Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  202 Lecture 46: Beckett’s Plays any intrinsic value; the reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately irrational; there is, therefore, no ultimate “reason” for valuing anything; living is action and there is no ¿ nal reason for action; and there is no ¿ nal reason for living. He tries, and fails, to commit suicide, after which he amends his ¿ fth principle: “There’s no ¿ nal reason for living (or for suicide).” This is the world of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which he argues that the only philosophical question is whether life is worth living or not. Kurt V onnegut’s works make many of the same points. They portray a world in which existence precedes essence, and they assume no identi ¿ able meaning or purpose for existence. Things just happen, often cruelly and pointlessly, and efforts to change them are generally futile. Salman Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair” also makes some of the same points as Barth’s The Floating Opera. Its main point is that there is no going back to the certainties of the past; we have to move on from where we are without trying to recapture the foundations of our ancestors. The story’s amazing combination of genres is also Postmodernist—a point we will come back to in the next two lectures. Samuel Beckett’s plays work from the same set of assumptions. The Nobel Prize Committee in 1969 said that Beckett had recognized the central dilemma of the century: the contradiction between the human effort to discover meaning and the awareness that there is no meaning that we have not created ourselves. His characters try to create or ¿ nd meaning, wait for explanations that never arrive, and ¿ ll up their time to keep terror at a distance. Beckett himself wrote in 1949 that the condition of art is that there is nothing to express, no desire to express anything, no way to express it if there were something to express, and still an obligation to express something. Beckett reinvented drama one more time in the 20 th century. It is in some ways the future drama that Joseph Wood Krutch predicted in Lecture 39: a drama without plot or characters in the way we usually understand them. What Beckett dramatizes is uncertainty, incoherence, and the absence of meaning. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo ¿ ll up time with arguments, reconciliations, eating, and doing vaudeville routines while waiting for

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Word ProblemOkay, so, there’s this woman, and she lives in Iowa City, and then she moves to Bloomington, Indiana, 408 miles away. And her girlfriend, who loves her very much, agrees to do the whole long-distance thing. She doesn’t even pause, it’s what she would call a no-brainer. (The pun is lost on her, in the moment.) She spends the entire second year of her graduate school experience shuttling back and forth to Bloomington. She does it gladly. In one trip, she can listen to 75 percent of an audiobook. If she is driving at sixty-five miles per hour, and the average length of an audiobook is ten hours, how many months will it take for her to realize she has wasted half of her MFA program driving to her girlfriend’s house to be yelled at for five days? How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself? IIIAnd because you are of a kind, the house knows you. When you cry out, the lights flicker, ghostly blue and ragged. When she says you are shut off, the light switches nod their white tiny heads. Tiles creak yes beneath her edicts—something bad must have happened to make you this way, the way where you don’t want her. But the windows rattle, disagree. In their honeyed, blindless light, they see it—something bad is happening. —Leah Horlick, “Ghost House” Dream House as Man vs. SelfYour mother once owned a tiny, trembling schnoodle named Greta, whom she rescued when you were in college. Greta was rotund and gray and the most neurotic dog you’d ever met, prone to fits of ennui and anxiety. When Gibby, your family’s cockapoo, died from choking on a plastic bag, Greta mourned by moving elaborate piles of stuffed animals—some of them bigger than she was—around the house. “She just keeps doing that,” your mother said mildly when you asked her about the behavior. You once dogsat Greta when your mother was out of town and you were profoundly unnerved by her malaise; she spent most of the day lying in a particular spot on top of the couch, her face flattened into the fabric—except she wasn’t sleeping: her dark eyes were open and fixed on nothing. She looked dead. Every time you moved her, she dangled limply, not extending her feet when you put her on the ground. When you took her outside to use the bathroom, she went to the closest spot, keeping her eyes on you the whole time, and peed with more lassitude than you experienced in the entirety of your teenage years. When you were out walking her on a leash she would lie on the ground and refuse to move, and more than once you had to carry her home.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I got my father’s razor and made up my mind to kill Freda, and now I know she is happy.” The jury chose madwoman, and Alice spent the rest of her life in the Western State Insane Asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee. Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she had forfeited some essential femininity. The conversation about domestic abuse in lesbian relationships had been active within the queer community since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989, when Annette Green shot and killed her abusive female partner in West Palm Beach after a Halloween party, that the question of whether such a thing was possible was brought before a jury and became one for the courts. Green was one of the first queer people to use “battered woman syndrome” to justify her crime. The idea of the battered woman 35 was brand-new—it had been coined in the ’70s—but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing: physical violence and a white, straight woman (Green is Latina), respectively. The baffled judge eventually allowed Green’s defense, but only after insisting on renaming it “battered person syndrome,” despite the fact that both the abuser and the abused were women. Regardless, it was not successful; Green was convicted of second-degree murder. (A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that “if this had been a heterosexual relationship,” she would have been acquitted.) All of this contrasts sharply with the way narratives of abused straight (and, usually, white) women play out. When the Framingham Eight—a group of women in prison for killing their abusive partners—came into the public eye in 1992, people were similarly uncertain about what to do with Debra Reid, a black woman and the only lesbian among them. When a panel was convened to hear the women’s stories to consider commuting their sentences, Debra’s lawyers did their best to leverage the committee’s inherent assumptions and prejudices by painting her as “the woman” in the relationship: she cooked, she cleaned, she cared for the children. The attorneys believed, rightly, that Debra needed to fit the traditional domestic abuse narrative that people understood: the abused needed to be a “feminine” figure—meek, straight, white—and the abuser a masculine one. 36 That Debra was black didn’t help her case; it worked against the stereotype. (In another early lesbian abuse case, in which a woman gave her girlfriend a pair of shiny black eyes, the prosecutor acknowledged that while she was grateful for and surprised by the abuser’s conviction, she believed that the fact that the defendant was butch and black almost certainly played into the jury’s willingness to convict her.) The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Picard looks up. He is unshaven, unkempt, covered in a glaze of sweat. His face is a rapidly shifting picture of bafflement and denial, of confusion and agony. “How many? How many lights?” Madred repeats. Off-screen, a door opens, and Madred’s face gets a little frantic. “This is your last chance. The guards are coming. Don’t be a stubborn fool. How many?” It is the first time he’s seemed weak; exhibited a real need. Something in Picard’s face shatters. He screams: “There—are—four—lights!” Every time I watch this climax, something inside me grinds a little, like the unglazed edges of a broken mug being shoved together. It is not a triumphant scream. It is broken, humiliating. It cracks like a boy’s. The final word, lights, is practically oatmeal in his mouth. Later, safe on the Enterprise, Picard talks with Counselor Troi about his experience. “What I didn’t put in the report,” he tells her, “was that, at the end, he gave me a choice between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights when, in fact, there were only four.” “You didn’t say it?” Troi asks. “No. No,” he says. “But I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.” His gaze rests, lost, in the middle distance. Dream House as Cosmic HorrorEvil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad: metallic, false. But what other word can you use for a person who makes you feel so powerless? Lots of people in the world have made you feel powerless. Run-of-the-mill bullies; both of your parents, and most adults, when you were a child; unflinching bureaucrats at the DMV, the post office. A doctor who didn’t believe you were sick, approximately two minutes before you projectile vomited against the wall. A cadre of nurses who pried your arms away from your body to take your blood when they thought you had cancer. (You didn’t have cancer, but they never did figure out why you spent so much of your childhood cramping with agony.) But did any of them seem to enjoy it? Did any of them make you feel complicit in your own suffering? You’ve outgrown parents and bullies. You’ve railed against the everyday tyrants to friends; you chastised the doctor while dropping a long line of sour saliva down to the floor; you fought those nurses as hard as if they were trying to murder you.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “I resolved to kill Freda because I loved her so much that I wanted her to die loving me,” Alice wrote in a statement her attorneys provided to the press, sounding every bit the possessive boyfriend from a Lifetime original movie. “And when she did die I know she loved me better than any human being on earth. I got my father’s razor and made up my mind to kill Freda, and now I know she is happy.” The jury chose madwoman, and Alice spent the rest of her life in the Western State Insane Asylum in Bolivar, Tennessee. Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she had forfeited some essential femininity. The conversation about domestic abuse in lesbian relationships had been active within the queer community since the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989, when Annette Green shot and killed her abusive female partner in West Palm Beach after a Halloween party, that the question of whether such a thing was possible was brought before a jury and became one for the courts. Green was one of the first queer people to use “battered woman syndrome” to justify her crime. The idea of the battered woman35 was brand-new—it had been coined in the ’70s—but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing: physical violence and a white, straight woman (Green is Latina), respectively. The baffled judge eventually allowed Green’s defense, but only after insisting on renaming it “battered person syndrome,” despite the fact that both the abuser and the abused were women. Regardless, it was not successful; Green was convicted of second-degree murder. (A paralegal who worked with Green’s attorney told a reporter that “if this had been a heterosexual relationship,” she would have been acquitted.)

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  So, Kahlil Gibran. I know what he’s saying, but even rhetorically he is making exactly the wrong point. The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain. Dream House as the Pool of TearsYou talk on the phone, but soon she stops picking up, stops responding to your texts. “If you don’t want me to worry,” you tell her when she finally answers, “if you want me to feel safe, you’re not doing a very good job.” Your body feels huge, swollen, as though it is pressed into the room’s corners and your limbs are growing out of the windows. “I don’t care,” she says, so softly that you know it’s true. “Are you still seeing her?” you ask. You cry and cry.40 You cry into your phone, flood it with saltwater. It stops working.41 So she breaks up with you over Skype instead. Her face is pinched and regretful. “I still want to be your friend,” she says. When it is over, you stare at your dark, dead phone; a rectangle of black glass. It grows in your hand, larger and larger, and you discover that, instead, you are shrinking. By the time the realization hits you, you are three feet tall. One foot. Six inches. And then, up to your chin in saltwater. You wonder if you have somehow fallen into the sea. “And in that case,” you think, “no one will come and get me.” You soon make out, though, that you are in the pool of tears that you had wept when you were nine feet high.42 “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” you say as you swim about, trying to find your way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.” [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 40. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C482, Taboo: weeping.41. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C967, Valuable object turns to worthless, for breaking taboo.42. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type A1012.1, Flood from tears.Dream House as Mrs. DallowayOn the night of the day she breaks up with you, you are meant to host a party for one of your professors after her reading.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Children gradually learn to interpret the messages their bodies give them. Indeed, it is by learning to coordinate movements (behaviors) and sensations into a coherent whole that a child learns who he or she is. By remembering actions that have proven to be effective, and discarding those that are not, children learn how to anticipate what the most appropriate response is and how to time its execution for maximum effect. In this way, they experience agency, satisfaction and pleasure. When a child is overwhelmed by trauma or thwarted by neglect, this developmental sequence is aborted or, if already developed, breaks down; and negative emotions come to dominate his or her existence. After being traumatized, a child’s relationship with his or her body often becomes formless, chaotic and overwhelming; the child loses a sense of his internal structure and nuance. As the body freezes, the “shocked” mind and brain become stifled, disorganized and fragmented; they cannot take in the totality of experience and learn from it. These children, who have become “stuck” at some point along a once meaningful and purposeful course of action, engage in habitually ineffective and often compulsive patterns of behavior. These often play out in symptoms like those of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. The child’s uncoordinated fragmented efforts are not registered as normal, explicit, narrative memories but rather are encoded in the body as implicit, procedural memories including discomfort, constriction, distress, awkwardness, rigidity, flaccidity and lack of energy. Such memories are encoded not primarily in the neocortex but, instead, in the limbic system and brain stem. For this reason behaviors and memories cannot be changed by simply changing one’s thoughts. One must also work with sensation and feeling—really with the totality of experience. The SIBAM ModelHuman beings, in general, and therapists, in particular, make contact through a kind of “body resonance.” As described in Chapter 4, we humans are programmed to experience sensations similar to those of people with whom we are in close proximity.85 Imagine the scenario of being in a room filled with anxious conspiracy theorists as compared to one with blissful, meditating monks. Resonance forms the basis for the empathic attunement needed to form intimate relationships.86 In treating traumatized individuals, a therapist first needs to cultivate a deep and enduring relationship with his or her own body. Only when a therapist’s embodiment skills are intact and engaged can he or she mentor and self-empower a client. Similarly, by refining their own capacity to observe the subtle behaviors of others, therapists can provide their clients feedback that helps them become aware of their sensations and feelings. Together, these two tools—somatic resonance and subtle observation—are of incalculable power and benefit. In the words of the analyst Leston Havens, “Perhaps the most striking evidence of successful empathy is the occurrence in our bodies of sensations that the patient has described in his or hers.”87

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Myth When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness or an encyclopedia peddler. 49 Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated. 50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible? You will never feel as desperate and fucked up and horrible as you do when you hear those things. Once, a woman drunkenly touches your elbow at a party and says, “I believe you,” in your ear, and you cry so hard you have to leave. You walk home in the dark over a footbridge and see a fat raccoon waddling up the riverbed. The raccoon is a trickster; everyone knows that. He doesn’t look up, he doesn’t speak to you, he just keeps going. But keeping going is a way of speaking. You hear him. He’s saying you will fight this fight for the rest of your days. 49. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C423.3, Taboo: revealing experiences in other world. 50. “Experiencing the ordinary brutality of love does not make one a victim. It makes one an adult,” Maureen Dowd wrote of Joyce Maynard, when Maynard published a memoir about how a decades-older J. D. Salinger seduced, abused, and disposed of her when she was eighteen. What, I wonder, is Maureen’s definition of ordinary? Brutality? Love?

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  God sustains both creation and humanity in his covenantal relationship with his people. God showed his foreknowledge of the future on different occasions. For example, the author of Jubilees speaks of God as the speaker of the prophetic words ( chapter 1), and these words become facts that are present in the foreknowledge of God. The message of the book of Jubilees may be summarized as follows: the present historical situation is one of corruption, but the faithfulness of God in electing a people and keeping them safe will usher in the coming judgment of the apostate Jews and the wicked gentiles at the dawn of the new creation. This anticipates the next point to be treated: eschatology in the book of Jubilees. Eschatology in Jubilees The present situation of the world is one of corruption and sin. Every being on earth had been corrupted/contaminated. Israel has turned away from the directives of Torah to follow the ways of the wicked peoples of the nations. The temple cult has become so corrupt that it no longer can be considered as authentic. Israel has forsaken the festivals, the covenant, and God himself. There is no hope for the present as the covenantal people stand in corruption and in disobedience to God. The present is characterized by despair and evil. It has lost its intrinsic value. However, in spite of Israel’s unfaithfulness, God remains faithful. Those who are unfaithful should heed the message of the faithfulness of God and confess both their sins and the sins of their ancestors so that they may partake in the eschatological hope. The only hope is in an imminent and final intervention of God to vindicate the righteous who keep the law. The faithful ones of the nation will rise and, with strength from God, will put everyone (unfaithful Israelites and wicked Gentiles) to the sword. They will be the zealots who use the sword of the Lord. Earlier, it appeared that the Maccabean warriors were the hope of Israel, but as it turned out, they became corrupted and defiled even the Holy of Holies. Consequently, there will be an even greater onslaught from the Gentiles. In the battles of this war, the faithful will eventual y emerge triumphant. All Israel’s foes will then be put to the sword.12 The Corruption of Creation

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  reason for getting out of it, after you have committed to them. They themselves never finish anything. In the end, they tend to blame others for not realizing their visions—society, nebulous antagonistic forces, or bad luck. Or they try to find a sucker who will do all of the hard work in bringing to life their vague idea but who will take the blame if it all goes wrong. Often such people had parents who were inconsistent, would turn on them suddenly for the smallest misdeed. Consequently their goal in life is to avoid situations in which they might open themselves up to criticism and judgment. They handle this by learning to talk well and impressing people with stories but running away when called to account, always with an excuse. Look carefully at their past for signs of this, and if they seem the type, be amused by their stories but take it no further. The Sexualizer: They seem charged with sexual energy, in a way that is refreshingly unrepressed. They have a tendency to mix work with pleasure, to blur the usual boundaries for when it is appropriate to use this energy, and you might imagine that this is healthy and natural. But in truth it is compulsive and comes from a dark place. In their earliest years such people probably suffered sexual abuse in some way. This could have been directly physical or something more psychological, which the parent expressed through looks and touching that was subtle but inappropriate. A pattern is deeply set from within and cannot be controlled—they will tend to see every relationship as potentially sexual. Sex becomes a means of self-validation, and when they are young, such types can lead an exciting, promiscuous life, as they will tend to find people to fall under their spell. But as they get older, any long periods without this validation can lead to depression and suicide, so they become more desperate. If they occupy positions of leadership, they will use their power to get what they want, all under the guise of being natural and unrepressed. The older they get, the more pathetic and frightening this becomes. You cannot help or save them from their compulsion, only save yourself from entanglement with them on any level. The Pampered Prince/Princess: They will draw you in with their regal air. They are calm and ever so slightly imbued with a feeling of superiority. It is pleasant to meet people who appear confident and destined to wear a crown. Slowly you might find yourself doing favors for them, working extra hard for no pay, and not really understanding how or why. Somehow they express the need to be taken care of, and they are masters at getting others to pamper them. In childhood, their parents indulged them in their slightest whim and protected them from any kind of harsh intrusion from the outside world. There are also some children who incite this behavior

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He called it “blond” when he put it on the furniture, but it wasn’t blond or even off-white; it was stark, industrial strength, eye-frying white. The house reeked of oil. My mother called a few days before Dwight was supposed to drive down and pick her up. She talked to him for a while, then asked to speak to me. She wanted to know how I was. Okay, I told her. She said she had been feeling kind of low and just wanted to check with me, make sure I felt good about everything. It was such a big step. Were Dwight and I getting along all right? I said we were. He was in the living room with me, painting some chairs, but I probably would have given the same answer if I’d been alone. My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late? I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink. After my mother hung up, Dwight and I finished painting the dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, “Sort of stands out, doesn’t it?” I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black walnut, that he had bought for twenty dollars from a family on the move who’d grown tired of hauling it around. Dwight did a victory dance after bringing it home. He said the stupid compones had no idea what it was worth, that it was worth twice that much. Dwight sat down at it one night with the idea of demonstrating his virtuosity, but after making a few sour chords he slammed it shut and pronounced it out of tune. He never went near it again. Sometimes Pearl banged out “Chopsticks” but otherwise it got no play at all. It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn’t look anywhere else. I agreed that it stood out. We went to work on it.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Both successful attack and escape are promoted by a basic strategy that incorporates past experience in the service of imagining (“imageing”) future outcomes. The spanning of time allows choice of the imagined options. This strategy, however, is only effective when the organism is fully present in the now. If, on the other hand, we view the future solely in terms of the past—without a robust anchoring in the present—then, in the words of the country-and-western singer Michael Martin Murphy, “There ain’t no future in the past.” In other words, a future that is overly determined by the past ain’t no future at all. This fixation, set in the past, with no sense of a future that is different, is precisely what happens in trauma. If Pouncer couldn’t have imagined in the present, he most likely would have stayed resigned, and therefore a bit depressed. Unfortunately, unlike our animal friends, humans have a tendency, when under stress, to be pinned to the past. Only man routinely becomes lost in regret for the past and fearful of what will happen in the future, causing us to be disconnected and adrift from the now. One might even call this lack of living in the present moment a modern-day malady. It appears to be a by-product of a loss of connection with our instinctual animal nature. Finding our Way in the World: The Instinct of PurposeThe “job” for each species is to adapt and maintain a place for itself in a very complex ecosystem. Evolution’s winnowing-out process has produced, for all species, a means of coping, through complex sets of actions, even in the most extreme situations. Whether we are frozen in terror, overwhelmed and collapsed or remain mobilized and engaged is determined largely by our ability to navigate the complex instinctual action patterns described by Darwin and elaborated by his followers. These complex organismic responses depend, in a context of social collaboration, on harmonious teamwork between chemicals, hormones, neurons and muscles. It is this complex coordination that allows animals to orient and to take the right actions to ensure the reestablishment of control and safety. When all of these intricate systems are working together coherently, we humans have the felt-sense recognition that we “belong” in the world, that our consciousness is expanded and that we are capable of coping with whatever challenges life brings our way. When these systems are not operating smoothly, we feel insecure and out of sorts. So while our literal survival in a postmodern (actual predator–sparse) environment does not so much depend upon expanded consciousness, the very survival of our sanity and selfhood does.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  89 in a tribute to Shakespeare entitled “Everything and Nothing,” suggests that Shakespeare shares with God the ability to be “many and no one.” As an illustration of Shakespeare’s gift for language, we can consider Macbeth and its most famous soliloquy, the “Tomorrow” speech. Macbeth, like many Shakespearean tragic protagonists, is thrust into a role that he cannot comfortably play: that of a cold-blooded regicide. He is, as the actor Ian McKellen says, “a murderer with a conscience.” Macbeth is partly aware of this before the murder of King Duncan, and assured of it afterwards. He spends the rest of the play after the murder trying to kill his conscience, but he also knows that in doing so he will be giving up everything that ordinarily makes life worth living: friends, feasts, loyalty, and love. It is at this point, immediately following the death of his wife, that Macbeth delivers his famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy. The speech itself incorporates in both sound and metaphor Macbeth ’s sense of eternal recurrence and utter pointlessness. Life for him has no substance: it is a “walking shadow,” a “poor player,” a story told by an idiot. Perhaps no bleaker speech has ever been uttered in drama. What Macbeth has done to himself in trying to be more than he is helps to make him a hero in the Elizabethan sense of the word, despite all the terrible things he has done. Macbeth still matters to us because he is utterly and ruthlessly honest with himself about what he has done and become; Shakespeare’s words allow us to be inside his soul. No one in the history of English drama has ever had this magni ¿ cent combination of language and the ability to see life as a whole. Shakespeare deserves his place as the best poet and dramatist in our language. Ŷ No account of … inÀ uences … has ever really accounted for Shakespeare’s achievement any more than the same kind of study can account for the wonders of Mozart’s music.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Folktale Taxonomy In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the Little Mermaid has her tongue cut out of her head. 4 In “The Wild Swans,” Eliza is a princess who is silent for seven years as she stitches nettle shirts for her brothers, who have been turned into the eponymous birds. 5 Then there’s the Goose Girl, whose identity, title, and husband are stolen by a treacherous maid, and who cannot speak of her plight for fear of her life. 6 The Little Mermaid suffers in other ways too. The process of growing legs is as painful as knives slicing open her tail. She dances beautifully because every time she steps, she is in agony. Still, the prince does not pick her. At the end, she considers killing him to save herself, but she chooses to die instead and is carried away by angels. (She has, through her suffering, earned a soul.) 7 But before that, the witch takes the muscle of her tongue and cuts through the tissue. If you have ever sliced a pork chop with a shitty Ikea knife, you know what it was like—that sawing, that rocking back and forth, the slick and squeaky give of the muscle, the white marbled fat. Eliza, on the other hand, is lucky. Well, lucky-ish. Well, luckier. The nettles are stinging nettles, and she has to harvest them from graveyards. And she has to be silent the whole time: silent as she creates the shirts with her raw and blistered hands, silent as a man falls in love with her, silent as they try to burn her for being a witch. And even once she has finished her task, she faints before she can speak, and so her brothers have to speak for her. And the Goose Girl? She survives. She straight-up survives. Yes, the false princess has her beloved talking horse killed and his decapitated head hung from a gate for all to see. Yes, she has to watch someone waltz around with her identity on like a costume, afraid to say what needs to be said. But in the end, with the help of a kindly king and a goose-boy, her truth comes out. She marries her prince and rules with kindness and is happy until the end of her days. Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it. There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, of course, is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two. 8 4. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S163, Mutilation: cutting (tearing) out tongue. 5. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 451, The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers. 6. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 533, The Repressed Bride. 7. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type Q172, Reward: admission to heaven. 8. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C432.1, Guessing name of supernatural creature gives power over him.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I stared at her back. She said, “I might be able to take them as pawn.” “Pawn? How much can I pawn them for?” She shrugged. “Five apiece.” “Five dollars? But that’s not fair!” She didn’t answer. “Your sign says you buy guns.” “I’m not buying any now.” “They’re worth a lot more than that,” I said. “A lot more.” “Then go get more.” “Maybe I will,” I said, but I knew better now. I also knew that if Chuck saw me walk out the door with all these shooters in my hands he would leave without me. “I could sell them for twenty,” I said. “I already told you, I’m not buying. If you want to pawn, five’s the limit.” Then she said, “All right. Throw in those other whatnots and you got yourself a deal.” “You mean twenty apiece?” She hesitated, then said, “Ten. Sixty for everything. Final offer.” “The binoculars are worth more than that,” I said. “All by themselves.” “Not as pawn they aren’t.” I kept staring at her back. She wasn’t moving. She knew I was going to give in, I could feel her knowing it, and that made me determined not to give in. I picked up the shotguns. Then I put them down again. “Okay,” I said. She locked the door behind me when I left. The lock shot home with a smack. I dropped the pawn tickets in the gutter, just as she knew I would. Amen___ My father took off for Las Vegas with his girlfriend the day after I arrived in California. He left me with the keys to a rented Pontiac and a charge account at the corner grocery. For two weeks I drove back and forth along the beach and ate TV dinners and went to movies with an acquaintance of my father’s who had offered to keep an eye on me. One morning I woke up to find this man embracing me and making declarations of love. I got him out of the apartment and called my father, who told me to “shoot the bastard” if he came back. For this purpose he directed me to a .223 Air Force Survival Rifle he had hidden in the closet. He waited on the telephone while I fetched the rifle from its hiding place, then instructed me in its assembly. That night the man leaned against the apartment door and sobbed while I stood in the darkness on the other side, silently hugging the rifle, sweating and shaking as in a fever. My father came home a few days before my brother arrived. He took me to meet Geoffrey’s bus and dropped us both off at the apartment while he went out to buy some groceries for dinner. He didn’t return. Several hours later his girlfriend called to say that he had gone crazy and was now in the custody of the police.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Every day in my work I am confronted with the detailed realities that hide behind statistics. I see people who are such good friends that they cannot sustain being lovers. I see lovers who hold so tenaciously to the idea that sex must be spontaneous that they never have it at all. I see couples who view seduction as too much work, something they shouldn’t have to do now that they’re committed. I see others who believe that intimacy means knowing everything about each other. They abdicate any sense of separateness, then are left wondering where the mystery has gone. I see wives who would rather carry the label “low sexual desire” for the rest of their lives than suffer explaining to their husbands that foreplay needs to be more than a prelude to the real thing. I see people so desperate to beat back a feeling of deadness in their partnerships that they’re willing to risk everything for a few moments of forbidden excitement with someone else. I see couples whose sex lives are rekindled by an affair, and others for whom an affair effectively ends what little connection remained. I see older men who feel betrayed by their newly unresponsive penises, who rush for Viagra to soften the anxiety of the hard facts; I see their wives made uncomfortable by the sudden challenge to their own passivity. I see new parents whose erotic energy has been sapped by caring for an infant—so consumed by their child that they don’t remember to close the bedroom door once in a while. I see the man who looks at porn online not because he doesn’t find his wife attractive but because her lack of enthusiasm leaves him feeling that there’s something wrong with him for wanting sex. I see people so ashamed of their sexuality that they spare the one they love the ordeal. I see people who know they are loved, but who long to be desired. They all come to see me because they yearn for erotic vitality. Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don’t just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence. For those who aspire to accelerate their heartbeat periodically, I give them the score: excitement is interwoven with uncertainty, and with our willingness to embrace the unknown rather than to shield ourselves from it. But this very tension leaves us feeling vulnerable. I caution my patients that there is no such thing as “safe sex.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Death Wish Afterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme. You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He called it “blond” when he put it on the furniture, but it wasn’t blond or even off-white; it was stark, industrial strength, eye-frying white. The house reeked of oil. My mother called a few days before Dwight was supposed to drive down and pick her up. She talked to him for a while, then asked to speak to me. She wanted to know how I was. Okay, I told her. She said she had been feeling kind of low and just wanted to check with me, make sure I felt good about everything. It was such a big step. Were Dwight and I getting along all right? I said we were. He was in the living room with me, painting some chairs, but I probably would have given the same answer if I’d been alone. My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late? I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink. After my mother hung up, Dwight and I finished painting the dining-room chairs. Then he lit a cigarette and looked around, his brush still in his hands. He gazed pensively at the piano. He said, “Sort of stands out, doesn’t it?” I looked at it with him. It was an old Baldwin upright, cased in black walnut, that he had bought for twenty dollars from a family on the move who’d grown tired of hauling it around. Dwight did a victory dance after bringing it home. He said the stupid compones had no idea what it was worth, that it was worth twice that much. Dwight sat down at it one night with the idea of demonstrating his virtuosity, but after making a few sour chords he slammed it shut and pronounced it out of tune. He never went near it again. Sometimes Pearl banged out “Chopsticks” but otherwise it got no play at all. It was just a piece of furniture, so dark in all this whiteness that it seemed to be pulsing. You really couldn’t look anywhere else. I agreed that it stood out. We went to work on it.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Lust is always built on a lie. And so for you and me to be free from lust, we have to begin by understanding the lie and where it comes from and why it can be so alluring. The word lust in the Greek language is the word epithumia. It’s actually two words in Greek: the word epi, which means “in,” and the word thumos, which refers to “the mind.” In the mind. Think about the head space we give to things and people we want. It’s easy for our thoughts to be dominated by a craving. We’re in a meeting, we’re taking a walk, we’re studying, we’re doing jobs around the house, and the whole time our brain is miles away, trying to figure out how to get it. It takes ahold of us. We are not free. Lust is slavery. If I want something to the point that I can’t conceive of being content without it, then it owns me. One writer in the scriptures puts it like this: “ ‘I have the right to do anything’—but I will not be mastered by anything.”9 That last part is great, isn’t it? “I will not be mastered by anything.” We are free to do anything we want. But because I can doesn’t mean I should. There is a massive distance between “can” and “best.” We’re addictive creatures. We try things, we experiment, we explore, and certain things hook us. They get their tentacles in us, and we can’t get away from them. What started out as freedom can quickly become slavery. Often freedom is seen as the ability to do whatever you want. But freedom isn’t being able to have whatever we crave. Freedom is going without whatever we crave and being fine with it. Where It Leads In the book of Ephesians, the writer claims that we get enslaved to lust because we become “darkened” in our understanding. The passage explains that we’re separated from the life of God because of ignorance due to the hardening of our hearts.10 It isn’t just what lust does, it’s where lust leads. God made us to appreciate aesthetics: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight. Shape, texture, consistency, color. It all flows from the endless creativity at the center of the universe, and we were created to enjoy it. But when lust has us in its grip, one of the first things to suffer is our appreciation for whatever it is we’re fixated on. The scriptures call this “having lost all sensitivity.”11 The word insensitivity is the Greek word apalgeo. It comes from the root word algeo, which means “to feel pain,” and apo, which means “lacking or going without.” It’s the condition of being void of or past feeling. We could translate the phrase in Ephesians as “having lost the ability to feel things like they used to.” Addictions often rob people of their appreciation of things.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  By then I was addicted to morphine, which the nurses had given me freely because when I didn’t get it I disturbed the ward with my screams. At first I wanted it for the pain; the pain was terrible. Then I wanted it for the peace it gave me. On morphine I didn’t worry. I didn’t even think. I rose out of myself and dreamed benevolent dreams, soaring like a gull in the balmy updraft. The doctor gave me some tablets when I left the hospital, but they had no effect. I was hurting in two ways now, from my finger and from narcotic withdrawal. Though it must have been a mild episode of withdrawal it did not seem mild to me, especially since I didn’t know what it was, or that it would come to an end. Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain. If I had lived in a place where drugs were bought and sold, I would have bought them. I would have done anything to get them. But nobody I knew used drugs. The possibility didn’t even occur to us. The marijuana scare films that might have sparked our interest never made it to Concrete, and heroin use was understood to be unique to the residents of New York City. I was all through being a good sport. Everything was a grievance to me. I complained about school, I complained about the uselessness of my medicine, I complained about how hard it was to eat and dress myself. I begged for comfort and then despised it. I talked back and found fault, especially with Dwight. From behind my wound I said things to Dwight I never would have said to him before. It occurred to me that alcohol might make me feel better. I stole some of Dwight’s Old Crow but the first drink made me choke, so I replenished the bottle with water and put it back. A few nights later Dwight asked me if I had been into his whiskey. It was watery, he said. He seemed more curious than anything else. He probably would have let me off with a warning if I’d admitted it, but I said, “I’m not the drinker in this house.” “Don’t talk to me like that, mister,” he said, and jabbed his fingers against my chest. He didn’t push all that hard, but he caught me off balance. I stumbled backward, tripping on my own feet, and as I went down I threw my hands out behind me to break the fall. All this seemed to happen very slowly, until the moment I landed on my finger. I forgot who I was.