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.

Page 53 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  My reaction was more than just an attempt to curb an excessive appetite, though, or a response to sensory overload. Beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place. I had seen worse poverty in Indonesia and glimpsed the violent mood of inner-city kids in L.A.; I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed, utterly. And nowhere, it seemed, was that collapse more apparent than in the black community I had so lovingly imagined and within which I had hoped to find refuge. I might meet a black friend at his Midtown law firm, and before heading to lunch at the MoMA, I would look out across the city toward the East River from his high-rise office, imagining a satisfactory life for myself—a vocation, a family, a home. Until I noticed that the only other blacks in the office were messengers or clerks, the only other blacks in the museum the blue-jacketed security guards who counted the hours before they could catch their train home to Brooklyn or Queens. I might wander through Harlem—to play on courts I’d once read about or to hear Jesse Jackson make a speech on 125th; or, on a rare Sunday morning, to sit in the back pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church, lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song—and catch a fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought. But I had no guide that might show me how to join this troubled world, and when I looked for an apartment there, I found Sugar Hill’s elegant brownstones occupied and out of reach, the few decent rental buildings with ten-year-long waiting lists, so that all that remained were the rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men counted out their rolls of large bills, and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly to themselves.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The uniqueness of his Ghost Dance was that the basic elements of a personal vision quest could now be understood as a national experience. First, people had been purified by their suffering. They had sweated blood in their struggle against the white conquerors. They were prepared for the quest. Then they had discovered their wise old medicine man, their mentor, in the person of Wovoka. He helped them to move to a high place where they could offer their lament. The Dance was this lonely place where the whole nation could go crying for a vision. Wovoka’s teachings replicated the vision quest on a large scale, expanding it for all people in their time of greatest need. Given the degree of suffering being endured by so many Native nations under the white occupation, it is little wonder that many of them turned to the Ghost Dance as their last try for salvation. It is also no wonder that this same vision could become lost in translation as the desperation of the people intensified. During the time of Jesus there were parts of the messianic expectation that took the form of armed resistance to Rome. The Zealots arose from a religious conviction that God sanctioned the use of force against their oppressors. For these men and women, the Messiah was to be more of a war chief than a wounded healer. In a similar way, Wovoka’s message reached many ears with an altered vision. There were Native people who said that the Ghost Dance was a prelude to Armageddon, that the end of days was near, and an angry God would soon visit vengeance upon the godless white oppressors, that there was magic in the name of God which would protect anyone who took up the sword against evil. The zealots of the Tribe of Benjamin and the zealots of the Tribe of the Lakota may have been separated by centuries, but their religious rationale was very much the same. The spiritual chemistry between a “quest,” our longing for meaning, and “vision,” our glimpse of meaning, becomes volatile when it is mixed in the medium of “messiahship,” that powerful belief that we have found our meaning, especially if we believe we have found it in one person. Those who followed Jim Jones or David Koresh to their own private Armageddon testify to the truth of that volatility. They were consumed by the fires of a quest for vision because they were manipulated by the claims of a false messiah. Others, like the Zealots and Native warriors who wore the “ghost shirt” to protect themselves against bullets, took a religious vision to the extreme. They sacrificed themselves for what they hoped would be true: that they could literally bring the vision out of the intangible and actualize it as a tangible force to alter their reality. They sought to use vision like a sword or a war club.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I reached for the bottle, this time pouring my own. Frank wasn’t watching me; his eyes were closed now, his head leaning against the back of his chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving of stone. “You can’t blame Stan for what he is,” Frank said quietly. “He’s basically a good man. But he doesn’t know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can’t know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like. That’s why he can come over here and drink my whiskey and fall asleep in that chair you’re sitting in right now. Sleep like a baby. See, that’s something I can never do in his house. Never. Doesn’t matter how tired I get, I still have to watch myself. I have to be vigilant, for my own survival.” Frank opened his eyes. “What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.” Frank closed his eyes again. His breathing slowed until he seemed to be asleep. I thought about waking him, then decided against it and walked back to the car. The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone. CHAPTER FIVE [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] THREE O’CLOCK IN THE morning. The moon-washed streets empty, the growl of a car picking up speed down a distant road. The revelers would be tucked away by now, paired off or alone, in deep, beer-heavy sleep, Hasan at his new lady’s place—don’t stay up, he had said with a wink. And now just the two of us to wait for the sunrise, me and Billie Holiday, her voice warbling through the darkened room, reaching toward me like a lover. I’m a fool … to want you. Such a fool … to want you.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  But by 1130 BCE, it was all over: the Hittite capital in Mitanni was in ruins, the Canaanite ports of Ugarit, Megiddo, and Hazor had been destroyed; and desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed through the region. It had taken Egypt over a century to relinquish its hold over its foreign provinces. The fact that Pharaoh Merneptah himself had been forced to fight a campaign in the highlands at the turn of the century suggests that even by this early date the Egyptian governors of the Canaanite city-states were no longer able to control the countryside and needed reinforcements from home. During this lengthy, turbulent process, one city-state after another collapsed. 9 There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that these cities were destroyed by a single conqueror. After the Egyptians had left, there may have been conflict between the city elites and the villages or rivalries among the urban nobility. But it was during this period of decline that settlements began to appear in the highlands, pioneered perhaps by refugees fleeing the chaos of the disintegrating cities. One of the very few ways in which peasants could act to better their lot was simply to decamp when circumstances became intolerable, leave their land, and become fiscal fugitives. 10 At a time of such political chaos, the Israelite peasants had a rare opportunity to make an exodus from these failing cities and establish an independent society, without fear of aristocratic retaliation. Advances in technology had only recently made it possible to settle in this difficult terrain, but by the early twelfth century, it seems that the highland villages already housed some eighty thousand people. If these settlers were indeed the first Israelites, some must have been native to Canaan, though they may have been joined by migrants from the south who brought Yahweh, a god of the Sinai region, with them. Others—notably the tribe of Joseph—may even have come from Egypt. But those Canaanites who had lived under Egyptian rule in the coastal city-states of Palestine would also have felt that in a very real sense they had “come out of Egypt.” The Bible acknowledges that Israel was made up of diverse peoples bound together in a covenant agreement, 11 and its epic story suggests that the early Israelites had made a principled decision to turn their backs on the oppressive agrarian state. Their houses in the highland villages were modest and uniform, and there were no palaces or public buildings: this seems to have been an egalitarian society that may have reverted to tribal organization to create a social alternative to the conventionally stratified state. 12 The final redaction of the Pentateuch occurred after the Israelites had suffered the destruction of their own kingdom by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and had been deported to Babylonia.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. Nobody asked you whether your father was a fat-cat executive who cheated on his wife or some laid-off joe who slapped you around whenever he bothered to come home. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That’s how it had seemed to me then, anyway. It had taken a couple of years before I saw how fates were beginning to play themselves out, the difference that color and money made after all, in who survived, how soft or hard the landing when you finally fell. Of course, either way, you needed some luck. That’s what Pablo had lacked, mostly, not having his driver’s license that day, a cop with nothing better to do than to check the trunk of his car. Or Bruce, not finding his way back from too many bad acid trips and winding up in a funny farm. Or Duke, not walking away from the car wreck…. I had tried to explain some of this to my mother once, the role of luck in the world, the spin of the wheel. It was at the start of my senior year in high school; she was back in Hawaii, her field work completed, and one day she had marched into my room, wanting to know the details of Pablo’s arrest. I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time. Except my mother hadn’t looked satisfied. She had just sat there, studying my eyes, her face as grim as a hearse.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  bruise, bray, crush; Aram. 297, 5 crush, shatter);—Qal Pf. 2 ms. sf. NF 1 ₪ 12% 1s. רצוּתי‎ v3; Impf. 3 ms. יר[‎ (Ges?”8) Ts 424 (Coa. Bab, yin, Niph., so SS here and 100 2"*(, 3 fs. YOR Ec 12*% 1 ₪, PIS עו‎ 189° =—YO 28 22% (vy. ה‎ Pt. act. fpl. רצְצות‎ Am 4}; pass. רצוץ‎ Is 42°+, estr. רצוץ‎ Ho au, pl. רְצוּצִים‎ Ts 58°;— crush: 1. lit., a. pt. cg in ayy (3) (ה)פָּנָה‎ 2K 1 368, 18 42° (all metaph. of weak pers.). = .ל‎ impf. intrans. get erushed (rd. 775 2), of bowl Ec 12°* (in metaph.). 2. fig. crush, oppress, acc. pers. 15 12°* Am 4'; pt. pass. Dt 28%, as subst. the oppressed Is 58°; DEVIN רצוּץ‎ Ho 5" (We Now לצ"‎ i.e. perverting judgment, but dub.); intrans. get crushed (rd. 77. 2), of ser- vant of, under fig. of wick, Is 42* (+1113) he shall not grow dim or be crushed out. Niph. be crushed, broken : Pf. 3 ms. consee. 773) (Ges St) 56ך‎ 1 2%* (of wheel at cistern); Zmpf. 2 ms. 7A Ez 207 (of Pharaoh as reed, cf. Qal 1a); Jb 20” rd. perh. 387° (for 8D, vy. רצה‎ Pi), are crushed (as) pore men, Bu, cf. Hoffm SS Gerber. —Is42*Ecr2°*v.Qal. Pi-.crush in pieces: 1. lit.(in metaph.) Pf. 2 ms. A¥31 / 74" 6. acc. rei. 2. fig. = grievously oppress, 3 ms. רצ‎ Jb 20"; Impf. 3 ms. הָעֶם‎ J) וירצץ‎ 2Ch16" Poel Impf. 3 mpl. 83 Ju ro’, ace. pers. (= Pi. 2 ; || רצץ ; רעץ‎ here perh. doublet, so GFM Het of. BuNow). Hiph. Jmpf. 3 fs. ותּרץ‎ (Ko = BaZaeanices) ast thiniks Qal) Jug” she rusia his skull. Hithpo‘. recipr., Jmpf. 3 mpl. הַבָּנִים בִּקְרְבָּהּ‎ wy4N) Gn 25” (J) the children crushed (thrust, struck) one another within her. usu. piece, bar )1(, in phr.‏ [.גגנ] .ג [רץ] ז D2 $12 DBIND y 68", but very obscure and‏ dub.; Aq. 93 wheels; G Sead ‘DIY; Che 322‏ .6 6 בְּרצִי ב' )125 or (JBLY‏ בְּבְצַע כ' or‏ , בסף בְּרצִי mercenaries); Pott We 312 “S72; Du JED‏ MEV n.f. crushing, oppression ;—‏ בד (4+p¥yn).‏ 22 16 .רקק Pryv.P2; Pv. IL.‏ ; רקק .1 .+ רק רקב deriv.) ;— Qal 79/0 3 ms. ירקב‎ Is 40” (of tree); fig. 327) רְשָעִים‎ ov Pr ro’ (Krochm al. יקב‎ 6 cursed, vs קבב‎ , cf. Toy). tan n.[m.]| rottenness, decay (always fig.);—’5 abs.; appar. of ravages of worm, in יְהוּרָה‎ MA, in fig. Ho 5 (|| VY), cf. Jb13% (\léd.); 6 of fone oi 3 caries (in fig.), ך' בְּעצמ'‎ Hb 3° Pr 12% str. OXY רקב‎ 14%. Jb 41" wood of‏ עץ ר'--; .18 n.[m.]‏ רקבון1 rottenness, =rotten wood (in fig.). vb. skip about (NH Pi. Hiph. =‏ רקדז Pa, -639 Pa.; As. rakddu,‏ רקד BH; so Aram.‏

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He thinks he will leave. School life is unreal. All this is unreal. He has had enough. He can’t bear his colleagues. He can’t bear the boys any more either; en masse, he thinks, they’re horrible, like haddocks. He has to get out. He’ll live on his writing. His last book did well. He’ll write more. He’ll take a cottage in Scotland and spend his days fishing for salmon. Perhaps he’ll take the barmaid with him as his wife, the dark-eyed beauty he’s been courting for months, though he’s only in love with her emotionally, so far, and he hasn’t got anywhere, really, and those long hours sitting at the bar reduce him too often to hopeless drunkenness. He drinks too much. He has drunk too much, and he has been unhappy for a long time. But things are certain to change. The notebook he writes in is grey. He’s stuck a photograph of one of his grass snakes on the cover, and written ETC above it in ink. The snake is suitable because this is his dream diary, though there are other things in it too: scraps of writing, lesson plans, line drawings of sphinxes and clawed dragons rampant, and the occasional stab at self-analysis: 1) Necessity of excelling in order to be loved. 2) Failure to excel. 3) Why did I fail to excel? (Wrong attitude to what I was doing?) But mostly the notebook records his dreams. There are dreams of women with penises, of boxes of maidenheads like fingernail parings, of hooded cobras that rear up but turn out to be harmless. There are dreams that he has forgotten his gun but can’t borrow his friend’s, because his friend is giving it to his wife; that he is a spy on the Hitlerists, hiding in a hole with only his cigarette poking out; that he must hide his shotgun in the boot of his mother’s car to stop it being struck by lightning. And a dream in which his psychoanalyst is congratulating him on how good his dreams are.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  with bars Jb 17" (si vera 1.: v. G Du); ’ ‘3 wi4i'; ש'‎ WY 153389; personif. Is 287% (|| (מות‎ as insatiable monster 5" Hb 2° Pr 1” 27°° 30"; as said (fig.) to have snares, ש,‎ *?2, ש'.)6 22% 5 2 ="18ש‎ IS 116"; opp. (height of) שָמִיִם‎ Am 9: Jb 11° ץ‎ 139°+ (opp. mynd) Is 7" (v. supra); dark, gloomy, without return Jb 17"3 (cf. v's 7° 107 16”; all being alike 3" 21°**5); without work or knowledge or wisdom ace. to Ee 9?" (cf. Jb 14%, and v. רְפָאִים‎ sub רפה‎ ; yet 61.11 4""(. 2. condition of right- eous and wicked disting. in ש"‎ (later than 1S 28, esp. penalty: a. wicked לשָאוּלָה‎ aw vo’, ;זב ידמו לש‎ death is their shepherd, without power and honour they waste away 49”; ש'‎ consumes them as drought water Jb 24"; righteous dread it because no praise or presence of God there (as in temple) y 6° (cf. 88°), Is 38%; deliverance from it a blessing 30°86" Pr23". In Ezek. ש'‎ is land below, place of reproach, abode of uncircumcised Ez 3121617 3277, .מ‎ righteous shall not be aban- doned, לש'‎ y 16" (|| שחת‎ g.v.; opp. DYT ,ארח‎ 6 Vy 6 07"), 18 4 from ש'‎ 49"° (cf. בד‎ 18 57"); cf. Job’s expectation and desire Jb14%17% (cf. 1o71g”"). 3. later distinction of places in ש'‎ : a. depths of ש'‎ for sensualist Pro® pb. ש' ואבדון‎ Pr 25", v. .אָבדון‎ ]תחש‎ and ,בור‎ q.v., when II” w, are usu. in bad sense ץ)‎ 88‘); rae =pit in ש'< ,ש'‎ itself as pit; words at least prepare for local distinctions of postB. Judaism and NT. } 4. ש'"‎ fig. of ex- treme degradation in sin Is 57°; as place of exile for Israel Ho 13*™ (cf. Is 26"). 1 [שאן]‎ vp. Pat. (Ges*#*) be at ease or at peace, rest securely (Syr. ₪* pacify, Jia, Eth. 07: peace) ;—Pf. 3 ms. שאנן‎ Je 48", [ש'‎ consec, 30+; 3 pl. שאנכו‎ Jb 3'°;—be at case, secure, ב‎ by ill fortune: / וְשֶקט וְש‎ TIM PR) Je "סךף‎ = 467; 48' (of Moab) ; my “7m שי‎ 5 1°; of rest from trouble, etc., in grave Jb 3% JRW y. NY .בִּית‎ Typos adj. at ease, secure (Ba‘®'™°* Ges et); —abs. ש'‎ Is 33%;. pl. D'228Y Am 6! + שאננות‎ 15 32°"; 1. at ease, secure: שי‎ m3 Is 33” secure 0 (of Jerus.), ef. מנּחות ש'‎ 32% (|| DDI). 2. as subst., one at ease, 983 שאר free from misfortune, Jb 12°. 3. at ease, with collat. idea of careless, wanton, arrogant, Am 6! peat, Ze 1 4. as pues ie "דב‎ but > TINY ied uproar, Bu! 2ב‎ פשם‎ 5 Cy Che Marti Kit (perh.), Bur. Cf. .שלאנן‎ .שסה ,שסס Je 30° Kt v.‏ שאסיך Pi שאף‎ vb. gasp, pant, pant after,

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White’s politics were deeply unfortunate. He loathed capitalism, and while he’d flirted with Communism at Stowe, loving its revolutionary fervour, he began to fear it, for if the revolution came, it would take away his individuality and he was sure that was all he had. Now he wondered if he might be a fascist. He was not sure. He hated nationalism, but certainly did not believe people were equal. He did not like Hitler. But he did not like the British government either. He had a child’s vision of apocalyptic redemption: he believed that war, when it came, would bring waste and murder and the ruin of civilisation, but that war would be worthwhile if we could emerge from the ruins with wisdom. One had to choose one’s side. Democracy against fascism. The rational against the irrational. Blood or peace. People or rabbits. White chose to shoot rabbits, rather than people, and he chose to fight the war in person with a hawk. Through Gos, he battled the dictator in himself. And for him the hawk was a salutary thing, for he believed that war came from society’s repression of innate human urges. Because the hawk could not dissemble he was a ‘tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart’. And so the war was fought, here, in a kitchen and a barn, a garden and a wood. To and fro across the disputed territory the battle onward raged. When White understood that he was the dictator he tasted defeat, engineered the hawk’s loss and pushed it away. Then came a new stage in the war: his retreat to forest bunkers. From these miniature shelters, he hoped to bring down the hawks of the air that flew like the aeroplanes in his dreams.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Weeks passed. The season changed. The leaves came, the mornings filled with light, the swifts returned, screaming past my Cambridge house through the skies of early summer and I began to think I was doing fine. Normal grief, they call it. That’s what this was. An uneventful, slow climb back into life after loss. It’ll be healed soon. I still break into a wry smile thinking of how blithely I believed this, because I was so terribly wrong. Unseen need was motoring out through me. I was ravenous for material, for love, for anything to stop the loss, and my mind had no compunction in attempting to recruit anyone, anything, to assist. In June I fell in love, predictably and devastatingly, with a man who ran a mile when he worked out how broken I was. His disappearance rendered me practically insensible. Though I can’t even bring his face to mind now, and though I know not only why he ran, but know that in principle he could have been anyone, I still have a red dress that I will never wear again. That’s how it goes. Then the world itself started to grieve. The skies broke and it rained and rained. The news was full of inundations and drowned cities; lost villages at the bottom of lakes; flash floods spilling over the M4 motorway to strand holiday traffic; kayaks on town streets in Berkshire; rising sea levels; the discovery that the English Channel was carved out by the bursting of a giant superlake millions of years ago. And the rain continued, burying the streets in half an inch of bubbling water, breaking shop canopies, making the River Cam a café-au-lait surge, thick with broken branches and sodden undergrowth. My city was apocalyptic. ‘I don’t see the weather as odd at all,’ I remember saying to a friend under a café awning while the rain struck the pavement behind our chairs with such violence that we sipped coffee in cold mist.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There is a point? White said that training a hawk was like psychoanalysis. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk. Now I see that I am more of a rabbit than a hawk. Living with a goshawk is like worshipping an iceberg, or an expanse of sliprock chilled by a January wind. The slow spread of that splinter of ice in your eye. I love Mabel, but what passes between us is not human. There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture. What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your soul could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky. The goshawk catches a rabbit. I kill the rabbit. There is no lust for blood in my heart. I have no heart at all. I watch it all as if I was an executioner after a thousand deaths, as if all this was just the inescapable way of the world. I don’t think it is. I pray it isn’t. I have scared myself. I go to the doctor. I drive to the surgery with no hope of rescue, but I can’t think of anything else to do. The doctor is a man I have not seen before; small, dark-haired, with a neat beard, red braces and a crumpled cotton shirt. He sits behind a wooden desk. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Take a seat.’ I sit on a chair. I look at the desk. It is oak. I think of winter trees. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asks. I say I think I might be depressed. That some things have happened over the last few months. My father died. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  If there is no God, then who cares about anything? (I told you it was going to get dark.) For eighteen months straight—more than five hundred days—this is what I thought… Until I learned to think differently about my thoughts. Until I remembered I had a choice. 4 Breaking Free “You’re going to think I’ve lost my mind,” I was telling my dear friends Esther and Ann, my cheeks still damp with tears, my hands shaking in my lap as the three of us perched awkwardly on the bench seats of a bus in a remote region of Uganda. “I mean, really. It’s possible I’ve actually lost my mind…” My choice to shoot straight with them about what I’d been experiencing—the months on months of 3 a.m. wake-up calls, the doubt, the unbelief, the terrifying sense that I’d lost my spiritual footing—was precipitated by their having observed my melting down thirty minutes prior in the office of the Ugandan officials we’d been meeting with. They’d watched as I came undone, so weary from fighting some unknowable force, so sick of pretending everything was okay when absolutely nothing was okay, that the only option I had was to tell them the truth. So I spilled it. All of it. The weird encounter with the woman in Arkansas. The threat she’d made: “We are coming for you.” The endless sleepless nights. The fear that I’d lost my faith, even though I don’t believe it’s possible for a person to lose her faith. My mouth spoke the words faster than my brain could process what exactly I was saying, as though I had pushed play on a secret recording I’d been making of the horror that had been my life for the past eighteen months. “I don’t know what I believe anymore,” I said. “It’s been dark…worse than I know how to say. I’ve been questioning everything for so many months. I don’t know if I still believe God. I think that maybe I don’t.” Ann studied my face with her characteristic intensity, waiting until I took a breath to insert her thoughts. “No. No, ” she said. “I know you. I know your faith. I have walked with you and watched you all this time.” I looked at her, wide eyed, desperate for her perspective to be true. “Jennie, this is the enemy,” she said. “None of this is from God.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said simply. ‘I’ve nowhere to go. I’ve no money, no home...’‘I am sorry for you, Miss Astley,’ she answered awkwardly. ‘But Bethnal Green is busting with badly-off girls. If I was to let them all come and stay, I should have to live in a castle! Besides, I - I don’t know you, or anything about you.’‘Please,’ I said. ‘Just for one night. If you only knew how many doors I have been turned away from. I really think that, if you send me out into the street, I shall keep walking until I reach a river or a canal; and then I shall drown myself.’She frowned, then put a finger to her lips and bit at a nail; all her nails, I now noticed, were very short and chewed.‘What kind of trouble are you in, exactly?’ she said at last. ‘Mr Banner thought you might have come from - well, from gaol.’I shook my head, and then said wearily: ‘The truth is, I’ve been living with someone; and they have thrown me out. They have kept my things - oh! I had such handsome things! - and they have left me so miserable and poor and bewildered...’ My voice grew thick. Florence watched me in silence for a moment. Then she said, rather carefully I thought, ‘And this person was... ?’But that made me hesitate. If I told her the truth, what would she make of it? I had thought her almost tommish, once; but now - well, maybe she had only ever been an ordinary girl, asking me to a lecture for friendship’s sake. Or perhaps she had liked girls once, then turned her back on them - like Kitty! That thought made me cautious: if a torn with a bruise turned up at Kitty’s door, I knew very well what a welcome she would get. I put my head in my hands. ‘It was a gent,’ I said quietly, ‘I’ve been living in the house of a gent, in St John’s Wood, for a year and a half. I let him make me a’- I remembered a phrase of Mrs Milne’s - ‘a pack of promises. He bought me all manner of stuff. And now...’ I raised my eyes to hers. ‘You must think me very wicked.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Years before, back in those happy times of safety in St Leonards, his greatest thrill had been when his grandparents took him to Hastings Caves and the guide led them underground into the curious halls of smuggler-carved sandstone. ‘At a particular point in the journey under the earth,’ he wrote, ‘as we children and the nannies and the ordinary holiday trippers stood mute in the silent, sound-absorbing sand, the guide used to put out his candle – and there we were in the utter darkness as well.’ He treasured that memory. For a boy who always felt imperilled, that pitch-black cave was a refuge, and he returned to it in his imagination again and again. He dreamed of tunnels and caves as sanctuaries. He called his cottage in the woods his badger’s sett. In Gone to Ground he made an underground bunker save a field of hunting folk from the end of the world; and in The Queen of Air and Darkness, the second book of The Once and Future King, he wrote of Merlyn’s imprisonment for centuries in the cave beneath the hill. The imprisonment is in Malory, but Merlyn’s foreknowledge of his fate is not. ‘It will be charming to have a rest for a few hundred years,’ he announces to the astounded king. A return to the womb would be one way of seeing this obsession with dark and private spaces. But White saw them not as the womb of the mother he despised, but as refuges under the ground; they were safe because they were hidden from the persecutor’s hunting eyes.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White said that training a hawk was like psychoanalysis. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk. Now I see that I am more of a rabbit than a hawk. Living with a goshawk is like worshipping an iceberg, or an expanse of sliprock chilled by a January wind. The slow spread of that splinter of ice in your eye. I love Mabel, but what passes between us is not human. There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture. What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your soul could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky. The goshawk catches a rabbit. I kill the rabbit. There is no lust for blood in my heart. I have no heart at all. I watch it all as if I was an executioner after a thousand deaths, as if all this was just the inescapable way of the world. I don’t think it is. I pray it isn’t. I have scared myself. I go to the doctor. I drive to the surgery with no hope of rescue, but I can’t think of anything else to do. The doctor is a man I have not seen before; small, dark-haired, with a neat beard, red braces and a crumpled cotton shirt. He sits behind a wooden desk. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Take a seat.’ I sit on a chair. I look at the desk. It is oak. I think of winter trees. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he asks. I say I think I might be depressed. That some things have happened over the last few months. My father died. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. Then I tell him I have no job any more and no money coming in. And no house either. It doesn’t sound convincing. So I tell him more. And more. Now it’s hard to stop talking. But when I do, he says some words. I can’t hear them clearly. I am watching his eyebrows. Sometimes they are frowning, sometimes very high. He hands me a multiple-choice questionnaire. This strikes me as grimly funny. I sit in front of it for a very long while, fiddling with the pen, worrying that I’m not getting the answers right. When it is finished it is hard to give it back: I’m convinced I’ve done it wrong. I don’t cry. I hand him the piece of paper and he takes it, turns it over and regards it for a while. He puts it down. He moves a pen from one side of the sheet to the other. He leans across the table. I see his face.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  I make it clear in these cases that I have no judgment about what a client chooses to do ultimately—it is their decision and theirs alone. What we learned is that with Jacob’s anxious attachment style (where a person tends to be overly fearful of abandonment and being alone), he was afraid to let go of a relationship that had lasted for years after putting in so much time and work. He worried: what would it say about me if I were to walk away from this relationship? Jacob was a victim of the sunk cost fallacy—having already invested so much time, he wanted to believe that if he put in “just a little more,” it might get better. 26 I could see he was mentally treading. As he tried fervently to fight off his thoughts, images, and feelings that he didn’t ultimately want this relationship, he was completely wearing himself out. He had learned how to ignore his body’s and brain’s cues that he was in distress. He would frequently stare off into space, sometimes for hours at a time. He would struggle to sleep, binge eat, and avoid having sex with his fiancée. As she kept pushing for their relationship to progress into marriage, he became more and more conflicted about what to do. As this went on month after month, and eventually year after year, he succumbed to the belief that this was his “new normal.” In fact, he had forgotten what it felt like to be happy. When I asked him what brought him joy, he responded with “I don’t even know anymore.” His brain fed him a constant dose of myths, including that he was a failure, that his relationship struggling was entirely his fault, and that if he were a better partner and worked harder, his relationship would improve. At his core, he believed he was unlovable. He was approaching his partnership from the mindset that he’d never find someone whom he felt he actually had a connection with.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “That’s the other thing, Barack!” Johnnie took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke roll from his mouth. “It was a young white girl, man, sixteen maybe, seventeen. One of these punk rock types, with blue hair and a ring through her nose. Afterward, I’m wondering what she was thinking about while she was riding up the elevator. I mean, folks musta been standing right next to her on the way up. Maybe they looked her over, decided she was a freak, and went back to thinking about their own business. You know, their promotion, or the Bulls game, or whatever. And the whole time this girl’s just standing there next to them with all that pain inside her. Got to be a lot of pain, doc, ’cause right before she jumps, you figure she looks down and knows that shit is gonna hurt.” Johnnie stamped out his cigarette. “So that’s what I’m saying, Barack. Whole panorama of life out there. Crazy shit going on. You got to ask yourself, is this kinda stuff happening elsewhere? Is there any precedent for all this shit? You ever ask yourself that?” “The world’s a place,” I repeated. “See there! It’s serious, man.” We’d almost reached Johnnie’s car when we heard a small pop, compact and brief, like a balloon bursting. We looked in the direction of the sound, and watched a young man appear from around the corner diagonal to us. I don’t clearly recall his features or what he wore, although he couldn’t have been older than fifteen. I just remember that he ran at a desperate pace, his sneakered feet silent against the sidewalk, his lanky limbs pumping wildly, his chest jutting out as if straining for an imaginary tape. Johnnie dropped flat onto a small plot of grass in front of one of the apartments, and I quickly followed suit. A few seconds later, two more boys came around the same corner, also running at full speed. One of them, short, fattish, with pants that bunched around his ankles, was waving a small pistol. Without stopping to aim, he let out three quick shots in the direction of the first boy. Then, realizing that his target was out of range, he slowed to a walk, stuffing the weapon under his shirt. His companion, skinny and big-eared, came alongside. “Stupid motherfucker,” the skinny boy said. He spat with satisfaction, and the two of them laughed to each other before continuing down the street, children again, their figures casting squat shadows on the asphalt.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I looked up at the top of my old bookshelves. There, dusty and unread for years, were all the animal books of my childhood. I’d loved these books. They were rich with wildness, escape and adventure. But I hated them too. Because they never had happy endings. Tarka the otter was killed by hounds. The falcons died of pesticide poisoning. A man with a spade beat to death the otter in Ring of Bright Water ; vultures tore out the Red Pony’s eyes. The deer in The Yearling was shot, the dog in Old Yeller died. So did the spider in Charlotte’s Web and my favourite rabbit in Watership Down . I remember that awful dread as the number of pages shrank in each new animal book I read. I knew what would happen. And it happened every time. So I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to eight-year-old me that Gos snapped his leash and was lost in the wind and rain. I greeted it with sad resignation. But it was dreadful all the same. But I hadn’t trained a hawk then, and I had no understanding of loss. I did not know how White felt. Now I did. I sat on my bed and it pressed on my chest like a weight the size of a hill. I felt it. For the first time I understood that vast blankness that shuttered his heart in horror . ‘ I cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.’ His heart is torn in half. The pigeon in his hand is rigid with terror; it has turned from a bird to a thing of iron and feathers. Its red eye is blank, its little beak panting. He steels himself and throws it high in the air towards the hawk in the tree. The pigeon he’d bought to trap the hawks in the wood – such irony – rises up, trailing the creance behind it. Gos stoops upon it like a vast predatory butterfly, but then pulls away and swings into the next tree. White pulls the pigeon to earth, picks it up, follows, and throws it out again. He fishes for Gos with the pigeon as a fisherman casts lures for a pike. He has been doing this for a while now, and each time the hawk’s stoop brings it closer to the pigeon and White’s waiting hands. He bends to pick the pigeon from the ground, exhausted, wings spread, its flight feathers so wet they look like fraying pencils. He knows this terrified bird can barely fly. He knows that the next time he throws it into the air the hawk will catch it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The falconer and scientist Professor Tom Cade once described falconry as a kind of ‘high-intensity birdwatching’. I thought it was a nice phrase, and an accurate one. But now I knew this was wrong. What I had just done was nothing like birdwatching. It was more like gambling, though the stakes were infinitely bloodier. At its heart was a willed loss of control. You pour your heart, your skill, your very soul, into a thing – into training a hawk, learning the form in racing or the numbers in cards – then relinquish control over it. That is the hook. Once the dice rolls, the horse runs, the hawk leaves the fist, you open yourself to luck, and you cannot control the outcome. Yet everything you have done until that moment persuades you that you might be lucky. The hawk might catch her quarry, the cards might fall perfectly, the horse make it first past the post. That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return. 19 Extinction Falconers have a word for hawks in the mood to slay: they call the bird in yarak. The books say it comes from the Persian yaraki, meaning power, strength and boldness. Much later I was amused to find that in Turkish it means an archaic weapon and is also slang for penis: never doubt that falconry is a boys’ game. I’m back in Cambridge now, and as I carry Mabel up the stony track to the hill each day I watch her come into yarak. It is disturbingly like watching her slow possession by a demon. Her crest feathers rise, she leans back, tummy feathers fluffed, shoulders dropped, toes very tight on the glove. Her demeanour switches from everything scares me to I see it all; I own all this and more. In this state she’s a high-tension wire-strung hawk of murderous anticipation, wound so tight she bates at anything that moves – things she’s not a hope of catching: flocks of larks, distant racing pigeons, even a farmyard tomcat – and I hold her jesses tight and don’t let her go.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Before I met him, this pressure to “prove people wrong” became too much for him. As we explored why his suicide attempt happened, he told me that the constant obligation to be everything to everyone was unsustainable. He didn’t see how he could keep on living like that for another forty years. He was already worn-out at twenty-eight. It didn’t help that some of the sharks in his waters were sometimes his own parents. While entirely well-meaning, they wanted so much for their son. Throughout his entire life, there was a constant pressure to be the best. Whether it was playing on his high school basketball team or moving across the country to go to a top law school, they cheered for Jordan each time he was at the top of the charts. He felt so loved in those moments, he would tell me. When he wasn’t winning, though, or when he decided to take a break, his parents would get deafeningly quiet. Though they were not openly disapproving, their silent side- eyes made Jordan feel like he was letting them down the second he exhaled. That’s how he learned at a young age that rest was for the “lazy.” While it was unspoken, he wanted to make all of the sacrifices his parents made worth it. He saw how hard they worked with multiple jobs, rarely complaining. He appreciated everything they had done for him. One of his greatest fears was appearing ungrateful for everything he had been given. That’s how he ended up taking on more and more—and doing so with a smile on his face. By his midtwenties, though, it was so much more than he could hold, and he broke down. My heart ached for Jordan. While on the surface we had very little in common, I resonated with the crushing weight he felt to always do more. Maybe you can relate, too—even if you have little in common with Jordan or me. That’s the thing—even though we all may have different demographics and different lived experiences, that mechanism of anxiety that propels us to push ourselves constantly can be a shared experience. I’ll never claim to know exactly how Jordan felt, but I do know that I can empathize with his experience. My own therapist expressed a similar concern for me when she reflected on my own people-pleasing tendencies. I should have known that I struggled with overdoing it when my tagline in high school and college was “I may not be the smartest, but I work the hardest.” I remember my dad vehemently praising me for this phrase. Looking back, I now see how problematic it may have been. I was telling myself two powerful and unhelpful statements when I would proudly repeat this harmful mantra.