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 A Grief Observed (1961)

  Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness? Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing? Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts? People like H. herself, who would have truth at any price. If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets. No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we—or what we mistake for ‘we’—could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’? Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But how if He were mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded. What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend. Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Each action led to a new round of duties that bound him to the inexorable cycle of samsara. The only way to find release was to “go forth” into the forest and become a hermit or a mendicant, who had none of these tasks. People in India did not regard the renouncers as feeble dropouts, but revered them as intrepid pioneers, who, at considerable cost to themselves, were trying to find a spiritual solution for humanity. Because of the prevailing despair in the region, many were longing for a Jina, a spiritual conqueror, or a Buddha, an Enlightened One, who had “woken up” to a different dimension of existence. The spiritual malaise was exacerbated by a social crisis. Like the Greeks, the peoples of north India were undergoing major political and economic change. The Vedic system had been the spirituality of a highly mobile society, engaged in constant migration. But by the sixth and fifth centuries, people were settling down in ever larger permanent communities and were seriously engaged in agriculture. The introduction of iron technology, including the heavy plow, made it possible to reclaim more fields, to irrigate them, and to clear the dense forests. The villages were now surrounded by carefully supervised plots of land with a network of ditches. New crops were produced: fruit, rice, cereal, sesame, millet, wheat, grains, and barley. Farmers were becoming richer. 104 There was also political development. By the end of the sixth century, the small chiefdoms had been absorbed into larger units. The largest of these new kingdoms were Magadha in the southeast and Kosala in the southwest. They were ruled by kings who had, very gradually, imposed their rule by force and had slowly changed the old patterns of allegiance from clan loyalty to an incipient patriotism that focused on territory rather than kinship. As a result, the kshatriya warrior class, which was responsible for defense and administration, had become even more prominent. The new kings were no longer as deferential to the Brahmins as their forebears had been, though they might still pay lip service to the older ideals. Monarchy was not the only form of government. To the east of the new kingdoms, a number of differently run states had also emerged, ruled by an assembly ( sangha ) of the elders of the old clans ( ganas ).

• From Cultish (2021)

  Both Applewhite and Jones kept their followers from conversing not only with the outside world but also with each other. It didn’t take long after settling in Jonestown for Peoples Templers to notice that this Promised Land was a sham. But bonding over their shared misery? Not allowed. Jones enforced a “quiet rule ,” so whenever his voice played over the camp PA system (which was often), no one was allowed to talk. In Heaven’s Gate, too, followers’ speech was heavily monitored. Frank Lyford remembers that everyone was expected to speak at a low volume, or not at all, so that they wouldn’t disturb other members. No communication, no solidarity. No chance to figure a way out. iv.Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a placebo pill. And there are a host of reasons why it might be likelier to “work” on certain people and not others. We’ll investigate some of these factors throughout this book, but one of them has to do with a type of conditioning most of us have experienced: the conditioning to automatically trust the voices of middle-aged white men. Over the centuries, we’ve been primed to believe that the sound of a Jim Jones–type voice communicates an innate power and capability—that it sounds like the voice of God. In fact, during the heyday of television broadcasting, there was a known style of delivery labeled “the voice of God ,” which applied to the deep, booming, exaggerated baritones of newscasters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. It doesn’t take much analysis to notice that the voices of history’s most destructive “cult leaders” largely fit this description. That’s because when a white man speaks confidently in public about big topics like God and government, many listeners are likely to listen by default—to hear the deep pitch and “standard” English dialect and trust it without much questioning. They fail to nitpick either the delivery or the content, even if the message itself is suspect. In Lindy West’s essay collection The Witches Are Coming , there is a chapter titled “Ted Bundy Wasn’t Charming—Are You High?,” which criticizes America’s frightfully low standards for men’s charisma. As long as someone is white, male, and telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll follow even “the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe,” West says. Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy. Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland. Even racist fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones. Admittedly, it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific dange r. Jonestown, cult scholars agree, was a singularly extraordinary tragedy, which had never happened before and remains unreplicated to this day.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There ensued a series of disasters. The Athenian navy was blockaded in the harbor at Syracuse, and the troops were incarcerated in nearby stone quarries. At a stroke, Athens lost about forty thousand men and half its fleet. In 411, a pro-Spartan cabal overturned the democratic government in Athens. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was restored the following year, but it was a sign of Athens’s new vulnerability. The war with Sparta continued until 405, when the Spartan general Lysander forced Athens to surrender. Yet again, an oligarchy was established under a government of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who killed so many citizens in the ensuing reign of terror that it was overthrown, and democracy reestablished after only a year. Athens had regained its independence, its democracy, and its fleet, but its power was broken, the empire dismantled, and Pericles’ great defensive wall demolished. Against this terrifying backcloth, two great tragedies were enacted in Athens. Just before Athens conceded defeat in 406, Euripides died, and his final dark, bitter plays, lurid with a sense of looming catastrophe, were performed posthumously. The last was The Bacchae, presented in 402.42 As the play opened, the god Dionysus arrived incognito in Thebes, the city that had rejected his mother, Semele, when she had fallen pregnant, and had consistently prohibited his cult. But now most Thebans were enchanted by the fascinating stranger who had suddenly turned up in their midst. The women of the city, who had not been properly initiated into the Dionysian mystery, abandoned themselves to unbridled frenzy, roaming through the woods, clad in animal pelts. The young king Pentheus tried to restore order, but to no avail. Eventually he allowed himself to be dressed in women’s clothes so that he could spy on these revels unobserved. But in their hysteria, the women tore him to pieces with their bare hands, thinking that they had killed a lion. Agaue, Pentheus’s mother, triumphantly carried her son’s head into Thebes at the head of a demented procession. The tragic dramas had often depicted the slaying of kinsfolk, but by making Dionysus, the patron of tragedy, responsible for this unnatural murder, Euripides seemed to be calling the entire genre into question. There was no glimmer of hope at the end of the play. The royal house had been shattered, the women reduced to animals, enlightened reason defeated by savage mania, and Thebes—like Athens at this juncture—seemed doomed. What had been the value of the annual release of emotion in honor of a god who killed, tortured, and humiliated human beings without giving any plausible explanation?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  And poor C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words were, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She had not always been. And she never lied. And she wasn’t easily deceived, least of all, in her own favour. I don’t mean that. But why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? More than half the Christian world, and millions in the East, believe otherwise. How do they know she is ‘at rest?’ Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can’t fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn’t be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C.—who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he’d been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn’t invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend. Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view ‘good,’ telling lies may be ‘good’ too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Down and to the left, the light in a room is on. The shades are drawn but the drapes are open, and Dominique sees shadows passing by the window in the yellowish light. - She tips the bellman and locks the door behind him. She takes off her jacket and shoes and walks into the bathroom. The floor and walls are of Italian marble, the fixtures harmonious with the eighteenth-century decor, but all apparently new. An enormous shower, a toilet, a sink and a bidet. She runs water into the enormous claw-foot tub, pouring in some lilac salts from the collection on the tub’s edge. While the bath fills, she unpacks some things, then undresses, carefully hanging up her clothes as if she’s aware of the symbolism of the act. She wants to remember this moment of arrival. She wants to remember what she feels like right now, before anything has happened. She wraps a robe around her and goes back into the bathroom, sits on the edge of the tub and watches the suds accumulate in the steaming water. 4 Valerie Grey She’d tried so hard to make it work. She had assumed from the start that Michael was the one, and even after he’d disappointed her time and again she’d refused to give up hope. In the end it had turned ugly and even degrading, and Dominique had clung to him, terrified of being alone after having given so much of herself. Her clinging had gained her nothing, and the more she gave, the less she had left of herself. Finally she lost Michael, all she had given, and a great deal more as well. She’d lost parts of herself she didn’t think he’d even had access to, parts she had thought were safe. She takes off her robe and hangs it behind the door, then eases herself into the tub, enjoying the sting of the hot water against her skin. She scrubs the grime of travel from her body and then soaks in the fragrant warmth, trying to think of nothing. She’s lost so much that sometimes the integrity of her body surprises her. It’s as if she expects to see a missing limb or vast scar running between her breasts, but no: her body remains surprisingly healthy in spite of all she’s been through. She emerges from the tub and takes a warm towel from the heater and dries herself, then wraps her robe around her body and walks into her sitting room, drying her hair. From her make-up case she takes three bottles of sleeping pills and puts them on the bedside table, next to the phone, lining them up like soldiers.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  What does it matter how this grief of mine evolves or what I do with it? What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish. Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never believed before—I thought it immensely improbable—that the faithfulest soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has rattled in the throat. It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to take up that belief now. H. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter. But oh God, tenderly, tenderly. Already, month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet enough? The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, we’re for it. What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist? Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles—‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’ But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I kept on thinking, ‘Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that—or disliked this, or knew so-and-so—or jerked his head back that way.’ I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone. What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest. I remember being rather horrified one summer morning long ago when a burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot came into our churchyard and, as he pulled the gate behind him, shouted over his shoulder to two friends, ‘See you later, I’m just going to visit Mum.’ He meant he was going to weed and water and generally tidy up her grave. It horrified me because this mode of sentiment, all this churchyard stuff, was and is simply hateful, even inconceivable, to me. But in the light of my recent thoughts I am beginning to wonder whether, if one could take that man’s line (I can’t), there isn’t a good deal to be said for it. A six-by-three-foot flower-bed had become Mum. That was his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her. May this not be in one way better than preserving and caressing an image in one’s own memory?

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Depression makes one feel dull, lifeless, and helpless. In stark contrast, peak eroticism always fosters energy and vitality. Sabrina’s lively story couldn’t have been more out of step with her chronic blue moods, and I sensed she was struggling with that contradiction. I was pleasantly surprised when she brought up her story again the following week. “You think I had something to do with Ted and I acting so differently that day, don’t you?” The conviction in her voice told me she knew she had. Over many weeks Sabrina catalogued how she had somehow set aside her usual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting during that peak experience. She interpreted Ted’s working in the garden as endearing rather than a sign of rejection. She allowed herself to be moved by the beautiful morning. She actively participated in creating a playful atmosphere. And most important of all, she seized the opportunity to become vibrantly erotic. Gradually, Sabrina embraced her peak experience as evidence of what could happen if she stopped clinging to her lonely fate and recognized her abilities to make things different. She read the story to Ted and taped it to her bedroom mirror as a reminder. Anyone who’s ever been seriously depressed knows how difficult it is to move beyond feelings of helplessness. Sabrina’s situation was complicated by the fact that she had selected a husband who matched her expectations; he often was emotionally distant and uncomfortable with closeness. Yet as Sabrina slowly reconnected with her vitality she became more approachable—and a lot more fun to be with. Sometimes Ted responded positively, and she would practice taking in his affection without critiquing it. When he was preoccupied and unavailable she learned to separate her mood from Ted’s personality quirks. Sabrina saw welcome improvements in their marriage and sex life, although neither was perfect. She did, however, cultivate a more active stance in her world, which made her far less despairing. Fred used his peak turn-ons to discover new information about his eroticism, whereas Sabrina used hers as inspiration. I have found these to be the two most common therapeutic benefits of exploring peak eroticism. But anyone who takes the time to examine the nuances of peak turn-ons will gain valuable insights into how the erotic mind creatively expresses our innermost needs and potentials. This knowledge, however, doesn’t necessarily come easily.

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

  I came to HubSpot with grandiose ideas about creating a new kind of corporate journalism. I was going to give speeches and write books and become a big-shot brand evangelist marketing guru. Instead, at the age of fifty-two, I’m writing lead-generation copy. In the world of publishing, lead-gen is about as low as you can go, a step down from writing copy for clothing catalogs. It’s hack work. It’s worse than what I was doing twenty-five years ago when I was toiling away in a computer industry trade magazine. I wrack my brain trying to figure out how this has happened. Why did Halligan hire me, if they were just going to stick me over here, doing this? My theory is that Halligan wanted to hire me but he didn’t want to manage me, so he passed me off to Cranium, but Cranium wanted nothing to do with me, so he handed me off to Wingman, and Wingman realized that Cranium didn’t consider me important, so he stuck me in the content factory working under Zack and hoped I would just go away. Wingman doesn’t want to hear my ideas about how to improve the blog by producing higher-quality articles written by real journalists. The only improvement Wingman cares about is our lead-generation number. That’s what Wingman gets paid to do. That’s how he gets measured and how he gets rewarded. He has zero incentive to change anything. After mulling things over a bit I come up with a solution that will let us attract the audience that Halligan wants to reach without interfering with the marketing blog and Jan’s lead-generation goals. My idea is that HubSpot should create a separate, high-end publication, a new website with beautiful graphics and video elements—an online magazine—and put me in charge of it. I write Wingman a long memo pitching him the idea. I suggest we call the magazine Inbound . I mention the idea to Tracy, the vice president who runs the brand and buzz department and organizes the annual Inbound conference. My online magazine dovetails perfectly with the conference. Tracy says she loves the idea. Wingman waits a week and writes back saying no. I think this is the wrong decision for the company, but it’s even worse for me. I suppose I could appeal to Cranium, but I’m pretty sure Cranium is the one who made this call. Wingman doesn’t really have a lot of autonomy. He does what Cranium tells him to do. Even if Wingman did make the decision, I doubt Cranium will overrule him. One thing I’ve started to figure out is that the top guys, like Halligan, might really want to change things, but below them there are middle managers like Cranium and Wingman, and entrenched veterans like Marcia and Jan, and these people want nothing to do with newcomers and new ideas. They don’t want change. They like things the way things are. After all, they’re the ones who made things that way.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand? Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’ Our elders submitted and said, ‘Thy will be done.’ How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love—yes, in every sense, an act—put on to hide the operation? Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him? One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe. After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers. At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles. Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Modern MLM language is defined by the sort of snappy, uplifting quotes you might find printed in flouncy bridesmaid cursive on Pinterest: “You got this, boss babe”; “Channel your inner #girlboss”; “Build a fempire”; “Be a mompreneur”; “#WFH so you can make money like the SHE-E-O you are without having to leave your kids!!” These phrases work initially to love-bomb potential sellers; then, over time, they become loaded with the weight of the American Dream itself, conditioning followers to believe that “giving up” on the business would mean giving up on your very life’s purpose. In the early days, direct sellers introduced their overpriced, chemical-smelling trinkets in person, hosting at-home product demonstrations called “parties.” But these days, many women choose to kick it new school and parade their goods across social media, as their snarky former classmates cringe-scroll past. My best friend Esther is a twenty-six-year-old Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor who posts a lot about cancer-free living and radiates just the breed of health-conscious positivity many MLMs enjoy exploiting. She gets one or two Instagram DMs a week from different direct sales recruiters trying to seduce her into the flock. “Hey girlboss!!! Love your content!!! You’re such a badass!!! Have you ever thought about turning your cancer journey into a business?!?!” She screenshots them all, sends them to me, and deletes.* As far as I’m concerned, an MLM is to a pyramid scheme as a Starbucks Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino is to a straight-up milkshake: One is just a glorified version of the other—an assertion that would scandalize any devoted MLMer. “I would NEVER be involved with a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are ILLEGAL,” they tend to say as their stock defense. This phrase is a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s an amusing one, because if you take the logic even one step further, it becomes obvious that simply saying something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not real or that you’re not involved. You can’t rob a bank and then, when accused, just say, “I didn’t do it, robbing banks is illegal,” to prove your innocence. In the city of Mobile, Alabama, it’s against the law to throw plastic confett i, but that doesn’t mean plastic confetti doesn’t exist or that people don’t use it. Sometimes citizens of Mobile throw plastic confetti without knowing it’s illegal, and sometimes they know plastic confetti is illegal but use it anyway because they don’t realize the confetti they’re using is made of plastic. Either way, it’s still a thing, and it’s still not cool. Pyramid schemes are indeed outlawed, and for good reason. They have the capacity to cheat people out of a couple hundred dollars or drive them all the way to bankruptcy and despair. They can shatter entire communities, even national economies, like those of Albania and Zimbabwe, which have been decimated by schemes both pyramid and Ponz i. It’s no surprise, then, that pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as suc h.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  As it turned out, Fred’s declining desire was influenced—but not caused—by his fascination with centerfolds. Much more important than Janette’s changing body was the fact that she had become increasingly passive in recent years, to the point where Fred was no longer sure if she particularly enjoyed sex with him anymore. Luckily, the two of them had always talked openly about most things, although it had been years since they had discussed sex. Spurred on by a deeper understanding of his eroticism and a reduction of his guilt, Fred initiated an extremely productive dialogue with Janette. Once she felt assured that his intention was not to criticize her but to improve their sex life, she acknowledged her increasing passivity in bed. She explained how Fred’s tendency to be sexually aggressive had led her to conclude that he preferred her to be submissive. She was just trying to give him what she assumed he wanted. She also divulged that her passivity was making sex less interesting for her too. As she grasped how much Fred missed feeling her unbridled desire, she gradually felt freer to let her excitement show. And in response, Fred’s passions once again began to stir. Fred might have found a solution to his problem without examining his peak turn-ons. And, of course, this couple’s ability to communicate so productively and become sexually experimental—skills that many sex therapy clients lack—were essential to their success. But by freeing him from the discouraging and mistaken belief that only physical perfection could excite him, Fred’s memories of peak sex greatly accelerated his progress. As I saw the benefits of investigating peak turn-ons in dozens of sex therapy cases, including ones much more difficult than Fred’s, I wondered if similar memories might also help with problems not directly linked to sex. Soon I had an intriguing opportunity to find out. Sabrina: Rediscovering vitality After she had struggled with “blue moods” for several years, Sabrina’s depression was getting worse. “Nothing matters that much anymore,” she lamented. “I’m lonely most of the time. I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I feel ugly. And I’m not even sure my husband loves me.” With that she burst into tears. It was easy to see she was suffering from a “love depression” based on the belief—shared by all the women in her family—that men are incapable of loving women, and therefore she was doomed to a life of dissatisfaction. Speaking of her husband, Ted, she complained, “If he’s not working, he’s puttering in the damn garden. He hardly ever notices me, let alone holds or kisses me.”

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  D. For Jesus, as for other Jewish teachers of his day, what God wanted was for his people to keep the commandments that formed the heart of his law, the commandments to love God above all else (Deut. 6:4) and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18; Mark 12:28-34), E. Even though the commandment to love is simple, it is also all encompassing. Giving oneself over to the command is necessary to enter God’s kingdom, which is the ultimate goal of all existence. 1. The kingdom is to be sought after as one’s most prized possession (cf. the parable of the pearl of great price; Matt. 13:45^16). 2 . Nothing else in human existence should be of any ultimate concern — not even food and clothing (Matt. 5:39^12; 6:33). 3 . Trying to live for things of this world while committing oneself totally to God would be like a slave trying to serve two masters — it can’t be done (Luke 16:13). 4 . Thus, one should give up everything — all possessions and everything that binds one to this world — in light of the coming kingdom (Mark 10: 17-21). Those who give up their lives in this world will gain much in the kingdom that will soon appear (Mark 10:29-31). F. This emphasis on giving up everything for the kingdom means that Jesus was not a major proponent of what we now call “family values.” 1. In fact, he was quite unambiguous that parents, siblings, spouses, and even children were to have no importance in comparison with the kingdom (Luke 14:26). 2 . Jesus appears to have realized how divisive this teaching could be, but he claimed that he would split families up rather than keep them together (Luke 12:51-53). 3 . As with other hard saying of Jesus, these should not be explained away so that they no longer mean what they say. Instead, they should be placed in their own apocalyptic context. G. Jesus’ teachings on marriage considered in this context are different than some modem interpretations. 16 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1. In his society, it was unusual for a man to be unmarried (as he was). Some were ascetics, as the evidence indicates Jesus was. 2. Jesus never taught against marriage. 3. In Mark 12, Jesus argues with the Pharisees over bodily resurrection, showing his belief in bodily resurrection into a state of no marriage. 4 . Thus, Jesus may be saying, “don’t get married” (in view of the coming judgment). H. Jesus did not advocate a strong structure to promote a healthy society, because he thought society was diseased and soon to be destroyed. III. Jesus “maximized” the commandment to love and “minimized” everything else in comparison. A. This can be seen in the so-called “antitheses” preserved now in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel (Matt. 5:21-48). 1. The law says not to murder; if you really love your neighbor, though, you won’t even get angry with him.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal—something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus H. would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that. Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one. Still, there are the two enormous gains—I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time. The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing. But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I’ve described H. as being like a sword. That’s true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Having received tips from followers’ families that they were being held captive against their will, Ryan decided to fly down and check in, and he brought a few reporters and some delegates along with him. Jones, impresario that he was, did everything to conceal the rotten truths of the place while putting on a show for the Congressman (a lavish dinner, confident banter). But Jones knew there was no way they’d let him off the hook. At the end of the visit, Ryan and his crew returned to the small Jonestown airstrip to leave, and several residents followed them, trying to escape. Jones had ordered his militia to tail the defectors, and as soon as they began to board, thinking they were in the clear, the squad turned on them. They opened fire and killed five people: one Jonestown defector, three journalists, and Congressman Ryan. This event sparked the infamous “suicide.” Contrary to popular belief, the tragedy wasn’t premeditated, at least not how the press painted it to be. And most of its victims did not die voluntarily. Popular Jonestown coverage spun a story that Jones regularly hosted ghoulish suicide rehearsals known as White Night s, where his mind-controlled minions would line up like lobotomized communicants and swallow cups of punch in preparation for the “real” suicide on November 18, 1978. But this wasn’t what happened at all. Surviving Peoples Templers contend that the real White Nights were much subtler events, and you didn’t have to be “mind controlled” to participate. Originally, Jones used the phrase “White Night” to denote any sort of crisis, and the possibility of death as a result of that crisis. He chose this particular phrase to subvert the fact that our language tends to equate the color black with negativity: blacklist, blackmail, black magic. He decided the phrase “White Night” destabilized that concept. Not a bad point, but a really bad motive. Over time, as Jones grew more deranged and power-starved, the term evolved to mean a slew of insidious things. Some say White Night described occasions when Jones convinced followers to arm themselves with makeshift weapons and stay up for days on end, prepared to defend their Promised Land to the death against attacks he swore were coming but never did. Others remember the term referencing the dozen or so meetings when people approached a microphone and declared their willingness to die—that very night, if necessary—for the Cause (the Peoples Temple term for living in service of the group, not the self). There’s also the story that White Nights were weekly events when Jones would keep the group up all night to discuss community concerns. And then there are those who’ve said a White Night was simply any meeting in which Jones mentioned death. The congressman’s visit confirmed what Jones had suspected for a long time: He couldn’t keep this thing up forever. Jonestown was a failure. Too many people were trying to leave. He was doomed to be found out and dethroned.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  we individually were to walk through the awful human aftermath of our bombing raids would the experiential horror be joined to the intellectual label, and we would learn, in a total way, the incredible things we have done. But we have been schooled for years to stress only the cognitive, to avoid any feeling connected with learning. We have been denying a most important part of ourselves, and the awful split I have described is one result. Another result is that the excitement has, in large measure, gone out of education—even though no one can take the excitement out of real learning. I have days when I think that educational institutions at all levels are doomed, and perhaps we would be well advised to bid them farewell—state-required curricula, compulsory attendance, tenured professors, hours of lectures, grades, degrees, and all that—and let true learning begin to blossom outside the stifling hallowed walls. Suppose every educational institution, from kindergarten through the most prestigious Ph.D. program, were to close tomorrow. What a delightful situation that would be! Parents and children and adolescents and young people—even a few faculty members, perhaps—would begin to devise situations in which they could learn! Can you imagine anything more uplifting to the spirit of all our people? It would be sad and it would be utterly marvelous at the same time. Millions of people would be asking the same question: “Is there anything I want to learn?” They would find that there are such things, and they would invent means by which they could learn them. Closing all schools would forever kill the attitude best expressed by a student (unpublished paper) in a self-directed course (facilitated by Robert Menges) at the University of Illinois: What is educational has been viewed by me as something to do before I can finally be left alone to do something I want to do. . . . When I came home from first grade my mother asked me, “How did you like it?” She says I answered with a question, “How long do I have to go?” Until this course I had never thought about how I learn, or why.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Of course it’s easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it quite frankly, we don’t ask for Him? One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe. After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers. At any rate I must keep clear of the spiritualists. I promised H. I would. She knew something of those circles. Keeping promises to the dead, or to anyone else, is very well. But I begin to see that ‘respect for the wishes of the dead’ is a trap. Yesterday I stopped myself only in time from saying about some trifle ‘H. wouldn’t have liked that.’ This is unfair to the others. I should soon be using ‘what H. would have liked’ as an instrument of domestic tyranny, with her supposed likings becoming a thinner and thinner disguise for my own. I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my own mother’s death when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood.