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 7 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  a few moments and then vomited again; another time, in the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and couldn't shut it off. I went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn't sleep; I couldn't lie still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the old man's boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward Canada. There were times when I thought I'd gone off the psychic edge. I couldn't tell up from down, I was just falling, and late in the night I'd lie there watching bizarre pictures spin through my head. Getting chased by the Border Patrol—helicopters and searchlights and barking dogs—I'd be crashing through the woods, I'd be down on my hands and knees—people shouting out my name—the law closing in on all sides—my hometown draft board and the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to—a mainstream life—I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was off on the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad. I'm not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can't remember. On two or three afternoons, to pass some time, I helped Elroy get the place ready for winter, sweeping down the cabins and hauling in the boats, little chores that kept my body moving. The days were cool and bright. The nights were very dark. One morning the old man showed me how to split and stack firewood, and for several hours we just worked in silence out behind his house. At one point, I remember, Elroy put down his maul and looked at me for a long time, his lips drawn as if framing a difficult question, but then he shook his head and went back to work. The man's self-control was amazing. He never pried. He never put me in a position that required lies or denials. To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was typical of that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held value, and even if I'd been walking around with some horrible deformity—four arms and three heads—I'm sure the old man would've talked about everything except those extra arms and heads. Simple politeness was part of it. But even more than that, I think, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion. During that long summer I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons,

• From Shunned (2018)

  Did it make sense to at least consider returning to Portland? I’d fallen into a vapid existence, working, sleeping, eating, struggling to retain some warmth, some aliveness, through a dark and frigid season. What was the point of such an existence? If I didn’t say yes to these offers, or at least entertain them, they might stop coming, and then where would I be? Stuck. Stuck in traffic, stuck in life, a pitiful divorced woman with uncertain professional prospects and no community. Maybe Mom was right: the world was a cold, hard place, and I’d set myself up to get knocked around. “You reap what you sow.” “Pride comes before a crash.” “Satan is a cruel master—he’ll cheat you out of life.” Just then, emanating from the car speakers came the gentle sound of a single acoustic guitar, playing a tune I’d not heard for a while but recognized immediately. It was delicate in tone, each note standing on its own, with a pacing that slowed me down, capturing my attention. I turned up the volume as Bonnie Raitt sang the plaintive tale of “Nobody’s Girl,” her voice nuanced with a wistful melancholy, She’s fragile like a string of pearls, she’s nobody’s girl. I burst into tears. Yes, that is what I am. Fragile. Alone. Nobody’s girl. I didn’t belong anywhere—not in the Chicago banking world, where I couldn’t seem to make a sale, but not in Portland, either; not at the Kingdom Hall; not with my family; not with Steve; not with Ross. The lyrics seared my chest like a branding iron. All this internal waffling, this confusion, this feeling deeply and utterly lost. What have I done with my life? Where do I belong? The lament in the lyrics weaved around the raw, simple sounds of the guitar. I was getting very heated and had to unbutton my jacket and crack the windows for air. Was I a fool to think I could have freedom and spiritual fulfillment at the same time? Was that possible for anyone? I cried so hard I got the hiccups. I was perilously close to being completely unstrung, barely holding it together. The final, lilting refrain repeated over and over until it faded out. Later that week, Lory called to say hello and found me at home, cooking dinner, surrounded by boiling pots of water, colander at the ready, fish wrapped in foil, fresh vegetables waiting to be cleaned and chopped. I’d been so down in the dumps, I’d eaten nothing but takeout food for several days. I’d finally had enough and had sought refuge in my own kitchen. It was a warm way to fill an evening, doing something I enjoyed. Just pulling it all together lifted my spirits, a tangible accomplishment.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen years old—it's too much for him—so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back. You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen to Rat: "Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin’ letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back." The dead guy's name was Curt Lemon. What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle. Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn't understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn't know. A nature hike, they thought, not even a war, so they went off into the shade of some giant trees—quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all—and they were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they'd invented. The game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did stupid things, and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of those huge trees. Whoever chickened out was a yellow mother. And if nobody chickened out, the grenade would make a light popping sound and they'd be covered with smoke and they'd laugh and dance around and then do it again. It's all exactly true.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  walked out of the plant and drove home. It was midmorning, I remember, and the house was empty. Down in my chest there was still that leaking sensation, something very warm and precious spilling out, and I was covered with blood and hog-stink, and for a long while I just concentrated on holding myself together. I remember taking a hot shower. I remember packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at the familiar objects all around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink and white Formica on the kitchen counters. The room was full of bright sunshine. Everything sparkled. My house, I thought. My life. I'm not sure how long I stood there, but later I scribbled out a short note to my parents. What it said, exactly, I don't recall now. Something vague. Taking off, will call, love Tim. I drove north. It's a blur now, as it was then, and all I remember is velocity and the feel of a steering wheel in my hands. I was riding on adrenaline. A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it— like running a dead-end maze—no way out—it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do. It was pure flight, fast and mindless. I had no plan. Just hit the border at high speed and crash through and keep on running. Near dusk I passed through Bemidji, then turned northeast toward International Falls. I spent the night in the car behind a closed-down gas station a half mile from the border. In the morning, after gassing up, I headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another. The land was mostly wilderness. Here and there I passed a motel or bait shop, but otherwise the country unfolded in great sweeps of pine and birch and sumac. Though it was still August, the air already had the smell of October, football season, piles of yellow-red leaves, everything crisp and clean. I remember a huge blue sky. Off to my right was the Rainy River, wide as a lake in places, and beyond the Rainy River was Canada.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As he looked back on his life the year before he died, and wrote a brief autobiography as the preface to his collected Latin works, Luther remembered how important his encounter with the text of Romans had been. “Up till then it was not the cold blood about the heart,” he wrote, referring to his emotional state of melancholy, “but a single word in chapter 1[:17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed,’ that had stood in my way. For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which…I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.” Luther had tried to be a perfect monk, yet “I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience….I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” 35 Yet the manuscript commentary on this passage in his lectures from 1515–16 cited Augustine and stated much more soberly that “the righteousness of God is the cause of salvation…the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God. This happens through faith in the Gospel.” It would probably not have been obvious at the time, not even to Luther, that this was anything other than orthodox Augustinianism. 36 The implications of this intellectual breakthrough did not become evident at once, but gradually emerged over the next years, as Luther lectured on the Psalms, Hebrews, and Galatians, and engaged closely with the biblical text; indeed, as we shall see, he dated it much later, to 1519. 37 Intellectual work clearly suited him. Alongside studying theology he had taught from the outset, and now the experience of lecturing, together with his doctorate, may have conferred a sense of authority. His first proper work, however, a translation into German and exposition of the seven Penitential Psalms, did not appear until 1517. 38 As Luther explained, his translation drew on the old Latin Vulgate of Jerome but he corrected it by referring to the Hebrew edition of the humanist Johannes Reuchlin, the leading Hebraist of the time. The proud author wrote to Lang that, even if it pleased no one else, it did please him. This work was not, so he wrote to Scheurl in Nuremberg, intended for an academic audience: It was not even aimed at highly educated Nurembergers but at “rough Saxons.” Luther was certainly wrong about this, for the price of the book, and its polished literacy, might have made it just about accessible to the Wittenberg elite, but hardly to most Saxons. 39 On the face of it, it was surprising that Luther so rapidly became a central figure in the new university. He was neither senior in age, nor of higher social class, and before 1517 he had published virtually nothing.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Anyway," Rat said, "the days aren't so bad, but at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys. It's like —I don't know—tt's like staring into this huge black crystal ball. One of these nights I'll be lying dead out there in the dark and nobody'll find me except the bugs—I can see it—I can see the goddamn bugs chewing tunnels through me—I can see the mongooses munching on my bones. I swear, it's too much. I can't keep seeing myself dead." Mitchell Sanders nodded. He didn't know what to say. For a time they sat watching the shadows come, then Rat shook his head. He said he'd done his best. He'd tried to be a decent medic. Win some and lose some, he said, but he'd tried hard. Briefly then, rambling a little, he talked about a few of the guys who were gone now, Curt Lemon and Kiowa and Ted Lavender, and how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead. Then he almost laughed. "This whole war," he said. "You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs." The next morning he shot himself. He took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round through his foot. Nobody blamed him, Sanders said. Before the chopper came, there was time for goodbyes. Lieutenant Cross went over and said he'd vouch that it was an accident. Henry Dobbins and Azar gave him a stack of comic books for hospital reading. Everybody stood in a little circle, feeling bad about it, trying to cheer him up with bullshit about the great night life in Japan. The Lives of the Dead But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life. Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off—Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline. Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point. Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut. The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view. I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  καταδᾶπᾶἄνάω, 20 squander, lavish, τὴν οὐσίαν Arist. Pol. 5. 12 18; τὸ στρωμάτων βάρος κ. εἰς τὰ ἐπιτήδεια Xen. Cyr. 6. 2, 30:— Pass., [τὰ χρήματα] καταδεδαπάνητό σφι Hdt. 5. 34:—Med. to be pr odig gal, Pyrrho ap. Ath. 410 E. II. to consume entirely, of an army, “Xen: An. 2. 2, 11; λιμὸς «. τινα Sotad. ap. Stob. 528. 21:—Pass., καταδαπανᾶσθαι xaxia, αἰκισμοῖς, etc., Lxx (Sap. 5. 14), Eccl. καταδἄπάνη, 7, expense, waste, Alex. Aphr. Probl. 2. 75. καταδαπανητικός, 77, dV, prodigal, cited from E. M. καταδάπτω, fut. -δαψω, to rend in pieces, devour, μή με ἔα .. κύνας καταδάψαι ᾿Αχαιῶν 1]. 22. 3393 κύνες τε καὶ οἰωνοὶ κατέδαψαν Od. 3. 259: metaph., καταδάπτεται ἦτορ, like δαίεται ἦτορ, 16. 92. καταδαρδάπτω, lengthd. for foreg., Hesych., Eccl. καταδαρθάνω, aor. κατέδαρθον, by poét. metath. κατέδρᾶθον, Hom. ; also aor. 2 pass. κατεδάρθην, 3 pl. κατέδαρθεν Ap. Rh. 2. 1227,—a tense mostly used by late writers, (for in Od. 5.471 Bekk. gives καταδράθω (act.) for —dpa0@ (pass.), and in Ar. Pl. 300 Pors. restored καταδαρ- θόντα for -δαρθέντα). To fall asleep, (v. infr.), mostly used in aor. to be asleep, sleep, ἐν θάμνοισι κατέδραθον Od. 7. 285, cf. 23.18; τὼ δ᾽ ἐς δέμνια βάντε κατέδραθον 8. 296; καδδραθέτην, for κατεδραθέτην, 15.494; εἰ δέ Kev... καταδράθω Οά. 5. 471; ἔασον... καταδαρθεῖν τί με Ar. Nub. 38; κατέδαρθεν εὐδαίμων Ar. Fr. 445 Δ, cf. Hipp. 1151 E, Xen. Ages. 9, 3:—in pres. to be just falling asleep, opp. to ἀνεγείρεσθαι (to be just waking), Plat. Phaedo 71 Ὁ, 72 B; pf. καταδεδαρθηκώς having fallen asleep, Id. Symp. 219 C. 2. simply 20 pass the night, κατέδαρθον ἐν Θησείῳ ἐν ὅπλοις Thue. 6. 61. καταδατέομαι, fut. -δάσομαι: Med.:—to divide among themselves, tear and devour, κατὰ πάντα δάσονται Il. 22. 354.—Pass., ὑπ᾿ ἰχθύων κατα- δασθῆναι (Cobet κατεδεσθῆναι) Luc. Demon. 35; καταδέδασται Hesych. with the interprr. καταβέβρωται, καταμεμέρισται. II. τὰν yay κατεδασσάμεθα divided it anew, Tab. Heracl. in C. 1. 5775. 28: cf. προσδατέομαι. καταδεδίττομαι, Dep. to Srighten exceedingly, to scare, Cyrill. καταδεής, ἔς, (καταδέω) wanting or failing in, lacking of, τινος Hdt. 2.121, 2: absol., of persons, poor, needy, Dem.141.1; #. τάφος a sorry, shabby burial, Plat. Legg. 719 E. 2. mostly in meee κατα- δεέστερος, weaker, inferior, Isocr. 16 B, 294 B, Dem., etc.; καταδε- ἐστερός τινος τῷ τάχει, πρὸς τὸ φρονεῖν Isocr. 27 D, 86 A. TE. Adv. -δεῶς, mostly i in Comp. καταδεέστερον. Isocr.gg A, 130 A, 240C, etc.; also, καταδεεστέρως ἔχειν περί τι to be very ill off in a thing, Dem. 1182. fin. καταδεής, és, (καταδείδων) very timid, Poll. 3. 136. καταδεῖ, impers. there is wanting, v. sub καταδέω. καταδείδω, only used in aor, -δεῖσαι, and (in Phalar. infr. cit.) fut. τδείσειν :—to fear greatly, τι Ar. Pax 759, Andoc. 29. 5, Thuc. 2. 93; περί τινος Philo 2. 102; μή .., Ib. 590. II. to put into great fear, scare, Phalar. Ep. 84.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  metaph., δολοποιὸς ἀν., i.e. the stratagem of Nessus, Soph. Tr. 822 ; βρόχων πλεκταῖς ἀνάγκαις Xenarch. Βουτ. 1. b. any con- straint or force, forcible treatment, application of mechanical force, τῶν ἀναγκῶν τινὰ προσφέρειν Hipp. Fract. 763, cf. Art. 813, 834. 4. in Poets for bodily pain, anguish, suffering, distress, κατ᾽ ἀνάγκην ἕρπειν painfully, Soph. Ph. 206; ὑπ᾽ ἀνάγκης βοᾶν Ib. 215; ὠδίνων ἀνάγκαι Eur. Bacch. 89, etc. IT. like Lat. necessitudo, the tie of blood, relationship, kindred, Andoc. 32. 14, Lys. 894. 20. (Prob. from the same Root as ἄγχω, ango, angustus, etc., Germ. eng; v. sub aykos.) ἀναγκό-δακρυς, v, shedding forced tears, Aesch. Fr. 407. dvayko-Qérnats, ews, 7, compulsion, coined by Oenom. ap. Eus. P. E. 260 (Ὁ, as a parody on νομοθέτησις. ἀναγκό-σῖτος, ov, eating perforce, i.e. getting what one can, epith. of parasites, Crates Incert. 6, Nicostr. Incert. 6. ἀναγκοτροφέω, (τρέφω) to eat perforce: to eat by regimen, not after one’s own appetite, like the athletes, Epict. Enchir. 29. 2. ἀναγκοφᾶἄγέω, --ἀναγκοτροφέω, Arr. Epict. 3. 15, 3: metaph., ἀν. τὰ πράγματα Theopomp. Hist. 301. ἀναγκοφαγία, 7, compulsory eating, the strict prescribed diet of athletes, Arist. Pol. 8. 4, 9. ἀναγκοφορέω, (φέρων to bear on compulsion, Dion. H. το. 16. ἀνάγκῦὕλος, ov, without thong (ἀγκύλη), of a javelin, Diod. 3. 8. ἀναγλῦκαίνω, to sweeten : Pass., to become sweet, Theophr. C. P. 3. 22, 3. ἀνάγλυπτος, ov, -- ἀνάγλυφος, Plin. H. N. 33. 49. avayAton, ἡ, work in low relief, Strabo 806. avayAtdos, ov, wrought in low relief, embossed, Byz.: τὸ avayA.= ἀναγλυφή, Clem. Al. 237. ἀναγνάμπτω, fut. Yw, to bend back, αἰχμὴ ἀνεγνάμφθη the spear-point was bent back, 1]. 3. 348., 7. 259, etc. 2. to undo, loose, δεσμὸν μὲν ἀνέγναμψαν θεοὶ αὐτοί Od. 14. 348. ἀναγνεία, ἡ, (ἁγνεύω) abominable wickedness, LXX (2 Macc. 4. 13). ἀνάγνιστοϑ, ον, unpurified, unexpiated, Orph. Arg. 1229. dvayvos, ov, impure, unclean, unholy, defiled, Aesch. Ag. 220, Cho. 986, Soph., etc.; ἄν. καὶ μιαρός Antiphot16.11. Adv. —vws, Poll. 1.32, Or. Sib. ἀνάγνωμα, v. sub ἀνάγνωσμα. avayvwpilw, to recognise, Plat. Polit. 258 A, Parm. 127 A, al. :—Med., Apollod. 3. 5, 5. 2. in a tragedy, to recognise or come to the know- ledge of a person, so as to produce a dénouement, Arist. Poét. 14, 13 sq., 17, 6:—in 16 it seems to have a causal sense, to make a person known. II. to recover knowledge possessed in a former state, Id, An. Pr. 2. 21, 7, cf. Plat. Meno 81 Θὲ ἀναγνώρισις, ews, 7, recognition, Plat. Theaet. 193 C. 2. in a tragedy, recognition, as leading to the dénouement (cf. foreg. 2), Arist. Poét. 11, 4., 16, I, etc. ;—in 26, 11, ἀναγνώσει was restored by Tyrwhitt. ἀναγνώρισμα, aros, τό, --ἴοτερ., Pseudo-Hipp. 300. 30. ἀναγνωρισμός, ὅ, --ἀναγνώρισις, Arist. Poét. 10, 2, Heliod. 7. 7, etc. ἀναγνωριστικός, 7), dv, contributing to recognition, Schol. Luc. Laps. 5. ἀναγνωσείω, Desiderat. of ἀναγιγνώσκω, to wish to read, Gloss.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (Here, I mistrust my memory, which holds no long talk between us of the type I’d have insisted on if our roles were reversed.) He and Dev come every afternoon to eat dinner with me in a private room. I cry before they arrive, then weep when they stride out. I cry for Mother to come. She’s about to head off on a spiritual retreat in Mexico counseling other alcoholics. Ponder the likelihood of that one— Mother as sober guru. Landing here is final proof I can’t outrun her, but neither can I get her to spring into action for me. Our phone call is brief. I’m in the hospital, I say. I wanted to kill myself. That’s terrible, honey. Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself? No, I was gonna use carbon monoxide, but I never did anything. Why’d you pick that? She sounds curious, like somebody idly shopping for suicide attempts as she might a ball gown. You don’t make a mess. You leave a very livid corpse. That’s just awful. Does Warren have Dev? Yeah. I get to see him every afternoon. Warren seems like he wants to really work on things, but we’ve been living like strangers for so long. Y’all should work things out. I know, Mother, I know. Since I was sixteen, you’ve wanted to pawn me off in matrimony to somebody. I just want you to be taken care of.... This marriage hasn’t exactly brought comfort and succor, otherwise I might not have planned to cash in my chips. He’s just so sweet with Dev. I don’t suppose you want to come up and help out a few weeks. (Actually, Warren had said it’d be awkward, the two of them in the house alone. Despite that and despite a marrow-deep certainty that she’d never come, I want her to want to.) She says, I just can’t, honey. You know I’ve had this trip to Mexico planned for a while. After she hangs up, I cry because part of me still wants to drag her behind my car. But the other part still wants to crawl into her lap. On the phone, Lecia tells me to snap out of it. That’s a Republican thing to say, I say, sniveling. She’s a fixer, and her inability to fix my mood makes her crazy. Or afraid, or both. I’m serious, she says. Tell me what you’re so miserable about. Do you want me to come up there and kick somebody’s ass? What? I feel like I’ve turned into Mother, I tell her. This draws an actual guffaw from her. You are crazy, she says. You’re nothing at all like Mother. I’m here in the Mental Marriott, like her. Well, you pay your taxes, for one, she says. You never shot at anybody... Wanted to, I say. Who doesn’t, she says. Then she adds, Also, unlike Mother, you have a job. Several jobs, if you count writing a book and raising a kid. Your second book!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You’ve stripped me of all my possessions, robbed me of anything I held dear. Mother, what are you talking about? I’ve been sitting here wondering whether it would make you happy to come in and find me with my brains blown out. That’s what would really make your day. It’s an ambush I never saw coming, and where I’d been sizzling with tired satisfaction before, I’ve suddenly got a kink between my shoulder blades. I say, I’m exhausted, Mother. Don’t start this shit now. (Maybe normal people don’t have to beseech God at such junc tures to stay level, but I do. But it’s as if I’ve never prayed. No space exists in me for any perspective.) In a flash, the fishy crab taste sours my breath, and I bend to rummage my bag for a toothbrush. Instead, I get a glowing vision of my toiletries bag, forgotten in the old house. I ask Mother if she has a fresh toothbrush or some mouthwash. I have nothing, she says. She’s sobbing. I have nothing. To escape the image of her pitched forward, her back heaving, I shut the bathroom door. I wash the grit off my face and neck. Spying a frayed toothbrush upside down in a glass, I squeeze paste on it and start to scrub my mouth out when I taste bleach—and do I detect the odor of shit on its bristles? It’s been used to scrub the toilet. I spit and rinse my mouth and spit, holding back the urge to vomit. And, in that instant, my mouth scalded with bleach and shit, I feel the entire fabric of the world began to undergo a profound shift. I cease to be myself, or rather, my adult self. Time arcs back, carrying me in it. On the ends of my arms, I feel the length of my fingers dwindle. Though standing upright, I sense the floor escalating closer as my legs get shorter. My arms shrink in their sockets. My eyes no longer sit flush to the front of my face; they’ve retreated far back into my head, as if my true self is crouched in terror in the back of my skull, staring out at Mother from far off. And, into each strand of my mother’s white hair, fiery color floods back. Her shoulders square, and she’s tall and slim again, facing me with the enraged pout of her former drunker self. In an eyeblink, our old forms devour us. When you’ve been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it’s like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Chuck, once a maverick for positive change, devolved into an egomaniac, wreaking havoc on his members’ lives through unyielding commands often issued from his selfish whims. These dogmatic orders would have detrimental effects on Synanonites. Ultimately, the community would return full circle, residents succumbing to the abuse of alcohol and drugs that earlier members had once fought so doggedly to overcome. Synanon fell to its demise in 1991. However, the approach of attack therapy such as The Game” and other abusive techniques established to control and straighten out the youth of Synanon are still in use in many troubled-teen programs that exist today. Some of these programs, such as Straight Inc. and The Seed, have been shut down by legal order after being subjected to lawsuits over various charges of mental, physical and emotional abuse. Although some scholarly studies have shown aggressive-style encounter groups to have an adverse psychological effect on participants, these tough-love teen programs continue to thrive and flourish. Maia Szalavitz speaks to this very issue in her book Help at any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (2006). She explores much of the background and history of the troubled-teen big-business phenomenon in America, discussing techniques used in some of these programs that stem directly from Synanon. When the Synanon school began, the best and brightest teachers of the commune worked with the children; the intention was to inspire our capacity for innovative and philosophical thinking. Parents were regularly involved, and the school was often likened to Israel’s kibbutzim (agricultural collectivist communities with socialistic economies). In a kibbutz, as in Synanon, children lived in separate houses and parents visited their children several hours each day. However, by the 1970s, kibbutzim were moving away from this model, and family members once again lived with one another. In Synanon, the opposite was true as the community became more antagonistic toward the traditional family structure. Parents were expected to support this devolution in Synanon philosophy. They were ordered to spend less time at the school. Chuck and other VIPs who parroted his distorted opinions lectured parents about their involvement with their children, shaming moms in particular by calling them “soul-sucking” and detrimental to children’s health. Parents were “gamed,” i.e., screamed at by their peers, for such indiscretions as “poisoning” their children by taking too much interest in their welfare. Mothers deemed too maternal were called “head suckers.” By the time I arrived in February 1977, Synanon was at its most violent stage as a result of Chuck’s growing paranoia of anything or anyone that wasn’t part of Synanon. The fact that he had walled himself off in his self-created society, immune from any criticism from “his people,” led him to become ever more delusional and Orwellian in his thoughts and ideas for what a Synanon lifestyle should be. The school had devolved into an orphanage of sorts. Parents by then were encouraged to stay away and give up their children completely to the community.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Sara’s lack of tears or cries encouraged her father to strike harder. Thwack! Her body flew forward with each hit of the paddle, forcing her to dance in place. When she still refused to make a sound, the blows came harder and faster. Finally, after what seemed like a full minute, she let out a small whimper. Ray gave one more final strike, and a guttural sound of anguish shot from her mouth as he let go of her arm and she fell to her knees. Ray stood hunched, his chest heaving, his anger spent, the paddle hanging limply at his side. He scanned the faces around him, looking lost. One of the younger girls who sat next to me leaned in closer, her shoulder pressing mine as if I could protect her. The original announcer came forward and took the paddle from Ray’s hand, patting his back before motioning for him to sit down. “Stand up,” he said to Sara. She rose to her feet, her face absent of color, gaze darting about the room. The man smiled and lifted Sara’s arm high as a statement for all of us to witness this official conquering of her spirit. A thunderous applause arose from the empty pit of silence, triumphant applause from the adults that grew louder and louder, followed by shrill whistles and whoops of approval that emanated from every corner. The man dropped Sara’s hand, and her arm flopped to her side as, leering down at her, he joined in the boisterous celebration. “Long live Synanon!” the applause seemed to say. It died out as quickly as it had come. “Let this be a warning,” the man said. “Any of you thinking of running away, it will be worse the next time. This is nothing.” It was over. We got up and filed out of the building. The adults, having made their point, allowed Sara to join the rest of us. She would be put on contract for a week at the very least. No one would be allowed to talk to her, and she would probably have to wear a sign that said “I’m an Ungrateful Asshole” while spending her time at the sink, washing pots all day. She walked as if in a daze, tears falling uncontrollably down her face. It was her own father who had punished her. Even more disturbing to me, Ray had recently love-matched Theresa. At some point my mother and Andrew had separated, and Ray had stepped in as her new husband. I first became aware of Sara’s dad when he began popping in now and then at the school. He was a short man who always wore high-water overalls, the cuffs riding several inches above his sneakers. He liked to joke around with the kids, giving the boys wedgies and performing complicated handshakes that lasted as long as a minute, requiring turning in circles, blowing an imaginary substance off your palm and exclaiming “Pow!” at the end.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters —the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter—it was the great American war chest—the fruits of science,

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  a few moments and then vomited again; another time, in the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and couldn't shut it off. I went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn't sleep; I couldn't lie still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the old man's boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward Canada. There were times when I thought I'd gone off the psychic edge. I couldn't tell up from down, I was just falling, and late in the night I'd lie there watching bizarre pictures spin through my head. Getting chased by the Border Patrol—helicopters and searchlights and barking dogs—I'd be crashing through the woods, I'd be down on my hands and knees—people shouting out my name—the law closing in on all sides—my hometown draft board and the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to—a mainstream life—I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was off on the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad. I'm not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can't remember. On two or three afternoons, to pass some time, I helped Elroy get the place ready for winter, sweeping down the cabins and hauling in the boats, little chores that kept my body moving. The days were cool and bright. The nights were very dark. One morning the old man showed me how to split and stack firewood, and for several hours we just worked in silence out behind his house. At one point, I remember, Elroy put down his maul and looked at me for a long time, his lips drawn as if framing a difficult question, but then he shook his head and went back to work. The man's self-control was amazing. He never pried. He never put me in a position that required lies or denials. To an extent, I suppose, his reticence was typical of that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held value, and even if I'd been walking around with some horrible deformity—four arms and three heads—I'm sure the old man would've talked about everything except those extra arms and heads. Simple politeness was part of it. But even more than that, I think, the man understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond discussion. During that long summer I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons,

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “One cat per bowl.” The girls began to scream, and I took a step back, scrunching my clothes to hide the lump of the cat sleeping in my pocket. I let my arms hang by my sides. Buddy pried open each girl’s fingers, wrestling the kittens from their grip. One by one the cats were handed to the boy whose chest rose and fell rapidly, his face unreadable as he dropped each baby into the ammonia water. I watched their small bodies writhe until Buddy was standing over me. “That’s all of them,” I told him. “There were only four.” His gaze swept my body. Satisfied that I did not have a kitten, he sent us all outside. Trusting no one, I went to the Shed in search of a box, my hand inside my pocket curled around the sleeping cat. Willing myself not to cry, I searched the back kitchen area, pretending I had some business there. I found a medium-sized cardboard box, picked it up and took it back to my dorm, where I lined it with a blanket before I struck a path into the hills. Once I felt that I had hiked far enough, I sat down in the grass and pulled the mewing cat from my pocket, snuggling it under my chin as hot tears gathered in my eyes and splashed down, dampening its fur. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into its warm little body. Carefully I placed it into the box with the blanket, which I scrunched up for a nest. Hoping for the best, I left it. Later that evening the wind picked up, and to my horror rain began to pelt down onto the bunkhouse. The storm grew stronger, and I lay in bed sick with the thought of the kitten outside. During the night the wind howled and rain pummeled the building, at times with such force that it sounded as if it might break through the roof. The next morning, instead of going to breakfast after inspection, I ran directly up the hill to where I had left the kitten. The box had blown on its side. The blanket was soggy in the flattened, wet grass. The kitten lay still next to the blanket, its fur matted and slick against its body. I squatted, scooping it up, and found it was still alive. It mewed weakly in my hands as I blew warm air onto its cold little body and then slipped it under my shirt to transfer some of my body’s warmth to it. For a long time I sat on the damp ground trying to come up with some kind of plan. In the end I knew I could do nothing. There was nowhere to keep it safely, no place where it wouldn’t soon be discovered. I removed the kitten from my shirt and kissed its head. I had given it some warmth, and it was quiet.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  he was touring seemed dead. Through the windows, as if in a stop-motion photograph, the place looked as if it had been hit by nerve gas, everything still and lifeless, even the people. The town could not talk, and would not listen. "How'd you like to hear about the war?" he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might've said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he'd give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew. Pass out samples, maybe. Smiling at this, he clamped the steering wheel slightly right of center, which produced a smooth clockwise motion against the curve of the road. The Chevy seemed to know its own way. The sun was lower now. Five fifty-five, he decided—six o'clock, tops. Along an unused railway spur, four workmen labored in the shadowy red heat, setting up a platform and steel launchers for the evening fireworks. They were dressed alike in khaki trousers, work shirts, visored caps, and brown boots. Their faces were dark and smudgy. "Want to hear about the Silver Star I almost won?" Norman Bowker whispered, but none of the workmen looked up. Later they would blow color into the sky. The lake would sparkle with reds and blues and greens, like a mirror, and the picnickers would make low sounds of appreciation. "Well, see, it never stopped raining," he would've said. "The muck was everywhere, you couldn't get away from it." He would have paused a second. Then he would have told about the night they bivouacked in a field along the Song Tra Bong. A big swampy field beside the river. There was a ville nearby, fifty meters downstream, and right away a dozen old mama- sans ran out and started yelling. A crazy scene, he would've said. The mama-sans just stood there in the rain, soaking wet, yapping away about how this field was bad news. Number ten, they said. Evil ground. Not a good spot for good Gls. Finally Lieutenant Jimmy Cross had to get out his pistol and fire off a few rounds just to shoo them away. By then it was almost dark. So they set up a perimeter, ate chow, then crawled under their ponchos and tried to settle in for the night. But the rain kept getting worse. And by midnight the field turned into soup.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  On his twelfth revolution, the sky went crazy with color. He pulled into Sunset Park and stopped in the shadow of a picnic shelter. After a time he got out, walked down to the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing. The water felt warm against his skin. He put his head under. He opened his lips, very slightly, for the taste, then he stood up and folded his arms and watched the fireworks. For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show. Notes "Speaking of Courage" was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa. In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon's final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war. He had worked briefly as an automotive parts salesman, a janitor, a car wash attendant, and a short-order cook at the local A&W fast-food franchise. None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks. He lived with his parents, who supported him, and who treated him with kindness and obvious love. At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. He dropped out after eight months. He spent his mornings in bed. In the afternoons he played pickup basketball at the Y, and then at night he drove around town in his father's car, mostly alone, or with a six-pack of beer, cruising. "The thing is," he wrote, "there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed over in Nam ... Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him ... Feels like I'm still in deep shit." The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn't know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much: God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I'm no basket case—not even any bad dreams. And I don't feel like anybody mistreats me or anything, except sometimes people act too nice, too polite, like they're afraid they might ask the wrong question ... But I shouldn't bitch. One thing I hate

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  That may be so, I tell Joan. But I’ve also prayed to write as well as Wallace Stevens, prayed to be five-ten, and not had those prayers answered. As Emile Zola once noted: The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg. 30Hour of LeadThis is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go— —Emily Dickinson, “After great pain” Only an alcoholic can so discombobulate her insides that she might weigh in her hands two choices—(a) get drunk and drive into stuff with more molecular density than she has, and (b) be a present and loving mother to her son—and, on picking the latter, plunge into despair. Which explains why I don’t deplane in Boston, saying, Lucky me, freed from paycheck work. Let’s settle down and raise a book. Instead, I come back feeling alternately mite-sized and unworthy, panicked as a felon facing the electric chair thanks to that fat grant. The time I’d bitched for years about not having now falls in abundance. But each day becomes a gray tundra I wade across. Notebooks from that time contain increasingly ornate doodles, designs and lines like (I kid you not) I am sad, the end, by Mary Karr. In the past, I’ve been able to learn poems or whole paragraphs by heart. Now lines pour through me like water. Guilt shadows every underemployed breath. Maybe I steer clear of Warren so much because while I do less, he slaves like a field hand—a forty-hour work week, classes three nights a week, with massive course work and a book-length master’s thesis on Robert Lowell to finish, plus Dev in the evenings and the magazine. Any night he’s home by six, I saunter out to a meeting. Our couples therapy has trailed off. The trips to his parents’ big house, I virtually stop going along on—Christmas being an exception—arguing that the abundant booze makes me nuts. The more Warren does, the more lardassed I get, wallowing in my dusty psychic moonscape. I complete not one sit-up, squat-press no weight, trot not a block. Thrown into a pool, I’d have sunk to the bottom and drowned before flapping a stroke. My daddy’s phrases for the lazy sometimes flurry through me—Wouldn’t say sooey if the hogs were eating her…Wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake reared back…Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass. One day I might splay across the sofa staring at infomercials with the sound off, wondering whether the Abdominizer is the answer, or the Pocket Fisherman, or that glittering altar of knives.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  Sass II. in Poets, but rarely, like ἀκούσιος, of acts or their consequences, involuntary, κακὰ ἑκόντα Kkovx ax. Soph. O. T. 1230; ἔργων ἀκ. Id. O. C. 240, cf. 977. - ἀέλιοι, οἱ, brothers-in-law, whose wives are sisters: Hesych. writes αἴ- Aor, but wrongly, v. Eust. 648. 45, E. M. 31. 24. (M. Miiller, Oxf. Essays (1856), p. 21, compares Skt. syalas (uxoris frater) ; in which case a@ must be taken as euphon., ἀ-έλιοι.) ἀέλιοπ, 6, Dor. for ἠέλιος, ἥλιος. [@, but made short in Soph. Tr. 835, Eur. Med. 1252, Ion 122.] ἄελλα, Ep. ἀέλλη. 75, 7, @ stormy wind, a whirlwind, often in Hom., not rare also in pl.; ἀργαλέων ἀνέμων... ἀέλλῃ Il. 13. 795; ἄελλαι παντοίων ἀνέμων Od. 5. 292, 304; ὕψι δ᾽ ἀέλλη σκίδνατ᾽ (i.e. the dust), Il. 16. 374, 2. metaph. of any whirling motion, ὠκυδρόμοις d., of an animal, Eur. Bacch. 873 ; ἄστρων tm ἀέλλαισι Id. Hel. 1498. Used by Soph. also in derivs. and compds. (v. infr.), but the word is mostly Ep. (For the Root, v. sub εἴλω.) ἀελλαῖος, a, ον, storm-swift, πελειάς Soph. O. C. 1081. ἀελλάς, άδος, 7,=foreg., ἵπποι Soph. O. T. 467; φωναί Id. Fr. 614. ἀελλήεις, egoa, εν, -- ἀελλαῖος, Nonn. Ὁ. 5. 322, etc. ἀελλὴς κονίσαλος, ὃ, in Il. 3. 13, eddying dust, i.e. an eddy of dust, not found elsewh.: Buttm., Ausf. Gr. § 41 Ann. 15 n., would write deAAqs, contr. from ἀελλήεις ; cf. Spitzn. ad 1. (For the Root, v. sub εἴλω.) ἀελλο-δρόμος, ov, storm-swift, πῶλος Bacchyl. 6. ἀελλό-θριξ, τριχος, ὃ, ἡ, with hair floating in the wind, Soph. Fr. 273. ἀελλο-μάχος, ov, struggling with the storm, Anth. P. 7. 586. ἀελλό-πος, ποδος, 6, ἡ, for ἀελλόπους (like ἀρτίπος, Οἰδίπος, etc.) :-— storm-footed, storm-swift, Il. 8. 409, etc. (never in Od.): dat. pl. ἀελ- λοπόδεσσιν h. Hom. Ven. 218; pl. ἀελλόποδες, - πόδων, Simon. 7, Pind. N. 1.6, etc. : once only in Trag., viz. Eur. Hel. 1330.—Later ἀελλοπόδης, ou, Opp. C. I. 413. ἀελλός, 6, a bird, perh. the stormy petrel, Hesych. ᾿Αελλώ, dos, contr. ods, 77, (deAAa) Storm-swift, name of a Harpy, Hes. Th. 267; also of a hound, Ovid. Metam. 3. 219. ἀελλώδηβ, ες, (εἶδος) storm-like, stormy, Schol. Il. 3. 13. ἀελπτέω, to be ἄελπτος, have no hope, despair, only found in part., deA- πτέοντες σόον εἶναι Il. 7. 310; ἀ. τοὺς Ἕλληνας ὑπερβαλέεσθαι Hat. 7. 168 :—the forms ἀελπέω, ἀελπής are defended by Lob. Phryn. 569. ἀ-ελπτήβ, és, unhoped for, unlooked for, unexpected, “γαῖαν ἀελπτέα δῶκεν ἰδέσθαι Od. 5. 408; ubi olim ἀελπέα, v. foreg. ἀ-ελπτία, ἡ, an unlooked for event, ἐξ ἀελπτίης, Lat. ex insperato, un- expectedly, Archil. 54. II. despair, Pind. P. 12.55 [where 1].