Fear

Passages

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

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sitting with Black women from all over the earth has made me think a great deal about what it means to be indigenous, and what my relationship as a Black woman in North America is to the land-rights struggles of the indigenous peoples of this land, to Native American Indian women, and how we can translate that consciousness into a new level of working together. In other words, how can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future? All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children. November 21, 1985 New York City It feels like the axe is falling. There it is on the new CAT scan—another mass growing in my liver, and the first one is spreading. I’ve found an anthroposophic doctor in Spring Valley who suggests I go to the Lukas Klinik, a hospital in Switzerland where they are conducting the primary research on Iscador, as well as diagnosing and treating cancers. I’ve known something is wrong from the returning pains and the dimming energies of my body. My classes have been difficult, and most days I feel like I’m going on sheer will power alone which can be very freeing and seductive but also very dangerous. Limited. I’m running down. But I’d do exactly what I’m doing anyway, cancer or no cancer. A. will lend us the money to go to Switzerland, and Frances will come with me. I think they will be able to find out what is really wrong with me at the Lukas Klinik, and if they say these growths in my liver are malignant, then I will accept that I have cancer of the liver. At least there they will be able to adjust my Iscador dosage upward to the maximum effect, because that is the way I have decided to go and I’m not going to change now. Obviously, I still don’t accept these tumors in my liver as cancer, although I know that could just be denial on my part, which is certainly one mechanism for coping with cancer. I have to consider denial as a possibility in all of my planning, but I also feel that there is absolutely nothing they can do for me at Sloane [ sic ] Kettering except cut me open and then sew me back up with their condemnations inside me. December 7, 1985 New York City My stomach x-rays are clear, and the problems in my GI series are all circumstantial. Now that the doctors here have decided I have liver cancer, they insist on reading all their findings as if that were a fait accompli.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When Blanche had her mastectomy last year, it was the first time that I had to face, in a woman I loved, feelings and fears I had faced within my own self, but never dealt with externally. Now I had to speak to these feelings in some way that was meaningful and urgent in the name of my love. Somehow I had known for the past eight years that someday it would be this way, that personal salvation of whatever kind is never just personal. I talked with Blanchie today over the phone about this feeling I have that I must rally everything I know, made alive and immediate with the fire of what is. I have always been haunted by the fear of not being able to reach the women I am closest to, of not being able to make available to the women I love most dearly what I can make available to so many others. The women in my family, my closest friends. If what I know to be true cannot be of use to them, can it ever have been said to be true at all? On the other hand, that lays a terrible burden on all of us concerned, doesn’t it? It is a matter of learning languages, or of learning to use them with precision to do what needs to be done with them, and it is the Blanchie in myself to whom I need to speak with such urgency. It’s one of the great things friends are for each other when you’ve been very close for a long time. And of course cancer is political—look at how many of our comrades have died of it during the last ten years! As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. Our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. Substance. Our work. Style. True to our selves. What would it be like to be living in a place where the pursuit of definition within this crucial part of our lives was not circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in america? Here the first consideration concerning cancer is not what does this mean in my living, but how much is this going to cost? April 22, 1986 St. Croix I got a letter from Ellen Kuzwayo this morning. Her sister in Botswana has died. I wish I were in Soweto to put my arms around her and rest her head on my shoulder. She sounds so strong and sanguine in her unshakable faith, yet so much alone.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  There is no mention of any question of the law, a question which always arose when there was a Jewish background. Their previous condition had been one of physical passions (r:14, 4:3-4) which fits Gentiles far better than Jews. At one time, they were not a people - Gentiles outside the covenant - but now they are the people of God (2:9-Io). The form of his name which Peter uses also shows that this letter was intended for Gentiles, for Peter is a Greek name. Paul calls him Cephas (i Corinthians 1:12, 3:22, 9:5, 15:5; Galatians 1:18, 2:9, 2:11, 2:14); among his fellow Jews, he was known as Simeon (Acts 15:14), which is the name by which he is called in 2 Peter (i:i). Since he uses his Greek name here, it is likely that he was writing to Greek people. The Circumstances behind the Letter That this letter was written in a time when persecution threatened is abundantly clear. They are going through various trials (1:6). They are likely to be falsely accused as evildoers (3:16). A fiery ordeal is going to try them (4:12). When they suffer, they are to commit themselves to God (4:19). They may well have to suffer for doing what is right (3:14). They are sharing in the afflictions which Christians throughout the world are called upon to endure (5:9). Behind this letter lie fiery trial, a campaign of slander and suffering for the sake of Christ. Can we identify this situation? There was a time when the Christians had little to fear from the Roman government. In Acts, it is repeatedly the Roman magistrates and the Roman soldiers and officials who save Paul from the fury of Jews and Gentiles alike. As the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, had it, the tribunal of the Roman magistrate proved the most assured refuge against the fury of the synagogue. The reason was that in the early days the Roman government was not able to distinguish between Jews and Christians. Within the empire, Judaism was what was called a religio licita, a permitted religion, and Jews were completely free to worship in their own way. It was not that the Jews did not try to enlighten the Romans as to the true facts of the situation; they did so in Corinth, for example (Acts 18:12-17). But, for some time, the Romans simply regarded the Christians as a Jewish sect and, therefore, did not molest them. The change came in the days of Nero, and we can trace almost every detail of the story. On 19th July, AD 64, the great fire of Rome broke out.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I don’t want to look like her or live my life that way.” “How did you meet Nick?” She sighed as she answered, “Well, we hardly knew each other in high school. We were never lovers or even friends. I think that he had a crush on me from afar. Then in my junior year I broke my ankle and during the six weeks that I was hobbling around, he was very kind to me, carrying my stuff and visiting me. He was the only one who took any care of me. He also comes from a divorced family with lots of troubles. When he dropped out of school, I felt very sorry for him.” “Then how did he come back into your life?” “I was having a real bad time. My brother was getting into serious trouble with the law and my dad wouldn’t do anything to help. I pleaded with him but he was totally indifferent. I was frantic and beginning to realize that all my efforts to hold my family together were wasted. So when Nick asked me to move in with him, I said yes. Anything to get away, even though I knew from the outset he had no plans for the future, no training, no formal education. After the first day, I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’ But at least I know he won’t betray me. At least I’m safe from that.” “Karen, this fear of betrayal is pretty central to you. You keep mentioning it.” “It’s been central to my life,” she agreed. “Both my parents played around. I saw it all around me. They felt that if you are not getting what you want, you just look elsewhere.” (I’ve never heard anyone put the alternative morality of our divorce culture so succinctly.) Karen took her hands away from her face and silently ripped the tissue in half. “There’s another reason I moved in with him,” she whispered. “It will probably distress you.” Karen spoke hesitantly, clasped her hands in her lap, and elaborated slowly, as if every word were painful and she had to extract them one by one. “I figured that this is one man who will never leave me.” Silence. “Because he has no ambitions, he will always have fewer choices than me. So if I stay with him and even marry him someday, I won’t ever have to worry about his walking out.” Karen was right about my being distressed. Her statement was chilling. How utterly tragic that this lovely woman would begin her adult journey so burdened down with fears. What kind of life could she build on such fragile foundations? Like a good caregiver child, Karen reinstalled her troubled relationships with her mother and father into her early relationships with men.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  After classes, I ascertained that the magazine belonged to one of my best friends. I charged him with betrayal and mockery. In the ensuing fight, he crashed backward into a desk, catching his foot in a joint and breaking his ankle. He was laid up for a month, but gallantly concealed from his family and from our teachers my share in the matter. The pang of seeing him carried downstairs was lost in my general misery. For some reason or other, no car came to fetch me that day, and during the cold, dreary, incredibly slow drive home in a hired sleigh I had ample time to think matters over. Now I understood why, the day before, my mother had been so little with me and had not come down to dinner. I also understood what special coaching Thernant, a still finer maître d’armes than Loustalot, had of late been giving my father. What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself—the blade or the bullet? Or had the choice already been made? Carefully, I took the beloved, the familiar, the richly alive image of my father at fencing and tried to transfer that image, minus the mask and the padding, to the dueling ground, in some barn or riding school. I visualized him and his adversary, both bare-chested, black-trousered, in furious battle, their energetic movements marked by that strange awkwardness which even the most elegant swordsmen cannot avoid in a real encounter. The picture was so repulsive, so vividly did I feel the ripeness and nakedness of a madly pulsating heart about to be pierced, that I found myself hoping for what seemed momentarily a more abstract weapon. But soon I was in even deeper distress. As the sleigh crept along Nevski Avenue, where blurry lights swam in the gathering dusk, I thought of the heavy black Browning my father kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. I knew that pistol as well as I knew all the other, more salient, things in his study; the objets d’art of crystal or veined stone, fashionable in those days; the glinting family photographs; the huge, mellowly illumined Perugino; the small, honey-bright Dutch oils; and, right over the desk, the rose-and-haze pastel portrait of my mother by Bakst: the artist had drawn her face in three-quarter view, wonderfully bringing out its delicate features—the upward sweep of the ash-colored hair (it had grayed when she was in her twenties), the pure curve of the forehead, the dove-blue eyes, the graceful line of the neck.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And I wonder what I will have to pay someday for that privilege, and in whose coin? Will those forces which serve non-life in the name of power and profit kill me too, or merely dismember me in the eyes of whoever can use what I do? When I stand in the radiance of a place like the Sapphire Sapphos dinner, with the elegant food and abundance of love and beautiful dark women, when I stand in that moment of sweetness, I sometimes become almost afraid. Afraid of their warmth and loving, as if that same loving warmth might doom me. I know this is not so, but it can feel like it. As if so long as I remained too different from my own time and surroundings I was safe, if terribly lonely. But now that I am becoming less lonely and more loved, I am also becoming more visible, and therefore more vulnerable. Malcolm saying to Martin in the film, “I love you, Martin, and we are both dead men.” February 9, 1984 New York City So. No doubt about where we are in the world’s story. It has just cost $32,000 to complete a government-commissioned study that purports to show there is no rampant hunger in the U.S.A. I wonder if they realize rampant means aggressive . So. The starving old women who used to sit in broken-down rooming houses waiting for a welfare check now lie under park benches and eat out of garbage bins. “I only eat fruit,” she mumbled, rummaging through the refuse bin behind Gristedes supermarket, while her gnarled Black hands carefully cut away the rotted parts of a cantaloupe with a plastic Burger King knife. February 18, 1984 Ohio How does it feel , Ms. L., to be a fifty-year-old Black woman who is still bleeding! Cheers to the years! Doing what I like to do best. Last night I gave a talk to the Black students at the university about coming to see ourselves as part of an international community of people of Color, how we must train ourselves to question what our Blackness—our Africanness—can mean on the world stage. And how as members of that international community, we must assume responsibility for our actions, or lack of action, as americans. Otherwise, no matter how relative that power might be, we are yielding it up to the opposition to be used against us, and against the forces for liberation around the world. For instance, what are our responsibilities as educated Black women toward the land-rights struggles of other people of Color here and abroad? I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But in England the rule was Rhadamanthine; the fags’ names on duty were put up on a blackboard, and if you were not on time, ay, and servile to boot, you’d get a dozen from an ash plant on your behind and not laid on perfunctorily and with distaste, as the Doctor did it, but with vim so that I had painful weals on my backside and couldn’t sit down for days without a smart. The fags too, being young and weak, were very often brutally treated just for fun. On Sunday mornings in summer, for instance, we had an hour longer in bed. I was one of the half dozen juniors in the big bedroom; there were two older boys in it, one at each end, presumably to keep order; but in reality to teach lechery and corrupt their younger favorites. If the mothers of England knew what goes on in the dormitories of these boarding-schools throughout England, they would all be closed, from Eton and Harrow upwards or downwards, in a day. If English fathers even had brains enough to understand that the fires of sex need no stoking in boyhood, they too would protect their sons from the foul abuse. But I shall come back to this. Now I wish to speak of the cruelty. Every form of cruelty was practiced on the younger, weaker and more nervous boys. I remember one Sunday morning, the half dozen older boys pulled one bed along the wall and forced all the seven younger boys underneath it, beating with sticks any hand or foot that showed. One little fellow cried that he couldn’t breathe and at once the gang of tormentors began stuffing up all the apertures, saying that they would make a “Black Hole” of it. There were soon cries and strugglings under the bed and at length one of the youngest began shrieking so that the torturers ran away from the prison, fearing lest some master should hear. One wet Sunday afternoon in midwinter, a little nervous “Mother’s darling” from the West Indies who always had a cold and was always sneaking near the fire in the big schoolroom, was caught by two of the Fifth and held near the flames. Two more brutes pulled his trowsers tight over his bottom, and the more he squirmed and begged to be let go, the tighter they held the trowsers and the nearer the flames he was pushed, till suddenly the trowsers split apart scorched through, and as the little fellow tumbled forward screaming, the torturers realized that they had gone too far. The little “Nigger” as he was called, didn’t tell how he came to be so scorched but took his fortnight in sick bay as a respite.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Talking it over we came to the conclusion that one man should ride to Fort Dodge for help and I was selected as the lightest save Bob and altogether the worst shot besides being the only man who would certainly find his way. Accordingly I brought up Blue Devil at once, took some pounds of jerked beef with me and a goat-water skin I had bought in Taos; a girth and stirrups quickly turned a blanket into a makeshift, light saddle and I was ready. It was Bob’s uncanny knowledge both of the Trail and of Indian ways that gave me my chance. All the rest advised me to go North out of our bay and then ride for it. He advised me to go south where the large body of Indians had stationed themselves. “They’ll not look for you there”, he said and “you may get through unseen; half an hour’s riding more will take you round them; then you have one hundred and fifty miles north on the Trail—you may pick up a herd—and then one hundred and twenty miles straight west. You ought to be in Dodge in five days and back here in five more; you’ll find us”, he added significantly. The little man padded Blue Devil’s hooves with some old garments he cut up and insisted on leading her away round the bight and far to the south, and I verily believe beyond the Indian camp. There he took off the mare’s pads, while I tightened the girths and started to walk keeping the mare between me and the Indians and my ears cocked for the slightest sound. But I heard nothing and saw nothing and in an hour more had made the round and was on the Trail for the north determined in my own mind to do the two or three hundred miles in four days at most.... On the fourth day I got twenty troopers from the Fort with Lieutenant Winder and was leading them in a bee-line to our Refuge. We got there in six days; but in the mean time the Indians had been busy. They cut a way through the scrub-oak brush that we regarded as impassable and stampeded the cattle one morning just at dawn and our men were only able to herd off about six or seven hundred head and protect them in the extreme north corner of the bend. The Indians had all drawn off the day before I arrived with the U. S. Cavalry troopers.... Next morning we began the march northwards and I had no difficulty in persuading Lieutenant Winder to give us his escort for the next four or five days....

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  The great danger of this heresy is that it comes from what can only be called a mistaken reverence. It is afraid to ascribe to Jesus full humanity. It regards it as irreverent to think that he had a truly physical body. It is a heresy which is by no means dead but is still held today, usually quite unconsciously, by many devout Christians. But it must be remembered, as John so clearly saw, that our salvation was dependent on the full identification of Jesus Christ with us. As one of the great early Church fathers unforgettably put it, `He became what we are to make us what he is.' This Gnostic belief had certain practical consequences in the lives of those who held it. (i) The Gnostic attitude to matter and to all created things produced a certain attitude to the body and the things to do with the body. That attitude might take any one of three different forms. (a) It might take the form of self-denial, with fasting and celibacy and rigid control, even deliberate ill-treatment, of the body. The view that celibacy is better than marriage and that sex is sinful goes back to Gnostic influence and belief - and this is a view which still lingers on in certain quarters. There is no trace of that view in this letter. (b) It might take the form of an assertion that the body did not matter and that, therefore, its appetites might be satisfied without restraint. Since the body was in any event evil, it made no difference what was done with it. There are echoes of this in this letter. John condemns as liars all who say that they know God and yet do not keep God's commandments; those who say that they abide in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked (i John r:6, 2:4-6). There were clearly Gnostics in these communities who claimed special knowledge of God but whose conduct was a long way from the demands of the Christian ethic.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Yet here we need to face an uncomfortable truth. As Lisa’s story shows, parents who cooperate fully with each other are not necessarily in touch with the feelings and needs of their child. Efforts to settle differences amicably do not automatically bring parents closer to understanding a child’s concerns or make them more responsive to a child’s distress. There’s a good deal more to helping children than declaring a cease-fire. The prevailing divorce nostrum in this country—don’t fight—does not, as so many lawyers, judges, and mental health professionals hope it will, protect children from experiencing the same sorts of difficulties in adulthood as we’ve seen in those raised in less cooperative families. Lisa represents a very large number of children in America’s divorce culture. Her experience is instructive for us all. Conflict and Suffering in the Midst of CooperationI FIRST MET Lisa when she was in nursery school—a charming four-year-old girl decked out in a raspberry red pantsuit with bright yellow ribbons in her hair. Her parents were successful professionals— her mom a lawyer at the National Resources Defense Counsel office in Los Angeles and her dad a journalist who later went into public relations for several Silicon Valley corporations in Menlo Park. I asked Lisa what was going on in her family. She explained soberly, in a very grown-up way, “Daddy does not like Mommy so he’s living in the city and Mommy likes Daddy and wants him back.” “That’s an awful lot of changes,” I said, with soberness to match hers. “What do you think is going to happen?” Lisa shook her head silently and refused to say any more. But her play revealed all that she couldn’t express in words. It had two acts. Each vividly portrayed her inner world. In the first episode, she placed the father, the mother, and the children dolls in the dollhouse living room where they all sat in a row watching television. Then they all lay in one big bed, hugging one another like puppies in a basket. Next they were all squashed together in the bathtub. Finally, they were perched precariously on the steep roof, holding on to each other to keep from falling. The togetherness wrought by little Lisa was overpowering. In the second act, the tiger, crocodile, giraffe, and bear all went mad with aggression, wildly biting each other. They snarled and leapt at one another’s throats. Finally, carried away by her powerful feelings, Lisa bit the giraffe savagely and pummeled the tiger with her tiny fists. The message was clear. Lisa wanted desperately for her family to stay together but knew that it was coming apart. Underneath her composed, ladylike manner, fierce angers threatened to explode.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  with which I formerly believed your heart was animated, at least to hear me before you do ine violence. What can possess you, Amadour," she said, seeing that he listened to her, " to desire a thing that can give you no pleasure, and would overwhelm me with grief ? You have so well known my sentiments during my youth and my prime, which might have served as an excuse for your passion, that I wonder how, at my present age, and ugly as you see I am, you seek for that which you know you cannot find. I am sure you do not doubt that my sen- timents are still the same, and, consequently, that nothing but violence can enable you to obtain your wishes. Look at the state of my face, forget the beauty you have seen in it, and you will lose all desire to ap- proach me. If there is any remnant of love in your heart, it is impossible but that pity shall prevail over your rage. It is to your pity, and to the virtue of which you have given me so many proofs, that I appeal for mercy. Do not destroy my peace of mind, and make no attempt upon my honour, which, in accordance with your counsel, I am resolved to preserve. If the love you had for me has degenerated into hate, and you design from vindictiveness rather than affection to make me the most miserable woman on earth, I declare to you that it shall not be so, and that you will force me to complain openly of your vicious conduct to her who is so prejudiced in your favour. If you reduce me to this extremity, consider that your life is not safe." " If I must die," replied Amadour, " a moment will put an end to all my troubles ; but the disfigurement of your face, which I believe is your own work, shall not hinder me from doing what I am resolved ; for though I could have nothing of you but your bones, I would have them dose to me." y gS THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Mnvl la

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  All apocalyptic literature deals with these events - the sin of the present age, the terrors of the time between, and the blessings of the time to come. It is entirely composed of dreams and visions of the end. That means that all apocalyptic literature is inevitably cryptic. It is continually attempting to describe the indescribable, to say the unsayable and to paint the unpaintable. This is further complicated by another fact. It was only natural that these apocalyptic visions should flame the more brightly in the minds of people living under tyranny and oppression. The more some alien power held them down, the more they dreamed of the destruction of that power and of their own recognition and restoration. But it would only have worsened the situation if the oppressing power could have understood these dreams. Such writings would have seemed the works of rebellious revolutionaries. These books, therefore, were frequently written in code, deliberately couched in language which was unintelligible to the outsider; and inevitably there are many cases in which they remain unintelligible because the key to the code no longer exists. But the more we know about the historical background of such books, the better we can interpret them. The Book of Revelation All this is the precise picture of our Revelation. There are any number of Jewish apocalypses - Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Ezra. Our Revelation is a Christian apocalypse. It is the only one in the New Testament, although there were many other similar writings which did not gain admission. It is written exactly on the Jewish pattern and follows the basic idea of the two ages. The only difference is that, for the day of the Lord, it substitutes the coming in power of Jesus Christ. Not only the pattern but also the details are the same. The Jewish apocalypses had a standard sequence of events which were to happen at the last time; these events all have their place in Revelation. Before we go on to outline that pattern of events, another question arises. Both apocalyptic and prophecy deal with the events which are to come. What, then, is the difference between them? Apocalyptic and Prophecy The difference between the prophets and the writers of apocalyptic was very real. There were two main differences - one of message and one of method.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Many people, including lawyers, judges, and mediators, don’t understand how often in divorce seemingly rational complaints cloak powerful, irrational feelings. Or they assume that the complaints always reflect anger at the spouse and not some other deep sadness. However familiar Mrs. James’s marital troubles sounded to her attorney, her anger did not arise from the marriage per se but from a secondary loss that fueled her rage. Ideally, her grief over her mother’s sudden death and her inability to mourn should have been addressed before she moved ahead to make thoughtful decisions about her divorce and her children. This is the kind of rage that can last for decades after divorce and it is the kind of anger that leaves lasting residue on a child’s personality. As an adult, Karen is terrified of conflict because it’s so dangerous. But we’re getting ahead of our story. Becoming a Caregiver Child SIX MONTHS AFTER the divorce, Dr. James married a much younger woman whom the children liked very much. She was lively, funny, and did not try to intrude into their lives as a rule-making stepmother but rather befriended them and treated them warmly. Unfortunately, Dr. James carried some baggage into his second marriage and it, too, was stormy, featuring many unexplained weekend departures by the second wife. Three years later, she kissed the children good-bye and left to marry another man. “I was a basket case,” Dr. James told me during one of our follow-up interviews. The children were stunned, bereft of explanation for the second loss in their family life. Nor did Mrs. James find much happiness in the years after her divorce. She had several love affairs followed by a second marriage. The new husband, who ran a landscape business, could not tolerate the children and soon grew bored with his pretty wife. The marriage lasted less than five years, throwing the mother into continued turmoil. For Karen, the legacy of divorce was that she moved into the role of substitute parent for her younger siblings and of confidante and adviser to her troubled mother and father. It was an entirely new role for this child who, like many others before the divorce, had been leading a fairly protected life. Yet Karen undertook the classic role of caregiver or “parentified” child with aplomb and grace. In fact, she was a model parent. “My brother is scared of a lot of things,” she once warned me. “What is he scared of?” “Of the dark. Of going upstairs. Of being alone. I try to take care of him. I go into his room every night, so he won’t cry.” Many young girls voluntarily move to fill the vacuum created by parents who collapse emotionally, and sometimes physically, after divorce. The caregiver child’s job, as she defines it, is to keep the parent going by acting in whatever capacity is needed—mentor, adviser, nurse, confidante. The range is wide depending on the parent’s need and the child’s perception.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The UNEXPECTED LEGACY of DIVORCE A 25 YEAR LANDMARK STUDY Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee This book is dedicated with gratitude, admiration, and affection to the women and men in this book who are the vanguard of an entire generation of young Americans raised in divorced families. We thank you for sharing your lives with all of us over twenty-five years and for helping millions of other children and young adults to understand that they are not alone. Prologue P UBLISHED ONE YEAR ago, our book hit a raw nerve in America. It broke through an almost conspiratorial silence about the true nature of our divorce culture and how much growing up in America has changed in recent decades. The major contribution of this book has been to recognize, for the first time, that when children of divorce become adults, they are badly frightened that their relationships will fail, just like the most important relationship in their parents’ lives failed. They mature with a keen sense that their growing-up experiences did not prepare them for love, commitment, trust, marriage, or even for the nitty-gritty of handling and resolving conflicts. In the book they say, “I never saw a man and a woman on the same beam.” Their decisions about whether or not to marry are shadowed by the experience of growing up in a home where their parents could not hold it together. They are no less eager than their peers who grew up in intact families for passionate love, sexual intimacy, and commitment. But they are haunted by powerful ghosts from their childhoods that tell them that they, like their parents, will not succeed. On the positive side, many young adults who weathered their parents’ divorce are extremely successful in their chosen careers, having learned how to be independent, resourceful, and flexible. Having invented their own moral path, they are decent, caring adults who managed to build good marriages in spite of their fears. Many are excellent parents. In the book they say, “I never want to let happen to my children what happened to me.” Others turned their lives around by dint of their own courage, insight, and compassion. The response to our book was phenomenal. Oprah Winfrey invited me to be on her show twice. Realizing she had tapped into concerns that deeply affect millions of young adults in her audience, she invited them to speak out. And they did. With tears and anger, they said: “This book is talking about me. This is what happened to me. This is what I am feeling today.” “I’m still angry that my parents never explained the divorce to me.” “When my dad remarried I lost him to his new family. Two sets of children were too much for him. I’m happily married and I worry all the time that I will lose my husband.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Unless his consciousness were something more than cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain of the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it could not long maintain itself in existence; for, by an inscrutable necessity, each human mind's appearance on this earth is conditioned upon the integrity of the body with which it belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as their tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruction. Its own body, then, first of all, its friends next, and finally its spiritual dispositions, must be the supremely interesting objects for each human mind. Each mind, to begin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in the shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist. This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther conscious acts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness more subtle still. All minds must have come, by the way of survival of the fittest, if by no director path, to take an intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked, altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego which they also possess. And similarly with the images of their person in the minds of others. I should not be extant now had I not become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast. Looks of contempt cast on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way. Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some other person's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then natural selection would unquestionably have brought it about that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes of that other person as I now am to my own. Instead of being egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then. But in this case, only partially realized in actual human conditions, though the self I empirically love would have changed, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remain just what it is now. My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than those of other people, and for the same reason. I should not be here at all unless I had cultivated them and kept them from decay. And the same law which made me once care for them makes me care for them still. My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the primitive object, instinctively determined, of my egoistic interests. Other objects may become interesting derivatively through association with any of these things, either as means or as habitual concomitants; and so in a thousand ways the primitive sphere of the egoistic emotions may enlarge and change its boundaries.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  So slight an emotion as that produced by the entrance of Professor Ludwig into the laboratory was instantly followed by a shrinkage of the arms. [125] The brain itself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge full of blood, in fact; and another of Mosso's inventions showed that when less blood went to the arms, more went to the head. The subject to be observed lay on a delicately balanced table which could tip downward either at the head or at the foot if the weight of either end were increased. The moment emotional or intellectual activity began in the subject, down went the balance at the head-end, in consequence of the redistribution of blood in his system. But the best proof of the immediate afflux of blood to the brain during mental activity is due to Mosso's observations on three persons whose brain had been laid bare by lesion of the skull. By means of apparatus described in his book, [126] this physiologist was enabled to let the brain-pulse record itself directly by a tracing. The intra-cranial blood-pressure rose immediately whenever the subject was spoken to, or when he began to think actively, as in solving a problem in mental arithmetic. Mosso gives in his work a large number of reproductions of tracings which show the instantaneity of the change of blood-supply, whenever the mental activity was quickened by any cause whatever, intellectual or emotional. He relates of his female subject that one day whilst tracing her brain-pulse he observed a sudden rise with no apparent outer or inner cause. She however confessed to him afterwards that at that moment she had caught sight of a skull on top of a piece of furniture in the room, and that this had given her a slight emotion. The fluctuations of the blood-supply to the brain were independent of respiratory changes, [127] and followed the quickening of mental activity almost immediately. We must suppose a very delicate adjustment whereby the circulation follows the needs of the cerebral activity. Blood very likely may rush to each region of the cortex according as it is most active, but of this we know nothing. I need hardly say that the activity of the nervous matter is the primary phenomenon, and the afflux of blood its secondary consequence. Many popular writers talk as if it were the other way about, and as if mental activity were due to the afflux of blood. But, as Professor H.N. Martin has well said, "that belief has no physiological foundation whatever; it is even directly opposed to all that we know of cell life." [128] A chronic pathological congestion may, it is true, have secondary consequences, but the primary congestions which we have been considering follow the activity of the brain-cells by an adaptive reflex vaso-motor mechanism doubtless as elaborate as that which harmonizes blood-supply with cell-action in any muscle or gland.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  They showed no inclination to scrape, . . . but when Dr. Thomson sprinkled a little gravel on the carpet, . . . the chickens immediately began their scraping movements." [103] A strange person, and darkness, are both of them stimuli to fear and mistrust in dogs (and for the matter of that, in men). Neither circumstance alone may awaken outward manifestations, but together, i.e. when the strange man is met in the dark, the dog will be excited to violent defiance. [104] Street-hawkers well know the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselves in a line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys from the last one of them, through the effect of the reiterated solicitation, what he refused to buy from the first in the row. Aphasia shows many examples of summation. A patient who cannot name an object simply shown him, will name it if he touches as well as sees it, etc. Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinitely, but it is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent chapters. Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Discrimination, Association, Memory, Æsthetics, and Will, will contain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the principle in the purely psychological field. REACTION-TIME. One of the lines of experimental investigation most diligently followed of late years is that of the ascertainment of the time occupied by nervous events. Helmholtz led off by discovering the rapidity of the current in the sciatic nerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soon applied to the sensory nerves and the centres, and the results caused much popular scientific admiration when described as measurements of the 'velocity of thought.' The phrase 'quick as thought' had from time immemorial signified all that was wonderful and elusive of determination in the line of speed; and the way in which Science laid her doomful hand upon this mystery reminded people of the day when Franklin first 'eripuit cœlo fulmen,' foreshadowing the region of a newer and colder race of gods. We shall take up the various operations measured, each in the chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I may say, however, immediately, that the phrase 'velocity of thought' is misleading, for it is by no means clear in any of the cases what particular act of thought occurs during the time which is measured. 'Velocity of nerve-action' is liable to the same criticism, for in most cases we do not know what particular nerve-processes occur. What the times in question really represent is the total duration of certain reactions upon stimuli.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Wherever a creature has to deal with complex features of the environment, prudence is a virtue. The higher animals have so to deal; and the more complex the features, the higher we call the animals. The fewer of his acts, then, can such an animal perform without the help of the organs in question. In the frog many acts devolve wholly on the lower centres; in the bird fewer; in the rodent fewer still; in the dog very few indeed; and in apes and men hardly any at all. The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehension of food as an example and suppose it to be a reflex performance of the lower centres. The animal will be condemned fatally and irresistibly to snap at it whenever presented, no matter what the circumstances may be; he can no more disobey this prompting than water can refuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the pot. His life will again and again pay the forfeit of his gluttony. Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, to poisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regular parts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which to weigh the danger against the attractiveness of the bait, and of all volition to remain hungry a little while longer, is the direct measure of his lowness in the mental scale. And those fishes which, like our cunners and sculpins, are no sooner thrown back from the hook into the water, than they automatically seize the hook again, would soon expiate the degradation of their intelligence by the extinction of their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atone for their imprudence. Appetite and the acts it prompts have consequently become in all higher vertebrates functions of the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiologist's knife has left the subordinate centres alone in place. The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-heap. Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolves exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shorn away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and cooings of its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch in heat would excite no emotion in male dogs who had suffered large loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have read Darwin's 'Descent of Man' know what immense importance in the amelioration of the breed in birds this author ascribes to the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is not performed until every condition of circumstance and sentiment is fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The sepia gloom of an arctic afternoon in midwinter invaded the rooms and was deepening to an oppressive black. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow. Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. In the stillness, the dry sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling upon the marble of a table made one’s nerves twang. My mother’s boudoir had a convenient oriel for looking out on the Morskaya in the direction of the Maria Square. With lips pressed against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane I would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze. From that oriel, some years later, at the outbreak of the Revolution, I watched various engagements and saw my first dead man: he was being carried away on a stretcher, and from one dangling leg an ill-shod comrade kept trying to pull off the boot despite pushes and punches from the stretchermen—all this at a goodish trot. But in the days of Mr. Burness’ lessons there was nothing to watch save the dark, muffled street and its receding line of loftily suspended lamps, around which the snowflakes passed and repassed with a graceful, almost deliberately slackened motion, as if to show how the trick was done and how simple it was. From another angle, one might see a more generous stream of snow in a brighter, violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight, and then the jutting enclosure where I stood would seem to drift slowly up and up, like a balloon. At last one of the phantom sleighs gliding along the street would come to a stop, and with gawky haste Mr. Burness in his fox-furred shapka would make for our door. From the schoolroom, whither I had preceded him, I would hear his vigorous footsteps crashing nearer and nearer, and, no matter how cold the day was, his good, ruddy face would be sweating abundantly as he strode in. I remember the terrific energy with which he pressed on the spluttering pen as he wrote down, in the roundest of round hands, the tasks to be prepared for the next day. Usually at the end of the lesson a certain limerick was asked for and granted, the point of the performance being that the word “screamed” in it was to be involuntarily enacted by oneself every time Mr. Burness gave a formidable squeeze to the hand he held in his beefy paw as he recited the lines: There was a young lady from Russia Who (squeeze) whenever you’d crush her She (squeeze) and she (squeeze) … by which time the pain would have become so excruciating that we never got any farther.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  plunged my poniard in your breast sooner than he will have delivered you." Presently the gentleman came up, and asked him whence he came ? " From your house, monsieur," replied the Cordelier. " I left mademoiselle quite well, and she is expecting you." The gentleman rode on without perceiving his wife ; but the valet who accompanied him, and who had always been in the habit of conversing with the Cordelier's companion, named Friar John, called to his mistress, thinking that she was that person. The poor woman, who durst not turn her head towards her husband, made no reply to the valet ; and the latter crossed the road, that he might see the face of this pretended Brother John. The poor lady, without saying anything, made a sign to him with her eyes, which were full of tears. The valet then rode up to his master, and said, '• In conscience, monsieur, Friar John IS very like mademoiselle, your wife. I had a look at him as I crossed the road. It is certainly not the usual Friar John ; at least, I can tell you, that if it is, he weeps abundantly, and that he gave me a very sorrowful glance of his eye." The gentleman told him he was dreaming, and made light of what he said. The valet, however, still persist- ing in it that there was something wrong, asked leave to ride back and see to it, and begged his master to wait for him. The gentleman let him go, and waited to see what would be the upshot. But the Cordelier, hearing the valet coming after him with shouts to Friar John, and making no doubt that the lady had been recognized, turned upon the valet with a great iron-bound staff, gave him such a blow on the side that he knocked him off his horse, and springing instantly upon him with the poniard, speedily dispatched him The gentleman, who from a distance had seen his valet fall, and supposed that this 296 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE IAwv/31,