Despair

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 Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Lust is always built on a lie. And so for you and me to be free from lust, we have to begin by understanding the lie and where it comes from and why it can be so alluring. The word lust in the Greek language is the word epithumia. It’s actually two words in Greek: the word epi, which means “in,” and the word thumos, which refers to “the mind.” In the mind. Think about the head space we give to things and people we want. It’s easy for our thoughts to be dominated by a craving. We’re in a meeting, we’re taking a walk, we’re studying, we’re doing jobs around the house, and the whole time our brain is miles away, trying to figure out how to get it. It takes ahold of us. We are not free. Lust is slavery. If I want something to the point that I can’t conceive of being content without it, then it owns me. One writer in the scriptures puts it like this: “ ‘I have the right to do anything’—but I will not be mastered by anything.”9 That last part is great, isn’t it? “I will not be mastered by anything.” We are free to do anything we want. But because I can doesn’t mean I should. There is a massive distance between “can” and “best.” We’re addictive creatures. We try things, we experiment, we explore, and certain things hook us. They get their tentacles in us, and we can’t get away from them. What started out as freedom can quickly become slavery. Often freedom is seen as the ability to do whatever you want. But freedom isn’t being able to have whatever we crave. Freedom is going without whatever we crave and being fine with it. Where It Leads In the book of Ephesians, the writer claims that we get enslaved to lust because we become “darkened” in our understanding. The passage explains that we’re separated from the life of God because of ignorance due to the hardening of our hearts.10 It isn’t just what lust does, it’s where lust leads. God made us to appreciate aesthetics: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight. Shape, texture, consistency, color. It all flows from the endless creativity at the center of the universe, and we were created to enjoy it. But when lust has us in its grip, one of the first things to suffer is our appreciation for whatever it is we’re fixated on. The scriptures call this “having lost all sensitivity.”11 The word insensitivity is the Greek word apalgeo. It comes from the root word algeo, which means “to feel pain,” and apo, which means “lacking or going without.” It’s the condition of being void of or past feeling. We could translate the phrase in Ephesians as “having lost the ability to feel things like they used to.” Addictions often rob people of their appreciation of things.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  By then I was addicted to morphine, which the nurses had given me freely because when I didn’t get it I disturbed the ward with my screams. At first I wanted it for the pain; the pain was terrible. Then I wanted it for the peace it gave me. On morphine I didn’t worry. I didn’t even think. I rose out of myself and dreamed benevolent dreams, soaring like a gull in the balmy updraft. The doctor gave me some tablets when I left the hospital, but they had no effect. I was hurting in two ways now, from my finger and from narcotic withdrawal. Though it must have been a mild episode of withdrawal it did not seem mild to me, especially since I didn’t know what it was, or that it would come to an end. Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain. If I had lived in a place where drugs were bought and sold, I would have bought them. I would have done anything to get them. But nobody I knew used drugs. The possibility didn’t even occur to us. The marijuana scare films that might have sparked our interest never made it to Concrete, and heroin use was understood to be unique to the residents of New York City. I was all through being a good sport. Everything was a grievance to me. I complained about school, I complained about the uselessness of my medicine, I complained about how hard it was to eat and dress myself. I begged for comfort and then despised it. I talked back and found fault, especially with Dwight. From behind my wound I said things to Dwight I never would have said to him before. It occurred to me that alcohol might make me feel better. I stole some of Dwight’s Old Crow but the first drink made me choke, so I replenished the bottle with water and put it back. A few nights later Dwight asked me if I had been into his whiskey. It was watery, he said. He seemed more curious than anything else. He probably would have let me off with a warning if I’d admitted it, but I said, “I’m not the drinker in this house.” “Don’t talk to me like that, mister,” he said, and jabbed his fingers against my chest. He didn’t push all that hard, but he caught me off balance. I stumbled backward, tripping on my own feet, and as I went down I threw my hands out behind me to break the fall. All this seemed to happen very slowly, until the moment I landed on my finger. I forgot who I was.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The bureaucratic paradoxes were maddening. Consider the case of John, middle-aged, paranoid, and mildly retarded. Having once been attacked in a shelter for the homeless, he thereafter avoided state-sponsored shelters and slept outside. John knew the magic hospital-opening words, and often on cold, wet nights, usually around midnight, he would scratch his wrists in front of an emergency room and threaten deeper wounds unless the state found him a safe, private sleeping space. But no agency had the authority to provide twenty dollars for a room, and since the emergency room physician could not be certain—that is, medically and legally certain—that John would not make a serious suicide attempt if he were forced to sleep in the shelter, he spent many nights a year sleeping soundly in a $700-a-day hospital room, courtesy of an inept and inhumane medical insurance system. The contemporary practice of brief psychiatric hospitalization works only if there is an adequate posthospital outpatient program. Nonetheless, in 1972 Governor Ronald Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California by not only closing the large state psychiatric hospitals but also eradicating most of the public aftercare programs. As a result hospital staffs were forced, day after day, to go through the charade of treating patients and discharging them back into the same noxious setting that had necessitated their hospitalization. It was like suturing up wounded soldiers and sending them back into the fray. Imagine breaking your ass taking care of patients—initial workup interviews, daily rounds, presentations to the attending psychiatrists, staff planning sessions, medical student workups, writing orders in the hospital charts, daily therapy sessions—knowing all the while that in a couple of days there would be no option but to return them to the same malignant environment that had disgorged them. Back to violent alcoholic families. Back to angry spouses who had long ago run out of love and patience. Back to rag-filled grocery carts. Back to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-crazed friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates. Question: How do we healers maintain sanity? Answer: Learn to cultivate hypocrisy. So that was how I put in my time. First I learned to muffle my caring—the very beacon that had led me to this calling. Next I mastered the canons of professional survival: avoid involvement—don’t let patients matter too much. Remember they’ll be gone tomorrow. Don’t concern yourself with their postdischarge plans. Remember that small is beautiful—settle for small goals—don’t attempt too much—don’t set yourself up for failure. If therapy group patients learn simply that talking helps, that being closer to others feels good, that they may be of use to others—that’s plenty. Gradually, after several frustrating months of leading groups with new arrivals and discharges every day, I got the hang of it and developed a method of getting the most out of these fragmented group meetings. My most radical step was to change my time frame.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Myth When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler. 49 Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says . The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice . Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated . 50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible? You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things. Once, a woman drunkenly touches your elbow at a party and says, “I believe you,” in your ear, and you cry so hard you have to leave. You walk home in the dark over a footbridge and see a fat raccoon waddling up the riverbed. The raccoon is a trickster; everyone knows that. He doesn’t look up, he doesn’t speak to you, he just keeps going. But keeping going is a way of speaking. You hear him. He’s saying you will fight this fight for the rest of your days. 49 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C423.3, Taboo: revealing experiences in other world. 50 . “Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary ? Brutality ? Love ?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I have a single life left, and I swear here and now to dedicate it to revenge. I will dwell in the dream dimension, and I will haunt you and your female descendants forever. You separated me forever from Cica, the bewitching Cica, the great passion of my life, and now I will make certain that you will forever be separated from any man who ever shows an interest in you. I’ll visit them when they are with you”—here he hissed most terribly—”and drive them from you in such terror that they will never return—they will forget your very existence.” At first I felt exultant. Stupid cat! Cats are, after all, simpleminded, pinheaded animals. Merges had no real understanding of me. His brilliant revenge—that I would no longer be able to be with a man twice! Not revenge but a blessing, a blessing exceeded only by my being forbidden to be with a man even once. Never again to touch or even see a man—that would be paradise. But I soon found that Merges was not simpleminded—far from it. He could read thoughts; I am sure of it. He sat on his haunches, stroking his whiskers, staring at me with his enormous red eyes for a very long time. Then he proclaimed, this time in a strangely human voice, sounding like a judge or a prophet, “What you feel toward men will be changed forever. Now you shall know desire. You shall be like a cat, and when your heat comes each month, your desire will be irresistible. But it will never be fulfilled. You will please men but never be pleased, and each man you please will leave you, never to return or even to remember you. You shall bear a child, and she and her child and her child’s child shall know what I and Kovacs feel. This shall be for all time.” “For all time?” I asked. “Such a long sentence?” “For all time,” he replied. “What greater offense than separating me forever from the love of my life?” Suddenly overcome, I began to tremble and beg for you, my unborn daughter. “Please punish me, Merges. I deserve it for what I did to you. I deserve a loveless life. But for my children and my children’s children, I beg you.” And I bowed low before him and pressed my forehead to the ground. “There is only one exit for your children. None for you.” “What is the exit?” I asked. “Redress the wrong,” said Merges, now licking—with a tongue larger than my hand—his monstrous paws and cleaning his hideous face. “Redress the wrong? How? What should they do?” I moved toward him, pleading. But Merges hissed and brandished his unsheathed claws. As I stepped back, he faded away. The last thing I saw of him were those terrible claws. This, Magda, was my curse. Our curse. It drove me to ruin. I grew wild with desire and ran after men. I lost my position.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  128 This poor man was at the end of his rope, having burned bridge after bridge in his personal and professional life. Unable to hold a job, bankrupted by various business ventures with disreputable partners and slammed by a rapid succession of divorces, Elliot had sought psychiatric help. His referral to Damasio provided the opportunity for a thorough neurological workup. He passed one cognitive/intellectual test after another and even scored normal on a standard personality inventory. Even on a test purporting to measure moral development, he scored high and was still able to reason through a variety of complex ethical questions. However, something was clearly not “normal” with this man. Yet in his own words Elliot said, “And after all of this I still wouldn’t know what to do.” While being able to “think through” all manner of complex intellectual and moral dilemmas, he was unable to make choices and act accordingly. His moral computers were working, but his moral compass was not. Eventually, Damasio designed some clever tests that were able to pinpoint Elliot’s deficit and provide clues as to why his life was such a disaster. One of these tests was a type of card game where strategies of risk and gain were played off against one another. When needing to shift his strategy from high risk–high gain (with a probable overall loss) to moderate risk–modest gain (with ultimate gain), Elliott was unable to learn and sustain the transition. Just like the overall outcome in his life, Elliot was an abject failure; he simply could not learn when it mattered. Damasio speculated that his patient was unable to emotionally experience the consequences of his decisions or acts. He could reason perfectly well, except when something of importance was at stake. Essentially, Damasio reasoned that Elliot had lost the ability to feel and to care. He was therefore unable to make (e)valuations, integrate them into meaningful consequences and then act upon them. He was emotionally rudderless. Damasio puzzled about the possibility that Elliot was a contemporary Phineas Gage. Both physicians, Harlow and Damasio, though separated by more than a century, speculated that their patients had lost their capability to balance instinct and intellect. However, rather than idly pondering this possibility, Damasio and his wife, Hannah, set out on a medically oriented archeological expedition. They located Gage’s preserved skull, ignominiously gathering dust on a shelf in an obscure museum at Harvard Medical School. In a study more like a suspenseful TV crime scene investigation replete with dramatic forensic analysis than a stodgy academic experiment, the Damasios were able to borrow the pierced skull and subject it to sophisticated computer-driven analysis. Using powerful imaging techniques, they were able to predict precisely where the wayward projectile would have ripped through his brain, throwing him to the ground and forever mutilating his personality.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was a fit of weeping violent and brief, and as my breath steadied I felt a sense of resolution, that I had been lucky and must learn from that luck; I wouldn’t go back to such a place, I thought, this would be the end of it. But how many times had I felt that I could change, I had felt it through all the long months with R., months that I had spent, for all my happiness, in a state of perpetual hunger; and so at the same time I felt it I felt too that my resolution was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that my real life was here, and I thought this even as I struggled to climb from the new depth I had been shown. And even as I climbed or sought to climb I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time. There was no lowest place, I thought, I would strike ground only to feel it give way gaping beneath me, and I felt with a new fear how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek. For some moments I wrestled with these thoughts, and then I stood and turned back to the boulevard, composing as best I could my human face.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He raised his hand then, signaling for the waitress and signaling too that our talk was over, that he had exhausted all hope of my helpfulness; and I was both relieved and exasperated by this, and exasperated too by what he had said. But this is a story you’re telling yourself, I said, a story you’ve made up that will make you unhappy. There’s nothing inevitable about it, it’s a choice you’ve made, you can choose a different story. But he was already gone, though he was still with me at the table; he was taking out his wallet to pay the check, which I covered with my hand as the waitress laid it down. I’ve got it, I said, and he thanked me, for the coffee and for the talk, as he said. He stood up and put on his coat while I was still counting out bills, and though he stood there willing to wait for me he was clearly relieved when I let him go, saying I would wait for my change. I watched him as he left, walking hunched over just slightly, carrying away the despair he held on to so tightly, and I told myself he would grow out from under it, that he would go to university and discover a new life in England or America, new freedoms and possibilities, a greater scope for love, and with it room in himself for other feelings. The pain he felt now would become a story he told to others, I thought, and of course he couldn’t believe this, of course it seemed impossible, I told myself, of course I had failed to make him see it.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The ambulances came, the boy, hoisted to his grandmother’s hip, watched the officers approach his father with guns drawn, how his father waved a bloody twenty-dollar bill, the way he did back in Saigon where the cops would take the money, tell the boy’s mother to calm down and take a walk, then leave as if nothing happened. The boy watched as the American officers tackled his father, the money slipping out in the tussle and landing on the sidewalk lit by sulfur lights. Focused on the brown-and-green money-leaf on the pavement, half expecting it to fly up, back onto a winter tree, the boy did not see his father cuffed, dragged up to his feet, his head pushed into the patrol car. He saw only the crumpled money, until a neighbor girl in pigtails swiped it when no one was looking. The boy looked up to find his mother being carried out by paramedics, her broken face floating past him on the stretcher. — In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another. He tugged at the visor of his Red Sox cap, his lips scrunched. A porch light reflected on the barrel a small white star in the faraway-dark, which rose and fell as he aimed. This is what we did on nights like this, a Saturday with no sound for miles. I sat on a milk crate sipping Dr Pepper and watched him empty one cartridge after another into metal. Where the rifle’s butt recoiled against his shoulder, his green Whalers T-shirt wrinkled, the creases grabbing with each shot. The cans leaped one by one off the bench. I watched, recalling a story Mr. Buford told us back on the farm. Years ago, hunting in Montana, Buford found a moose in his trap. A male. He spoke slowly, rubbing his white stubble, describing how the trap had cut off the moose’s hind leg—a sound like a wet stick snapping, he said—save for a few stringy pink ligaments. The animal groaned against its body, which, bleeding and torn, was suddenly a prison. It raged, fat tongue lolling out a voice. “Almost like a man’s,” Buford said, “like you and me.” He glanced at his grandson, then at the ground, his plate of beans speckled with ants. He put down his rifle, he explained, and took out the double barrel holstered to his back and steadied. But the buck noticed him and charged, tearing its leg clean off. It ran right at him before he could aim, then veered toward a clearing and broke through the trees, hobbling on what was left of itself. Like you and me, I said to no one.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  102 Lecture 24: Voltaire’s Candide While this last chapter can be read in a variety of ways, several items need to be kept in mind. The mice-in-the-galley metaphor suggests that the universe was not made for us; therefore any speculations we make about its purpose and nature will be as foolish as mice speculating on the purpose or nature of the galley in which they happen to be. Work can keep us from speculating too much and getting ourselves tangled up in useless hypotheses about why we are here and what we are supposed to be doing. “Cultivating our garden” is the metaphor for whatever work we do, and it will prevent us from worrying too much about good and evil or whether this is the best of all possible worlds. Beyond natural disasters, Candide contains a lot of human cruelty and indifference to others’ suffering, the origins of which are a little harder to pin down. About midway through the book, Candide and his servant discover Eldorado, a utopia in South America. Candide, however, is not content there, and he leaves to return to Europe with the wealth from Eldorado. Candide brings up the question of whether a hostile environment— like the one in Europe—produces the cruel, greedy, prideful human nature we meet there, while a friendlier environment produces kinder people, as it seems to do in Eldorado. On the other hand, the work suggests, human nature may be as ¿ xed as the predatory habits of a hawk, as Martin suggests. Much of the suffering in the book is produced not by nature’s attacks on people, but by people’s attacks on each other. This spurs readers to question who is at fault in this situation and what, if anything, can be done to improve it. Questions like these remind us that Candide is really a debate about ideas—a philosophical tale in which the intellectual debate is more important than characters or plot. These questions still resonate today. Ŷ V oltaire, Candide. This is a very small book with a lot of big ideas. … Really … a philosophical tale whose ideas are more important than characters, setting, or events. Essential Reading 103 Adams, Candide, or, Optimism. Mason, Candide. 1. Some of Candide’s lowest points in the book are caused not by natural events but by human cruelty and/or indifference. In what way is that a separate theme from that of Optimism? To what extent is it integrated into the questions about the nature of the universe we live in? 2. What, exactly, do you understand Candide to mean when he says that “We must cultivate our garden”? If he means it as a metaphor (and not as a literal garden), how would it translate into your life? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In one campaign King led in Albany, Georgia, to desegregate the city, the mayor and police chief made a show of exaggerated calmness, making it seem as if King and the SCLC were the unreasonable group, just stirring up trouble from the outside. The campaign in Albany was largely a failure, and it left King depressed and exhausted. It was now the pattern in his life that in such moments he yearned for the simpler, easier days of the past— his happy childhood, his pleasant years at the university, the first year and a half at Dexter. Perhaps he should retire from the leadership role and devote his time to preaching, writing, and lecturing. Such thoughts tugged him at him with greater frequency. Then, toward the end of 1962, he received yet another request for his services: Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the leading black activists in Birmingham, Alabama, begged King and the SCLC to help him in his efforts to desegregate stores in the downtown area. Birmingham was one of the most fiercely segregated cities in the country. Rather than comply with federal laws to desegregate public places, such as swimming pools, they merely closed them down. Any form of protest against the segregation practices was met with powerful violence and terrorism. The city had come to be known as “Bombingham.” And overseeing this bastion of the segregated South was the police chief, Bull Connor, who seemed to relish the chance to use force— whips, attack dogs, high-pressure fire hoses, billy clubs. This would certainly be the most dangerous campaign so far. Everything inside King leaned toward turning it down. The old doubts and fears returned to him. What if people were killed, and the violence touched him and his family? What if he failed? He suffered more sleepless nights as he agonized over this. Then the voice from seven years before returned to him, as loud and clear as ever: he had been tasked to stand up for justice, not to think of himself but to think of the mission. How foolish to be afraid again. Yes, it was his mission to go to Birmingham. But as he mulled this over, he could not help thinking more deeply about what the voice had told him. Standing up for justice meant bringing it about in some real and practical way, not talking or settling for useless compromises. His fears of disappointing people and failing had made him too cautious. He would have to be more strategic and more courageous this time. He would have to raise the stakes and he would have to win. No more fears or doubts. He accepted Shuttlesworth’s offer, and as he planned the campaign with his team, he made it clear to them they would need to learn from past mistakes. King laid out to them the nature of the predicament they faced.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  198 Lecture 45: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart When Okonkwo returns, he sees violence as the only possible response; when his people fail to join him after he has killed the messenger, he kills himself. He dies representing what he sees as the values of his society—values which he thinks have been betrayed. What he does not see is the À exibility built into his culture, a À exibility illustrated in many of its proverbs. Okonkwo is in many ways like the ¿ gures in Greek tragedy: someone who is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong and whose weaknesses are the reverse of his strengths. Okonkwo is not inherently a cruel man, as we see when he decides that he must kill Ikemefuna with his own hands, and on the night the priestess carries his daughter through the nine villages. It is simply that because of the weakness of his father, he cannot express the gentler sides of his nature and of his culture. His tragedy is also that of his people, who cannot manage to deal with Okonkwo and the missionaries at once, as they could have had they not coincided so disastrously. The title of the novel comes from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and the poem’s vision of history is used to explain the confrontation between Igbo and British cultures. According to Yeats’s poem, every civilization is a construct which excludes as it de ¿ nes and hence pushes what is unacceptable outside its parameters. Over time, the excluded values gather strength until they overwhelm the civilization itself, replacing its values with their reverse. The ¿ rst two-thirds of the book portrays the Igbo culture which, among its many values, asserts that the community is always more important than the individual. This culture’s values are courage, self-reliance, strength, and success, and while other virtues can be tolerated, they are not honored. They are, in Yeats’s terms, the values which the de¿ nition of Igbo culture excludes. When the Christians arrive, they give expression to the values excluded by Igbo culture: kindness, gentleness, and above all personal relationships, and they inevitably appeal to the outcasts of the community. These values beat on the walls of Igbo civilization, and when some village members become Christian, the community is for the ¿ rst time divided against itself. The second missionary to arrive, Mr. Smith, is far less tolerant than the ¿ rst and less À exible than the Igbo people; when Okonkwo returns home, spoiling for a ¿ ght, the disaster is precipitated.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I followed the path through the wooded part of campus, the trees that separate the main buildings from the faculty houses. The two floors of my cottage had been divided into apartments, of which mine was the loveliest, I thought, on the ground floor with windows facing into the trees. I had moved in less than a year before, tired of taking the bus each morning from my apartment off campus. I hadn’t known how soon I would be leaving, not just Sofia but teaching altogether, it had become unbearable, the drudgery and routine of it, earlier that spring I had realized I couldn’t face another year. A short set of stairs led to my door, four or five steps, and as I began to climb them I stumbled, catching myself with my hands and then falling onto my side against the concrete, where I lay or half lay for a moment before sitting upright on the bottom step. I swallowed hard against a wave of nausea, of nausea and something else, they were indistinguishable, seven years, I thought, seven years undone, a betrayal of vocation. But I rejected this even as I thought it, it wasn’t my vocation, it was just something I had done, a way I had passed the time; don’t be so pious, something said in me, and something else cringed away. I swallowed again, I couldn’t be sick here, everyone would see it, if I was going to be sick I had to get inside. But though I willed myself to stand I remained where I was, barely upright, my hands buttressed at my sides and my torso leaning forward, swaying a little. I was exaggerating or making excuses, it wasn’t so bad or it was worse. You can’t know tonight, I thought, in the morning you’ll know, and I feared what I would feel, how my actions would look in the light of day, those were the words I used, the light of day, I was thinking in old phrases.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Back in the barn that first night we touched, the Patriots game at halftime through the radio, I heard him. The air was thick or thin or not there. Maybe we even drifted off for a bit. The commercials were on, crackling and buzzing through the receiver, but I heard him. We were just staring at the rafters, and then he said, casually, as if naming a country on a map, “Why was I born?” His features troubled in the waning light. I pretended not to hear. But he said it again. “Why was I even born, Little Dog?” The radio hissed beneath his voice. And I spoke to the air. I said, “I hate KFC,” responding to the commercial, on purpose. “Me too,” he said without skipping a beat. And we cracked up. We cracked open. We fell apart like that, laughing. — Trevor and his daddy lived alone in an Easter-yellow mobile home behind the interstate. That afternoon his old man was out laying redbrick walkways for a commercial park out in Chesterfield. The white door frames in the mobile home were stained pink with fingerprints: a house colored with work, which meant a house colored with exhaustion, disrepair. The rug uprooted “so no one gotta clean,” but the hardwood never waxed and polished, and you could feel the hammered-down nails through your socks. The cabinet doors were torn off “to make it easy.” There was a cinder block under the sink to hold the pipes. In the living room, above the couch, was a duct-taped poster of Neil Young, guitar in hand, grimacing into a song I’ve never heard. In his room, Trevor turned on a Sony car stereo hooked to two speakers set on a dresser, and bobbed his head as a hip-hop beat intensified through the amp. The beats were interspersed with recordings of gunshots, men shouting, a car peeling off. “Have you heard this yet? It’s this new dude 50 Cent.” Trevor smiled. “Pretty dope, huh?” A bird flew past the window, making the room seem to blink. “I’ve never heard of him,” I lied—why I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wanted to give him the power of this small knowledge over me. But I’d heard it before, many times, as it was played that year through endless passing cars and opened apartment windows back in Hartford. The entire album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, was burned bootleg on hundreds of blank CDs bought in forty packs for cheap from Walmart or Target—so that the whole northside echoed with a kind of anthem of Curtis Jackson’s voice fading in and out of intelligibility as you rode your bike through the streets. “I walk the block with the bundles,” he recited, his hands gestured in front of him, fingers splayed. “I’ve been knocked on the humble, swing the ox when I rumble, show your ass what my gun do.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Finally, they required that I take a prep-school version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to be administered in January at the Lakeside School in Seattle. I was stumped. Whenever I looked at the forms I felt despair. Their whiteness seemed hostile and vast, Saharan. I had nothing to get me across. During the day I composed high-flown circumlocutions, but at night, when it came to writing them down, I balked at their silliness. The forms stayed clean. When my mother pressed me to send them off, I transferred them to my locker at school and told her everything was taken care of. I did not trouble my teachers for praise they could not give me, or bother to have my collection of C’s sent out. I was giving up— being realistic , as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. It was a new feeling, and one I didn’t like, but I saw no way out. MY FATHER CALLED . He called on a night when both Dwight and Pearl were out of the house, and that was a lucky thing, because my mother took the call and everything about her immediately changed. She became girlish. I realized who it was and stood beside her, straining to hear words in the rumble of my father’s voice. He did most of the talking. My mother smiled and shook her head. Now and then she laughed skeptically and said, “We’ll have to see,” and “I don’t know about that.” Finally she said, “He’s right here,” and handed the receiver over to me. “Hi, Chum,” he said, and I could feel him there. His bearish bulk, his tobacco smell. I said hello. “Your brother tells me you’re thinking of Choate,” he said. “Personally, I think you’d be happier at Deerfield.” “Well, I just applied,” I said. “Maybe I won’t get in.” “Oh, you’ll get in all right, boy like you.” He recited back to me the things I had told Geoffrey. “I don’t know. They get a lot of applications.” “You’ll get in,” he said sternly. “The question is, which school to choose. I’m simply suggesting that Deerfield may be on a more congenial scale than Choate. Let’s face it, you’re used to being a big fish in a small pond—you might get lost at Choate. But it’s your choice to make. If you want to go to Choate, for Christ’s sake go to Choate! It’s a fine school. A damn fine school.” “Yes sir.” He asked me where else I’d applied and I went through the list. He gave his approval, then added, “Mind you, Andover’s something of a factory. I’m not sure I’d send a boy of mine there, but we can talk about that when the time comes. Now here’s the plan.” The plan was that I should come down to La Jolla as soon as school was over.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Finally, they required that I take a prep-school version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to be administered in January at the Lakeside School in Seattle. I was stumped. Whenever I looked at the forms I felt despair. Their whiteness seemed hostile and vast, Saharan. I had nothing to get me across. During the day I composed high-flown circumlocutions, but at night, when it came to writing them down, I balked at their silliness. The forms stayed clean. When my mother pressed me to send them off, I transferred them to my locker at school and told her everything was taken care of. I did not trouble my teachers for praise they could not give me, or bother to have my collection of C’s sent out. I was giving up— being realistic , as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. It was a new feeling, and one I didn’t like, but I saw no way out. MY FATHER CALLED . He called on a night when both Dwight and Pearl were out of the house, and that was a lucky thing, because my mother took the call and everything about her immediately changed. She became girlish. I realized who it was and stood beside her, straining to hear words in the rumble of my father’s voice. He did most of the talking. My mother smiled and shook her head. Now and then she laughed skeptically and said, “We’ll have to see,” and “I don’t know about that.” Finally she said, “He’s right here,” and handed the receiver over to me. “Hi, Chum,” he said, and I could feel him there. His bearish bulk, his tobacco smell. I said hello. “Your brother tells me you’re thinking of Choate,” he said. “Personally, I think you’d be happier at Deerfield.” “Well, I just applied,” I said. “Maybe I won’t get in.” “Oh, you’ll get in all right, boy like you.” He recited back to me the things I had told Geoffrey. “I don’t know. They get a lot of applications.” “You’ll get in,” he said sternly. “The question is, which school to choose. I’m simply suggesting that Deerfield may be on a more congenial scale than Choate. Let’s face it, you’re used to being a big fish in a small pond—you might get lost at Choate. But it’s your choice to make. If you want to go to Choate, for Christ’s sake go to Choate! It’s a fine school. A damn fine school.” “Yes sir.” He asked me where else I’d applied and I went through the list. He gave his approval, then added, “Mind you, Andover’s something of a factory. I’m not sure I’d send a boy of mine there, but we can talk about that when the time comes. Now here’s the plan.” The plan was that I should come down to La Jolla as soon as school was over.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  One morning, as the queen’s expiration date was getting perilously near, the unfortunate woman once again found herself standing before the large mirror in her bedchamber. Soon she was uttering the same pitiful plea: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. How much longer ’til I fall? Was my beauty all in vain? Advise me please, to end this pain!” The mirror had been waiting patiently for her return, and this time it responded with an even more chilling direction: “Your beauty, once beyond compare, Soon will be no longer there. Snow White is one like you once were. Take and eat the heart of her!” The queen whirled from the mirror in a rage and grabbed a nearby chair with the intention of hurling it at the offending mirror and shattering it once and for all. But she stopped short; partly because she believed the mirror offered her the only real hope, and partly because, in her undernourished state, she hadn’t the strength to throw the chair. She sat down on the chair instead. She knew that she would indeed eat Snow White’s heart if that was the only way to regain her beauty. With this realization, the queen resolved to get it over quickly, and immediately sent for her most trusted servant to help her. This servant, however, was really a handsome prince disguising himself as the queen’s servant in order to be closer to her, for he was secretly in love with her and waiting for the opportunity to win her heart. The prince listened to the queen’s request in shocked silence, staring at her with disbelief in his handsome blue eyes. Since true love was the only antidote to the sorcerer’s evil spell, the prince had been completely unaware that the queen was nearing her expiration date. Indeed, in his eyes she was becoming more beautiful with each passing day. But the prince could not refuse the queen anything, his love for her was so great, and so he readily agreed to help her. Recognizing this as the opportunity he had been waiting for, he added the condition that the queen spend that very evening with him, away from the castle. Desperate to have Snow White’s heart, the queen agreed to the arrangement. The prince found Snow White working in the kitchen, but the kind and gentle man had no intention of harming her. Instead, he took her deep into the woods to hide in safety; and then, coming upon a small lamb, he slaughtered it and carefully wrapped its heart. Content that he had done the right thing, he returned to the queen and presented the counterfeit heart to her. The queen wasted no time in cooking the heart in low-calorie, non-saturated, high-omega oil and then tentatively took a bite of it. She could detect nothing unpleasant in the taste, but it nevertheless took every bit of her willpower to swallow it. The cruel spell that held her forced her onward until every last drop was consumed.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  might well have set fire toa village, that tall column of flame was probably the church; and the Boches were punishing Compiégne again, to judge from the heavy sounds of bombardment. Yet by now there was nothing real in the world but that thick and almost impenetrable darkness, and the ache of the eyes that must stare and stare, and the dreadful, patient pain of the wounded — there had never been anything else in the world but black night shot through with the pain of the wounded. 4 On tHE following morning the two ambulances crept back to their base at the villa in Compiégne. It had been a tough job, long hours of strain, and to make matters worse the reliefs had been late, one of them having had a breakdown. Moving stiffly, and with red rimmed and watering eyes, the four women swallowed large cups of coffee; then just as they were they lay down on the floor, wrapped in their trench coats and army blankets. In less than a quarter of an hour they slept, though the villa shook and rocked with the bombardment. CHAPTER 36 I flees is something that mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being. The ageing and the cynical may make wars, but the young and the idealistic must fight them, and thus there are bound to come quick reactions, blind impulses not always comprehended. Men will curse as they kill, yet accomplish deeds of self-sacrifice, giving their lives for others; poets will write with their pens dipped in blood, yet will write not of death but of life eternal; strong and courteous friend- ships will be born, to endure in the face of enmity and destruc- tion. And so persistent is this urge to the ideal, above all in the presence of great disaster, that mankind, the wilful destroyer of beauty, must immediately strive to create new beauties, lest it perish from a sense of its own desolation; and this urge touched the Celtic soul of Mary. For the Celtic soul is the stronghold of dreams, of longings come down the dim paths of the ages; and within it there dwells a vague discontent, so that it must for ever go questing. And now as though drawn by some hidden attraction, as though stirred by some irresistible impulse, quite beyond the realms of her own un- derstanding, Mary turned in all faith and all innocence to Stephen. Who can pretend to interpret fate, either his own fate or that of another? Why should this girl have crossed Stephen’s path, or indeed Stephen hers, if it came to that matter ? Was not the world large enough for them both? Perhaps not — or perhaps the event of their meeting had already been written upon tablets of stone by some wise if relentless recording finger.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  STEPHEN left Cornwall without a regret; everything about it had seemed to her depressing. Its rather grim beauty which at any other time would have deeply appealed to her virile nature, had but added to the gloom of those interminable weeks spent apart from Angela Crossby. For her perturbation had been growing apace, she was constantly oppressed by doubts and vague fears; bewildered, uncertain of her own power to hold; uncertain, too, of Angela’s will to be held by this dangerous yet bloodless loving. Her defrauded body had been troubling her sorely, so that she had tramped over beach and headland, cursing the strength of the youth that was in her, trying to trample down her hot youth and only succeeding in augmenting its vigour. But now that the ordeal had come to an end at last, she began to feel less despondent. In a week’s time Angela would get back from Scotland; then at least the hunger of the eyes could be ap- peased — a terrible thing that hunger of the eyes for the sight of the well-loved being. And then Angela’s birthday was drawing near, which would surely provide an excuse for a present. She had sternly forbidden the giving of presents, even humble keepsakes, en account of Ralph — still, a birthday was different, and in any case Stephen was quite determined to risk it. For the impulse to THE WELL OF LONELINESS 185 give that is common to all lovers, was in her attaining enormous proportions, so that she visualized Angela decked in diadems worthy of Cleopatra; so that she sat and stared at her bank book with eyes that grew angry when they lit on her balance. What was the good of plenty of money if it could not be spent on the person one loved? Well, this time it should be so spent, and spent largely; no limit was going to be set to this present! An unworthy and tiresome thing money, at best, but it can at least ease the heart of the lover. When he lightens his purse he lightens his heart, though this can hardly be accounted a virtue, for such giving is perhaps the most insidious form of self- indulgence that is known to mankind. 4 STEPHEN had said quite casually to Anna: * Suppose we stay three or four days in London on our way back to Morton? You could do some shopping.’ Anna had agreed, thinking of her house linen which wanted renewing; but Stephen had been thinking of the jewellers’ shops in Bond Street.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  552 00:26:31,222 --> 00:26:32,857 You're--you're missing this part. 553 00:26:32,958 --> 00:26:34,759 It's kind of like a hamster in the wheel, 554 00:26:34,859 --> 00:26:37,062 where you're never gonna get the cheese. 555 00:26:39,531 --> 00:26:41,967 [Dr. Joseph] It really is a psychological manipulation 556 00:26:42,067 --> 00:26:45,904 because you can devote your entire life, your resources, 557 00:26:46,004 --> 00:26:47,606 your time, your family, 558 00:26:47,706 --> 00:26:50,909 and you'll never get what you came for. 559 00:26:51,009 --> 00:26:53,712 [Robin] They were being pressured to move up 560 00:26:53,812 --> 00:26:56,014 with the sashes, with the levels. 561 00:26:56,114 --> 00:26:58,717 And they had to keep feeding money into it 562 00:26:58,817 --> 00:27:00,151 to take more workshops. 563 00:27:00,251 --> 00:27:04,055 And these workshops were 8,000, 10,000. 564 00:27:04,155 --> 00:27:07,626 You wanna change your life? That's not gonna come cheap. 565 00:27:07,726 --> 00:27:08,927 [Narrator] Both members and coaches 566 00:27:09,027 --> 00:27:12,597 are encouraged to bring others into the fold. 567 00:27:12,697 --> 00:27:15,133 [Kelly] It was a constant conversation 568 00:27:15,233 --> 00:27:16,134 about getting people in. 569 00:27:16,234 --> 00:27:18,436 And we didn't use the word "recruit." 570 00:27:18,536 --> 00:27:20,672 We used the word "enroll." 571 00:27:20,772 --> 00:27:23,141 Never use the word "recruit," we were told. 572 00:27:24,909 --> 00:27:26,344 [Narrator] And while recruiters are promised 573 00:27:26,444 --> 00:27:28,780 a commission for new members, 574 00:27:28,880 --> 00:27:32,217 the money never seems to materialize. 575 00:27:32,317 --> 00:27:34,052 I had enrolled nine people, you know? 576 00:27:34,152 --> 00:27:36,655 But I didn't get any money from that at all, 577 00:27:36,755 --> 00:27:38,356 because the only way you could get money from it 578 00:27:38,456 --> 00:27:40,525 is if you had enrolled the right amount of people 579 00:27:40,625 --> 00:27:43,695 within the first... 30 to 45 days. 580 00:27:43,795 --> 00:27:46,364 So only a small amount of people would get paid. 581 00:27:46,464 --> 00:27:48,299 [Kelly] Everybody at the top needed to get paid. 582 00:27:48,400 --> 00:27:50,869 Nobody at the bottom was getting paid. 583 00:27:50,969 --> 00:27:53,471 So we were all working for free. 584 00:27:53,571 --> 00:27:58,943 [Rick] In my view, it was at best a Ponzi scheme financially. 585 00:27:59,044 --> 00:28:03,114 They thought they were buying into something really positive. 586 00:28:03,214 --> 00:28:06,317 They were given, um, very misleading information. 587 00:28:06,418 --> 00:28:07,686 They were deceived. 588 00:28:07,786 --> 00:28:10,221 It was very much like a bait-and-switch con. 589 00:28:12,090 --> 00:28:15,994 [Narrator] NXIVM's reach even extends to Hollywood. 590 00:28:16,094 --> 00:28:18,930 There was a very small center in Los Angeles, 591 00:28:19,030 --> 00:28:21,766 where the teachings would happen. 592 00:28:21,866 --> 00:28:25,537 That's where they'd recruit people from. 593 00:28:25,637 --> 00:28:28,506 [Paige] They targeted actors, actresses, musicians, 594 00:28:28,606 --> 00:28:31,710 people who are looking for an in into the industry 595 00:28:31,810 --> 00:28:33,578 that requires a lot of networking.