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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  You could walk up and down the main drive any Thursday in the week till doomsday and never meet an expansive soul. Sixty or seventy thousand people—perhaps more—wrapped in woolen underwear and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turning out mustard by the carload. Female orchestras grinding out The Merry Widow . Silver service in the big hotels. The ducal palace rotting away, stone by stone, limb by limb. The trees screeching with frost. A ceaseless clatter of wooden shoes. The University celebrating the death of Goethe, or the birth, I don’t remember which. (Usually it’s the deaths that are celebrated.) Idiotic affair, anyway. Everybody yawning and stretching. Coming through the high driveway into the quadrangle a sense of abysmal futility always came over me. Outside bleak and empty; inside, bleak and empty. A scummy sterility hanging over the town, a fog of book-learning. Slag and cinders of the past. Around the interior courts were ranged the classrooms, little shacks such as you might see in the North woods, where the pedagogues gave free rein to their voices. On the blackboard the futile abracadabra which the future citizens of the republic would have to spend their lives forgetting. Once in a while the parents were received in the big reception room just off the driveway, where there were busts of the heroes of antiquity, such as Molière, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, etc., all the scarecrows whom the cabinet ministers mention with moist lips whenever an immortal is added to the waxworks. (No bust of Villon, no bust of Rabelais, no bust of Rimbaud.) Anyway, they met here in solemn conclave, the parents and the stuffed shirts whom the State hires to bend the minds of the young. Always this bending process, this landscape gardening to make the mind more attractive. And the youngsters came too, occasionally—the little sunflowers who would soon be transplanted from the nursery in order to decorate the municipal grassplots. Some of them were just rubber plants easily dusted with a torn chemise. All of them jerking away for dear life in the dormitories as soon as night: came on. The dormitories! where the red lights glowed, where the bell rang like a fire alarm, where the treads were hollowed out in the scramble to reach the educational cells. Then there were the profs! During the first few days I got so far as to shake hands with a few of them, and of course there was always the salute with the hat when we passed under the arcades. But as for a heart-to-heart talk, as for walking to the corner and having a drink together, nothing doing. It was simply unimaginable. Most of them looked as though they had had the shit scared out of them. Anyway, I belonged to another hierarchy. They wouldn’t even share a louse with the likes of me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  — They’d gone straight to Mitch’s after leaving me by the side of the road. Another thirty minutes in the car, thirty minutes that were maybe energized by my dramatic dismissal, the consolidation of the group into the true pilgrims. Suzanne leaning on folded arms over the front seat, giving off an amphetamine fritz, that lucid surety. Guy turning off the highway and onto the two-lane road, crossing the lagoon. The low stucco motels by the off-ramp, the eucalyptus loomy and peppering the air. Helen claimed, in her court testimony, that this was the first moment she expressed reservations to the others. But I don’t believe it. If anyone was questioning themselves, it was all under the surface, a filmy bubble drifting and popping in their brains. Their doubt growing weak as the particulars of a dream grow weak. Helen realized she’d left her knife at home. Suzanne shouted at her, according to trial documents, but the group dismissed plans to go back for it. They were already coasting, in thrall to a bigger momentum. — They parked the Ford along the road, not even bothering to hide it. As they made their way to Mitch’s gate, their minds seemed to hover and settle on the same movements, like a single organism. I can imagine that view. Mitch’s house, as seen from the gravel drive. The calm fill of the bay, the prow of the living room. It was familiar to them. The month they’d spent living with Mitch before I’d known them, running up delivery bills and catching molluscum from dank towels. But still. I think that night they might have been newly struck by the house, faceted and bright as rock candy. Its inhabitants already doomed, so doomed the group could feel an almost preemptive sorrow for them. For how completely helpless they were to larger movements, their lives already redundant, like a tape recorded over with static. — They’d expected to find Mitch. Everyone knows this part: how Mitch had been called to Los Angeles to work on a track he’d made for Stone Gods, the movie that was never released. He’d taken the last TWA flight of the

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning. I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge. A deep fog has settled down, the earth is smeared with frozen grease. I can feel the city palpitating, as if it were a heart just removed from a warm body. The windows of my hotel are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of chemicals burning. Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation, street lamps drowning, men and women choking to death, the bridges covered with houses, slaughterhouses of love. A man is standing against a wall with an accordion strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but the accordion writhes between his stumps like a sack of snakes. The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers. The people who live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, but the wheel is turning too fast. … Something was needed to put me right with myself. Last night I discovered it: Papini . It doesn’t matter to me whether he’s a chauvinist, a little Christer, or a near sighted pedant. As a failure he’s marvelous. … The books he read—at eighteen! Not only Homer, Dante, Goethe, not only Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, not only Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, not only Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Villon, Carducci, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, not only Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley—not only these but all the small fry in between. This on page 18. Alors , on page 232 he breaks down and confesses. I know nothing, he admits. I know the titles, I have compiled bibliographies, I have written critical essays, I have maligned and defamed. … I can talk for five minutes or for five days, but then I give out, I am squeezed dry. Follows this: “Everybody wants to see me. Everybody insists on talking to me. People pester me and they pester others with inquiries about what I am doing. How am I? Am I quite well again?

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  In such a relationship, they may also feel unable to leave the group because of what they perceive as “exit costs.” Exit costs in destructive cults, as described by sociologist Benjamin Zablcoki, can range “from financial penalties, to relational commitments to various sorts of cognitive and emotional dependencies.”236 In such small cults, when the leader is delusional, progressively loses his or her grasp upon reality, or both, group members are often influenced to think, feel, and behave the same way. This situation can become a formula for tragedy. The consequences of such leader-driven, delusional thinking can be catastrophic and cause small cults to either implode or explode as we can see through the following historical overview. 1969—Charles Manson Murders In the summer of 1969, a horrific cultic story would indelibly imprint itself on popular American culture, and its images would persist for decades to come. During the morning hours of August 9, 1969, at a mansion located in an exclusive enclave of Los Angeles known as Benedict Canyon, five people were murdered. Among those found dead was actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski. Scrawled in blood at the scene were the words “Death to Pigs.”237 Later that night another multiple murder shook Los Angeles. A prominent couple, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, were found stabbed to death in their home at the edge of Hollywood. The investigation of what became known as the “Tate-LaBianca murders” culminated in the arrests of members of a small cult group calling itself “The Family” or the “Manson Family,” led by Charles Manson. Manson had a history of manipulating and controlling others as well as a list of mental health issues, including schizophrenia and a paranoid-delusional disorder.238 He had spent most of his youth in public institutions, and other than brief paroles, he had been locked up for most of the 1950s and 1960s. Manson studied Scientology and Buddhism. In 1967, at the age of thirty-two, he was released from prison for the last time.239 The small cult of followers Manson assembled, which never numbered much more than one hundred, was fixated on his dark vision of a coming apocalypse. In his twisted mind Manson imagined that the TateLaBianca murders would be a pivotal point in an apocalyptic drama. Manson saw these senseless slayings as somehow becoming the ignition point of a race war, which would engulf society and lead to the fulfillment of his destiny. What followed instead was a sensational ten-month trial that transfixed the media and morbidly fascinated the public. The mindless devotion of the Manson Family members was unsettling, and it was recorded and broadcast on television. The glassy eyes and eerie smiles of the cult leader’s disciples were noticeable and deeply disturbing. His followers appeared totally disconnected from reality and completely enthralled by, and obsessed with, Manson. Even though Charles Manson hadn’t been physically present at the murders, he was nevertheless found guilty of the crimes.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I thought to myself [said Miller]—you poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my chest. … I’ll give you an Horatio Alger book. … My head was in a whirl to leave his office. I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening. I saw the tracks they left on the highways, lying on the floor of freight trains, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy. … I saw the walls giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting, waiting contentedly… saying that things were temporarily out of order. I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft. … I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away. And he did. Miller’s first book, Tropic of Cancer , was published in Paris in 1934 and was immediately famous and immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. It is the Horatio Alger story with a vengeance. Miller had walked out of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company one day without a word; ever after he lived on his wits. He had managed to get to Paris on ten dollars, where he lived more than a decade, not during the gay prosperous twenties but during the Great Depression. He starved, made friends by the score, mastered the French language and his own. It was not until the Second World War broke out that he returned to America to live at Big Sur, California. Among his best books several were banned: the two Tropics (Tropic of Cancer , 1934, and Tropic of Capricorn , 1939); Black Spring , 1936; and part of the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (including Sexus, Plexus , and Nexus ). Unfortunately for Miller he has been a man without honor in his own country and in his own language. When Tropic of Cancer was published he was even denied entrance into England, held over in custody by the port authorities and returned to France by the next boat. He made friends with his jailer and wrote a charming essay about him. But Miller has no sense of despair.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui—in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Shortly after Rimbaud is born his father is off to the Crimean War. So is Tolstoy. The revolution of 1848, of brief duration but full of consequences, is followed by the bloody Commune of 1871, which Rimbaud as a boy is thought to have participated in. In 1848 we in America are fighting the Mexicans with whom we are now great friends, though the Mexicans are not too sure of it. During this war Thoreau makes his famous speech on Civil Disobedience, a document which will one day be added to the Emancipation Proclamation. ... Twelve years later the Civil War breaks out, perhaps the bloodiest of all civil wars. ... From 1874 until his death in 1881 Amiel is writing his Journal Intime... which... gives a thoroughgoing analysis of the moral dilemma in which the creative spirits of the time found themselves. The very titles of the books written by influential writers of the nineteenth century are revelatory. I give just a few... The Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gérard de Nerval), Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), Les Chants de Maldoror (Lautréamont), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), La Bête Humaine (Zola), Hunger (Knut Hamsun), Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (Dujardin), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin), Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), Alice in Wonderland, The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher- Masoch), Les Paradis Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of the Dead (Dostoevski), The Wild Duck (Ibsen), The Inferno (Strindberg), The Nether World (Gissing), A Rebours (Huysmans). ... Goethe’s Faust was not so very old when Rimbaud asked a friend for a copy of it. Remember the date of his birth is October 20th, 1854 (6:00 A.M. Western Standard Diabolical Time). The very next year, 1855, Leaves of Grass makes its appearance, followed by condemnation and suppression. Meanwhile Moby Dick had come out (1851) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In 1855 Gérard de Nerval commits suicide, having lasted till the remarkable age of 47. In 1854 Kierkegaard is already penning his last words to history in which he gives the parable of “The Sacrificed Ones.” Just four or five years before Rimbaud completes A Season in Hell (1873), Lautréamont publishes his celebrated piece of blasphemy, another “work of youth,” as we say, in order not to take these heartbreaking testaments seriously. ... By 1888 Nietzsche is explaining to Brandes that he can now boast three readers: Brandes, Taine, and Strindberg. The next year he goes mad and remains that way until his death in 1900. Lucky man! From 1893 to 1897 Strindberg is experiencing a crise... which he describes with magisterial effects in The Inferno. Reminiscent of Rimbaud is the title of another of his works: The Keys to Paradise. In 1888 comes Dujardin’s curious little book, forgotten until recently. ...

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  And so, just two months before my eighteenth birthday, I faced expulsion from the community, banished from my home, my parents, my siblings, and the only people I knew and loved. An infant in the ways of modern life, I was being compelled to leave my family behind and make my way alone in a world I’d been taught to believe was full of sin and danger. PART 1 Where is God? Grace A Brief Meditation T he definition of Grace is that free and unearned favor endowed by God. I believe in grace, although I have to admit I hadn’t given it much thought until an event some years ago brought it into perspective for me. The occasion was a visit in 2000 to Mother Mary Clare Vincent OSB, the seventy-five-year-old prioress of St. Scholastica Priory in Petersham, Massachusetts. She had known me all my life. We were having a quiet tea together, when she suddenly took my hand and, looking into my eyes with her intense and bright black eyes, she said, “Darling, there’s a special place in heaven for you on account of all your generosity.” I was taken aback. I had been visiting the priory since 1985 when Mother Mary Clare, with a small group of nuns, had set up the community under the auspices of the Benedictine order. While I was most assuredly not called to be a nun, much less lead a contemplative life, I adored Mother Mary Clare and came to love her band of Sisters. We had a symbiotic relationship—I gave them advice on matters of finance and business and provided modest financial support. They, in turn, prayed for me, my intentions, and anyone for whom I asked them to pray. We were indeed family. Listening to Mother’s words about my place in heaven, I answered with a chuckle, “Mother Mary Clare, what I do is nothing special. It just comes naturally to me because I love you.” “Aha,” she responded before I could speak another word. “Your generosity is a direct response to grace. Believe you me—that’s what is so marvelous about you. You accept grace; you never reject it. For that you will be greatly rewarded, my darling.” She had silenced me and I contemplated her words, encouraging words for someone who was far from a model Catholic, much less saintly. A place in heaven, I thought. I hoped it would be close to her. I took her reassuring words to heart and have been a believer in grace ever since. Grace received and embraced inspires the heart and soul to respond. How we respond to grace determines how we live our lives. The millions of acts of daily human kindness throughout the world are evidence of man’s innate goodness in response to God’s grace and favor. I like to think of grace as being granted in a variety of flavors—kindness, joy, patience (sadly that grace totally skipped me by), fortitude, faith, hope, humor, and so many more.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  40 Hurtling Toward the Inevitable 1964 M ariam, the oldest child, graduated from high school in the spring, a celebratory moment in the life of the Center. Since the age of twelve, she had expressed her desire to live her life as a nun, the perfect illustration of the success Sister Catherine hoped to achieve among all thirty-nine children. In so many ways, Mariam was the leader of the children, and she was set as an example of what each of us could achieve. For a year before her graduation from high school, under Sister Catherine’s tutelage, she had been encouraged to spend time alone doing spiritual reading in preparation for becoming a nun. Now this summer, Sister Catherine expanded the spiritual reading to include the next twelve oldest children, seven Little Sisters and five Little Brothers. It was a clear signal that we, too, were being groomed for postulancy, the first of three steps to becoming a professed nun. For one hour each day after lunch, I was expected to find a quiet place to read and to contemplate on my vocation as a bride of Christ. I chose a secluded spot in the grove of white pines that bordered the hay fields where the alfalfa was high and ready to be cut. The site was ideal for an hour of solitude and reading, but I did neither of those. Instead, I spent the hour peering through the camouflage of pine needles and watching Brother Basil as he sat tall on the tractor and traversed the field, mowing the hay. When my hour of “meditation” had expired, I emerged from the pine grove, precisely as he neared me. We exchanged silent smiles and I basked in the warm feeling that crept through my whole body. Throughout the summer that I turned sixteen, Sister Catherine spent endless hours exhorting the eight of us Little Sisters to seek joy in a life of prayer and penance, citing examples of the great mystics of the Catholic Church. Her words only heightened my sense of foreboding and the gnawing premonition that I was hurtling toward a day I had hoped would never arrive. I felt powerless to escape the encircling clutches of impending religious life. Dreams of the worldly life I so craved would soon be shattered. Gone, too, would be the childish fantasy I had harbored since I was twelve—that Prince Charles of England, who was exactly three months younger than I was, would somehow find out about me and ask me to marry him. Then I would become a queen one day. Was I the only one of the children who didn’t want to be a religious? I wondered. Outside of the marathon of spiritual admonition, the summer was much like those of prior years, with farm work absorbing most of our waking hours.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I worked the graveyard shift at a phone sex company in downtown Phoenix with a bunch of other lost girls. I mostly sat in my booth and did crossword puzzles while I talked to lonely men who wanted nothing more than the fantasy of a woman who might listen to them for ten minutes or an hour or two. Around four in the morning, on our lunch break, we would get food, greasy terrible food, from a Jack in the Box across the street. I was fat and I continued to eat to get fatter and I talked to men without having to be touched by men. When my shift was over, I went home and sometimes invited my coworkers over, and we sat around the pool at this man’s house, sleeping with our sunglasses on as the Arizona sun burned into our skin. One day the man who brought me to Arizona taught me to shoot a gun with wax bullets. It was exhilarating, holding a gun in my hand, the power of pulling the trigger, even if the bullets only hit an inanimate target with a quiet splat. I thought about turning the gun on the boys who had hurt me. I thought about turning the gun on myself.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Helen watched me with a medical curiosity. Guy shifted in the driver’s seat, adjusting the mirror. Helen said something under her breath— Donna shushed her. “Suzanne,” I said, “please,” the powerless tilt in my voice. She said nothing. When I finally shuffled along the seat and got out, Suzanne didn’t even hesitate. Ducking back inside the car and closing the door, the dome light snapping off and returning them to darkness. And then they drove away. I was alone, I understood, and even as I tended some naïve wish—they would return, it was only a joke, Suzanne would never leave me like that, not really—I knew that I had been tossed aside. I could only zoom away, to hover up somewhere by the tree line, looking down on a girl standing alone in the dark. Nobody I knew. 15 There were all kinds of rumors those first days. Howard Smith reported, erroneously, that Mitch Lewis had been killed, though this would be corrected more swiftly than the other rumors. David Brinkley reported six victims had been cut up and shot and left on the lawn. Then the number was amended to four people. Brinkley was the first to claim the presence of hoods and nooses and Satanic symbols, a confusion that started because of the heart on the wall of the living room. Drawn with the corner of a towel, soaked in the mother’s blood. The mix-up made sense—of course they’d read a ghoulish meaning in the shape, assume some cryptic, doomy scrawl. It was easier to imagine it was the leftover of a black mass than believe the actual truth: it was just a heart, like any lovesick girl might doodle in a notebook. — A mile up the road, I came upon an exit and nearby Texaco station. I went in and out of the sulfur lights, the sound they made like bacon frying. I rocked on my toes, watching the road. When I finally gave up on anyone coming for me, I called my father’s number from the pay phone. Tamar answered. “It’s me,” I said. “Evie,” she said. “Thank God. Where are you?” I could picture her twining the cord in the kitchen, gathering the loops. “I knew you’d call soon. I told your dad you would.” I explained where I was. She must have heard the crack in my voice. “I’ll leave now,” she said. “You stay right there.” I sat on the curb to wait, leaning on my knees. The air was cool with the first news of autumn, and the constellation of brake lights was going along 101, the big trucks rearing as they picked up speed. I was reeling with excuses for Suzanne, some explanation for her behavior that would

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  All alone and via these ridiculous things, Puddle would feel the sharp tug of England. And one evening her weary mind must switch back to the earliest days of her friendship with Stephen. What a lifetime ago it seemed since the days when a lanky colt of a girl of fourteen had been licked into shape in the schoolroom at Morton. She could hear her own words: ‘You’ve forgotten something, Stephen; the books can’t walk to the bookcase, but you can, so suppose that you take them with you,’ and then: ‘Even my brain won’t stand your complete lack of method.’ Stephen fourteen—that was twelve years ago. In those years she, Puddle, had grown very tired, tired with trying to see some way out, some way of escape, of fulfilment for Stephen. And always they seemed to be toiling, they two, down an endless road that had no turning; she an ageing woman herself unfulfilled; Stephen still young and as yet still courageous —but the day would come when her youth would fail, and her courage, because of that endless toiling. She thought of Brockett, Jonathan Brockett, surely an unworthy companion for Stephen; a thoroughly vicious and cynical man, a dangerous one too because he was brilliant. Yet she, Puddle, was actually grateful to this man; so dire were their straits that she was grateful to Brockett. Then came the remembrance of that other man, of Martin Hallam—she had had such high hopes. He had been very simple and honest and good—Puddle felt that there was much to be said for goodness. But for such as Stephen men like Martin Hallam could seldom exist; as friends they would fail her, while she in her turn would fail them as lover. Then what remained? Jonathan Brockett? Like to like. No, no, an intolerable thought! Such a thought as that was an outrage on Stephen. Stephen was honourable and courageous; she was steadfast in friendship and selfless in loving; intolerable to think that her only companions must be men and women like Jonathan Brockett—and yet— after all what else? What remained? Loneliness, or worse still, far worse because it so deeply degraded the spirit, a life of perpetual subterfuge, of guarded opinions and guarded actions, of lies of omission if not of speech, of becoming an accomplice in the world’s injustice by maintaining at all times a judicious silence, making and keeping the friends one respected, on false pretences, because if they knew they would turn aside, even the friends one respected.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  A phrase without meaning, since from the beginning of history man has never enjoyed the full measure of youth nor known the limitless possibilities of adulthood. How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one’s energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth’s only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up to sacrifice? What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with chimeras?... Stifle or deform youth’s dreams and you destroy the creator. Where there has been no real youth there can be no real manhood. If society has come to resemble a collection of deformities, is it not the work of our educators and preceptors? Today, as yesterday, the youth who would live his own life has no place to turn, no place to live his youth unless, retiring into his chrysalis, he closes all apertures and buries himself alive. The conception of our mother the earth being “an egg which doth contain all good things in it” has undergone a profound change. The cosmic egg contains an addled yolk. This is the present view of mother earth. The psychoanalysts have traced the poison back to the womb, but to what avail? In the light of this profound discovery we are given permission... to step from one rotten egg into another. ... Why breed new monsters of negation and futility? Let society scotch its own rotten corpse! Let us have a new heaven and a new earth!—that was the sense of Rimbaud’s obstinate revolt. Miller calls for an end to revolt once and for all. His message is precisely that of Whitman, of Rimbaud, of Rilke: “Everything we are taught is false”; and “Change your life.” As a writer Miller may be second- or third-rate or of no rating at all; as a spiritual example he stands among the great men of our age. Will this ever be recognized? Not in our time probably. The Rimbaud book ends with a Coda, a little recital of the literature of despair which has surrounded us for a hundred years. Listen to it. Rimbaud was born in the middle of the nineteenth century, October 20th, 1854, at 6:00 A.M., it is said. A century of unrest, of materialism, and of “progress,” as we say. Purgatorial in every sense of the word, and the writers who flourished in that period reflect this ominously. Wars and revolutions were abundant. Russia alone, we are told, waged thirty-three wars (mostly of conquest) during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Come on,” she said one last time, and the boy inched toward her. Then he was in her lap, and she held him there, the knife like a gift she was giving him. — By the time the news report was finished, I was sitting down. The couch seemed sheared off from the rest of the apartment, occupying airless space. Images blistered and branched like nightmare vines. The indifferent sea beyond the house. The footage of policemen in shirtsleeves, stepping from Mitch’s front door. There was no reason for them to hurry, I saw—it was over. Nobody would be saved. I understood this news was much bigger than me. That I was only taking in the first glancing flash. I careened toward an exit, a trick latch: maybe Suzanne had broken off from the group, maybe she wasn’t involved. But all these frantic wishes carried their own echoed response. Of course she had done it. The possibilities washed past. Why Mitch hadn’t been home. How I could have intersected with what was coming. How I could have ignored all the warnings. My breath was squeezed from the effort of trying not to cry. I could imagine how impatient Suzanne would be with my upset. Her cool voice. Why are you crying? she’d ask. You didn’t even do anything. — It’s strange to imagine the stretch of time when the murders were unsolved. That the act ever existed separately from Suzanne and the others. But for the larger world, it did. They wouldn’t get caught for many months. The crime—so close to home, so vicious—sickened everyone with hysteria. Homes had been reshaped. Turned suddenly unsafe, familiarity flung back in their owners’ faces, as if taunting them—see, this is your living room, your kitchen, and see how little it helps, all that familiarity. See how little it means, at the end. The news blared through dinner. I kept turning at a jump of motion in the corner of my eye, but it was just the stream of television or a headlight

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  For you are well aware of how when he afterwards wanted to claim the blessing he ought to have inherited, he was rejected – for he had no opportunity to change his mind – although he sought that blessing with tears. WITH this passage, the writer to the Hebrews comes to the problems of everyday Christian life and living. He knew that sometimes it is given to us to rise up with inspiration as if we had the wings of eagles; he knew that sometimes we are able to run and not grow weary in the pursuit of some great moment of endeavour; but he also knew that, of all things, it is hardest to continue to walk day after day and not to faint. Here, he is thinking of the daily struggle of the Christian way. (1) He begins by reminding them of their duties. In every congregation and in every Christian society, there are those who are weaker and more likely to go astray and to abandon the struggle. It is the duty of those who are stronger to put fresh vigour into listless hands and fresh strength into failing feet. The phrase used for slack hands is the same as is used to describe the children of Israel in the days when they wanted to abandon the harsh demands of the journey across the wilderness and to return to the ease and the fleshpots of Egypt. The Odes of Solomon (6:14ff.) have a description of the work of those who are true servants and ministers: They have refreshed the dry lips, And have raised up the will that was paralysed ... And limbs that were fallen They have straightened and raised up. One of life’s greatest glories is to be an encourager of those who are near to despair and a strengthener of those whose strength is failing. To help these people, we have, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, ‘to make their paths straight’. Christians have a double duty; they have a duty to God and a duty to other people. The Testament of Simeon (5:2–3) has an illuminating description of the duty of those who would strive for goodness. ‘Make your heart good in the sight of the Lord; and make your ways straight in the sight of men; so you will find favour in the sight of the Lord and of men.’ To God, individuals must present a clean heart; to others, they must present an upright life. To show others the right way to walk, by personal example to keep them on the right road, to remove from the path something that would make them stumble, to make the journey easier for faltering and lagging feet, is a Christian duty.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Dugard was discovered living in the backyard of Phillip Garrido’s home in Antioch, California, east of San Francisco. And she was the mother of two children ages eleven and fifteen, whom Garrido had both fathered. The convicted rapist had created a family he completely controlled. Dugard and her children lived in a makeshift compound accessible through a maze of tarps and sheds. “All of the sheds had electricity by cords, rudimentary outhouse and shower, as if you were camping,” said Fred Kollar, El Dorado County sheriff.421 Jaycee Dugard’s formal education effectively ended at the time of her kidnapping. Dugard’s two daughters never attended school. A source close to the investigation told the press, “Some type of brainwashing clearly occurred.” Similar to the situation of Elizabeth Smart, Duggard seemed physically able to escape. “There were moments in the 18 years when she could have called attention to who she was. She hadn’t forgotten her real identity. In fact, she remembers a remarkable amount about her old life,” a source told the press. But like Elizabeth Smart and Patty Hearst, the same source attributed “mind games” as the cause of Dugard’s inaction and seeming inability to escape. “It sounds simplistic, but the real prison was her brain,” a source told reporters.422 Phillip Garrido, like Brian Mitchell, had a female accomplice. Her name was Nancy Bocanegra, and she married Phillip Garrido in Leavenworth, Kansas, when he was still an inmate in prison. Garrido served eleven years for the kidnapping and rape of his previous victim. He was released in 1988. Nancy Garrido was with her husband when he kidnapped Jaycee Dugard, and she was criminally charged like Wanda Barzee, Mitchell’s accomplice. Nancy Garrido was also a certified nurse assistant, which probably explains how Phillip Garrido managed to deliver two babies and provide some level of medical care for Dugard and her children, without seeing doctors.423 Garrido’s brother, Ron, described Nancy Garrido as “a robot.” He said in an interview, “She would do anything he asked her to…It’s no different from [Charles] Manson.”424 Many who knew Phillip Garrido gave him the nickname “creepy Phil,” but examining psychologists found him to be “very coherent.” He owned a print shop, where Jaycee Dugard and her children worked. Customers described the mother and daughters as “polite” and “well mannered,” though one customer commented, “Obviously, there was some brainwashing going on.” Dugard went by the name “Alissa,” and her two children were called “Angel” and “Starlet.” “They were not dressed like average teenage girls. They were dressed very conservatively,” one print shop customer remarked.425 Phillip Garrido later told police, “We raised them right. They don’t know anything bad about the world.”426 Like Brian Mitchell, Garrido believed he was special and chosen by God.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  In this environment participants experience what has been called “love bombing,” which is a term used to describe the seemingly unconditional affection church members direct toward them. However, this “love” is actually highly conditional and based on their growing acceptance of Unification Church principles and corresponding progress in the group. This contrived but intense experience in the context of a controlled group environment can produce the desired commitment. After recovering from her experience under the control of the political cult called the Symbionese Liberation A Army, the heiress Patty Hearst commented that she had been told how to think. Upon reflection Hearst compared the process she endured to something like “the disciplining of your mind.”567 Conway and Siegelman notably include such practices as “group encounter, guided fantasy [and] meditation” as a means of implementation. The authors conclude, “By tampering with basic distinctions between reality and fantasy, right and wrong, past, present and future, or simply by stilling the workings of the mind over time, these intense communication practices may break down vital faculties of mind.” The authors also point out that there is growing evidence that such abuses may ultimately “impair crucial working connections in the brain’s underlying synaptic networks and neurochemical channels,” which may potentially “destroy long-standing information processing pathways in the brain.” 568 Such changes in the brain were the focus of the book Craving for Ecstasy by professors Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth, which examines how addiction and behavior affect the brain. Milkman and Sunderwirth, who specialize in brain chemistry, reinforce Conway and Siegelman’s observations. They write, “Individuals can change their brain chemistry through immersion in salient mood-altering activities as well as through ingesting intoxicating substances.” The researchers add, “If our synaptic chemistry changes dramatically we seem to possess altogether different personalities.”569 The authors specifically cite the power of “cults,” which they say “may be used to short-circuit the usual course of an addictive process.” They then offer “the tragic example of Jonestown, blind devotion to a religious cult,” which “burned a path straight to the suicidal vortex.”570 The comparison of cults to chemical addiction may explain the seemingly addictive pattern of behavior often evident in cultic involvement. This analogy may also explain why discontinuing that involvement, especially after years of reinforcement, is frequently difficult. Conway and Siegelman have identified “four distinct varieties of information disease” we can see by observing an affected individual. “Ongoing altered state of awareness”—characterized as a “state of narrowed or reduced awareness.” This can be brought on by an encapsulated environment controlled by a group and/ or leader that virtually excludes any other focus or outside frame of reference.“Delusional phase”—“vivid delusions [and] hallucinations” that lead to “irrational, violent and self-destructive behavior,” which can be brought on through techniques of sensory deprivation and/or overload“Not thinking”—“literally shutting off the mind”“Not feeling”—“actively suppressing one’s emotional responses” that may “ultimately numb a person’s capacity for human feeling”571Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, prohibited his followers from watching television and strictly regulated their reading.

• From The Girls (2016)

  — Gwen’s hands had been tied loosely—as soon as the blade sank into Scotty, she jerked free and ran out the front door. Screaming with a cartoon recklessness that sounded fake. She was almost to the gate when she tripped and fell on the lawn. Before she could get to her feet, Donna was already on her. Crawling over her back, stabbing until Gwen asked, politely, if she could die already. — They killed the mother and son last. “Please,” Linda said. Plainly. Even then, I think, hoping for some reprieve. She was very beautiful and very young. She had a child. “Please,” she said, “I can get you money.” But Suzanne didn’t want money. The amphetamines tightening her temples, an incantatory throb. The beautiful girl’s heart, motoring in her chest—the narcotic, desperate rev. How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved. Helen held Linda down—her hands on Linda’s shoulders were tentative at first, like a bad dance partner, but then Suzanne snapped at Helen, impatient, and she pressed harder. Linda’s eyes closed because she knew what was coming. — Christopher had started to cry. Crouching behind the couch; no one had to hold him down. His underwear saturated with the bitter smell of urine. His cries were shaped by screams, an emptying out of all feeling. His mother on the carpet, no longer moving. Suzanne squatted on the floor. Holding out her hands to him. “Come here,” she said. “Come on.” This is the part that isn’t written about anywhere, but the part I imagine most. How Suzanne’s hands must have already been sprayed with blood. The warm medical stink of the body on her clothes and hair. And I can picture it, because I knew every degree of her face. The calming mystic air on her, like she was moving through water.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then Stephen must tell her the cruel truth, she must say: ‘I am one of those whom God marked on the forehead. Like Cain, I am marked and blemished. If you come to me, Mary, the world will abhor you, will persecute you, will call you unclean. Our love may be faithful even unto death and beyond—yet the world will call it unclean. We may harm no living creature by our love; we may grow more perfect in understanding and in charity because of our loving; but all this will not save you from the scourge of a world that will turn away its eyes from your noblest actions, finding only corruption and vileness in you. You will see men and women defiling each other, laying the burden of their sins upon their children. You will see unfaithfulness, lies and deceit among those whom the world views with approbation. You will find that many have grown hard of heart, have grown greedy, selfish, cruel and lustful; and then you will turn to me and will say: “You and I are more worthy of respect than these people. Why does the world persecute us, Stephen?” And I shall answer: “Because in this world there is only toleration for the so-called normal.” And when you come to me for protection, I shall say: “I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you.” ’ And now Stephen was trembling. In spite of her strength and her splendid physique, she must stand there and tremble. She felt deathly cold, her teeth chattered with cold, and when she moved her steps were unsteady. She must climb the wide stairs with infinite care, in case she should inadvertently stumble; must lift her feet slowly, and with infinite care, because if she stumbled she might wake Mary. 4Ten days later Stephen was saying to her mother: ‘I’ve been needing a change for a very long time. It’s rather lucky that a girl I met in the Unit is free and able to go with me. We’ve taken a villa at Orotava, it’s supposed to be furnished and they’re leaving the servants, but heaven only knows what the house will be like, it belongs to a Spaniard; however, there’ll be sunshine.’ ‘I believe Orotava’s delightful,’ said Anna. But Puddle, who was looking at Stephen, said nothing. That night Stephen knocked at Puddle’s door: ‘May I come in?’ ‘Yes, come in do, my dear. Come and sit by the fire—shall I make you some cocoa?’ ‘No, thanks.’ A long pause while Puddle slipped into her dressing-gown of soft, grey Viyella. Then she also drew a chair up to the fire, and after a little: ‘It’s good to see you—your old teacher’s been missing you rather badly.’ ‘Not more than I’ve been missing her, Puddle.’ Was that quite true? Stephen suddenly flushed, and both of them grew very silent.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  even more thoroughly than Hitler’s victims, since they at least belong to blessed memory, and their murders cry out for public memorial, while the boy has vanished into the private obscurity and ordinary silence that will befall most of us. In Sebald’s work, then, and in this book especially, we experience a vertiginous relationship to a select number of photographs of humans—these pictures are explicitly part of the story that we are reading, which is about saving the dead (the story of Jacques Austerlitz), and they are also part of a larger story that is not found in the book (or only by implication), which is also about saving the dead. These people stare at us, as if imploring us to rescue them from the banal amnesia of existence. But if Jacques Austerlitz certainly cannot save his dead parents, then we certainly cannot save the little boy. To “save” him would mean saving every person who dies, would mean saving everyone who has ever died in obscurity. This, I think, is the double meaning of Sebald’s words about the boy: it is Jacques Austerlitz, but it is also the boy from Stockport (as it were), who stares out at us asking us to “avert the misfortune” of his demise, which of course we cannot do.