Excitement

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 White Oleander (1999)

  The horses shied at children at the rail, at flags, all nerves and heat. “Pick a horse,” Barry told my mother. She picked number seven, a white horse, because of her name, Medea’s Pride. The jockeys had trouble getting them into the starting gates, but when the gates opened, the horses pounded the brown of the track in a unit. “Come on, seven,” we yelled. “Lucky seven.” She won. My mother laughed and hugged me, hugged Barry. I’d never seen her like this, excited, laughing, she seemed so young. Barry had bet twenty dollars for her, and handed her the money, one hundred dollars. “How about dinner?” he asked her. Yes, I prayed. Please say yes. After all, how could she refuse him now? She took us to dinner at the nearby Surf ’n’ Turf, where Barry and I both ordered salads and steaks medium rare, baked potatoes with sour cream. My mother just had a glass of white wine. That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty. During the meal Barry told us of his travels in the Orient, where we had never been. The time he ordered magic mushrooms off the menu at a beachside shack in Bali and ended up wandering the turquoise shore hallucinating Paradise. His trip to the temples of Angkor Wat in the Cambodian jungle accompanied by Thai opium smugglers. His week spent in the floating brothels of Bangkok. He had forgotten me entirely, was too absorbed in hypnotizing my mother. His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebes, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute. On the way home, she let him touch her waist as she got into the car. BARRY ASKED US to dinner at his house, said he’d like to cook some Indonesian dishes he’d learned there. I waited until afternoon to tell her I wasn’t feeling well, that she should go without me. I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real. She spent an hour trying on clothes, white Indian pajamas, the blue gauze dress, the pineapples and hula girls. I’d never seen her so indecisive. “The blue,” I said. It had a low neck and the blue was exactly the color of her eyes. No one could resist her in her blue dress. She chose the Indian pajamas, which covered every inch of her golden skin. “I’ll be home early,” she said. I lay on her bed after she was gone and imagined them together, their deep voices a duet in the dusk over the rijsttafel.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But all the demons were still safely bottled up, and only I was free to walk between the two rows of giant eucalyptus trees. A freedom that went to my head, magical, with the whole universe obeying me at that moment; the freedom of the first few days of vacation, or of an adventurer taking off and abandoning his country to its rhythm of everyday life, the office workers at their desk jobs, the workers in their plants, the children in their schools. As I crossed the yard that I had never seen so silent and went by the windows of the classrooms where all my classmates watched me with envy, their arms crossed, I felt privileged indeed, with a great adventure beginning ahead of me. For the first time in my life, I opened the glass-paneled door of the principal’s office and saw him writing at his desk. I was now within the sacred precincts and all my gestures were therefore slow and studied, as if for a ritual. I was careful to close the door and progressed slowly across three platforms or stages, end to end. The desk of Monsieur Louzel was placed at the end of the third, at the far end of the room, against the wall. Three black cabinets, some framed reproductions in black and white, and black curtains. Behind Monsieur Louzel, a bay window revealed a tiny garden that seemed full with a single green banana tree and one aloe tree that somehow tempered the schoollike severity, so solemn and cold, of this room. With a gesture of his hand, the principal invited me to be seated, then he got up to fetch my file from one of the cabinets. I stole a glance at him, full of admiration. His hair was spotlessly white, of a fine silky white, and gave him a distinguished air. He was, I feel, a bit histrionic, but with sincerity, out of an awareness of his function and his importance in our eyes. He always impressed us because of his perfect diction and polished manners that represented, for us, the real Frenchman from metropolitan France whose prestige remains undiminished. My various instructors and he too, the principal informed me, had noted my uninterrupted successes and had decided to reward them. So I had been proposed as candidate for the annual school scholarship. It is wrong to think that a child of twelve cannot grasp the importance of a decisive moment in his own life. I remained speechless, so deeply moved that I was overwhelmed. A mass of vague projects, all wonderful, suddenly ceased to be merely imaginary and gained some probability. The prestige of the doctor’s white smock at the hospital, the respect that the nurses felt for him, all this exquisite but serious play, the money earned...

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It did not take me long to cross the forbidden threshold and to find myself in the deserted alley, where I could perceive the unfamiliar noises from Tarfoune Street. Soon, I had ventured even further afield, as far as the source of the disturbance: the neighborhood kids were playing the game that was called “apricot kernels,” behind the handcarts and close to the garbage cart. Their ears were red with excitement, their knees already covered with mud, and they threw themselves suddenly onto the ground and then jumped up again like devils, pulling frightful faces behind the backs of the foe and stressing every gesture with a howl of rage or of triumph. At once, I recognized on the back of Fraji, the son of Choulam, my own sweater. As I had never played except with my sister, I stayed away from the others, feeling vaguely ill at ease and hostile. All around these savage trespassers, the whole street remained silent and deserted, expressing its disapproval of their strange liveliness in the heart of my own kingdom. Suddenly, the game stopped because of a nigat, a draw. All the players uttered one single yell in a single clear-cut peal, after which they relaxed, joking and jeering before deciding to play another game. Chouchane, the tailor, and Fraji were both considered too weak and were refused by both teams, ruthlessly sacrificed. As for myself, I approved this decision. Without wasting time, the game began again, a bit further away from the garbage cart. Chouchane and Fraji, both disappointed, continued to gravitate around the stakes of the players, although the latter kept a watchful eye on them, and had to content themselves with kibitzing and giving advice that nobody followed. Fraji finally lost interest in the battle and, having nothing better to do, became aware of the presence of the garbage cart, pushed it forward with one hand, and then took hold of the two shafts. The mountain of refuse began to tremble, with avalanches of green and red vegetable peel rolling down its sides. Fraji then discovered the real use of this godsend: he set his right foot on the hub of one wheel, grasped the rail of the cart with the palms of his hands, and began to climb the whole edifice. Scarcely hesitating, he dug his little legs deep into the rotting garbage and stood up, staring all around and quite surprised at what he saw: himself towering above us all, above the whole world, on a many-colored throne made of butcher’s wrapping paper, egg shells, and vegetable peelings.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Still, I had my successes as well as my failures. Our physics teacher, hardly out of school himself and not yet disentangled from his education, added complications to our textbook by trying to simplify it. Since it was generally impossible to follow him, we got into the habit of letting our minds wander out of the classroom or laboratory to our favorite hobbies and most urgent preoccupations. While he spoke, I usually worked at my poetry. One afternoon he had darkened the classroom to prepare an experiment. Usually, this was amusing enough to keep us attentive; but the teacher, this time, went on so lengthily and pointlessly preparing that the class gradually gave up listening. In the cold semidarkness of this room that was haunted by appliances, whisperings, and hysterical laughter, an insistent rhythm began to beat in my head. I wrote it down; one word evoked another, and soon the poem seemed to have written itself on the sheet of paper. I felt that I had locked the rhythm of life very exactly in those twenty lines and I could hear the pulse of nature beating in them. While our teacher talked and talked and apologized for the slowness of his preparations, I passed my poem down the line to Sitboun and sat back with the pleasurable anticipation of glory. Sitboun, one of the best literature students, always wrote perfectly classical verse: never an error in rhyme or scansion. We often argued together and, although everyone admired his work, I used to tease him about it, complaining that he weakened the content by exaggerating his concern with form. I saw him read my poem, but he did not at first react. His gaze lingered and, suddenly, he crumpled the paper and threw it away. I couldn’t understand why he had done this and signalled to him for an explanation. But we were too far apart and I had to wait until the class was over. “You slob!” he shouted when I joined him. “It was too damn good!” I believed I was destined for triumph, and I was never more certain of this than during my years of adolescence when each day represented a discovery of myself and there seemed to me to be no limits to me or to the richness of life. In the last year before graduation, a man named Marrou, of whom I was very fond and whom I will mention again later, was my French teacher. We were analyzing Racine’s Andromaque and he was a great enthusiast of the work of this poet; one morning, after we had read the extraordinary scene in which Pyrrhus admits his love, Marrou turned to the class and, in a tired and hopeless voice, asked: “Which line in this scene is most typical of Racine?” An embarrassed silence followed; to me, the class did not seem to have quite understood the question.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (24:46–49) It is all too easy for us, in our individualized Western world, to jump at once to the “personal” meaning of this and ignore the larger whole. “Repentance” and “forgiveness”: yes, we think, I have repented of my sins, and I have been granted forgiveness. That, to be sure, is vital. But if we go there too soon, we may miss the breathtaking sweep of what is being said. Jesus’s followers are to go out into the world equipped with the power of his own Spirit to announce that a new reality has come to birth , that its name is “forgiveness,” and that it is to be had by turning away from idolatry (“repentance”). Something has happened, clearly, that has unleashed this new kind of power into the world. That something is the chain-breaking, idol-smashing, sin-abandoning power called “forgiveness,” called “utter gracious love,” called Jesus . It isn’t that first you have to repent and then, as a result, God may decide not to press charges on this occasion. It isn’t that somehow you thereby gain “forgiveness” as a kind of private transaction unrelated to the truth about the wider world. It is, rather, that forgiveness is the new reality. It is the way the new creation actually is. All it requires to belong to that new creation, with that banner over its doorway, is that you should turn from the idols whose power (did you but know it) has already been broken and join in the celebration of Jesus’s victory. This is why, by the way, “believing in Jesus’s resurrection” isn’t simply a matter of giving acknowledgment to the fact that on the third day he rose again from the dead, though of course it includes that. To say yes to Jesus’s resurrection is, by that very thought and deed, to say yes to the new world of forgiveness that was won on the cross, the world that was then launched into heaven-and-earth reality on Easter morning. It is not a matter first of convincing oneself that perhaps “miracles” may happen after all, then that Jesus’s resurrection might be one of them, and then that the evidence really does seem to point this way. Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation. They are the hallmarks, the telltale signs, the characteristic marks of the new creation.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Like my colleagues, I eagerly embraced the pharmacological revolution. In 1973 I became the first chief resident in psychopharmacology at MMHC. I may also have been the first psychiatrist in Boston to administer lithium to a manic-depressive patient. (I’d read about John Cade’s work with lithium in Australia, and I received permission from a hospital committee to try it.) On lithium a woman who had been manic every May for the past thirty-five years, and suicidally depressed every November, stopped cycling and remained stable for the three years she was under my care. I was also part of the first U.S. research team to test the antipsychotic Clozaril on chronic patients who were warehoused in the back wards of the old insane asylums.[6] Some of their responses were miraculous: People who had spent much of their lives locked in their own separate, terrifying realities were now able to return to their families and communities; patients mired in darkness and despair started to respond to the beauty of human contact and the pleasures of work and play. These amazing results made us optimistic that we could finally conquer human misery. Antipsychotic drugs were a major factor in reducing the number of people living in mental hospitals in the United States, from over 500,000 in 1955 to fewer than 100,000 in 1996.[7] For people today who did not know the world before the advent of these treatments, the change is almost unimaginable. As a first-year medical student I visited Kankakee State Hospital in Illinois and saw a burly ward attendant hose down dozens of filthy, naked, incoherent patients in an unfurnished dayroom supplied with gutters for the runoff water. This memory now seems more like a nightmare than like something I witnessed with my own eyes. My first job after finishing my residency in 1974 was as the second-to-last director of a once-venerable institution, the Boston State Hospital, which had formerly housed thousands of patients and been spread over hundreds of acres with dozens of buildings, including greenhouses, gardens, and workshops—most of them by then in ruins. During my time there patients were gradually dispersed into “the community,” the blanket term for the anonymous shelters and nursing homes where most of them ended up. (Ironically, the hospital was started as an “asylum,” a word meaning “sanctuary” that gradually took on a sinister connotation. It actually did offer a sheltered community where everybody knew the patients’ names and idiosyncrasies.) In 1979, shortly after I went to work at the VA, the Boston State Hospital’s gates were permanently locked, and it became a ghost town.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Celebrate the revolution that happened once for all when the power of love overcame the love of power. And, in the power of that same love, join in the revolution here and now. 13 The Death of Jesus in Paul’s Letter to the Romans Passover and Atonement W E MUST NOW move back at last to the passage where most interpreters of Paul have tried to discern an “atonement” theology and where much debate has focused. The dense little paragraph we know as Romans 3:21–26 is arguably the beating heart of Romans 1–4 as a whole. Ask any preachers or biblical teachers to explain the meaning of the cross, and sooner or later they will come to this passage. It is a difficult passage, partly because Paul has crammed so much into a short space and partly because every phrase, almost every word, has been controversial down the years. But there is no escape: we must keep our nerve and work at it steadily. Since my own translation will inevitably be seen as biased, I here quote the New Revised Standard Version. (Many other translations are available, of course, but at this point the NRSV is among the least problematic.) I highlight vv. 24–26, in which the crucial phrases occur: But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. Despite the difficulties this passage presents, I believe we are in a good position, granted the argument of this book so far, to get some fresh clarity on what Paul is saying here. Two things in particular encourage me to think this. First, the case I have presented so far feeds directly into this present passage. I have argued that the early Christian view of Jesus’s death was focused on Passover and hence on the Exodus story, now to be experienced as the new liberating event that was also the great one-off “sin-forgiving” event.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  tions of others, I shall think myself lucky if I can closely fol low those who have already done what you desire. I believe there is not one of you but has read the novels of Boccaccio, recently translated into French, and which the most Christian King, Francis I. of that name, Monseigneur le Dauphin, Madame la Dauphine, and Madame Marguerite prized so highly, that if Boccaccio could hear them, the praises be- stowed on him by those illustrious persons would surely raise him from the dead. I can certify that the two ladies I have named, and several other personages of the court, resolved to imitate Boccaccio, except in one thing — namely, in writing nothing but what was true. Monseigneur and the two ladies arranged at first that they would each write ten tales, and that they would assemble a party of ten persons, selecting for it those whom they thought most capable of telling a stor\' with grace, and expressly excluding men of letters ; for Monseigneur did not wish that there should be any intrusion of art into the matter, and was afraid lest the flowers of rhetoric should be in some manner prejudicial to the truth o{ history. But the great affairs in which the king afterwards became involved, the peace concluded between the sovereign and the King of England, the accouchement of Madame la Dauphine, and several other affairs of a nature to occupy the whole court, caused this project to be forgotten ; but as we have time to spare we will put it into execution whilst waiting for the completion of our bridge. If you think proper, we will go from noon till four o'clock into that fine meadow along the Gave river, where the trees form so thick a screen that the sun cannot pierce it, or incommode us with its heat. There, seated at our ease, we will each relate what we have seen or been told by persons worthy of belief. Ten days will suffice to make up the hundred. If it please God that our work prove worthy of being seen by the lords and ladies I have named, we will present it to them on our return, in lieu of images and paternosters, and I am convinced that such an offering will not be displeasing to them. At the same time, TO THE HEPTAMERON. II if anyone can suggest something more agreeable, I am ready to fall in with his ideas."

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul sees himself standing at the cutting edge of the revolution. The death of Jesus has opened up a whole new world, and he is part of the team leading the way into unexplored territory. He is not only to announce, but also to embody the faithfulness of the creator God to his covenant and his world. He is thinking of Isaiah’s vision of Israel’s “servant” vocation and quoting from one of his favorite chapters, Isaiah 49: “I listened to you when the time was right; I came to your aid on the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2, quoting Isa. 49:8). The remainder of that verse in Isaiah goes on, “I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people.” Paul is not summarizing the “works contract” (Jesus takes our sin, and we take his “righteousness”). He is doing what Revelation is doing: celebrating the fact that Jesus’s reconciling death sets people free to take up their true vocation. The Messiah’s death gives to him, and by extension to all who follow Jesus, the vocation to be part of the ongoing divine plan, the covenant purpose for the whole world. Something similar is visible in Galatians 3:13. “The Messiah redeemed us from the curse of the law,” writes Paul, “by becoming a curse on our behalf.” This is not a statement of an abstract works-based atonement theology, though it is often snatched out of context and made to play that role. Many sermons have been preached about how the “curse of the law” (seen as the threatening moral code) is removed by the death of Jesus. Some have even supposed that Paul was regarding Israel’s law itself as a bad thing that had no business pronouncing this “curse” and that Jesus’s death had showed this up. But this has nothing to do with Paul’s meaning. He does not go on—as such sermons regularly have—to say, “The Messiah became a curse for us so that we might be freed from sin and go to heaven,” or anything like it. He says in v. 14 that the Messiah bore the curse of the law, “so that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in King Jesus—and so that we might receive the promise of the spirit, through faith.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In the excitement of the Gentile mission, the reflex for ancient Israel is not forgotten. The death of Jesus, going ahead of Israel into the mouth of the pagan lion, has created a breathing space in which Peter can urge his hearers, “Let God rescue you from this wicked generation” (Acts 2:40). “The whole house of Israel must know this for a fact: God has made him Lord and Messiah” (2:36). Thousands of Jews, including a great many priests, believed this message and became part of the renewed community (2:41, 47; 4:4; 5:14; 6:7; 11:24; 21:21). We should be in no doubt that Luke, like most other early Christian writers, saw the messianic community focused on Jesus as the liberated, redeemed people, those in and for whom the long-awaited promise of rescue from pagan overlords had been fulfilled. Luke has thus inscribed into history the truth spoken of in the formulas of Revelation 1, 5, and 20, which we studied in Chapter 4. The other New Testament writers make the same point in different ways. What has happened to Jesus’s followers? They do not simply have some new, exciting ideas to share with people who are interested in such things. They are not telling people that they have discovered a way whereby anyone can escape the wicked world and “go to heaven” instead. They are functioning as the worshipping, witnessing people of God: as the “priestly kingdom” of Exodus 19, as the “servant” of Isaiah 49, as the people who, in one psalm after another, worship the God of Israel and discover in doing so that he is also the God of all the earth. How has this come about? The whole early church answers: through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Israel’s Messiah and through the power of the Spirit. But when we look at this narrative sequence we discover, again and again, that though the resurrection, ascension, and Spirit are vital for the whole thing to work in the way it must, none of these is even thinkable unless a meaning is given to the death of Jesus, a meaning far greater than simply that it is the prelude to these other events. “With your own blood you purchased a people for God,” sang the group around the throne in Revelation 5, “and made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign on the earth” (vv. 9–10). This was always the goal of the great act of redemption. The earliest Christians held on tightly to the creational monotheism of ancient Israel, to the scriptural narratives of slavery and Exodus, of exile and restoration, of the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple, and of the ultimate renewal of creation itself.

• From Vox (1992)

  “And I say, ‘Hi, this is Jim. I know it’s late, but I wonder if I could use your phone. My car’s engine has seized up, and all the oil lights on the dash are glowing, and I don’t dare drive it any further, and the pay phone down the street isn’t working.’ ” “I say, ‘Why did you buzz my apartment?’ ” “And I say, ‘The others don’t answer. You’re right to be hesitant, but this isn’t a normal situation, this is urgent, I’ve got to get back to my hotel, I’ve got a whole day of appointments tomorrow, I just have to get seven and a half hours of sleep or I won’t function, and I need to use your phone, and I assure you that I’m reasonably sane and peaceable, and I would not normally do this, invade your privacy, but I’m telling you nothing could be more important than this. Please.’ And you hear the conviction in my voice, and you buzz me in.” “Well, no, first I hold the talk button in and to my empty apartment I call out, ‘Jeff? Jeff! Enough with the weights! Do you and Mojo Cartilage-Popper mind if someone comes up to use the phone for a second?’ Then I buzz you in downstairs, knowing that I can look at you through the peephole in my door, and call Bobby the super if you look strange.” “Exactly. I run up to the second floor, and I find your door, and before I stand right in front of it, I check the Mmmm-Sensor and find that your arousal has suffered some decline, you are now ten or more minutes away from an orgasm, though the glow faintly persists. I knock, and I begin pacing back and forth in front of the door, distractedly, like a guy impatient to make a phone call. You look through the peephole and you see this guy, middle height, black hair, not bad-looking, somewhat frazzled, pacing back and forth in front of your door, checking a pocket watch. You let me in. And I introduce myself, I apologize for bothering you, I smile at you and immediately I can sense the alertness and intelligence in your face, and I see that we understand each other, and I know my Mmmm-Sensor hasn’t misled me. Ah, but I’ve lied my way into your apartment, which is a problem.” “It is, because if I knew!” “Curtains. So you bring me the phone, and I sit on the edge of a dining-room chair, and I call my answering machine, and I start telling it about the oil lights on my dashboard, I really have to have someone take care of it, I need the number of a cab company, etcetera, and then all of a sudden I stop, in midsentence, and I click off the phone and I say, ‘Nah, I can’t.’ ” “ ‘You can’t what?’ ”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I thought I saw a streak of light. I wasn’t sure if I even saw it. I gazed upward, trying not to blink, waited. “There!” Davey pointed. In a different quadrant of the sky, another star broke loose. It was eerie, the one thing you didn’t plan on, stellar movement. I tried to keep my eyes open without blinking. When you blinked, you missed them. I held them open for the light to develop on them like a photograph. The little boys shivered despite the jackets over their pajamas and muddy boots, chattering and giggling in the cold and the excitement of being up so late as they gazed at the stars that started pinging like pinballs, mouths opened in case one should fall in. It was completely dark except for the line of Christmas lights that twinkled along the edge of the trailer porch. The screen door opened and slammed. I didn’t have to look to know it was him. The flare of a match, the warm stinky pot smell. “Ought to take down those Christmas lights,” he said. He came out on the yard where we were, the ember glow, and then the sharpness of his body, the smell of new wood. “It’s the Quadrantid shower,” Davey said. “We’ll be getting forty an hour pretty soon. It’s the shortest-lived meteorite display, but the densest except for the Perseids.” I could hear the mud sucking at his boots as he shifted his weight. I was glad it was dark, that he couldn’t see the flush of pleasure on my face as he drew closer, looking up at the sky, as if he cared about the Quadrantids, as if that’s why he’d come out. “There!” Owen said. “Did you see it, Uncle Ray? Did you?” “Yeah, I saw it buddy. I saw it.” He was standing right next to me. If I shifted just an inch to my left, I could brush him with my sleeve. I felt the radiant heat of him across the narrow gap between us in the darkness. We had never stood so close. “You and Starr having a beef?” he asked me softly. I exhaled vapor, imagined I was smoking, like Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “What did she say?” “Nothing. She’s just been acting funny lately.” Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole. Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. “Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house.” I gazed up as if I hadn’t heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The analgesic effect of these endogenous endorphins can be just as powerful as the strongest known opioid drugs like morphine! What occurred to me at Esalen was the possibility that I had witnessed the effects of opiate withdrawal during our Monday sessions. This was in stark contrast to Thursdays, when the previous night’s opiate orgy, stimulated by the hyperventilating catharsis, produced a “stoned,” spaced-out group of participants. These Thursday groups were populated by community members who had recently gotten their drug fix on Wednesday and did not crave another one. In particular, I wondered if the intense emotional abreactions I observed on Mondays were a method by which participants released their own internal opiates (endorphins), essentially giving themselves a fix, not unlike a shot of morphine. Excited about my hypothesis, I telephoned my brother. Since it was not yet known that the brain regions and neural pathways responsible for physical and emotional pain were nearly identical, Jon’s response was not encouraging. “Peter,” he said, pitying my naïveté, “don’t be silly,” while managing to get in a well-deserved jab at his older sibling—a rivalry reasserted. However, a few years later, Bessel van der Kolk replicated Jon’s experiment. 165 This time the focus was on Naloxone’s blocking the endorphins released by emotional, rather than physical, pain . He studied a common treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) administered, at that time, to Vietnam vets in the nation’s VA hospitals. These unfortunate soldiers were repeatedly provoked into “reliving” their horrific battlefield experiences. In this “therapy,” they were forced, for example, to watch gory war movies like Platoon with their arms tied to a chair. These exposures frequently catapulted the veterans into intense emotional abreactions. However, when Naloxone was administered before these cathartic sessions (depriving them of their self-induced endorphin rush) they soon lost interest in taking part in further “therapeutic” sessions . As I observed many workshop attendees over the years (returning time and time again), I couldn’t help but wonder if they were also inducing their own chemical highs. Their repeated and cathartic dramatizations, screaming at their parents or pounding pillows in endless anger, seemed to be rewarding, bringing them back for further fixes.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I chose my words carefully as I suggested to her that she come and prepare her French literature exams with me at home; my excuse was that I would have all my books there. We would be all by ourselves in peace and quiet. This last I stressed carefully. I was so upset that I could scarcely pretend that all this was only normal, and I would have made a fool of myself with endless apologies if she had merely frowned. But Ginou answered my hesitant invitation quite simply: “Yes! O.K., for Saturday.” My heart beat so fast that I felt I might faint. I stared tenderly in her direction and tried to find, in her own eyes, some inkling of her complicity. But she evaded my appeal or failed to understand what I was after. Still, I was so happy! I might have dared to kiss her then and there, not out of sensuality but out of sheer affection. So I took my fill of the sight of her, of the sky, the hills, the Mediterranean sea that seemed to love us. I felt that Ginou and the whole universe had signified their acceptance of me, their full confidence. I left her there and went off to swim all by myself, going against the waves with clean strokes of my arms, thrusting my chest forward and head on. The following Saturday, I could scarcely conceal my impatience to see my parents leave. The long Sabbath lunch seemed to me to be literally endless, and I could barely stand it as I watched the kids receiving their weekly pocket money. As for Aunt Maissa who had come with her sad nun’s face to swell the crowd, she drove me nearly insane. Finally, however, the house was silent. Once the door had closed on the last of them all, I leaped from the couch where I lay trying to read, and feverishly began to do my best to make our dining-room tidy. Actually, I limited my efforts to kicking all stray shoes beneath the furniture and stuffing the clothes just anyhow into the sideboard. On the table, I spread again our Friday night’s white tablecloth and set two chairs side by side. Then I left the door ajar, so that Ginou need not wait till I came and opened it, thus she would avoid being seen by any of the neighbors. But it was still too early and I was so impatient that the time seemed to go by very slowly. So I went back to the couch and again tried to read, but in vain for my eyes somehow failed to come to grips with the text.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After all, she had more or less taken the first step when she had dreamed of me and mentioned me to Mina. These arguments served to give me the necessary courage and made it all the more easy for me. Besides, it was summer, the season that was in every way most appropriate for this kind of situation. Two days later, as I was swimming beside her, I suggested to Ginou that we take a walk together along the beach at five o’clock that afternoon. Her eyes glistened with sea water as she expressed some surprise, perhaps candidly, but in any case already disarming as far as I was concerned. “Why don’t you suggest that the others come along too?” I mumbled: “I thought it would be more fun if we were alone.” “O.K., if you say so,” she concluded. She spoke as if she were merely yielding to some fancy of mine. I would have preferred it if she had shown some emotion about accepting my proposal, as if she were trying to conceal her pleasure. Still, she did grant me an awareness of complicity; she assured me she would tell nobody that we were going out together, all by ourselves. I was too glad to be at long last able to enjoy the business of being in love, and too proud to be going out with her, elegant and lovely and popular as she was, so I wasted no time quarreling about shades of meaning. I knew that all the other boys surely envied me my luck, now that I had caught up with them and was even well ahead. Yes, I of all people, the boy whom they all found too serious and a bit of a prig, as they said. I was stupid enough to believe that I had been deprived of these pleasures which, I thought, were exclusively reserved for the rich, I mean the business of pretending to be in love. Still, I’m not unattractive, I found, and, as a matter of fact, better looking than most of them. I began to look at my own reflection in mirrors and rather enjoyed being able to rediscover myself in this manner. My nose, it’s true, might be a bit long, but only a trifle. I found I had a good profile, firm features, good strong teeth set in even rows, the high forehead of an intellectual and curly black hair. Be that as it may, I had been chosen among many, and by Ginou of all people! The very first time we went out together, I was clumsy enough to talk to Ginou about what worried me most, about myself, my ambitions, what I felt sure of achieving in life. Being a woman, she listened to me with interest and kindness and asked questions and gave me advice.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  One evening I suggest to Hugo that we go to an “exhibition” together, just to see. “Do you want to?” I say, although in my mind I am ready to live, not to see. He is curious, elated. “Yes, yes.” We call up Henry to ask for information. He suggests 32 rue Blondel. On the way over, Hugo hesitates, but I am laughing at his side, and I urge him on. The taxi drops us in a narrow little street. We had forgotten the number. But I see “32” in red over one of the doorways. I feel that we have stood on a diving board and have plunged. And now we are in a play. We are different. I push a swinging door. I was to go ahead to barter over the price. But when I see it is not a house but a café full of people and naked women, I come back to call Hugo, and we walk in. Noise. Blinding lights. Many women surrounding us, calling us, trying to attract our attention. The patronne leads us to a table. Still the women are shouting and signaling. We must choose. Hugo smiles, bewildered. I glance over them. I choose a very vivid, fat, coarse Spanish-looking woman, and then I turn away from the shouting group to the end of the line and call a woman who had made no effort to attract my attention, small, feminine, almost timid. Now they sit before us. The small woman is sweet and pliant. We talk, oh, so politely. We discuss each other’s nails. They comment on the unusualness of my nacreous nail polish. I ask Hugo to look carefully to see if I have chosen well. He does and says I could not have done better. We watch the women dancing. I see only in spots, intensely. Certain places are utter blanks to me. I see big hips, buttocks, and sagging breasts, so many bodies, all at once. We had expected there would be a man for the exhibition. “No,” says the patronne , “but the two girls will amuse you. You will see everything.” It would not be Hugo’s night, then, but he accepts everything. We barter over the price. The women smile. They assume it is my evening because I have asked them if they will show me lesbian poses. Everything is strange to me and familiar to them. I only feel at ease because they are people who need things, whom one can do things for. I give away all my cigarettes. I wish I had a hundred packets. I wish I had a lot of money. We are going upstairs. I enjoy looking at the women’s naked walk.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “For me, it became a question of upsetting the pattern. I set out to do this with the most ingenious lies, the most elaborate piece of acting I have ever done in my life. I used all my talent for analysis and logic, which he admitted I had to a great degree, my own ease at giving explanations. As I hinted to you, I did not hesitate to play with his own personal feelings, every bit of power I had I used, to create a drama, to elude his theory, to complicate and throw veils. I lied and lied more carefully, more calculatingly than June, with all the strength of my mind. I wish I could tell you how and why. . . . Anyway, I did it all without endangering our love: it was a battle of wits in which I have taken the utmost delight. And do you know what? Allendy has beaten us, Allendy has found the truth, he has analyzed all of it right, has detected the lies, has sailed (I won’t say blithely) through all my tortuousness, and finally proved today again the truth of those damned ‘fundamental patterns’ which explain the behavior of all human beings. I tell you this: I would never let June go to him, for June would simply cease to exist, since June is all ramifications of neuroses. It would be a crime to explain her away. . . . And tomorrow I go to Allendy and we start another drama, or I start another drama, with a lie or a phrase, a drama of another kind, the struggle to explain, which is in itself deeply dramatic (are not our talks about June sometimes as dramatic as the event we are discussing?). I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence or whether it is the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening. . . . All I know is that drama is by no means dead in the so-called laboratory. This is as passionate a game as it has been for you to live with June. And then when you see the analyst himself caught in the currents, then you are ready to believe there is drama everywhere. . . . ” My letter to Henry reveals my lies to him, necessary lies, mostly lies meant to heighten my confidence. October

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On one or two occasions, I had been ashamed of my own excitement and been forced to dive immediately under water in order to conceal my very obvious emotion. But now that I had decided to follow this line of action I couldn’t rest until I had worked out a plan. The most difficult step would be to get Ginou to agree that we be left alone together in a room, behind a closed door. On Saturday afternoons, my parents generally left our overheated apartment for a neighborhood beach. It never occurred to me that Ginou, too, had thought seriously of what I was about to propose to her. I can still remember every detail of that day and of the whole scene, though our days at the beach were so much alike that they now all melt into a single image in my memory. Ever since the morning, I had repeatedly failed in my attempts to drag her away from the rest of the crowd. Then the others all agreed to rent a rowboat, but Ginou felt tired and refused to join them. So we stayed alone, a real treat to be by ourselves. We lay together, face to face, on our stomachs in the sand. Ginou’s face seemed to fill the whole landscape ahead of me, spreading beyond the sky line of the hills, filling the whole sky, while the sunlight, reflected off her tousled hair, seemed to form a halo around her. I chose my words carefully as I suggested to her that she come and prepare her French literature exams with me at home; my excuse was that I would have all my books there. We would be all by ourselves in peace and quiet. This last I stressed carefully. I was so upset that I could scarcely pretend that all this was only normal, and I would have made a fool of myself with endless apologies if she had merely frowned. But Ginou answered my hesitant invitation quite simply: “Yes! O.K., for Saturday.” My heart beat so fast that I felt I might faint. I stared tenderly in her direction and tried to find, in her own eyes, some inkling of her complicity. But she evaded my appeal or failed to understand what I was after. Still, I was so happy! I might have dared to kiss her then and there, not out of sensuality but out of sheer affection. So I took my fill of the sight of her, of the sky, the hills, the Mediterranean sea that seemed to love us. I felt that Ginou and the whole universe had signified their acceptance of me, their full confidence.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My thoughts re-echoed inside me, as in a hollow, a desert that was quite alien to me. I scarcely dared obey such an imperative and, as soon as the rough wooden edge of the worn pencil began to rub against the paper as she wrote, I felt that I had to put an end to this unpleasant sound. To achieve it, I had to touch her hand with my own while she tried to trace heavy childish letters, but something had to be done to stop the noise that was so irritating in the otherwise silent room. After my discovery of this important fact, whole centuries seemed to go by. At long last, I plucked up enough courage to act: my hand moved, grasped her own, which stopped still, tense in mine that held it. Everything seemed to stop and I no longer even felt that I existed. Our noisy family apartment was capable, it seemed, of breeding unbelievable silence too. Then, all by itself, my heart began to beat, like a gong. This lasted, lasted, until she suddenly shook time to its very foundations, literally upset it whereas it had seemed to curdle, transforming us into statues. She spoke: “Don’t you want to let me write?” She had said it in such a friendly and even tender tone. She was far less disturbed than I, it seemed to me. I raised my eyes at last and stared into her face that I had forgotten so long ago in all this excitement. She was smiling and her hair fell over her forehead and one third of her face, following that year’s hair style; her lips were tinted with a deep-rose lipstick that suited her perfectly. No, she was not in the least bit shocked. She smiled and, little by little, I regained control over myself. Something must be done now, something must be done now, in order to behave really like a man in love. I lowered my eyes and very suddenly, with the motion of an automaton, placed my left arm around her neck. Again, for centuries it seemed, silence settled down on us and we were way out of this world. Finally, I said to myself: “You must kiss her, you must kiss her, now’s the time.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Two days later, while the women were all away at the public bath, I was left at home, under the none too careful supervision of Imiliou, the eldest of the Barouch children. It did not take me long to cross the forbidden threshold and to find myself in the deserted alley, where I could perceive the unfamiliar noises from Tarfoune Street. Soon, I had ventured even further afield, as far as the source of the disturbance: the neighborhood kids were playing the game that was called “apricot kernels,” behind the handcarts and close to the garbage cart. Their ears were red with excitement, their knees already covered with mud, and they threw themselves suddenly onto the ground and then jumped up again like devils, pulling frightful faces behind the backs of the foe and stressing every gesture with a howl of rage or of triumph. At once, I recognized on the back of Fraji, the son of Choulam, my own sweater.