Disappointment

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 114 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Marking Progress along the Way It’s a pretty rigid view of the world that defines success only as crossing the finish line. It’s not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure. The way we view goals as pass-fail is, by definition, inflexible and categorical, causing us to discount or completely ignore any progress that we’ve made. That means, to counteract this problem, we need to find ways to mark that progress, to celebrate the things that we’ve accomplished on the way to the finish line. If you’re trying to summit Everest because you get a lot of value out of that physical and mental challenge, you’re not objectively in the losses if you make it to Camp 1, 2, 3, or 4, or 300 feet from the summit, certainly not in comparison with not having tried at all. Of course, that’s not our subjective experience. That’s what we need to change. We need to find a way to flip the script and stop measuring ourselves solely by how far we are from the finish line. We need to start giving ourselves more credit for how far we are from where we started. If we do that, a silver medal will feel much less disappointing, because in reality it’s a huge accomplishment, as measured against where any figure skater has ever started. Doing that would let you see what an accomplishment it is to earn acceptance as a private student from Itzhak Perlman or, in my case, to have completed five years of graduate-level work. It’s easier to mark and celebrate your progress toward a goal if the goal itself is not so all-or-nothing. There are some goals that you set where there is little of value that you can glean if you come up short. While there are other goals where there are lots of things of value that you can accomplish or learn along the way, no matter whether you actually cross the finish line. Those are the types of goals we should prioritize. This is something Astro Teller really gets. If he has a choice between a project where there is little technology or learning that will come out of the trying versus one where there is, he will prioritize the project where he gets more out of it along the way.

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

  All my impressions of Paris came from American movies, in which everyone wore berets and striped jerseys and sat around smoking cigarettes while accordian music played in the background. It was the same instrument I heard in the background of my mother’s Piaf records. But I didn’t know that it was an accordian. I thought it was a harmonica, and that everyone in Paris knew how to play one. So I bought a harmonica, a Hohner Marine Band, and wandered around Chinook blowing on it, honking out moony approximations of “La Vie en Rose” and the theme from Moulin Rouge to prepare myself for my new life in Paris, France. I WAS SUPPOSED to leave as soon as I finished seventh grade so I’d have the summer to study French and learn my way around before starting school in the fall. My mother had made reservations for me on planes from Seattle to New York, and New York to Paris. She was about to drive me down to Mount Vernon to apply for a passport when my uncle changed the plan. He wrote that he and his wife had had second thoughts about the original idea. It simply didn’t make sense for us to go to the immense trouble and cost of uprooting me from my family, my community, and my school, not to mention my language, only to do it all over again a year later. It took more than a year to get to know a country as complex as France. And there was also the question of authority. They gathered that I had a history of discipline problems. How could they be sure that I would obey them when I didn’t seem to obey my own mother, especially since I knew I’d be leaving at the end of the year? They foresaw a lot of problems, to say the least. But they still wanted to help, and believed I would benefit greatly from the experience of foreign travel, a good school, and a well-regulated family. So they proposed that I should live with them not for just one year but for five years, until I finished high school. And to make sure that I regarded them as my own family, they offered to become my own family. They offered to adopt me. In fact they insisted on adopting me as a condition of the rest of the plan. This was, they said, the only way it could work. My mother was welcome to visit whenever she wanted, of course, but they meant the adoption to be genuine and not just a pro forma arrangement. Henceforth I would be their son. They knew this gave us a lot to think about. They didn’t want to pressure us or hurry us in any way, but we should remember that they needed time to prepare for my arrival, and that summer was coming up fast. I asked my mother why she’d told them I had discipline problems. “Because it’s true.

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

  Oscar Wilde wrote, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it.” When our desires are unfulfilled, we are disappointed. It’s frustrating to be denied a raise, a college acceptance, an audition. When the object of our desire is a person, her rejection leaves us feeling lonely, unworthy, unloved, or—worse—unlovable. But fulfilled desire carries its own brand of loss. Getting what we want undermines the thrill of wanting it. The deliciousness of yearning, the elaborate strategies of pursuit, the charged fantasies, in short all the activity and energy that went into wanting give way to the foreclosure of having. Just think about the last thing you had to have until you owned it. Now that it’s yours, you may enjoy it, you may love it, but do you still want it? Do you even remember how much you wanted it in the first place? Gail Godwin wrote, “The act of longing will always be more intense than the requiting of it.” Is it harder to want what you already have? The law of diminishing returns tells us that increased frequency leads to decreased satisfaction. The more you use a product, the less satisfying each subsequent use will be. Paris just isn’t the same on your fifteenth trip as it was on the first. Fortunately, the logic of this argument breaks down when it is applied to love, for it is based on the erroneous assumption that we can own a person in the same way that we can own an iPod or a new pair of Prada heels. When my friend Jane said, “Perhaps I only want what I can’t have,” I responded, “What makes you think you have your husband?” The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility. It’s remarkable to me how a sudden threat to the status quo (an affair, an infatuation, a prolonged absence, or even a really good fight) can suddenly ignite desire. There’s nothing like the fear of loss to make those old shoes look new again.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Self-Help Best Seller When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do. (“Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length,” Terry Castle writes, “I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness.”) But then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonymed women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There is a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life. A pie chart! The first book about lesbian abuse was published the year I was born. Not the most ancient scholarship in the world, but old enough. Why did no one tell me? But who would have told me? I knew so few queer people, and most of them were my age, still figuring things out themselves. I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Galeazzo had chosen for her was Girolamo Riario, the thirty-year-old nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, a marriage that would forge a valuable alliance between Rome and Milan. As part of the arrangement, the pope purchased the city of Imola, in Romagna, which the Sforzas had taken decades before, christening the new couple the Count and Countess of Imola. Later the pope would add the nearby town of Forlì to their possessions, giving them control of a very strategically located part of northeastern Italy, just south of Venice. In her initial encounters with him, Caterina’s husband seemed a most unpleasant man. He was moody, self-absorbed, and high- strung. He appeared interested in her only for sex and could not wait for her to come of age. Fortunately, he continued to live in Rome and she stayed in Milan. But a few years later some disgruntled noblemen in Milan murdered her beloved father, and the power of the Sforzas seemed in jeopardy. Her position as the marriage pawn solidifying the partnership with Rome was now more important than ever. She quickly installed herself in Rome. There she would have to play the exemplary wife and keep on the good side of her husband. But the more she saw of Girolamo, the less she respected him. He was a hothead, making enemies wherever he turned. She had not imagined that a man could be so weak, and compared with her father he failed by every measure. She turned her attention to the pope. She worked hard to gain his favor and that of his courtiers. Caterina was now a beautiful young woman with blond hair, a novelty in Rome. She ordered the most elaborate gowns to be sent from Milan. She made sure to never be seen wearing the same outfit twice. If she sported a turban with a long veil, it suddenly became the latest craze. She reveled in the attention she received as the most fashionable woman in Rome, Botticelli using her as a model for some of his greatest paintings. Being so well read and cultivated, she was the delight of the artists and writers in town, and the Romans began to warm up to her. Within a few years, however, everything unraveled. Her husband instigated a feud with one of the leading families in Italy, the Colonnas. Then in 1484 the pope suddenly died, and without his protection Caterina and her husband were in grave danger. The Colonnas were plotting their revenge. The Romans hated Girolamo. And it was almost a certainty that the new pope would be a friend of the Colonnas, in which case Caterina and her husband would lose everything, including the towns of Forlì and Imola. Considering the weak position of her own family in Milan, the situation began to look desperate. Until a new pope was elected, Girolamo was still the captain of the papal armies, now stationed just outside Rome. For days Caterina watched her husband, who was paralyzed with fear and

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  356The History of Christianity II SECULARIZATION õFactors like declining church attendance numbers and the shrinking role of professional clergy in public life have many Christians, particularly in the Western world, wondering what to do. Some evangelical Christians in America have gone from calling themselves the moral majority to saying they must accept their role as a moral minority in a pagan culture. õSome conservatives have blamed all these things on the Social Gospel. For more than a century, they have called the Social Gospel a dangerous shift in the church’s focus from personal salvation and the life hereafter toward, instead, trying to save the world in the here and now. õIt’s not really the job of historians to call a faith a success or failure. But Christians themselves think in these terms all the time. And often, they’re very focused on numbers: baptism rates, the percentage of tithing members, and so on. This is true for liberal Christians as well as for conservatives. õBut to take the attitude that success is a numbers game is to adopt what the historian David Hollinger calls a “Christian survivalist” mentality. What if, instead, we ask the question from a historian’s perspective: Which Christian groups have had great historical significance? Which have changed the course of history? We see that many of the Christian traditions that are dwindling today, like the liberal Protestant denominations in North America, had an incredible role in shaping modern Western society. õHollinger points out that many of them took that uncomfortable, humbling experience they had in the mission field, where they learned to respect other cultures and skin colors, and brought it home, where they helped lead the civil rights movement, encouraged their fellow citizens to embrace more freedoms for women, urged them to view non-Christian religions with curiosity and compassion, and generally laid the groundwork for a more tolerant, peaceful, pluralist society. 357Lecture 36—The Challenge of 21 st -Century Christianity õThese churches are now shrinking; perhaps their historical moment is in its twilight. But judging by the Christian principle of the incarnation, the notion of making God’s presence real in the human world, these churches can’t be considered a failure. õFrom another angle, many people call secular modernity, not religion, the big failure: It has not brought peace, happiness, or material comfort to billions of people. War and terrorism rage in some areas. Drug addiction epidemics have destroyed families and communities in countries that are supposedly the wealthiest and most modern on earth. õPerhaps disappointment with the promises of modernity is a major reason for the global explosion of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christianity during the 20 th century. These are faith traditions that boldly rebel against the claims of modern reason; they say people can speak in strange tongues and claim the gifts of prophecy and healing.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  143 stage conventions that were permissible on European stages. All drama had to be either comic or tragic, neither of which captures what it feels like to live an ordinary life or to spend an ordinary day. Chekhov’s goal was to let life be the determiner of form, rather than the other way around. Uncle Vanya (1900) illustrates Chekhov’s method. In the play, a group of characters on a country estate keeps half a dozen plots in motion, all of which are at cross-purposes and are mutually incompatible. There is no single central character; like life, this play is an ensemble event, with each character trying to make himself or herself its central character—and failing, because all the other characters are trying to do the same thing. There are multiple plots, some of which cancel each other out. The climax of the play is anticlimactic; at the end, the characters are all back where they were when it started. Eric Bentley says that the difference between an Ibsen and a Chekhov play is that in Ibsen’s plays a secret is slowly revealed that indicates that what everyone believed all these years was not really so; in Chekhov’s plays what everyone believed all these years is con ¿ rmed, even though no one wants to believe it. The ending of Uncle Vanya is neither comic nor tragic, and its life seems simply to go offstage to continue as it had been before the play started and while we were watching it. As we have discussed in this lecture, realism comes to drama in Ibsen’s introduction of contemporary and sometimes sensational material and in Chekhov’s manipulation of the form of drama, making its trajectory more like that of ordinary life. Between them they prepared the way for a period of great drama in the Western world. Their descendents include George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. Their achievements stimulated the reactions of innovative playwrights like Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht. In many ways what Nora does in A Doll’ s House is as revolutionary as what Faust does in his play and what Catherine Earnshaw does in Wuthering Heights. The Realist Movement takes these grand gestures out of the cosmic realm and locates them in the Victorian drawing room. Ŷ That’s how Realism came to drama. Ibsen kept the old forms, but he renewed the drama. … Chekhov changed the form … making it more like ordinary life.

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

  I met Maria when she was at the tail end of a heartbreak. She’d just spent two years on the west coast with a man she thought she was going to marry, only to come home a disillusioned wreck. Her friends decided it was time for her to meet a nice man, a mensch. Enough of these himbos (for those of you unfamiliar with this new term, himbos are male bimbos sought by successful women). The friends organized a dinner party with a mission: a tasteful cover-up for a first date. It worked. For Maria, dating Nico was a reeducation in the art of love, a slow unfolding that was remarkably worry-free. She didn’t fall in love; she grew to love him. But a year after meeting him, she’s in my office, asking, “How important is sex, anyway? I keep going back and forth. I know you can’t build a life on passion. I’ve tried that. My grandma used to say, ‘What are you going to live on, love? Hah! You’ve got a lot to learn.’ My mother’s no better. Her line is, ‘Sweetheart, passion is doomed. Take my word for it, what you need is to find someone you can live with. Someone who’s like you, who shares your values. You know, money doesn’t hurt, either.’ I love Nico. I’ve never felt so secure, so trusting. And after years of being out there dating more than my share of jerks, I’m finally free to think about other things in my life. But I just don’t know. I don’t think we click sexually. It’s an issue. Or is it? Everyone says that the sex fades anyway, no matter how steamy it is in the beginning, so how important is it, really?” “You tell me,” I prompt her. “You know what I tell myself? ‘Girl, you had your fun. It’s time to grow up. He’s a great guy. Get over yourself.’” Three years after Maria asked me the question, “How important is sex, anyway?” she’s back again. Evidently, she hasn’t yet found her answer. In the beginning she was so taken up by the thrill of security that she was able to postpone dealing with her lack of sexual responsiveness to Nico. She held out some hope that the problem would take care of itself, that one day the block would lift and everything would fall into place. Nico, for his part, is a patient man. He wasn’t going to push, even though he is clearly less than jolly about their anemic sex life. Not pushing the issue is his way of forestalling rejection. In our sessions Maria had always displayed an approach-avoidance attitude to the topic of sex. On the few occasions that she brought it up directly, it was always at the end of the hour, when there was no time left for discussion. One week I decided to keep my foot on the gas and rev up the conversation. “Sex is hard, isn’t it?” I asked her.

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

  My father had been in touch, she told me. He’d arranged everything. I would take the bus down to La Jolla as soon as school let out, and Geoffrey would join me there after his graduation from Princeton. “What about you?” I said. “What about me?” “Are you going to come too? Later, if things go all right?” “I’d be a fool if I did,” she said morosely, as if she knew that wouldn’t keep her from doing it. We talked about Dwight and his little ways. How he used to stay up late counting all the pieces of candy in the house to see how many I’d eaten that day. How he used to run into the living room when he came home and put his hand on top of the TV to see if it was warm. How he bought vacuum cleaner bags by the dozen and wrote month-apart dates on each one so they would last exactly a year. My mother said he’d been on his best behavior since she started looking for work. He didn’t want her to leave. Now that she’d found a job he was falling all over himself to be nice to her. He was sort of courting her, she said. Being friendly and having Pearl cozy up to her all the time. He had even applied for a transfer to Seattle so he could be close to her. “I don’t get it,” she said. “He doesn’t even like me. He just wants to hang on. It’s so strange.” Then my mother said she had something to tell me, and I knew from the way she said it that it wasn’t going to be good. It was about my money, she said, the money Dwight had been saving for me from my paper route. She knew I was planning to use it to pay the fees not covered by my scholarship. The trouble was, Dwight hadn’t really been saving it. It wasn’t there. Not a penny of it. She had asked him about it and he stalled and avoided the subject until she finally cornered him, and then he admitted that he didn’t have it. He also didn’t have the money she had earned at the cookhouse. The account was completely empty. “I’ll get the five hundred,” she said, “don’t worry about that.” All I could do was look at her. “There isn’t anything we can do about it. It’s gone. You just have to forget about it.” That wasn’t what I was doing. I wasn’t forgetting about it. I was remembering it. Over $1,300. But it wasn’t really the money that made me feel sorry for myself, it was the time. For two and a half years I had spent all my afternoons delivering papers. Most nights I went out again after dinner to collect from my subscribers and to try to recruit new ones. People didn’t like to pay me. Even the honest ones put me off again and again.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight. But that doesn’t mean that the inverse is true, that if you stick to something, you will succeed at it. Prospectively, it’s neither true nor good advice. In fact, sometimes it’s downright destructive. If you are a bad singer, it doesn’t matter how long you stick with it. You’re not going to be Adele. If you are fifty years old and set your sights on becoming an Olympic gymnast, no amount of grit or effort will make it possible for you to succeed. Thinking otherwise is as absurd as reading one of those articles about the habits of billionaires, finding out that they wake up before 4 a.m., and figuring that if you get up before 4 a.m. you will become a billionaire. We ought not confuse hindsight with foresight, which is what these aphorisms do. People stick to things all the time that they don’t succeed at, sometimes based on the belief that if they stick with it long enough, that will lead to success. Sometimes they stick with it because winners never quit. Either way, a lot of people are banging their heads against the wall, unhappy because they think there is something wrong with them rather than something wrong with the advice. Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest. When the world tells you to quit, it is, of course, possible you might see something the world doesn’t see, causing you to rightly persist even when others would abandon the cause. But when the world is screaming at the top of its lungs to quit and you refuse to listen, grit can become folly. Too often, we refuse to listen. This may be, in part, because quitting has a nearly universal negative connotation. If someone calls you a quitter, would you ever consider it a compliment? The answer is obvious. Quitting means failing, capitulating, losing. Quitting shows a lack of character. Quitters are losers (except, of course, when it involves giving up something obviously bad like smoking, alcohol, drugs, or an abusive relationship).

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Parallel UniverseYou occasionally find yourself idly thinking about how it could have gone right. Or, maybe gone isn’t the best word, because it suggests that nothing was under anyone’s control; the outcome is merely fate, or chaos theory. But assuming she’d been normal, assuming she hadn’t homed in on your soft spots, assuming she’d not been shot through with that dark, smoky core of poison, what would have happened? Any number of things. Maybe you and she and Val would have stayed a threesome, a polyamory success story. Maybe you wouldn’t have stayed together but you would have remained dear friends, a trio growing old parallel to each other. Or maybe it would have been messy and sad. Sometimes you wish you’d had the chance to find out. Dream House as Self-Help Best SellerWhen it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do. (“Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length,” Terry Castle writes, “I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness.”) But then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonymed women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There is a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life. A pie chart! The first book about lesbian abuse was published the year I was born. Not the most ancient scholarship in the world, but old enough. Why did no one tell me? But who would have told me? I knew so few queer people, and most of them were my age, still figuring things out themselves. I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  started. But as is so often the case, when it comes to goals, our cognition cares very little for what economists have to say. Being in the losses is as much a state of mind as anything else. We don’t see ourselves as being in the gains, even though we’ve gone farther than where we started, because we’re not measuring ourselves by how far we are past the starting line. We’re measuring ourselves by whether we’re short of the finish line. Because we don’t want to close mental accounts in the losses, we’re just going to keep running toward the finish line, even if we feel our leg is about to snap, and even after it does. If you turn around 300 feet from the summit of Everest, you will feel like you failed. That must have been the feeling that stuck with Rob Hall and his client Doug Hansen when they turned around that close to the summit in 1995, the year before the expedition chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book. Never mind that Hansen climbed more than 28,000 feet, something few humans have ever accomplished. Hansen expressed this feeling of failure from the previous year so poignantly when he told Krakauer, “The summit looked soooo close. Believe me, there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it.” When Hall convinced Hansen to come back and try again, that started them both in the losses. They opened a new account, a second attempt to summit Everest, and anything short of reaching that summit would mean failing yet again. Hall felt compelled to let Hansen reach the finish line this time, and so he, otherwise regarded as an extremely methodical guide and expedition leader, waited two hours at the summit for Hansen to arrive, long after the turnaround time he set for his clients. Of course, that ended in tragedy for both of them. Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There’s no partial credit given. Altogether, the pass-fail nature of goals can impede progress, cause escalation of commitment, and stop us from considering the progress we make along the way as a success. The shame in all this is that those finish lines are often arbitrary.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  235Lecture 24—Apocalyptic Faith in the 1800s and Beyond õMiller began studying the Bible intently, and he became convinced that he’d hit on the true way to interpret biblical prophecy. He claimed that he’d discovered the date when Jesus would return to Earth. The Second Coming was to occur between March 1843 and March 1844. William Miller was a master of self-promotion, and at the peak of Miller’s career, he had probably 50,000 followers nationwide. õ But there was a problem: March 1844 came and went, and Jesus failed to show up. In response to the confusion, one of Miller’s followers took another look at the calculations and concluded that he’d been off by a year. õMiller announced a new date: He promised that Jesus would definitely return on October 22, 1844. And his followers threw themselves into evangelism, printing tracts and preaching about the end times with more zeal than ever. But the world failed to end again, and his followers were crushed. NEW APOCALYPTIC CHURCHES õHowever, the Millerite movement was not really over. A Millerite named Hiram Edson initially felt deep despair. But he eventually experienced a vision convincing him that Christ had, indeed, returned on the date Miller predicted. õThis return had been a heavenly event, not an earthly one, and Edson believed that the Bible’s end-time prophecies were still to come. A group of ex-Millerites, who called themselves Adventists, took heart in Edson’s vision and explanation of the prophecy. They later organized as the Seventh-day Adventist denomination in 1863. õAnother apocalyptic movement that emerged about a generation after Miller’s predictions is the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are best known today for their determined door-to-door missionary work. They are dogged in their work because they believe we are in the end times and Armageddon is close at hand.

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

  If marriage is about love, as we like to believe, then married sex must be a declaration of love. It has to be meaningful. But, the sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor says: For [married] sex to be “meaningful,” it must always be an expression of love—preferably of lifelong, abiding love—every time we climb into bed with one another. And what an incredible burden that is! It eliminates sex stimulated by a whole array of other emotions and sensations: playful sex and angry sex, quick, “mindless” sex and “naughty” sex. It eliminates, in fact, just about every occasion for having sex there is. After all, who can feel “lifelong, abiding love” that regularly—especially at eleven o’clock at night? Marriage, we’ve been taught, is about commitment, security, comfort, and family. It’s a serious business, a responsible and purposeful enterprise; it’s all the things we need, and all the things we need to do. Play and its playmates (risk, seduction, naughtiness, transgression) are left to fend for themselves outside the solid architecture of our homes. Many people in my field assume that the intensity that shapes the early stages of romance is a sort of temporary insanity, destined to be cured by the rigors of the long haul. Clinicians often interpret the lust for sexual adventure—ranging from simple flirting to infatuation, from maintaining contact with previous lovers to cross-dressing, threesomes, and fetishes—as an infantile fantasy or a fear of commitment. They favor a model of love as a companionate, intimate, collaborative partnership. What we are left with is a relationship that is strong on cooperation and communication but weak on complicity and playfulness. But dispassionate friendship is a problematic ecology for cultivating eroticism. The Day I Got That Ring… Jacqueline and Philip are trying to rekindle the spark they once had. Married for ten years, they are finally emerging from the haze of parenting young children. This fall their youngest son began kindergarten, and his new schedule put some order back into theirs. At the same time, in the past year their friends have gone through an epidemic of divorces. “All these couples we used to hang out with, who got married right around the same time as us, are throwing in the towel,” Philip tells me. “It makes you think about what you value, and it puts you face to face with the fatal flaws in your own relationship.” “And your fatal flaw?” I ask them. “Sex,” he answers. “Cheating,” she says. When they met, Jacqueline was the winning prize for Philip. “Jackie was smart, beautiful, and sexy. I couldn’t believe she was interested in me. I was really into her. I was all over her, too. We had great sex for a long time. Right up until I asked her to marry me,” he recalls. “What happened when she said yes?” I inquire.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  100 Lecture 24: Voltaire’s Candide Voltaire’s Candide Lecture 24 Voltaire is one of the most important writers of the Age of Reason, and he worked in so many different genres. He wrote drama, and history, and letters, and essays, and philosophy as well as prose ¿ ctions like Candide, and … his collected works run to about 135 volumes. V oltaire played an important role in the Neoclassical Age. He was a voluminous author in many genres. He was also a perpetual critic of the French government and the Catholic Church. After his death, he was heralded as someone who had prepared the way for the French Revolution. The subtitle of Candide is Optimism. Optimism was a popular 18 th-century theory that asserted that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Optimism argues that since God is both omnipotent and benevolent, he necessarily created the best of all worlds. Therefore, certain conditions in the world— famine, À ood, earthquakes, disease—are necessarily a part of this best of all worlds, each promoting some greater good of which we, from our limited perspectives, are unaware. The theory was generated in its most complex form by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, but it was adopted, simpli¿ ed, and endorsed by a wide variety of 18 th-century theorists, including Christian Wolff and Alexander Pope. V oltaire himself was an Optimist in his early years, but he found it increasingly dif ¿ cult to square the immense amount of suffering in the world with the theory. He abandoned the theory altogether after the Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755, and Candide is his explicit refutation of the theory. Candide is a prose ¿ ction, not a novel, because it does not adhere to standards of the novel form, especially the standards of the form in the 18 th century. First, it has too much coincidence in it to be entirely plausibleAlso, its characters are not fully developed in novelistic ways. Additionally, it is extremely unlikely that its protagonists could have endured all that they do and still survive, even though many of the events in the book did actually happen to someone.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Ambition She takes you to Harvard’s campus, which you’d never seen, and you find yourself engaging in some kind of weird retrospective fantasy. When she shows you the undergraduate dining hall, which basically looks like Hogwarts, you keep thinking to yourself: Maybe I should have gone to Harvard? Maybe I should have applied? You keep thinking back to why you applied to the colleges you did, and you remember—for the first time in years—that you chose your college list almost completely at random. You wanted to go to a city and you wanted to get out of Pennsylvania; those were the only two criteria. You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing. She takes your arm as you walk among the buildings, as if you would have belonged there, as if you belong there, like she does.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  DECENT PEOPLEBut it isn’t serious, he said, waving his hand at the snarl of traffic on the boulevard leading into the center, of course not, if it were serious we would be part of it, nie shofyorite, taxi drivers he meant, we would blockade the streets like we did during the Changes, everyone would be on strike. You could be proud in those days, he said, meaning 1989, when Communism fell, we were proud, we were organized. I was young then, it was a wonderful time. I could have left, he said, I could have gone anywhere, Europe, America, but I didn’t want to go anywhere, I wanted to stay here. We thought it was the most exciting place to be, we thought we would make something out of our country, we had so much hope, do you understand, we felt so much hope because finally we were free. Free, he said, then sucked hard on his cigarette, turning to the window to blow the smoke away from me, we thought we would make something new but we didn’t. It was the same assholes, he said—the word he used was neshtastnitsi, the literal meaning is something like unhappy or unlucky, the unfortunate ones—it was the same assholes who took over. It was still hot though it was the end of the afternoon, people were heading home from work, heading home or to the center, as we were, where already protesters were gathering as they had all week, in the hundreds and thousands. I had been watching them on the news but wanted to be among them in person, it felt like something remarkable was happening or about to happen in this country where so little happens, really, which is usually so quiescent. I wanted to see it for myself though it had nothing to do with me, of course, it wasn’t my country, would never be my country, I was leaving at the end of the term. But it had been my home, as close to home as anywhere else, and I wanted the demonstrations to be more than a momentary spasm, I felt the hope that some of my students felt, my colleagues, I wanted it to be real. What does it matter which party takes over, he went on, vse edno, they’re all the same, they’re all thieves, look what they’ve done to my country. The traffic moved a little finally, he gripped the steering wheel again, the cigarette burned almost to the filter between the first and second fingers of his left hand. I could have gone away but I didn’t, he said, prostak, idiot, I’ve fucked my life. He was still a young man, I thought, or at least he wasn’t old, maybe a few years older than I was, too young to talk the way he was talking. Too young by American time, I mean, different times pertain in different places.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  reigning Olympic champion Sarah Hughes in 2003) finished ahead of Sasha Cohen. As a seventeen-year-old, she finished fourth in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and earned gold medals in six Grand Prix competitions in 2002–2003 (including the Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final in 2003). She won six other international events between 2001 and 2005, and medaled at the World Championships in 2004 (silver), 2005 (silver), and 2006 (bronze). During Cohen’s time in figure skating, her focus and persistence was what we expect of the world’s top athletic performers. She started skating at seven and was competing regularly by eleven, when she began homeschooling to maximize her time practicing, training, and competing. The intensity of her commitment led to numerous injuries and related setbacks. She continued to suffer from the back problems that took her out of the 2001 U.S. Championships, limiting her competitive schedule in 2004 and 2005. But 2006 looked like it was going to be Sasha Cohen’s year. Michelle Kwan, now twenty-five, had been training for an Olympic bid but withdrew from three late 2005 competitions due to a hip injury. She also withdrew immediately before the start of the U.S. Championships in January, ending her eight-year winning streak. Cohen earned gold, finally becoming U.S. champion. Kwan petitioned for a medical waiver to compete in the Olympic Games, received it, but then had to withdraw when she suffered an injury during her first practice in Turin. This signaled the end of Michelle Kwan’s competitive skating career. Cohen was now the heir apparent to America’s skating dynasty, which included medals in ten consecutive Olympics, five of them gold, including in three of the previous four Olympics. Cohen held the lead after the short program and the gold medal was hers to lose. But less than thirty seconds into her long program in the finals, she fell. As a testament to how great she was, despite the fall and the instant realization that she would not win, she

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

  The last picture she took was of me and Pearl. “Closer!” she yelled. “Come on! Okay, now hold hands. Hold hands! You know, hands? Like on the end of your arms?” She ran up to us, took Pearl’s left hand, put it in my right hand, wrapped my fingers around it, then ran back to her vantage point and aimed the camera at us. Pearl let her hand go dead limp. So did I. We both stared at Norma. “Jeez,” she said. “Dead on arrival.” On the way back to Chinook my mother said, “Dwight, I didn’t know you played an instrument. What do you play?” Dwight was chewing on an unlit cigar. He took it out of his mouth. “A little piano,” he said. “Mainly sax. Alto sax.” Skipper and Norma looked quickly at each other, then looked away again, out the windows. * * * WHEN DWIGHT FIRST invited us to Chinook he’d won me over by mentioning that the rifle club was going to hold a turkey shoot. If I wanted to, he said, I could bring my Winchester along and enter the contest. I hadn’t fired or even held my rifle since we left Salt Lake. Every couple of weeks or so I tore the house apart looking for it, but my mother had it hidden somewhere else, probably in her office downtown. I thought of the trip to Chinook as a reunion with my rifle. During art period I made drawings of it and showed them to Taylor and Silver, who affected disbelief in its existence. I also painted a picture that depicted me sighting down the the barrel of my rifle at a big gobbler with rolling eyes and long red wattles. The turkey shoot was at noon. Dwight and Pearl and my mother and I drove down to the firing range while Skipper went off to work on a car that he was customizing and Norma stayed home to cook. Not until we reached the range did Dwight get around to telling me that in fact there would be no turkey at this turkey shoot. The targets were paper—regulation match targets. They weren’t even giving a turkey away; the prize was a smoked Virginia ham. Turkey shoot was just a figure of speech, Dwight said. He thought everybody knew that. He also let drop, casually, as if the information were of no consequence, that I would not be allowed to shoot after all. It was for grown-ups, not kids. That was all they needed, a bunch of kids running around with guns. “But you said I could.” Dwight was assembling my Winchester, which he apparently meant to use himself. “They just told me a couple of days ago,” he said. I could tell he was lying—that he’d known all along. I couldn’t do a thing but stand there and look at him. Pearl, smiling a little, watched me.

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

  As he drove he listed the advantages of life in Chinook. The air. The water. No crime, no juvenile delinquency. For scenery all you had to do was step out your front door, which you never had to lock. Hunting. Fishing. In fact the Skagit was one of the best trout streams in the world. Ted Williams—-who, not many people realized, was a world-class angler as well as a baseball great, not to mention a war hero—-had been fishing here for years. Pearl sat up front between Dwight and my mother. She had her head on my mother’s shoulder and was almost in her lap. I sat in the backseat between Skipper and Norma. They were quiet. At one point my mother turned and asked, “How about you guys? How do you like it here?” They looked at each other. Skipper said, “Fine.” “Fine,” Norma said. “It’s just a little isolated, is all.” “Not that isolated,” Dwight said. “Well,” Norma said, “maybe not that isolated. Pretty isolated, though.” “There’s plenty to do here if you kids would just take a little initiative,” Dwight said. “When I was growing up we didn’t have all the things you kids have, we didn’t have record players, we didn’t have TVs, all of that, but we were never bored. We were never bored. We used our imaginations. We read the classics. We played musical instruments. There is absolutely no excuse for a kid to be bored, not in my book there isn’t. You show me a bored kid and I’ll show you a lazy kid.” My mother glanced at Dwight, then turned back to Norma and Skipper. “You’ll be graduating this year, right?” she said to Skipper. He nodded. “And you have another year,” she said to Norma. “One more year,” Norma said. “One more year and watch my dust.” “How’s the school here?” “They don’t have one. Just a grade school. We go to Concrete.” “Concrete?” “Concrete High,” Norma said. “That’s the name of a town?” “We passed it on the way up,” Dwight said. “Concrete.” “Concrete,” my mother repeated. “It’s a few miles downriver,” Dwight said. “Forty miles,” Norma said. “Come off it,” Dwight said. “It’s not that far.” “Thirty-nine miles,” Skipper said. “Exactly. I measured it on the odometer.” “What’s the difference!” Dwight said. “You’d bellyache just as much if the goddamned school was next door. If all you can do is complain, I would thank you to just stow it. Just kindly stow it.” Dwight kept looking back as he talked. His lower lip was curled out, and his bottom teeth showed. The car wandered the road. “I’m in fifth grade,” Pearl said. Nobody answered her. We drove on for a while. Then my mother asked Dwight to pull over. She wanted to take some pictures. She had Dwight and Norma and Skipper and Pearl stand together on the side of the road with snowy peaks sticking up behind them. Then Norma grabbed the camera and started ordering everyone around.