dancing to confess their sins? And I realized that this was a bad idea, that none of this was God’s idea. Nobody was going to get angry, but nobody was going to care very much either. There is nothing relevant about Christian spirituality, I kept thinking. God, if He is even there, has no voice in this place. Everybody wants to have a conversation about truth, but there isn’t any truth anymore. The only truth is what is cool, what is on television, what protest is going on on what block, and it doesn’t matter the issue; it only matters who is going to be there and will there be a party later and can any of us feel like we are relevant while we are at the party. And in the middle of it we are like Mormons on bikes. I sat there wondering whether any of this was true, whether Christian spirituality was even true at all. You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic. I didn’t feel like explaining it very much. I didn’t feel like being in the booth or wearing that stupid monk outfit. I wanted to go to the rave. Everybody in there was cool, and we were just religious. I was going to tell Tony that I didn’t want to do it when he opened the curtain and said we had our first customer. “What’s up, man?” Duder sat himself on the chair with a smile on his face. He told me my pipe smelled good. “Thanks,” I said. I asked him his name, and he said his name was Jake. I shook his hand because I didn’t know what to do, really. “So, what is this? I’m supposed to tell you all of the juicy gossip I did at Ren Fayre, right?” Jake said. “No.” “Okay, then what? What’s the game?” He asked. “Not really a game. More of a confession thing.” “You want me to confess my sins, right?” “No, that’s not what we’re doing, really.” “What’s the deal, man? What’s with the monk outfit?” “Well, we are, well, a group of Christians here on campus, you know.” “I see. Strange place for Christians, but I am listening.” “Thanks,” I told him. He was being very patient and gracious. “Anyway, there is this group of us, just a few of us who were thinking about the way Christians have sort of wronged people over time. You know, the Crusades, all that stuff . .

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

  Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of 'correspondences' to which the most heredity caste of custodi would never approximate, merely because to them, as human beings, the dog's interest in those smells would for ever be an inscrutable mystery. These writers have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural , makes experience more than it is made by it. Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction , and Zerstreutheit in German. We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree. Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start ; the pensée de derrière la tête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again. This curious state or inhibition can for a few moments be produced at will by fixing the eyes on vacancy. Some persons can voluntarily empty their minds and 'think of nothing.'

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

  Her hand being hidden by a screen, she was ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would then come, corresponding to the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the hand itself or its fingers would come when manipulated; and finally objects placed in it would come; but on the hand itself nothing would ever be felt. Of course simulation would not be hard here; but M. Binet disbelieves this (usually very shallow) explanation to be a probable one in cases in question.[202] The usual way in which doctors measure the delicacy of our touch is by the compass-points. Two points are normally felt as one whenever they are too close together for discrimination; but what is 'too close' on one part of the skin may seem very far apart on another. In the middle of the back or on the thigh, less than 3 inches may be too close; on the finger-tip a tenth of an inch is far enough apart. Now, as tested in this way, with the appeal made to the primary consciousness, which talks through the mouth and seems to hold the field alone, a certain person's skin may be entirely anæsthetic and not feel the compass-points at all; and yet this same skin will prove to have a perfectly normal sensibility if the appeal be made to that other secondary or sub-consciousness, which expresses itself automatically by writing or by movements of the hand. M. Binet, M. Pierre Janet, and M. Jules Janet have all found this. The subject, whenever touched, would signify 'one point' or 'two points,' as accurately as if she were a normal person. She would signify it only by these movements; and of the movements themselves her primary self would be as unconscious as of the facts they signified, for what the submerged consciousness makes the hand do automatically is unknown to the consciousness which uses the mouth. Messrs. Bernheim and Pitres have also proved, by observations too complicated to be given in this spot, that the hysterical blindness is no real blindness at all. The eye of an hysteric which is totally blind when the other or seeing eye is shut, will do its share of vision perfectly well when both eyes are open together. But even where both eyes are semi-blind from hysterical disease, the method of automatic writing proves that their perceptions exist, only cut off from communication with the upper consciousness. M. Binet has found the hand of his patients unconsciously writing down words which their eyes were vainly endeavoring to 'see,' i.e., to bring to the upper consciousness.

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

  Where the parts of an object have already been discerned, and each made the object of a special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the object again in its pristine unity; and so prominent may our consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly believe that it ever could have appeared undivided. But this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being that any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately , will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind . The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why "the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel."[408] It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie before us, "How could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion, as if it were a continuum , a plenum ? There would have been gaps —but we felt no gaps; wherefore we must have seen and heard these details, leaned upon these steps; they must have been operative upon our minds, just as they are now, only unconsciously , or at least inattentively . Our first unanalyzed sensation was really composed of these elementary sensations, our first rapid conclusion was really based on these intermediate inferences, all the while, only we failed to note the fact." But this is nothing but the fatal 'psychologists fallacy' (p. 134) of treating an inferior state of mind as if it must somehow know implicitly all that is explicitly known about the same topic by superior states of mind. The thing thought of is unquestionably the same, but it is thought twice over in two absolutely different psychoses,—once as an unbroken unit, and again as a sum of discriminated parts.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  She just looked at me and rolled her tired eyes. She dropped her hands into her lap with a sigh. “I wish I could read you my journal,” she said, looking blankly at the wall. “There is this part of me that wants to believe. I wrote about it in my journal. My family believes, Don. I feel as though I need to believe. Like I am going to die if I don’t believe. But it is all so stupid. So completely stupid.” “Laura, why is it that you hang out with the Christians on campus?” “I don’t know. I guess I am just curious.” She wiped her eye again. “You’re not dumb, I don’t think. I just don’t understand how you can believe this stuff.” “I don’t either, really,” I told her. “But I believe in God, Laura. There is something inside me that causes me to believe. And now I believe God is after you, that God wants you to believe too.” “What do you mean?” she asked, dropping her hands in her lap and sighing once again. “I mean the idea that you want to confess. I think that God is wanting a relationship with you and that starts by confessing directly to Him. He is offering forgiveness.” “You are not making this easy, Don. I don’t exactly believe I need a God to forgive me of anything.” “I know. But that is what I believe is happening. Perhaps you can see it as an act of social justice. The entire world is falling apart because nobody will admit they are wrong. But by asking God to forgive you, you are willing to own your own crap.” Laura sat silent for a while. She sort of mumbled under her breath. “I can’t, Don. It isn’t a decision. It isn’t something you decide.” “What do you mean?” “I can’t get there. I can’t just say it without meaning it.” She was getting very frustrated. “I can’t do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don’t decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me.” “That is true. But don’t panic. It’s okay. God brought you this far, Laura; He will bring you the rest of the way. It may take time.” “But this hurts,” she said. “I want to believe, but I can’t. I hate this!” Laura went back to her room. The next day I got an e-mail from Penny saying she, too, had talked with Laura. Penny asked me to pray for her as Laura felt trapped. Penny said she was going to spend a great deal of time with her, really walking through her emotions. [image "9780785263708_0067_006" file=Image00013.jpg] I had no explanation for Laura. I don’t think there is an explanation.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the person I am and bring him here to the person I should be. Are you following me at all? Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?” The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away. [image "9780785263708_0111_003" file=Image00040.jpg] I suppose what I wanted back then is what every Christian wants, whether they understand themselves or not. What I wanted was God. I wanted tangible interaction. But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was. I felt like a robot or an insect or a mysterious blob floating around in the universe. I believed if I could contact God, He would be able to explain who and why I was. The days and weeks before a true commitment to Jesus can be terrible and lonely. I think I was feeling bitter about the human experience. I never asked to be human. Nobody came to the womb and explained the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain. I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity. I think maybe I was going crazy or something. I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn’t breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like an experience of freedom. About twelve hours after I had the conversation with my pastor, a friend and I jumped into one of those Volkswagen camping vans and shoved off for the green lumpy places. A week into our American tour, we found ourselves at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which is more lumpy than green, it turns out. It was a heck of a hike, let me tell you. I was in no shape to do it. So by the time I got to the bottom of that gargantuan hole in the ground, I was miserable.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  It took me a while to realize that these stories, while often used with children, are not at all children’s stories. I think the devil has tricked us into thinking so much of biblical theology is story fit for kids. How did we come to think the story of Noah’s ark is appropriate for children? Can you imagine a children’s book about Noah’s ark complete with paintings of people gasping in gallons of water, mothers grasping their children while their bodies go flying down white-rapid rivers, the children’s tiny heads being bashed against rocks or hung up in fallen trees? I don’t think a children’s book like that would sell many copies. I couldn’t give myself to Christianity because it was a religion for the intellectually naive. In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children’s stories or ignore them. The entire thing seemed very difficult for my intellect to embrace. Now none of this was quite defined; it was mostly taking place in my subconscious. Help came from the most unlikely of sources. I was taking a literature course in college in which we were studying the elements of story: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. The odd thought occurred to me while I was studying that we didn’t know where the elements of story come from. I mean, we might have a guy’s name who thought of them, but we don’t know why they exist. I started wondering why the heart and mind responded to this specific formula when it came to telling stories. So I broke it down. Setting: That was easy; every story has a setting. My setting is America, on earth. I understand setting because I experience setting. I am sitting in a room, in a house, I have other characters living in this house with me, that sort of thing. The reason my heart understood setting was because I experienced setting.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  MY FRIEND KURT USED TO SAY FINDING A WIFE IS a percentage game. He said you have to have two or three relationships going at once, never letting the one girl know about the others, always “moving in to close the deal.” One of them, he said, is bound to work out, and if you lose one, you just pick up another. Kurt believed you had to date about twenty girls before you found the one you were going to marry. He just believed it was easier to date them all at once. Kurt ended up marrying a girl from Dallas, and everybody says he married her for her money. He is very happy. Elsewhere in the quandary is my friend Josh. When I first moved to Oregon I was befriended by this vibrant kid who read a lot of the Bible. Josh was good-looking and obsessed with dating, philosophies of dating, social rituals, and that sort of thing. He was homeschooled and raised to believe traditional dating was a bad idea. I traveled with him around the country and introduced him at seminars he would conduct on the pitfalls of dating. He wrote a book about it, and it hit the bestseller list. No kidding. A couple years later he moved to Baltimore and got married. I called him after the wedding and asked him how he got to know his wife without dating. He said they courted, which I understood to mean he had become Amish. But he explained courting is a lot like dating without the head games. He and his wife are also very happy. My friend Mike Tucker reads books about dating and knows a lot on the subject. He says things like “You know, Don, relationships are like rubber bands . . . When one person pulls away, the other is attracted, and when the other person pulls away, well, that just draws the other one even closer.” That sort of thing is interesting to a guy like me because I know nothing about dating. What little I know about dating is ridiculous and wouldn’t help rabbits reproduce. I know you shouldn’t make fun of a girl on a date and you shouldn’t eat spaghetti. Other than these two things I am clueless.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Before I even had time to fully open the heavy wooden door, it was pushed from the outside by a long black-stockinged leg, a room service tray held between two white-gloved hands. The girl flashed a crooked smile and tossed her head back, sending the red ponytail she wore bouncing across her milky white bare shoulders. “Where would you like this?” she cooed, two emerald green eyes sparkling in my direction. It was a rhetorical question. I watched as she set the tray down on the walnut writing desk and hopped onto the bed. I knew instantly there was something not quite right about this strange scenario being played out in the dimly lit room. She just didn’t belong in this movie. Her ivory cream–colored cutoff top, short cobweb gray skirt, and tattooed arms didn’t fit the normal room service uniform script. “Come up here,” she said, patting the spare space next to her on the bed. “Look, I’m not sure what this is all about but I think there has been some kind of mistake.” A confused and somewhat clumsy cliché retort, but the only one that seemed to make any sense in this moment of fast-unraveling reality. “Think of me as an adventure,” she replied, sliding off her red heels. I didn’t really know what to think as my tired eyes fell softly into hers. “My name is Lucy. Lucy Lockett. You can call me Arousal. All my special friends do.” “Pleased to meet you, Lucy. Do you work for the hotel?” “Call me Arousal and no, I don’t work for anyone. Now, how about you take off that robe and hop into bed. All this chitchat is getting in the way.” “In the way of what? Listen, I think there has been a serious mix-up and you’ve got the wrong room. I didn’t book a hooker and to be perfectly honest I really think you should leave.” She laughed. Flashing a row of perfectly white teeth. Her mischievous eyes smiling. “Relax. I don’t fuck for money. I fuck for fun, for poetry, for words whispered late at night by strangers.” I felt a curious sense of calm slowly wrapping itself around me like a comfy blanket on a cold winter’s morning. A hazy whiteness seemed to fill the hotel room as the walls dissolved away to nothing and I found myself standing naked, my back against a tree in a forest. Arousal was on her knees, her pretty little mouth sucking my hard cock, eyes looking up at me.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But suddenly her eyes opened, eyes that had grown quite dark and were full of tears. And in a troubled voice she blurted out: “What does this man want from me –! What have I done to him -?!' At which she burst into tears. – The Consul glanced at his wife and looked at his empty cup, a little embarrassed. 'Dear Tony,' said the Consul softly, 'what's the point of this echauffement! You can be sure, can't you, that your parents only have your best interest in mind and that they cannot advise you to turn down the job that is being offered to you. You see, I assume that you don't yet harbor any decisive feelings for Herr Grünlich, but that will come, I assure you, that will come with time... A young thing like you never really knows what it really wants... It looks as confused in the head as it does in the heart... You have to give your heart time and keep your head open to the encouragements of experienced people who plan to ensure our happiness..." 'I don't know anything about him -' Tony managed disconsolately, squeezing her eyes with the little white cambric napkin that had egg stains in it. "All I know is that he has golden whiskers and a brisk business..." Her upper lip, which trembled when she cried, looked unspeakably touching. The Consul, with a movement of sudden tenderness, drew his chair near her and stroked her hair, smiling. 'My little Tony,' he said, 'what should you know about him? You're a child, you see, you wouldn't know any more about him if he hadn't spent four weeks here, but fifty-two... You're a little girl who doesn't yet have eyes for the world and who focuses on eyes of other people who have good intentions for you..." "I don't understand...I don't understand..." Tony sobbed in disbelief, cuddling her head like a kitten under the stroking hand. "He comes here... says something nice to everyone... leaves... and writes that he... I don't understand... how did he get there... what have I done to him?!..." The Consul smiled again. 'You've said that before, Tony, and it shows your childish perplexity. My little daughter doesn't have to believe that I'm pushing her and tormentwants ... All this can be considered calmly, must be considered calmly, because it is a serious matter. That's what I'll answer Mr. Grünlich for the time being and will neither refuse nor approve his request... There are many things to consider... So... we see? deal! Now papa goes to work... Farewell, Bethsy...” "Goodbye, my dear Jean." "You ought to have some more honey, Tony," said the Consul, when she was left alone with her daughter, who remained motionless and with her head bowed. "You have to eat enough..." Tony's tears gradually dried up. Her head was hot and full of thoughts...

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  “Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete. Tired. It has nothing to do with this church; it’s all me. Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the person I am and bring him here to the person I should be. Are you following me at all? Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?” The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away. I suppose what I wanted back then is what every Christian wants, whether they understand themselves or not. What I wanted was God. I wanted tangible interaction. But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was. I felt like a robot or an insect or a mysterious blob floating around in the universe. I believed if I could contact God, He would be able to explain who and why I was. The days and weeks before a true commitment to Jesus can be terrible and lonely. I think I was feeling bitter about the human experience. I never asked to be human. Nobody came to the womb and explained the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain. I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity. I think maybe I was going crazy or something. I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn’t breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like an experience of freedom.