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.

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• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Lesson 6: Never Send to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls One day, in the fourth year of therapy, Irene arrived carrying a large portfolio. She put it on the floor, slowly unbuckled it, and pulled out a big canvas, keeping its back toward me so I couldn’t see it. “Did I tell you I was taking art lessons?” she asked in an uncharacteristically playful manner. “No. First I’ve heard of it. But I think that’s great.” And I did. I took no umbrage that she mentioned it en passant; every therapist is used to patients’ forgetting to mention the good things in their lives. Perhaps it’s simply a misunderstanding, a mistaken assumption by patients that since therapy is pathology-oriented, therapists want to hear only about problems. Other patients, however, who are dependent upon therapy choose to conceal positive developments lest their therapists conclude that they no longer need help. Now, taking a breath, Irene flipped the canvas. Before me gleamed a still life, a simple wooden bowl containing a lemon, an orange, and an avocado. While impressed with her graphic skills, I felt disappointed in her subject matter, so flat and pointless. I would have hoped for something more relevant to our work. But I feigned interest and was convincingly enthusiastic in my praise. Not as convincing as I had thought, I soon learned. In the next session she announced, “I’m signing up for another six months of art lessons.” “That’s wonderful. Same teacher?” “Yes, same teacher, same class.” “You mean a still-life class?” “You’re hoping not, I think. Obviously there’s something you’re not sharing.” “Like what?” I began to feel uncomfortable. “What’s your hunch?” “I see I’ve hit on something.” Irene grinned. “Almost never do you fall back on the traditional shrink practice of answering a question with a question.” “Never miss a trick, Irene. Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.” Here I invoked a practice I always teach my students: when two opposing feelings put you in a dilemma, your best recourse is to express both feelings and the dilemma. “First, as I said, I admired it greatly. I have absolutely no artistic talent and am filled with respect for work of such quality.” I hesitated, and Irene nudged me: “But—” “But—well—uh—I’m so pleased with your finding pleasure in painting that I dread sounding even slightly critical, but I guess I was hoping that you might do something with your art that might be more—uh—how to put it?—resonant with our therapy.” “Resonant?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  must consciously develop, because we humans are generally inept when it comes to such assessments. The general source of our ineptness is that we tend to base our judgments of people on what is most apparent. But as stated earlier, people often try to cover up their weaknesses by presenting them as something positive. We see them brimming with self-confidence, only to later discover that they are actually arrogant and incapable of listening. They seem frank and sincere, but over time we realize that they are actually boorish and unable to consider the feelings of others. Or they seem prudent and thoughtful, but eventually we see that they are in fact timid at their core and afraid of the slightest criticism. People can be quite adept at creating these optical illusions, and we fall for them. Similarly, people will charm and flatter us and, blinded by our desire to like them, we fail to look deeper and see the character flaws. Related to this, when we look at people we often are really seeing only their reputation, the myth that surrounds them, the position they occupy, and not the individual. We come to believe that a person who has success must by nature be generous, intelligent, and good, and that they deserve everything they have gotten. But successful people come in all shapes. Some are good at using others to get where they have gotten, masking their own incompetence. Some are completely manipulative. Successful people have just as many character flaws as anyone else. Also, we tend to believe that someone who adheres to a particular religion or political belief system or moral code must have the character to go with this. But people bring the character they have to the position they occupy or to the religion they practice. A person can be a progressive liberal or a loving Christian and still be an intolerant tyrant at heart. The first step, then, in studying character is to be aware of these illusions and façades and to train ourselves to look through them. We must scrutinize everybody for signs of their character, no matter the appearance they present or the position they occupy. With this firmly in mind, we can then work on several key components to the skill: recognizing certain signs that people emit in certain situations and that clearly reveal their character; understanding some general categories that people fit into (strong versus weak character, for instance), and finally being aware of certain types of characters that often are the most toxic and should be avoided if possible. Character Signs The most significant indicator of people’s character comes through their actions over time. Despite what people say about the lessons they have learned (see Howard Hughes), and how they have changed over the years, you will inevitably notice the same actions and decisions repeating in the course of their life. In these decisions they reveal their character. You must take notice of any salient forms

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I don’t know where a dump is, and I don’t know how long it takes to get back from one. A car pulls up to the curb, stops, and one of my girl cousins gets out holding a sack. Aunt Bernie and my other cousin stay in the car. My mother hangs up the phone and goes to the door while Bernice and I watch each other through the glass. “We went to the store and this is for Jo-Jo,” my cousin says when she hands the sack over. She’s been crying. “We didn’t get anything!” she bursts out. My mother sends her into the kitchen for cookies. “One for you, one for your sister, and none for your mom,” she tells her. She holds up the sack and calls, “You didn’t have to do this!” to Bernie, who rolls down her window. “You’re raising a brat!” she hollers. My mother laughs and shakes her fist in the air. The girl cousin goes back down the sidewalk and triumphantly shows her mother the cookies before getting in. They pull away from the curb and my mother waves as they head down the street, then says, “I’d like to slap that mouth right off her face.” Linda and Pattyann come into view on the other side of the street. They look both ways and then hop across the street on one foot. “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” my mother says brightly, setting the sack on the coffee table. She checks all her pockets, looking for her lighter, then puts a cigarette in her mouth and heads to the kitchen to light it on the stove. They got that sack at the store. Outside, a lady is walking by with a dog, and Linda and Pattyann pet the dog so fervently the lady has to pull him away and keep going. The sack is folded over at the top and it’s pretty big but not that big. Linda and Pattyann start playing hopscotch on the front sidewalk, using soda crackers for markers. My mother is all excited about the sack. She sits down with her ashtray and pats the couch next to her. I climb up and then lie down with my eyes closed. She can’t figure out why we aren’t more curious about our new present. It must be something very special or they wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here. You know, there just might be something inside that will make Jo-Jo forget her troubles. So. Is somebody ready to go down for her nap, or is she ready to sit up here right now and see what’s in the sack? It’s a box with a picture of girl on it. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and a pearl necklace. Her hair is curled and she has lipstick on. Inside the box are a broom, a dustpan, and a vacuum cleaner. “Christ,” my mother snorts.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Hypochondria You tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees. She does go, for a while. The first morning, you make her coffee and breakfast, so that she’s ready to head out into the world. You feel like a mother on her child’s first day of school. You sit there in your underwear and robe, contemplating the winter morning from the plate-glass window in her kitchen. She returns in a cheery mood, holding a second coffee; her nose and the tops of her ears blushing with winter. “What did the therapist say?” you ask. “I know I shouldn’t be asking, I just think—” “We’re still getting to know each other,” she says. “It’s too early to say.” Things get better for a little bit. They really do. She is attentive, kind, patient. She brings you treats—little foods, dips and things, your favorite—and leaves them for you to find when you wake up. A few weeks later, she tells you over the phone that she’s not going to continue therapy. “It’s too much time,” she says. “I’m really fucking busy.” “It’s one hour a week,” you say, gutted. “Besides, he says I’m totally fine,” she says. “He says I don’t need therapy.” 37 “You threw things at me,” you say. “You chased me. You destroyed everything around me. You have no memory of any of it. Doesn’t that alarm you?” 38 She is silent. Then she says, “I’ve got lots of things to do. You don’t understand how hard I work.” You remember your promise, to leave her if she doesn’t get help. But you don’t push the issue. You will never talk about it ever again. 37 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type X905.4, The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless. 38 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C411.1, Taboo: Asking for reason of an unusual action. Dream House as Dirty Laundry One day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer? But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance: Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas? She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm. Every answer enrages her. When you tell her, “No one,” she calls you a liar. When you say, “Just my roommates,” her eyes go flat and hard as flint.

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

  Planning has proved to be most useful for Stephanie. She elaborates, “Warren’s idea of a date is this: he approaches me for sex at eleven on Tuesday, and when I turn him down he says, ‘Can we have a date tomorrow night?’ I’ve had to explain to him that, for me, scheduled intercourse is not a date. I need to go out. I want food that someone else has cooked, on dishes that someone else is going to wash. When we go out, we talk, we kiss, we joke. We can finish a sentence without being interrupted. He pays attention to me, and it makes me feel sexy.” Not only do their rendezvous help maintain the emotional connection so critical for Stephanie; they also help her to make the transition from full-time mom to lover. “For so long, my thinking about sex was about how to avoid it. Knowing that Warren and I have a date has helped me to anticipate it instead. I pamper myself. I take a shower, shave my legs, put on makeup. I make a special effort to block the negativity and to give myself permission just to be sexual.” The story of Stephanie and Warren is typical of the effect of parenthood on eroticism, but it is only one among many. It is the story of a straight, white, legally married, middle-class couple whose egalitarian ideals and romantic aspirations were mercilessly undone in the transition from two to three. My work with them isn’t finished. Things have definitely improved, but for this couple, and for this woman, caring for small kids doesn’t agree with eroticism. I suspect that when they reach the next life stage—when the kids are both in school full time and Stephanie is back at work, as she plans—new energy will be released. In the meantime, thinking of this as but one phase in a lifelong relationship helps them remain patient and hopeful. Sexy Mamas Do Exist Today we arrive at parenthood with a sexual identity that’s often fully sprung. All of us benefited when sexuality was cut loose from reproduction. As regular users of birth control, we have been granted the privilege of a risk-free romp that can go on for years. We enjoy desire with impunity, at least for a time, and we expect sexual fulfillment in our committed relationships. For our parents and grandparents, sex after kids probably wasn’t all that different from sex before kids—pregnancy, and the heavy responsibility that went with it, was always a looming possibility. But for baby boomers and all who have followed, parenthood throws a wrench into our liberated, self-gratifying lifestyle. The “baby clash” is all the more galling because we have something to compare it with. “You used to love sex,” “We used to make love for hours,” and “I used to know how to turn you on,” are laments I frequently hear. We’re as flabbergasted as we are resentful when parenthood brings our fun to a screeching halt.

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

  I tell them I want to know how, or if, we can hold on to a sense of aliveness and excitement in our relationships. Is there something inherent in commitment that deadens desire? Can we ever maintain security without succumbing to monotony? I wonder if we can preserve a sense of the poetic, of what Octavio Paz calls the double flame of love and eroticism. I’ve had this conversation many times, and the comments I heard at this party were hardly novel. “Can’t be done.” “Well, that’s the whole problem of monogamy, isn’t it?” “That’s why I don’t commit. It has nothing to do with fear. I just hate boring sex.” “Desire over time? What about desire for one night?” “Relationships evolve. Passion turns into something else.” “I gave up on passion when I had kids.” “Look, there are men you sleep with and men you marry.” As often happens in a public discussion, the most complex issues tend to polarize in a flash, and nuance is replaced with caricature. Hence the division between the romantics and the realists. The romantics refuse a life without passion; they swear that they’ll never give up on true love. They are the perennial seekers, looking for the person with whom desire will never fizzle. Every time desire does wane, they conclude that love is gone. If eros is in decline, love must be on its deathbed. They mourn the loss of excitement and fear settling down. At the opposite extreme are the realists. They say that enduring love is more important than hot sex, and that passion makes people do stupid things. It’s dangerous, it creates havoc, and it’s a weak foundation for marriage. In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, “Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.” For the realists, maturity prevails. The initial excitement grows into something else—deep love, mutual respect, shared history, and companionship. Diminishing desire is inescapable. You are expected to tough it out and grow up. As the conversation unfolds, the two camps eye each other with a complex alloy of pity, tenderness, envy, exasperation, and outright scorn. But while they position themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, both agree with the fundamental premise that passion cools over time. “Some of you resist the loss of intensity, some of you accept it, but all of you seem to believe that desire fades. What you disagree on is just how important the loss really is,” I comment. Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.

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

  348The History of Christianity II õSome Koreans have celebrated the role of Christianity in nurturing democracy in South Korea. For example, South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, was an elder in the Methodist Church. But the truth is more complicated. For most of the past 60 years, the South Korean government, with plenty of Christians in its ranks, has been authoritarian. Syngman Rhee himself was not shy about using strong-arm tactics to silence political dissent. õAnother example was President Park Chung Hee, a general who seized power in a military coup in 1961 and ruled until he was assassinated in 1979. He dissolved the National Assembly—South Korea’s legislature—and enacted martial law. He drew up a new constitution that gave him more or less complete control, and allowed him to steamroll over working people in order to “modernize” South Korea and raise economic output. õMost Christian clergy just tried to keep their heads down and survive. Some openly endorsed Park’s policies. But eventually, some Protestant ministers became vocal defenders of democracy and civil rights. They organized and educated workers, ministered to political prisoners, brought relief to poor city neighborhoods, and monitored voting during Park’s very fraudulent elections. õAfter several years of doing this work, in the late 1970s, Protestant activists developed a uniquely Korean version of the social gospel called minjung theology: a people’s theology focused on giving voice to the frustrations of common people and assuring them that Jesus is on their side. õMinjung theology has been a powerful stream in Korean Christian culture. But the most famous Korean church is on the other end of the theological spectrum. That’s David Yonggi Cho’s Yoido Full Gospel 349Lecture 35—Revival and Repression in Korea Church. Cho picked up on the powerful stream of the prosperity gospel: the promise that God rewards the faithful in this life with worldly blessings. õCho may be the most famous prosperity preacher in the world, but America is full of pastors who preach a very similar message. And 92% of Korean Protestants say they believe in another Western idea: biblical inerrancy, or the belief that the Bible it totally without error. Korean Christians have, in some ways, held on more tightly to the ways Western missionaries presented things than Christians in other parts of the non-Western world. õYet Korean evangelicals have also accommodated Korean culture. They tend to place a special emphasis on the Fifth Commandment to honor one’s parents. And very early in the 19 th century, they started adopting Christianized versions of Confucian ancestor rites called services of recollection—technically a prayer addressed to God, not ancestor worship. However, the marriage of Christianity and Korean nationalism has both strengthened churches and them into dangerous alliances with authoritarian regimes. SUGGESTED READING Buswell and Lee, Christianity in Korea. Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy. Lee, Born Again. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHas nationalism been a positive or negative inf luence on Korean Christianity? äHow has the repressive regime of North Korea shaped the Christian experience in South Korea?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Most of the Framingham Eight had their sentences commuted or were otherwise released, but not Debra. (The board said that she and her girlfriend had “participated in a mutual battering relationship”—a common misconception about queer domestic violence—even though it had never come up during the hearing.) She was paroled in 1994, the second-to-last member of the group to achieve some measure of freedom. An ABC Primetime report about them barely talked to or about Debra compared to the other women. The Academy Award–winning short documentary about the Framingham Eight— Defending Our Lives —didn’t include Debra at all. The sort of violence that Annette and Debra experienced—brutally physical—or that Freda experienced—murder—is, obviously, far beyond what happened to me. It may seem odd, even disingenuous, to write about them in the context of my experience. It might also seem strange that so many of the domestic abuse victims that appear here are women who killed their abusers. Where , you may be asking yourself, are the abused queer women who didn’t stab or shoot their lovers? (I assure you, there are a lot of us.) But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention. There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse—verbal, emotional, psychological—and even worse, it does not provide context . It does not allow certain kinds of victims in. “By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.” After all, in Gaslight , Gregory’s only actual crimes are murdering Paula’s aunt and the attempted theft of her property. The core of the film’s horror is its relentless domestic abuse, but that abuse is emotional and psychological and thus completely outside of the law. Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. Trying to find accounts, especially those that don’t culminate in extreme violence, is unbelievably difficult. Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean . When I was a teenager, there was this girl in my sophomore-year English class. She had luminous gray-green eyes and a faint smattering of freckles across her nose. She was a little swaggery and butch but also loved the same movies I did, like Moulin Rouge and Fried Green Tomatoes .

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

  278The History of Christianity II õAnother bishop stood up and said there was a huge gap between church doctrine and the contrary practice of the immense majority of Christian couples. Maybe, he said, the church should seek the advice of “married Christians” as well as theologians and other experts. õThe pope who had followed John XXIII and wrapped up the council was Paul VI. Some people thought of him as a progressive, so liberals were hopeful that he would reform the church’s teachings, especially after the papal commission came back and recommended that the church permit Catholics to use contraception. õBut Paul VI was unnerved by how quickly the church was changing, and he rejected the recommendation. In 1968, he issued an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, or On Human Life. He affirmed that the only birth control Catholic women could use was the so-called rhythm method based on keeping track of a woman’s monthly cycle. This had a devastating effect on progressive Catholics. THE CHURCH IN POST-COLONIAL POLITICS õThese debates were unfolding in an era when Catholic leaders found themselves thrust into the middle of complicated and violent political revolutions all around the world, particularly in places formerly ruled by European powers. õVatican II encouraged many liberal reformers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia because the council seemed to place the church firmly on the side of democracy and dignity for oppressed peoples. It seemed to give reformers theological tools to use in criticizing the economic and social policies that ground down the poor.

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

  The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools. My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man’s car while he held a flashlight over the paper. The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner. Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude. Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house. Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn’t come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I’d been I told her lies.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  159 and that of King Arthur’s knights for the Holy Grail. Two men counting money suggest the money-changers Jesus drove from the Temple in the New Testament story. The result of plot and the density of symbols and allusions makes the disillusionment of the boy even more crushing—a triumph of commercial and ugly Dublin over a boy’s romantic dreams. “The Dead,” the last story in the collection, is about Gabriel and Gretta Conroy attending a holiday party thrown by his elderly aunts. Three events during the course of the party disconcert Gabriel. First, a maid snaps at him for what he means as merely a polite question. Second, his wife teases him in front of his aunts about his concern for galoshes and umbrellas and healthy food. Also, a colleague teases him about caring more about the continent than he does about Ireland and things Irish. Gabriel recovers from these events to have a good time at the party, where he is his aunts’ favorite nephew and a master of ceremonies who gets to make the speech that goes with the toast. As he is getting ready to leave, he sees Gretta standing at the top of the steps listening to a tenor sing in the next room. He is struck by her pose, and on the way to their hotel he is overwhelmed by memories of the intimate moments they have spent together. By the time they reach the hotel, he is eager to make love to her. When pressed, Gretta tells him that the song she was listening to had been sung to her in the rain beneath her window years ago by a young man named Michael Furey, who was already ill and who died soon afterwards. As Gretta says, “I think he died for me.” As Gretta goes to sleep, Gabriel has his epiphany, thinking about what a poor part he must have played in Gretta’s life next to the memory she carried all these years of Michael Furey. The scene is like the ¿ nal one in Ibsen’s A Doll’ s House, in which, when Torvald is eager to make love to Nora after she has danced the tarantella, she tells him she is leaving him. As Gabriel watches the snow fall outside his window, he feels himself drifting towards death, and he feels himself becoming one with both those who have already died and those who, like himself, are drifting towards death. Like all the stories in this collection, every detail matters in this one. A picture of Romeo and Juliet hangs over the piano at his aunts’ house,

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Prisoner’s Dilemma Many years later, you stick a memory card into your SLR and find dozens of naked photos of the woman in the Dream House. You jerk involuntarily when the first image comes onto the preview screen. You remember the afternoon so clearly: how the soft, indirect natural light filtered into the room; how she was naked and pale and lounging, and how her cunt was flushed maroon with blood. (It was either just before fucking or just afterward.) You got down between her knees and took dozens of photos, loving the ombre of her, from white to pink to purple. The memory is not sexual; it is distant and removed, as if you are watching a movie about someone else. You sit there for a while, thinking about the photos. You could keep them, but there is no reason to, good or bad. You have no desire for blackmail or the kind of revenge they could make possible; you do not find them erotic anymore. (How quickly your desire curdled when you saw her for what she was, like the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson pulls away from a sexy woman to find a decomposing creature in her place.) They are simply a memory, and as you overwrite the data card, erasing them forever, you feel an irrational twinge of loss. Dream House as Parallel Universe You 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.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  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 [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 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.Dream House as MenagerieA line has been crossed—you’ve fallen in love. “I have to talk to Val,” she says. “I have to tell her, I have to figure this out. We’ve been together for three years,” she finishes, by way of explanation. And though everything has been on the up-and-up, you feel a weird stab of guilt. This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness. Dream House as Star-Crossed LoversOne day, a letter arrives. She is rejected from Iowa’s graduate writing program but accepted into Indiana’s. She tells you this with sorrow, over the phone even though you live less than a mile apart. You cry in the privacy of your bedroom. This was inevitable, you think. It’s been great, but it’s over.

• 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.