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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The wooden railroad car bumped us about on the seats and against the walls. My companions had shut the door and the window of our compartment. Soon the air became stifling and my temples and neck were sticky with sweat and soot. Once, I almost fell asleep, but the suitcase that was on my knees and on which I rested my arms and head was jerked away. Outside the compartment, the cold made me cough violently, but at least I could think. Once I had thrown up the sponge in the exam, I never entered the college again. But I did not wish to leave Algiers before having set the whole matter straight; after that, I was face to face with myself. If I now remain alive, I’ll never forget this extraordinary meeting and the strange way I came up against myself. So I have progressed from crisis to crisis, each time finding a new equilibrium, though a bit more precariously; still, there was always something left that could be destroyed. This time, the accounts are balanced: at last nothing shields me from myself. I made my break with our blind alley because it was but a childish dream, then with my father and my mother when I grew ashamed of them, with values of our community because they were obsolete, with ambition and the middle-class world because they are unjust and their ideals all questionable, with the city because it still lives in Oriental medievalism and has no love for me, with the West because it lies and is selfish. Each time, a part of me has disintegrated. I thought of death, of leaving the world. But never has the idea of death been so familiar and so present, like a ripe decision. I am amazed at not being afraid; but habit gives one courage, and I have actually watched for my self-discovery for a long while: I am dying through having turned back to look at my own self. It is forbidden to see oneself, and I have reached the end of discovering myself. God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt — is it possible for me to survive my contemplation of myself? I did not kill myself because I remembered the ditch in summer camp where I used to go and weep every afternoon, and because I refuse to allow myself any compromises. I am leaving now with Henry to give what is left of my life its last chance. Here, there’s no solution; whatever my choice, I would have suffered. If the world is everywhere such a tissue of lies and hatred as here, then life is but endless despair. Perhaps I owe it to myself to cross the ocean first. Perhaps elsewhere I will be taken for a man of good will with a simple case history and simple feelings. Perhaps my body and my soul will recover there.

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

  In essence, our study confirmed the dual memory system that Janet and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière had described more than a hundred years earlier: Traumatic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography. Perhaps the most important finding in our study was that remembering the trauma with all its associated affects, does not, as Breuer and Freud claimed back in 1893, necessarily resolve it. Our research did not support the idea that language can substitute for action. Most of our study participants could tell a coherent story and also experience the pain associated with those stories, but they kept being haunted by unbearable images and physical sensations. Research in contemporary exposure treatment, a staple of cognitive behavioral therapy, has similarly disappointing results: The majority of patients treated with that method continue to have serious PTSD symptoms three months after the end of treatment.[27] As we will see, finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks or improve concentration, stimulate vital involvement in your life or reduce hypersensitivity to disappointments and perceived injuries. Listening to SurvivorsNobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality and cultivate the courage to listen to the testimonies of survivors. In his book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Lawrence Langer writes about his work in the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University: “Listening to accounts of Holocaust experience, we unearth a mosaic of evidence that constantly vanishes into bottomless layers of incompletion.[28] We wrestle with the beginnings of a permanently unfinished tale, full of incomplete intervals, faced by the spectacle of a faltering witness often reduced to a distressed silence by the overwhelming solicitations of deep memory.” As one of his witnesses says: “If you were not there, it’s difficult to describe and say how it was. How men function under such stress is one thing, and then how you communicate and express that to somebody who never knew that such a degree of brutality exists seems like a fantasy.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But in spite of this interview with the principal, I did not realize how close at hand was utter despair. I went on getting my papers in order for my departure. The momentum of the old machine still carried me ahead. The situation in the city, at this time, was still disturbing. At the victory parade, an onlooker who was pushed around by a policeman had answered too violently. There was much loud talk about the new Rights of Man saved from barbarism, and the man had let himself go too far. But the policeman had been more influenced by racial propaganda, so he fired on the onlooker and killed him. As the victim was a Jew, the murderer was acquitted. The indignant Jews inferred that nothing had changed. The Moslems too, as a matter of fact, for not longer after this, their nationalist leaders were arrested. Some thought that order was being restored. Lastly, the French Constituent Assembly definitely rejected the law on conscription. Things got organized, merchants started going back to business as usual, and the politicians returned to cheating. In short, all was once more in hand. After all, I too had gone back to normal, I believed. I decided to resume my interrupted studies again and even thought I had once more found the rhythm and the pleasure of productive work. The French Revue de Philosophie appeared again in Algiers, the temporary capital, and I sent in my subscription. I bought new notebooks and went back to keeping a diary. Six weeks before the exams, I turned up in Algiers, like every other serious student, to verify my transcripts, sit in on a few lectures, and get inside dope by means of the grapevine. This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water and bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands. When I finished dressing, the window was still dark. I was well ahead of the first streetcar, with its load of sleepy grocers on their way to market. In the examination hall I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors. The boy to my left is small and dark with black eyes under heavy brows; his name is Bounin. On my right, my neighbor’s name is Ducamps. When the supervisors with their expressionless faces and ritual gestures deposited the examination papers on the end of the table, I read the little square of yellow paper like the others. Soon silence reigned. Not a breath in the vast hall with its hundreds of students. Each has identified himself with his work, each is alone for the next seven hours. It is then that it dawns on me, with the white paper in front of me, that all this no longer concerns me at all.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Once again, I was exhausted by the effort to escape from myself. The usual cycle was completed and I was incapable of taking an interest in the world or of coming to a decision. To me, the war was far off and of no importance. I listened to Henry as he spoke with precision and conviction. I knew too well how deceptively rational and clear his dreams could seem. Anyone else, seeing us there, with me so attentive and him so bright-eyed and talkative, would never have guessed that he was only daydreaming. I borrowed some books from the public library and tried to do some studying again. It was my old means of protection against the world and against myself, in fact against anything that happened. At this time the temporary Algiers government announced by proclamation that we were reinstated in the university and that exams were to be held within two months. This forced my decision: perhaps it was wiser to continue my studies and become a professor of philosophy, as I had always so much wanted, and to bother less about others. Unfortunately, this time the way back was full of pitfalls. If I wished and, indeed, was forced to break with the West, could I peacefully keep its values and philosophy and become one of its officials? Actually, I got caught up once more in the fever of preparing for the exams and avoided my self-questioning. But I soon realized how impossible it all was. ~ 7. EXAMINATION ~ I have now come to the point where I began my narrative. Here I am in the examination hall, in the huge university library. All around me, as far as the distant shelves on the walls, my comrades are feverishly at work. The early morning sun begins to warm us through the stained glass. The first beads of sweat are tickling my forehead and forming heavy drops in my eyebrows. On my desk there are a thermos flask, a package of sandwiches, cigarettes, and a bottle of ink, as on all the other desks. But as I face these white sheets of paper and long hours that call for an effort, I must admit at last how impossible my whole life has become.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  the operation failed and my face were marred, I even planned to disappear completely, never see loved ones again. Then came the moment when I saw my nose in the mirror, bloodstained and straight—Greek! Afterwards, bandages, swelling, a painful night, dreams. Would my nostrils ever quiver again? In the morning the nurse brings me writing paper stamped with the name of the clinic. This suggests an idea. I write to Eduardo, in a faltering hand, that I went to the country, took cocaine and was brought to the hospital because I would not awaken. I play with the idea, chuckling as I write. To make life more interesting. To imitate literature, which is a hoax. What you imagine is something you want. How would it have been, that day and night in Louveciennes alone with June, if there had been cocaine? I am home, haunted by the wonder of the hours with Henry and by a belated horror of the clinic. My nose is heavy but beautiful. I put off seeing Allendy until I am presentable. He tells me he has seen Eduardo and that he is very unhappy. I also want Allendy to believe the cocaine story. There is sunshine on the bed but no feeling of sacrilege because Henry has slept here. It seems natural to me. The house is in order. My trunk is packed and in the entrance. I have Austrian money in my bag and a ticket for Innsbruck. Henry was in despair the day after our talk, which was supposed to settle everything. We decided we should not run away together. I told him sadly, “You will lose me soon because you don’t love me enough.” But we are not there yet. As my passion spreads, so does my tenderness for Hugo. The more distance I create between our two bodies, the more exotic to me his perfection, his goodness, the more keen my gratitude, the more aware I am that he, among all of us, knows best how to love. While he is traveling and I sit alone I do not feel bound to him, I do not imagine myself at his side, I do not wish for him, yet he has given me the most precious of all gifts, and when I think of him I see a vastly generous, warm man who has kept me from misery, suicide, and madness. Madness. It would be easy for me to again feel the mood I had aboard the ship to New York when I wanted to drown myself. When I write Eduardo my imaginary letter, I say, “I am glad to have escaped the inferno for twenty-four hours of dreams.” I mean this. My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness. When I left Henry the other day, I knew so deeply I was leaving him that I could easily have turned to the taxi driver and ordered him to drive me straight into the Seine.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  “Your daughter wasn’t in great condition when she arrived here,” the surgeon had said. So that was where we were. The light outside was already darkening. The summer was already ending and she was still upstairs in the ICU overlooking the river and the surgeon was saying she wasn’t in great condition when they put her there. In other words she was dying. I now knew she was dying. There was now no way to avoid knowing it. There would now be no way to believe the doctors when they tried not to seem discouraging. There would now be no way to pretend to myself that the spirit of the AIG founders would pull this one out. She would die. She would not necessarily die that night, she would not necessarily die the next day, but we were now on track to the day she would die. August 26 was the day she would die. August 26 was the day Gerry and I would leave the ICU overlooking the river and walk into Central Park. I see as I write this that there is no uniformity in the way I refer to Gerry. Sometimes I call him “Gerry,” sometimes I call him “her husband.” She liked the sound of that. Her husband. My husband. She would say it again and again. When she could still speak. Which, as the days continued to shorten and the track to narrow, was by no means every day. You notice we’re doing hand compression. Because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the vent. For at least an hour now. In an underpass beneath one of the bridges in Central Park that day someone was playing a saxophone. I do not remember what song he was playing but I remember that it was torchy and I remember stopping under the bridge, turning aside, eyes on the fading leaves, unable to hold back tears. “The power of cheap music,” Gerry said, or maybe I only thought it. Gerry. Her husband. The day she cut the peach-colored cake from Payard. The day she wore the shoes with the bright-red soles. The day the plumeria tattoo showed through her veil. In fact I was not even crying for the saxophone. I was crying for the tiles, the Minton tiles in the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain, Sara Mankiewicz’s pattern, Quintana’s christening. I was crying for Connie Wald walking her dog through Boulder City and across Hoover Dam. I was crying for Diana holding the champagne flute and smoking the cigarette in Sara Mankiewicz’s living room. I was crying for Diana who had talked to Blake Watson so that I could bring the beautiful baby girl he had delivered home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Diana who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles. Dominique who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The review continues: “Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.” I had seen most of these hallmarks . I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair. I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground , she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep . I had seen the impulsivity. I had seen the “affective lability,” the “identity diffusion.” What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the “frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.” How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her? Had she no idea how much we needed her? I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as “the novel I’m writing just to show you.” She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. “Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fictitious,” she advises the reader at the outset. “The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to “confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist,” her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.” At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.” So ended the novel she was writing just to show us. Show us what? Show us that she could write a novel? Show us why and how she would die?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I jumped from the truck and limbered up my legs. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, two men from the line were at one another’s throats, rolling on the ground and hitting out blindly, hindered by their rags. They were brutally and unhurriedly separated by the others while the soldiers looked on indifferently. The degradation of my new companions was so complete that the idea of the job I had set myself gave me anguish. I caught myself swearing inwardly to myself that I would never fight for a bowl of soup, and found that, whether I liked it or not, I was already prepared to run away. Fresh work crews arrived, followed at a distance by soldiers who chattered among themselves. The men were visibly exhausted and never made a move that was useless but took only enough time to lay down their tools, fetch their bowls, and rejoin their line. They looked at us briefly and without curiosity. Those who had already received their portion sat on the ground in groups of two or three to eat. We looked on, in front of our truck, disconcerted. I had come to the work-camp of my own accord, and I fully realized it when I saw that my presence could be of no help to these men. I am not trying to justify myself, I am only relating what I believe I must say. I had been simple enough to think I could help the others, but in fact I could neither break through the massive suspiciousness caused by their suffering, nor get them to accept me. Maybe I lacked love, maybe I was too feeble for such a struggle which was mostly a struggle against myself. To help them rediscover and keep their dignity, I had to fight the danger of losing my own. It was at the camp, in my daily life with them, that I came to realize how far my studies and my high-school education had removed me from any possible communion with my own people. When I slid under the tent where the head of the camp had assigned me a place, I thought I would never get used to the stifling animal stench that rose from the stale straw. Jute sacks and rags showed that all the places on either side of the doors were occupied. Courage failed me and I was unable to make up my mind to return to this lair the first night; I left the tent with my bag on my back. When somebody called my name and got up from a little group, I felt very great pleasure, as though I had been lost in a hostile crowd.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The buzzing in my ears has started again these last few days. At first, I tried to ignore it: it was nothing but a slight fatigue that would leave me after the exams. But now it sounds like the incessant ringing of a bell. Come, it’s high time! My chest aches too; to tell the truth, it has always ached, but I would not let it worry me. Now I cannot but admit it: my ears are buzzing and my chest is aching. I might uncork the flask full of such strong coffee and it would bring the dead back to life, and drink a cupful and perhaps even finish this paper. But again I have to admit that I can work only with lots of coffee, while my hands tremble and my heart beats fast. The truth is that I am a wreck. I have wasted too much energy and for too long. I paid a far higher price than the others for my smallest success because I always had to fight under impossible conditions. It is now time to put an end to this disastrous business. I am beaten. In any case, had I been capable of continuing, I did not want to. How could I go on taking seriously this little world of conventions, of arbitrary values, of exams and their little emotions, together with the absurd administrative hierarchies? The sheet of paper before me waits for me to tell the examiners what I think of John Stuart Mill and of Condillac. What do I think? Precisely, today I am incapable of thinking about anything but my own ideas and what I am. I look at my comrades around me. With their pale heads bent over their work and their nervous hands in their tousled hair, they know exactly what they want.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Strange, I forgot my appointment with Allendy today and I didn’t telephone him. I need him terribly, and yet I want to fight alone, grapple with life. Henry writes a letter, comes to me, appears to love me, talks to me. Empty. I am like an instrument which has stopped registering. I don’t want to see him tomorrow. I asked him again the other day, “Shall I send money to June so that she can come, instead of giving it to you so you can go to Spain?” He said no. I begin to think a great deal about June. My image of a dangerous, sensual, dynamic Henry is gone. I do all I can to recapture it. I see him humble, timorous, without self-confidence. When I said playfully the other day: “You’ll never have me again,” he answered, “You’re punishing me.” What I realize is that his insecurity is equal to mine, my poor Henry. He wants as much to prove to me how beautifully he can make love, prove his potency, as I want to know that I arouse potency. Yet I showed courage. When that scene, so unbearably like the one with John, happened, I showed no concern, no surprise. I stayed in his arms, quietly laughing and talking. I said, “Love spoils fucking.” But this was more bravado than anything else. The way I suffered was a truer self-revelation. Despite all this I risked my marriage and happiness to sleep with Henry’s letter under my pillow, with my hand on it. I am going to Henry without joy. I am afraid of that gentle Henry I am going to meet, too much like myself. I remember that from the first day I expected him to take the lead, in talk, in action, in all things. I thought bitterly of June’s magnificent willfulness, initiative, tyranny. I thought, it isn’t strong women who make men weak, but weak men who make women overstrong. I stood before Henry with the submissiveness of a Latin woman, ready to be overwhelmed. He has let me overwhelm him. He has constantly feared to disappoint me. He has exaggerated my expectations. He has worried about how long and how much I would love him. He has let thinking interfere with our happiness. Henry, you love your little whores because you are superior to them. You really have refused to meet a woman on your own level. You were surprised how much I could love without judging, adoring you as no whore ever adored. Well, then, are you no happier to be adored by me, and doesn’t it make you infinitely superior? Do all men shrink before the more difficult love?

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

  The only thing that occasionally relieved this feeling of aimlessness was intense involvement in a particular case. During the course of our treatment Tom had to defend a mobster on a murder charge. For the duration of that trial he was totally absorbed in devising a strategy for winning the case, and there were many occasions on which he stayed up all night to immerse himself in something that actually excited him. It was like being in combat, he said—he felt fully alive, and nothing else mattered. The moment Tom won that case, however, he lost his energy and sense of purpose. The nightmares returned, as did his rage attacks—so intensely that he had to move into a motel to ensure that he would not harm his wife or children. But being alone, too, was terrifying, because the demons of the war returned in full force. Tom tried to stay busy, working, drinking, and drugging—doing anything to avoid confronting his demons. He kept thumbing through Soldier of Fortune, fantasizing about enlisting as a mercenary in one of the many regional wars then raging in Africa. That spring he took out his Harley and roared up the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. The vibrations, speed, and danger of that ride helped him pull himself back together, to the point that he was able to leave his motel room and return to his family. The Reorganization of PerceptionAnother study I conducted at the VA started out as research about nightmares but ended up exploring how trauma changes people’s perceptions and imagination. Bill, a former medic who had seen heavy action in Vietnam a decade earlier, was the first person enrolled in my nightmare study. After his discharge he had enrolled in a theological seminary and had been assigned to his first parish in a Congregational church in a Boston suburb. He was doing fine until he and his wife had their first child. Soon after the baby’s birth, his wife, a nurse, had gone back to work while he remained at home, working on his weekly sermon and other parish duties and taking care of their newborn. On the very first day he was left alone with the baby, it began to cry, and he found himself suddenly flooded with unbearable images of dying children in Vietnam. Bill had to call his wife to take over child care and came to the VA in a panic. He described how he kept hearing the sounds of babies crying and seeing images of burned and bloody children’s faces. My medical colleagues thought that he must surely be psychotic, because the textbooks of the time said that auditory and visual hallucinations were symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. The same texts that provided this diagnosis also supplied a cause: Bill’s psychosis was probably triggered by his feeling displaced in his wife’s affections by their new baby.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One can make a mess of one’s childhood or of one’s whole life. Slowly, painfully, I understood that I had made a mess of my own birth by choosing the wrong city. Bissor was a strong boy, all muscles and big bones, like a ploughhorse. Healthy as a peasant, robust, vigorous, thickset — he was a miracle within the ghetto’s rotten heart. A mop of jungle-wild red hair stressed his primitive appearance. Yet, for all this, he had within him the fears, humiliations, and resentments of all those born and still living in the ghetto. At the age of eleven, he had begun to deliver evening newspapers after school and had thus come to know the city. I was not self-conscious in his presence, and once I even told him about my father’s terrors and hatreds. But he interrupted me at once: “Your father’s right. You don’t yet know what it’s like.” His own father’s store, he explained, had been burned in a pogrom, and his old man had then died of grief. Although Bissor’s schooling was paid for by the community, he worried constantly about his mother and sisters, fearing that they might not be able to support themselves without his help. (He was right about this, for even though he left school before graduating, he was unable to prevent one of his sisters from becoming a prostitute.) He used to describe to me his daily rounds: the distrust and innuendoes, the perfect imperviousness of others. In Bissor, I caught echoes of my father’s despair, but I still refused to accept it. Constantly, I heard him talk of his hatred of the city, of his horror of having been born there, of the impossibility of ever finding normal opportunities there. I was ironical when the city seemed to stir but he would then race home, put up a supply of food, and barricade the doors and windows, terrified by the unpredictable. Other people’s misfortunes could force me to retreat, but could never convince me; they had bungled the situation, I thought, through awkwardness or prejudice. If the same thing happened to me, I was sure I would come out better.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Perhaps my desire to preserve the magnificence of those four days with Henry is a wasted effort. Perhaps, like Proust, I am incapable of movement. I choose a point in space and revolve around it, as I revolved for two years around John. Henry’s movement is a constant hammering to draw sparks, unconcerned about the mutilations involved. I later asked him, “When your feeling for June comes back, does it, even for a moment, alter our relationship? Does our connection break? Do your feelings flow back to a source love or flow into two directions?” Henry said it was a double flow. That he had been carrying in his head a letter to June: “I want you back, but you must know that I love Anaïs. You must accept that.” The estrangement between Hugo’s body and mine will drive me mad. His constant caresses are intolerable to me. Up to now I could steel myself, find a tender pleasure in his closeness. But today I might be living with a stranger. I hate it when he sits near me, running his hands up my legs and around my breasts. This morning when he touched me, I jumped away angrily. He was terribly taken aback. I can’t bear his desire. I want to run away. My body is dead to his. What is my life going to be now? How can I go on pretending? My excuses are so futile, so feeble—bad health, bad moods. They are transparent lies. I will hurt him. How I crave my liberty! During our siesta Hugo tried to possess me again. I closed my eyes and let go, but without pleasure. If it is true that this year I have reached new peaks of joy, it is also true that I have never reached such black depths. Tonight I am afraid of myself. I could leave Hugo this minute and become a derelict. I would sell myself, take drugs, die with voluptuous pleasure. I said to Hugo, who was boasting of being a little drunk, “Well, tell me something about yourself that I do not know, tell me something new. You have nothing to confess? And you couldn’t invent something?” He did not get my meaning. Nor did he get my meaning when I jumped away from his caresses. Sweet faith. To be laughed at, made use of. Why aren’t you cleverer, less believing? Why don’t you hit back, why have you no aberrations, no passions, no comedies to play, no cruelty? As I was working today I realized that I had given away to Henry many of my ideas on June and that he is using them. I feel impoverished, and he knows it, because he writes me that he feels like a crook. What was left for me to do? To write as a woman and as a woman only. I worked all morning, and I still felt rich.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This was certainly one of the most terrible periods of my life. Again I was forced to choose, and my weariness made the least effort exhausting. But this time the choice would not be personal; it required an urgent, definite, and public solution. When war had been declared, a spontaneous movement had caused all native-born Jews to sign up. At the Liberation, not one of them volunteered. The instinct of human groups is usually sound. The war had taught us our real place in the mind of the West. Each time we had needed the West it had ignored us. The news that now reached us from the rest of the world confirmed this selfishness of the West: the desperate appeals of the Warsaw ghetto, the silence of the West’s religious authorities, and its abandonment of most of the Jewish minorities to the Germans. As soon as the Germans left Tunis, our ghetto decided for itself that the war was over. For me, it could not be so simple. Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. How much would I have to uproot in myself now? What would be left me? It was in this dreadful moment that I finally caught a glimpse of my ruin. If I rejected what I was becoming would I be able to return to what I had been?

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

  Self-acknowledged suicide attempts rise exponentially with ACE scores. From a score of zero to a score of six there is about a 5,000 percent increased likelihood of suicide attempts. The more isolated and unprotected a person feels, the more death will feel like the only escape. When the media report an environmental link to a 30 percent increase in the risk of some cancer, it is headline news, yet these far more dramatic figures are overlooked. As part of their initial medical evaluation, study participants were asked, “Have you ever considered yourself to be an alcoholic?” People with an ACE score of four were seven times more likely to be alcoholic than adults with a score of zero. Injection drug use increased exponentially: For those with an ACE score of six or more, the likelihood of IV drug use was 4,600 percent greater than in those with a score of zero. Women in the study were asked about rape during adulthood. At an ACE score of zero, the prevalence of rape was 5 percent; at a score of four or more it was 33 percent. Why are abused or neglected girls so much more likely to be raped later in life? The answers to this question have implications far beyond rape. For example, numerous studies have shown that girls who witness domestic violence while growing up are at much higher risk of ending up in violent relationships themselves, while for boys who witness domestic violence, the risk that they will abuse their own partners rises sevenfold.[18] More than 12 percent of study participants had seen their mothers being battered. The list of high-risk behaviors predicted by the ACE score included smoking, obesity, unintended pregnancies, multiple sexual partners, and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the toll of major health problems was striking: Those with an ACE score of six or above had a 15 percent or greater chance than those with an ACE score of zero of currently suffering from any of the ten leading causes of death in the United States, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), ischemic heart disease, and liver disease. They were twice as likely to suffer from cancer and four times as likely to have emphysema. The ongoing stress on the body keeps taking its toll. When Problems Are Really SolutionsTwelve years after he originally treated her, Felitti again saw the woman whose dramatic weight loss and gain had started him on his quest. She told him that she’d subsequently had bariatric surgery but that after she’d lost ninety-six pounds she’d become suicidal. It had taken five psychiatric hospitalizations and three courses of electroshock to control her suicidality. Felitti points out that obesity, which is considered a major public health problem, may in fact be a personal solution for many. Consider the implications: If you mistake someone’s solution for a problem to be eliminated, not only are they likely to fail treatment, as often happens in addiction programs, but other problems may emerge.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My misfortunes were never chance encounters, and I could not easily avoid them. The more I get to know myself, the more aware I become of this. To put an end to this state of affairs would mean putting an end to myself, to die or to go mad. My principal’s temporary appointment would end one day, but I would never find the solution to my problem because I am that problem. I was no longer in a hurry as I left the Board of Education. Where would I go now? I followed the old ramparts with their white battlements that cut the sky in equal slices of blue. Then I went through the great green door with its useless rusty gates. The setting is unreal and absurd, like pasteboard in a provincial theater. I went into the covered bazaars, between rows of low houses leaning against and climbing over each other. This was the architecture of my native country. Would I agree to live in one of these houses, without water or light, in these muddy streets? Could I bring myself to return to live in the Middle Ages? But how could I ever have become a professor of philosophy and dedicated myself to the play of well-defined ideas, teaching the young my phony solutions to phony problems, with all the imaginary psychology of university textbooks? One has to teach calmly, with peace of mind and a pipe in one’s mouth like Poinsot; to walk to and fro in the classroom and puff away before answering a question with conviction, with conviction and irony, in fact with complete detachment. How wonderfully transparent was Poinsot! He walked around with tiny steps, one hand in his pocket, the other at his pipe, his eyes vague. In the middle of a sentence, halfway between his desk and the window, he would stop and take off in a quick reverie, while we waited respectfully. There was only the puffing of his pipe to disturb the silence; then, after a moment, he would deliver his precise and methodical conclusions. What could I be sure of? Before one scoffs at national pride and the fatherland, at wealth and good manners, love of one’s country, family, and traditions, one must have arrived at a proper evaluation of one’s country, have had enough to eat, and have received a good education. Then one can look on from afar and make wisecracks. But I have no sense of humor and not enough courage to be cynical. I would have had to rediscover everything for myself, build it all up again, and reconsider every proposition.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there’s a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I’m a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself a bankrupt. To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen. At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find a way out. PART ONE The Blind Alley ~ 1. THE BLIND ALLEY ~ My father’s breathing, a rapid hissing, punctuated the nighttime silence of our room. The world of my childhood was reassured and protected by this asthmatic breathing that dispelled the terrors of my solitary awakenings. When the moon rose high and plunged its light deep into the narrow blind alley, the anxieties of night stopped at the bars of our window, as their shadows, slowly revolving, cast a pattern of squares on the wall of the room. But I hated to stare at the room that was all sticky with the darkness that seemed to distend the clothes hanging from nails in the wall behind the closed door, that appeared to stifle the mirror of the wardrobe, and then to dissolve itself in a bluish mist by the window. I kept my eyes closed and was soon asleep again. Now, I want to remember all this. My life has known days of innocence when I had only to close my eyes in order not to see. Regularly, at dawn, I was awakened by the muffled and spasmodic rumbling of the garbage carts. Frightened, I would nestle close to my father in the big family bed, with my legs against his belly. He would then place his heavy hand on my head, with a gesture that had become a ritual.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On my desk there are a thermos flask, a package of sandwiches, cigarettes, and a bottle of ink, as on all the other desks. But as I face these white sheets of paper and long hours that call for an effort, I must admit at last how impossible my whole life has become. The buzzing in my ears has started again these last few days. At first, I tried to ignore it: it was nothing but a slight fatigue that would leave me after the exams. But now it sounds like the incessant ringing of a bell. Come, it’s high time! My chest aches too; to tell the truth, it has always ached, but I would not let it worry me. Now I cannot but admit it: my ears are buzzing and my chest is aching. I might uncork the flask full of such strong coffee and it would bring the dead back to life, and drink a cupful and perhaps even finish this paper. But again I have to admit that I can work only with lots of coffee, while my hands tremble and my heart beats fast. The truth is that I am a wreck. I have wasted too much energy and for too long. I paid a far higher price than the others for my smallest success because I always had to fight under impossible conditions. It is now time to put an end to this disastrous business. I am beaten. In any case, had I been capable of continuing, I did not want to. How could I go on taking seriously this little world of conventions, of arbitrary values, of exams and their little emotions, together with the absurd administrative hierarchies? The sheet of paper before me waits for me to tell the examiners what I think of John Stuart Mill and of Condillac. What do I think? Precisely, today I am incapable of thinking about anything but my own ideas and what I am. I look at my comrades around me. With their pale heads bent over their work and their nervous hands in their tousled hair, they know exactly what they want. They can work themselves into a frenzy over something that is not themselves. What is required of us? That we express the balanced opinions of our examiners and the impersonal ideas of the university concerning John Stuart Mill and Condillac? They would then be able to choose the twenty essays that are most alike because they reflect most slavishly the university’s ideal version. I am no longer able to forget myself and to think of something else. Nothing can distract me now from this basic quest.

• From Bluets (2009)

  134. It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue. You will drown , the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too . To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do. 135. Of course one can have “the blues” and stay alive, at least for a time. “Productive,” even (the perennial consolation!). See, for example, “Lady Sings the Blues”: “She’s got them bad / She feels so sad / Wants the world to know / Just what her blues is all about.” Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness. 136. “Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire,” I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression ever felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf. 137. It is unclear what Holiday means, exactly, when she sings, “But now the world will know/She’s never gonna sing ’em no more/No more.” What is unclear: whether she is moving on, shutting up, or going to die. Also unclear: the source of her triumphance . 138. But perhaps there is no real mystery here at all. “Life is usually stronger than people’s love for it” (Adam Phillips): this is what Holiday’s voice makes audible. To hear it is to understand why suicide is both so easy and so difficult: to commit it one has to stamp out this native triumphance, either by training oneself, over time, to dehabilitate or disbelieve it (drugs help here), or by force of ambush . 139. “Memory is blue in the head? Heads are easily taken off” (Lorine Niedecker). 140. How to take it off: I could drink every single drop of alcohol in my house, which includes the rest of this beer and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I could let myself be fucked mercilessly by many strangers at once, as in my first sexual fantasy: I am sent halfway across the world in a cardboard box with a lot of postage on it. The journey is long and rough and invariably involves much jostling by camels. When I arrive, a tribe of men opens the box under a hot desert sun, and out spills my small body. They are all eager to touch it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Was it a mirage? A dirty yellow jalopy, crudely painted with a red cross, rattled around an elbow in the road; it was the community ambulance! The men yelled, threw themselves forward in an effort to run, and waved their thin arms. In my tired head, another useless question had formed: how had Picchonero arrived so soon? How much time had gone by? I found it unpleasant to feel that I had lost all conception of time. The men surrounded the prehistoric vehicle deliriously; with their stiff hands they touched it and groped for the door handle, found it, and dived inside. They climbed into it with their knees and chests and elbows and heads banging against each other, pushing, squeezing, piling up, disappearing in the dark as fast as possible. This took as long as was necessary for the driver and the guide, who was not Picchonero, to set the brakes, open the doors, leave their seats, and appear smiling and shy. They gazed at the overflowing truck with its wide-open doors, covered with men hanging onto the windows and standing on the step. Unfortunately, they explained, they had precise orders, and first they must... The others, their arms hanging and silent, stared vacantly at their lost hope. “Who is the group leader?” the driver asked timidly. Nobody answered. The redhead was certainly buried in the dark belly of the ambulance. “We’ll come back and fetch you,” he shamefully went on. “The community could find no other transport. We’ll be back as fast as we can.” The driver and his guide hesitated, waited in vain for a reply, and got back into their seats. With great difficulty, the truck turned round, jumped, and slowly started on its way. With its doors open on both sides, it looked like a great beetle, too heavy for its wings, with masses of little fleas on its back. We were once more alone with the war, which was steadily catching up with our torn feet. Now that the bombers had made sure of the silence of their former objectives, they were aiming closer to us on the left. Clouds of thick gray smoke slowly rose and hung in the air, and the whims of the wind brought us the acid smell of bomb explosions.