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 History of World Literature (2007)

  8 Lecture 2: The Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh Lecture 2 The ¿ rst [part of the poem]… is pretty much a … heroic story about the exploits of a legendary king. … [who] for the second part … goes out on a … spiritual quest looking for a more literal remedy against death than … a name that will live on beyond him. W e begin our study of world literature with one of the oldest literary works in the world, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh . The modern text is based on a 7 th-century B.C.E. copy found in the library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal. The poem itself dates to about 2800 B.C.E., when Gilgamesh was king of the Sumerian city of Uruk. The poems written about him were passed down from the Sumerians to the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians as these people succeeded to power in the Middle East. The poems were woven into a single narrative in the 2 nd millennium B.C.E. by a Babylonian scribe known as Sin-liqe- uninni. Professor Vandiver tells the story of the poem’s rediscovery in the 19 th century in The Teaching Company course Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition. The poem is divided into two parts: a heroic story about the exploits of a legendary king, and a narrative about a spiritual quest by a man who has just recognized his own mortality. Gilgamesh is heroic in that, like Achilles and Aeneas, he is partly divine and hence larger than life in all respects. His adventures are told in an epic, which is a narrative poem about a heroic ¿ gure who de¿ nes his culture. Gilgamesh begins the story as a ruler who wears out his people, who pray to the gods for relief. The gods create Enkidu as an alter-ego for Gilgamesh: half animal, half human in complement to Gilgamesh’s half-human, half- divine nature. Enkidu is civilized by a prostitute who has sex with him, introduces him to shepherds—who teach him to eat human food, wear clothing, and groom himself—and then takes him to meet Gilgamesh. The two wrestle and become fast friends, the ¿ rst instance in literature of the kind of male friendship that we will later encounter in this course between

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

  Our love affair with monogamy arguably comes at some cost. The Brazilian family therapist Michele Scheinkman says, “American culture has great tolerance for divorce—where there is a total breakdown of the loyalty bond and painful effects for the whole family—but it is a culture with no tolerance for sexual infidelity.” We would rather kill a relationship than question its structure. So entrenched is our faith in monogamy that most couples, particularly heterosexual couples, rarely broach the subject openly. They have no need to discuss what’s a given. Even those who are otherwise willing to probe sexuality in all its permutations are often reluctant to negotiate the hard lines around exclusivity. Monogamy has an absolute quality. According to this way of thinking, you can’t be mostly monogamous, or 98 percent monogamous, or periodically nonmonogamous. Discussing fidelity implies that it’s open to discussion, no longer an imperative. The prospect of betrayal is too dark, so we avoid the subject with practiced denial. We fear that the smallest chink in our armor will let in Sodom and Gomorrah. Despite a 50 percent divorce rate for first marriages and 65 percent the second time around; despite the staggering frequency of affairs; despite the fact that monogamy is a ship sinking faster than anyone can bail it out, we continue to cling to the wreckage with absolute faith in its structural soundness. Finding the One Historically, monogamy was an externally imposed system of control over women’s reproduction. “Which child is mine? Who gets the cows when I die?” Fidelity, as a mainstay of patriarchal society, was about lineage and property; it had nothing to do with love. Today, particularly in the West, it has everything to do with love. When marriage shifted from a contractual arrangement to a matter of the heart, faithfulness became a mutual expression of love and commitment. Once a social prohibition directed at women, fidelity is now a personal choice for both sexes. Conviction has replaced convention.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Undead I think about Debra Reid so much—incarcerated, unpardoned—how powerless she must have felt. Even after Jackie was gone, she was still there. When Debra was on trial for her murder, Debra’s brother brought her a dress to wear. Her first thought was, “Oh God, Jackie going to kill me if she saw me with this one.” Dream House as Sanctuary The night she chased me in the Dream House and I locked myself in the bathroom, I remember sitting with my back against the wall, pleading with the universe that she wouldn’t have the tools or know-how to take the doorknob out of the door. Her technical incompetence was my luck, and my luck was that I could sit there, watching the door test its hinges with every blow. I could sit there on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe. When Debra Reid was eventually released on parole, she had to stay in prison longer than she needed to because securing housing was a condition of her release and she was having difficulty doing so. She told an interviewer, “I just want to get an apartment and turn my own little doorknob and use my own bathroom and eat my own food.” I can’t get Debra or her doorknob out of my mind. I hope she got what she needed. Dream House as Double Cross This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether negligence can be a mortal sin?Objection 1: It would seem that negligence cannot be a mortal sin. For a gloss of Gregory [*Moral. ix. 34] on Job 9:28, “I feared all my works,” etc. says that “too little love of God aggravates the former,” viz. negligence. But wherever there is mortal sin, the love of God is done away with altogether. Therefore negligence is not a mortal sin. Objection 2: Further, a gloss on Ecclus. 7:34, “For thy negligences purify thyself with a few,” says: “Though the offering be small it cleanses the negligences of many sins.” Now this would not be, if negligence were a mortal sin. Therefore negligence is not a mortal sin. Objection 3: Further, under the law certain sacrifices were prescribed for mortal sins, as appears from the book of Leviticus. Yet no sacrifice was prescribed for negligence. Therefore negligence is not a mortal sin. On the contrary, It is written (Prov. 19:16): “He that neglecteth his own life [Vulg.: ‘way’] shall die.” I answer that, As stated above (A[2], ad 3), negligence arises out of a certain remissness of the will, the result being a lack of solicitude on the part of the reason in commanding what it should command, or as it should command. Accordingly negligence may happen to be a mortal sin in two ways. First on the part of that which is omitted through negligence. If this be either an act or a circumstance necessary for salvation, it will be a mortal sin. Secondly on the part of the cause: for if the will be so remiss about Divine things, as to fall away altogether from the charity of God, such negligence is a mortal sin, and this is the case chiefly when negligence is due to contempt. But if negligence consists in the omission of an act or circumstance that is not necessary for salvation, it is not a mortal but a venial sin, provided the negligence arise, not from contempt, but from some lack of fervor, to which venial sin is an occasional obstacle. Reply to Objection 1: Man may be said to love God less in two ways. First through lack of the fervor of charity, and this causes the negligence that is a venial sin: secondly through lack of charity itself, in which sense we say that a man loves God less when he loves Him with a merely natural love; and this causes the negligence that is a mortal sin. Reply to Objection 2: According to the same authority (gloss), a small offering made with a humble mind and out of pure love, cleanses man not only from venial but also from mortal sin.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. (ubi sup.) But the Lord foretells to His disciples what is about to happen to them, that when they have gone through it, they may not despair of salvation, but work out their repentance, and be freed; wherefore there follows: And Jesus saith unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night. PSEUDO-JEROME. All indeed fall, but all do not remain fallen. (Ps. 40:9. Vulg.) For shall not he who sleeps also rise up again? It is a carnal thing to fall, but devilish to remain lying when fallen. THEOPHYLACT. The Lord allowed them to fall that they might not trust in themselves, and lest He should seem to have prophesied, what He had said, as an open accusation (κατηγορία ap. Theoph.) of them, He brings forward the witness of Zechariah the Prophet; wherefore it goes on: For it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. BEDE. (ubi sup.) This is written in different words in Zecharias, and in the person of the Prophet it is said to the Lord; Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. (Zech. 13:7) PSEUDO-JEROME. For the Prophet prays for the Passion of the Lord, and the Father answers, I will smite the shepherd according to the prayers of those below. The Son is sent and smitten by the Father, that is, He is made incarnate and suffers. THEOPHYLACT. But the Father says, I will smite the shepherd, because He permitted him to be smitten. He calls the disciples sheep, as being innocent and without guile. At last He consoles them, by saying, But after that I am risen I will go before you into Galilee. PSEUDO-JEROME. In which the true resurrection is promised, that their hope may not be extinguished. There follows: But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I. Lo, a bird unfledged strives to raise itself on high; but the body weighs down the soul, so that the fear of the Lord is overcome by the fear of human death. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Peter then promised in the ardour of his faith, and the Saviour as God knew what was to happen. Wherefore it goes on: And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, that this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  issue. He saw their side. He offered numerous quid pro quos. Eventually, as one senator after another relented, he got the last holdouts to cave in. Somehow Johnson was now someone to fear; if they did not give in and remained one of the few holdouts, clearly he could make their lives miserable over the next few years. When it finally became public, the Republicans and the press were astounded at what Lyndon Johnson had accomplished. In a matter of weeks, since assuming the leadership position, he had gained unprecedented powers. He, not the seniority system, controlled committee appointments. He was now the undisputed “Master of the Senate,” and the byword among his colleagues was “Let Lyndon do it.” Drawn into his sphere of influence was the most unlikely cast of characters—from Dick Russell to Hubert Humphrey. But the most astonished person of all must have been Senator Tom Connally himself. In four short years, Johnson had not only risen to the top but had gained control of the Senate Democrats through a slow and steady campaign of accumulating influence, far surpassing the power Connally had accrued in over twenty years of service. • • • Interpretation: From the beginning of his political career, Johnson had a single ambition—to one day become president of the United States. To get there he needed a relatively swift rise to prominence. The younger he reached leadership positions, the more time he would have to spread his name and gain leverage within the Democratic Party. Elected to the House of Representatives at the age of twenty-eight, he seemed on track to get what he wanted, but in the House his career got bogged down. The place was so big and complex, and he was not good at dealing with large groups. He was not an exciting public speaker. He was much more charming in one-on-one situations. He became frustrated and restless. Finally reaching the Senate at the age of forty, he brought with him his impatience, as evidenced by his meeting with Connally. But shortly before his inauguration, he toured the floor of the Senate and had an epiphany: the place was much smaller; it was more like a cozy club for gentlemen. Here he could work one on one and slowly gain power by accumulating influence. To accomplish this, however, he had to transform himself. He was naturally aggressive; he would have to rein this in, slow down, and step back. He would have to stop talking so much and getting into heated arguments. Let other people do the talking; let them feel like the star of the show. Stop thinking of himself; instead, focus completely on his fellow senators as they talked and talked. Assume the inoffensive front of the junior senator learning the ropes, the serious and somewhat dull student of procedure and legislation. Behind this front he could observe people without seeming ambitious or aggressive. In this way he could slowly gain knowledge of the

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

  After more than a decade of working his way through the ranks at several schools as an assistant coach, he finally got his chance as a head coach at the University of Washington in 2013. He inherited a program in which his student athletes played or practiced six days a week, which was the status quo for college basketball teams. The NCAA mandates that Division I players get a minimum of one day off athletic activities each week, and pretty much every NCAA coach treats that minimum as a maximum. After many years of losing, the Huskies had rebounded in the previous two seasons under coach Kevin McGuff (who brought Neighbors in as an assistant). When McGuff took the head coaching job at Ohio State, it was on Neighbors to fulfill the rising expectations. His team immediately stumbled, losing its first two games, including a horrific loss, 91–77, in the home opener to the University of Portland, a team the Huskies beat by 20 points the year before under Coach McGuff. They improved a little, going into the Christmas break 6–4, but Neighbors could see he needed to make some changes. Minor injuries were piling up and he realized his starters couldn’t play heavy minutes in games given the intensity of practices. During the holiday break, he had the time and space to mull over how he might turn things around, and on the cross-country flight back to Washington, he decided to make a drastic change. He resolved to cut out one additional day of practice a week, giving his players two days off instead of one. He decided to make this unconventional move because his team was plagued by injuries. Their bodies were wearing out, and he knew from all his years as an assistant coach that those injuries would accumulate as the season went on. He surmised that the extra day of rest would get his players more time on the court when it mattered most—during games. To understand the boldness of this decision, you have to realize that no other Division I coach was doing this. This was at the end of 2013, long before the language of self-care became part of the zeitgeist. He knew he was taking a risk and he would take the blame if this decision didn’t work. But in his words, if the Huskies, and his coaching career, were going down, they were going to go down his way.

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

  Dwight always went drinking with some other Scoutmasters, then picked me up outside Glenvale for the drive home. This year he would have a long wait. He would have a long wait, and a long drive home alone, and a long explanation to make to my mother when he pulled up to the house without me. I told no one but Arthur, who kept my secrets even when I betrayed his. He liked the plan. He thought so highly of it that he asked to be included. At first I said no. Being on my own was the whole idea. And Arthur had no money. But a few days before The Gathering of the Tribes I told him I’d changed my mind, that he could come along after all. I gave Arthur this news with a show of reluctance, as if I were doing him a favor, but really I was just afraid to be alone. ARTHUR’S FATHER, CAL , worked on the turbines in the powerhouse. He thought I was a great wit because I could always tell him a new joke. I got the jokes from “Today’s Chuckle,” a filler they ran on the front page of the paper. Whenever I visited Arthur, Cal said, “Well, Jackaroony, what’s the word?” “Woman bought three hundred pounds of steel wool. Says she’s going to knit a stove.” “Knit a stove! Knit a stove, you say! Oh that’s rich, that’s a beauty ....” and Cal would hold his sides and reel back and forth while Arthur and Mrs. Gayle looked on with disgust. He was a simple, sunny man well liked in the camp. Even the kids called him Cal. I never heard anyone call him Mr. Gayle. Once, at a beach house belonging to friends of theirs, I persuaded Cal to let me take Arthur out for a spin in a sailboat, claiming that back in Florida I had pretty much lived with a tiller in my hand. After being very nearly swept out to sea we ran aground a mile from the house. Arthur went up the beach and got Cal, but Cal didn’t know how to sail either, so he had to pull the boat home through the surf. He had a hard time of it—the wind was stiff and the waves high—but he didn’t stop laughing the whole way back. Arthur and Mrs. Gayle were complicated. They were complicated by themselves and exotically complicated when together, playing off each other in long cryptic riffs like a pair of scat singers, then falling heavily, portentously silent. They had a way of turning silence into accusation. Cal could not begin to understand them. Under their scrutiny he smiled and blinked his eyes. This seemed to compound the unspoken charges against him. Mrs. Gayle was a snob. She and Cal had been among the first to move into the camp, and she would have nothing to do with those who came afterwards. Mrs.

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

  Well, he wanted those names, and he was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here all night long. The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed; he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn’t let this drop, that he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got worse and I had to go to the nurse’s office. That was where the vice-principal finally came for me. He kicked at the cot where I lay doubled up and sweating. “Get up,” he said. I gave him a confused look and said, “What?” “Get moving. Now!” I sat up partway, still miming incomprehension. The school nurse came to the doorway and asked what the problem was. The vice-principal told her I was faking. “I’m not either,” I said hotly. “He’s definitely in pain,” she told him. “He’s faking it,” the vice-principal said, and explained that this was nothing but a stratagem to avoid punishment for something disgusting I had done. The nurse turned to me with a quizzical expression. She had been warm and gentle; I couldn’t bear for her to think that I was the kind of person who took advantage of other people’s kindness, or wrote filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn’t. I began to say something along this line, but the viceprincipal wasn’t having any. “Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed one of my ears and brought me to my feet. “I’m not here to bandy words with you.” The nurse stared at him. “Now wait just a minute,” she said. He pulled me into the corridor and down toward his office, jerking on my ear so that I had to walk sideways and keep my face toward the ceiling, stumbling all the way and spastically waving my arms. “I’m going to call his mother,” the nurse said. “Right now!” “I already did,” the vice-principal said. BY THE TIME my mother arrived, I’d spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of my own innocence. The more I insisted on it the angrier he got, and the angrier he got the more impossible it was for me to believe that I had done anything to deserve such anger. He was, I knew, very close to hitting me; this made me feel a contempt for him that he could see, which in turn brought him closer to violence, inflating even further my sense of injury and innocence. And as his rage grew so did my contempt, because I saw that it was not self-restraint that kept him from hitting me but some kind of institutional restraint. But he still had me scared. It was like being lunged at by a dog on the end of its leash. Things stood thus when my mother came in.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Since time immemorial, people have attempted to cope with powerful and terrifying feelings by doing things that contradict perceptions of fear and helplessness: religious rituals, theater, dance, music, meditation and ingesting psychoactive substances, to name a few. Of these various methods for altering one’s way of being, modern medicine has accepted only the use of (limited, i.e., psychiatric) chemical substances. The other “coping” methods continue to find expression in alternative and so-called holistic approaches such as yoga, tai chi, exercise, drumming, music, shamanism and body-oriented techniques. While many people find help and solace from these valuable approaches, they are relatively nonspecific and do not sufficiently address certain core physiological mechanisms and processes that allow human beings to transform terrifying and overwhelming experiences. In the particular methodology I describe in these pages, the client is helped to develop an awareness and mastery of his or her physical sensations and feelings. My observations, in visiting a few indigenous cultures, suggest that this approach has a certain kinship with various traditional shamanic healing rituals. I am proposing that a collective, cross-cultural approach to healing trauma not only suggests new directions for treatment, but may ultimately inform a fundamentally deeper understanding of the dynamic two-way communication between mind and body. Over my lifetime, as well as in writing this book, I have attempted to bridge the vast chasm between the day-to-day work of the clinician and the findings of various scientific disciplines, particularly ethology, the study of animals in their natural environments. This vital field reached a pinnacle of recognition in 1973 when three ethologists—Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch—shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.* All three of these scientists utilized patient and precise observation to study how animals express and communicate through their bodies. Direct body communication is something that we reasoning, language-based human animals do as well. Despite our apparent reliance on elaborate speech, many of our most important exchanges occur simply through the “unspoken voice” of our body’s expressions in the dance of life. The deciphering of this nonverbal realm is a foundation of the healing approach that I present in this book.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Because of the central importance of restoring these lost (rather, misplaced) instinctive active responses in healing trauma, I will—at the risk of repetition—address this subject from a slightly different angle. It can be said that the experience of fear derives from the primitive responses to threat where escape is thwarted (i.e., in some way—actual or perceived—prevented or conflicted).54 Contrary to what you might expect, when one’s primary responses of fight-or-flight (or other protective actions) are executed freely, one does not necessarily experience fear, but rather the pure and powerful, primary sensations of fighting or fleeing. Recall, the response to threat involves an initial mobilization to fight or flee. It is only when that response fails that it “defaults” to one’s freezing or being “scared stiff” or to collapsing helplessly. In my case, in the ambulance, it was in my limbs—in the micro-movements of my arms rising upward to protect my head from mortal injury—that I first felt an opposite experience that contradicted my sensation of helplessness. For Nancy, it was her legs running to escape the doctor’s surgical knife. In both cases, consciously feeling our way through these active self-protective reflexes with precision brought us the physical sense of agency and power. Together, these experiences countered our feelings of overwhelming helplessness. Step by step, our bodies learned that we were not helpless victims, that we had survived our ordeals, and that we were intact and alive to the core of our beings. Along with instilling active defensive responses (which reduces fear), individuals learn that when they experience the physical sensations of paralysis, it is with less and less fear—each time trauma loosens its grip. With such a body-based epiphany, the mind’s interpretation of what happened and the meaning of it to one’s life and who one is shifts profoundly. Step 6. Uncoupling fear from immobilityMy clinical observations, drawn from more than four decades of work with thousands of clients, have led me to the solid understanding that the “physio-logical” ability to go into, and then come out of, the innate (hard-wired) immobility response is the key both to avoiding the prolonged debilitating effects of trauma and to healing even entrenched symptoms.55 Basically, this is done by separating fear and helplessness from the (normally time-limited) biological immobility response as described in Chapter 4. For a traumatized individual, to be able to touch into his or her immobility sensations, even for a brief moment, restores self-paced termination and allows the “unwinding” of fear and freeze to begin.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Vaccine When I was a kid, I learned that you develop immunity when an illness rages through your body. Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn’t just heal—it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn’t kill you first.) After the Dream House, I developed a sixth sense. It goes off at random times—meeting a new classmate or coworker, a friend’s new girlfriend, a stranger at a party. A physical revulsion that comes on the heels of nothing at all, something akin to the sour liquid rush of saliva that precedes vomiting. Inconvenient, irritating, but important: my brilliant body’s brilliant warning. Dream House as Ending That there’s a real ending to anything is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go. Where to stop this story? Val’s and my wedding, on a hot day in June? Some narratively satisfying confrontation between the woman from the Dream House and me? If you grasp the story by the base and pull, will the ripping sound indicate the looseness of the roots? What is left behind in the soil? Should I loop back to a memory from the Dream House? A lovely one? Will that work, a contrast between what could have been and what was? A memory of the two of us freshly returned from a local winery, sipping on a spicy Zinfandel and eating some kind of feta dip and telling a story? One day the woman from the Dream House will die, and I will die, and Val will die, and John and Laura will die, and my brother will die, and my parents will die, and her parents will die, and everyone who ever knew any of us will die. Is that the end of the story? Time’s mindless, chattering advancement? There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending. Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.

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

  Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again. We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flashlight. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air. If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared. By the time I started my first year at Concrete High School, I had over eighty dollars squirreled away in the ammunition box. Some of it had been given to me by customers on my paper route, as tips for good service; the rest I’d stolen from other customers. Eighty dollars seemed a lot of money, more than enough for my purpose, which was to run away to Alaska. I planned to travel alone under an assumed name. Later on, when I had my feet on the ground, I would send for my mother. It was not hard to imagine our reunion in my cabin: her grateful tears and cries of admiration at the pelt-covered walls, the racks of guns, the tame wolves dozing before the fire. Our Scout troop went to Seattle every November for The Gathering of the Tribes. In the morning we competed with other troops. In the afternoon all the Scouts converged on Glenvale, an amusement park reserved that day for our use.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  feared him. Rockefeller was the kind of man who could not stand to lose in anything. If someone passed him by in a horse-drawn carriage, Rockefeller would have to whip his horses and overtake it. They worshipped in the same church; Payne knew he was a man of high principle, but he was also quite mysterious and secretive. In their meeting, Rockefeller confided in Payne: he was the first outsider to be told of the existence of this secret organization, to be called the Southern Improvement Company (SIC). Rockefeller claimed it was the railroads that had come up with the idea of the SIC to increase their profits, and that he had really had no choice but to enter into the agreement. He did not invite Payne to join the SIC. Instead he offered to buy out Payne’s refinery at a very nice price, to give Payne a hefty amount of Standard Oil stock that would certainly mint him a fortune, and to bring him in as a high-level executive with an illustrious title. He would make far more money this way than by trying to compete with Standard Oil. Rockefeller said all of this in the politest tone. He was going to keep expanding and bring some much-needed order to the anarchic oil industry. It was a crusade of his, and he was inviting Payne to be a fellow crusader from within Standard Oil. It was a compelling way to present his case, but Payne hesitated. He had moments of exasperation in dealing with this unpredictable business, but he had not thought of selling the refinery. It was all so sudden. Sensing his indecision, Rockefeller gave him a look of great sympathy and offered Payne the chance to examine Standard Oil’s ledgers, to convince him of the futility of resistance. Payne could hardly turn that down, and what he saw in a few short hours astounded him: Standard Oil had considerably higher profit margins than his own. Nobody had suspected to what extent Standard Oil was outpacing its rivals. For Payne, it was enough, and he accepted Rockefeller’s offer. News of the sale of Payne’s refinery, as well as the growing rumors of the existence of the SIC, completely rattled the other refinery owners in town. With Payne’s refinery in his pocket, Rockefeller was in a very strong position. Within weeks, J. W. Fawcett of Fawcett and Critchley, another major refinery in town, received a visit from Rockefeller. His pitch was ever so slightly more ominous than what he had delivered to Payne: the business was too unpredictable; Cleveland was farther away from the oil-producing towns, and the refiners had to pay more for crude oil to be shipped there; they were at a continual disadvantage; with the prices of oil continuing to fluctuate, many of them would go bust; Rockefeller was going to consolidate them and give Cleveland some leverage with the railroads; he was doing them

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

  decision yet” from others and why we accept it from ourselves. Of course, what that really means is “I’m not ready to veer from the status quo.” The next time that you find yourself saying, “I’m just not ready to decide yet,” what you should actually say is “For now I think that the status quo is still the best choice.” Maybe you need more information to know whether to switch. But what shouldn’t stop you from quitting (or getting that information) is that it’s too scary to switch because loss aversion is too intense. Better the Devil You Know Adding to the ruckus, we prefer what we know to what we don’t know, to what is ambiguous and undefined. Whatever you’re already doing, whether it’s working out or not, you have a lot more certainty about than something that you’ve never experienced before. Thus, the aphorism “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” You can see this clearly with Olstyn Martinez. When I asked her whether she was happy in her current position, she easily answered. It was already a known quantity, and she knew she was unhappy. But when I asked whether she would be happy in the new job, she said she didn’t know, an expression of uncertainty about what might lie ahead if she switched, because she had never experienced being in that position. That uncertainty contributed to her fear of quitting. By asking her if she would be happier in the new job more than 0% of the time, that helped her see that there was some certainty in changing jobs. Specifically, she had a better chance of getting to where she wanted to go faster if she switched. In that moment, she realized the devil that she didn’t know was the better choice. The Price of Sticking In addition to how this bias against quitting affects our personal lives, all the forces that encourage status quo choices cause organizations to pay a massive

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  If I say the woman. If I say the woman is bearing down, her back hunched below this man-made storm, would you see her? From where you are standing, inches, which is to say years, from this page, would you see the shred of blue shawl blowing across her collarbones, the mole at the outside corner of her left eye as she squints at the men, who are now close enough for her to realize they are not men at all, but boys—eighteen, twenty at most? Can you hear the sound of the chopper, its dismemberment of air so loud it drowns the shouting beneath it? The wind coarse with smoke—and something else, a sweat-soaked char, its odd and acrid taste blowing from a hut at the edge of the field. A hut that, moments ago, was filled with human voices. The girl, her ear pressed to the woman’s chest, listens as if eavesdropping behind a door. There is something running inside the woman, a beginning, or rather, a rearranging of syntax. Eyes closed, she searches, her tongue on the cliff of a sentence. The veins green over his wrists, the boy raises the M-16, blond hairs sweated brown along his arms. The men are drinking and laughing, their gapped teeth like mouthfuls of dice. This boy, his lips pulled at an angle, green eyes filmed pink. This private first class. The men are ready to forget, a few still have the scent of their wives’ makeup on their fingers. His mouth opens and closes rapidly. He is asking a question, or questions, he is turning the air around his words into weather. Is there a language for falling out of language? A flash of teeth, a finger on the trigger, the boy saying, “No. No, step back.” The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat. She knows the first letter in the name is C. Like in Go Cong, the name of the open-air market she had visited two days ago, its neon marquee buzzing at the entrance. She was there to buy a new shawl for the girl. The cloth had cost more than what she had planned to spend, but when she saw it, day-bright among the grey and brown bolts, she peered up at the sky, even though it was already nightfall, and paid knowing there would be nothing left to eat with. Sky blue. —

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In the course of a few hundred years of this change in our awareness, we cannot suddenly transform one of the deepest parts of our nature, our fear of death. And so what we do instead of creating belief systems such as an afterlife is to rely on denial, repressing the awareness of death as much as possible. We do so in several ways. In the past, death was a daily and visceral presence in cities and towns, something hard to escape. By a certain age, most people had seen firsthand the deaths of others. Today, in many parts of the world, we have made death largely invisible, something that occurs only in hospitals. (We have done something similar to the animals that we eat.) We can pass through most of life without ever physically witnessing what happens. This gives a rather unreal aspect to what is so profoundly a part of life. This unreality is enhanced in the entertainment we consume, in which death is made to seem rather cartoonish, with dozens of people dying violent deaths without any attendant emotion except excitement at the imagery on the screen. This reveals how deep the need is to repress the awareness and desensitize ourselves to the fear. Furthermore, we have recently come to venerate youth, to create a virtual cult around it. Objects that have aged, films from the past unconsciously remind us of the shortness of life and the fate that awaits us. We find ways to avoid them, to surround ourselves with what is new, fresh, and trending. Some people have even come to entertain the idea that through technology we can somehow overcome death itself, the ultimate in human denial. In general, technology gives us the feeling that we have such godlike powers that we can prolong life and ignore the reality for quite a long time. In this sense, we are no stronger than our most primitive ancestors. We have simply found new ways to delude ourselves. As a corollary to all this, we find hardly anyone willing to discuss the subject as a personal reality we all face, and how we might manage it in a healthier manner. The subject is simply taboo. And by a law of human nature, when we go so far in our denial, the paradoxical effect takes hold of us in the negative direction, making our life more constrained and deathlike. We became aware of our mortality quite early on in childhood, and this filled us with an anxiety that we cannot remember but that was very real and visceral. Such anxiety cannot be wished away or denied. It sits in us as adults in a powerfully latent form. When we choose to repress the thought of death, our anxiety is only made stronger by our not confronting the source of it.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  were not afraid to ask for more or assert our will. We were remarkably resilient and fearless in so many ways. Timidity is a quality we generally acquire. It is a function of our mounting fears as we get older and a loss of confidence in our powers to get what we want. We become overly concerned with how people perceive us and worry what they will think if we stand up for ourselves. We internalize their doubts. We become afraid of any kind of conflict or confrontation, which will churn up emotions and lead to consequences we cannot predict or control. We develop the habit of backing down. We don’t say what we feel even when it would be appropriate, and we fail to set boundaries to people’s harmful behavior. We find it hard to ask for a raise or a promotion or the respect due to us. Losing our bold spirit, a positive form of aggression, is losing a deep part of our self, and it is inevitably painful. You must try to recover the fearlessness you once possessed, through incremental steps. The key is to first convince yourself that you deserve good and better things in life. Once you feel that, you can start by training yourself to speak up or even talk back to people in everyday situations, if they are proving to be insensitive. You are learning to defend yourself. You might call people on their passive- aggressive behavior, or not be so timid in expressing an opinion that they may not share or in telling them what you really think of their bad ideas. You will often come to realize that you have less to fear in doing this than you had imagined. You might even gain some respect. You try this out in small ways every day. Once you lose your fear in these less dramatic encounters, you can start to ramp it up. You can make greater demands on people that they treat you well, or honor the quality work that you do. You do this without a complaining or defensive tone. You make it clear to bullies that you are not as meek as you seem, or as easily manipulated as others. You can be as relentless as they are in defending your interests. In negotiations, you can train yourself not to settle for less but to make bolder demands and see how far you can push the other side. You can apply this growing boldness to your work. You will not be so afraid to create something that is unique, or to face criticism and failure. You will take reasonable risks and test yourself out. All of this must be built up slowly, like a muscle that has atrophied, so that you don’t risk a large-scale battle or aggressive reaction before you have toughened yourself up. But once you develop this muscle, you will gain the confidence that you can meet any adversity in life with a fearless attitude.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  like caretakers, there to stand back and enable the group to make the right decisions, doing everything by consensus. Or they entertain the idea that what matters more than anything else is crunching numbers, absorbing the mass of information available today. Data and algorithms will determine the direction to take and are the real authority. All of these ideas and values have unintended consequences. Without authority in the arts, there is nothing to rebel against, no prior movement to overturn, no deep thinking to assimilate and later even reject. There is only an amorphous world of trends that flicker away with increasing speed. Without parents as authority figures, we cannot go through the critical stage of rebellion in adolescence, in which we reject their ideas and discover our own identity. We grow up lost, constantly searching outside ourselves for that identity. Without teachers and masters whom we acknowledge as superior and worthy of respect, we cannot learn from their experience and wisdom, perhaps even seeking later on to surpass them with new and better ideas. Without leaders who dedicate much mental energy to foreseeing trends and guiding us to long-term solutions, we are lost. And as this situation becomes the norm, because we humans have always needed some form of authority as a guide, we tend to fall for certain fake forms of authority that proliferate in times of chaos and uncertainty. This could be the strongman, who gives the illusion of leadership and direction but has no real vision of where to go, just ideas and actions that serve his ego and enhance his sense of control. This could be the panderer, the leader who cleverly mimics what the public wants to hear, creating the illusion of being sensitive to the group and giving it what it wants. This could be the chummy leader, who affects the style and mannerisms of everyone else, offering what seems to be the ultimate in fairness, fun, and consensus. This could also be the authority of the group, which becomes that much more powerful in the age of social media: what other people are saying and doing must be true and respected, by dint of sheer numbers. But all of these false forms only lead to more turmoil, chaos, and bad decisions. As students of human nature, we must recognize the myriad dangers of our prejudice against authority figures. To acknowledge people of authority in the world is not an admission of our own inferiority but rather an acceptance of human nature and the need for such figures. People of authority should not be seen as self-serving or tyrannical—in fact, those are the qualities that diminish their authority. They are not relics of the past but people who fulfill a necessary function and whose style adapts with the times. Authority can be an eminently democratic phenomenon. We must realize that much of what is behind progressive ideas of consensus, the minimal leader, and the parent as friend, is actually a great fear of

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

  Well, he wanted those names, and he was going to get them if he had to keep every single one of us here all night long. The vice-principal was new and hard-nosed; he meant what he said. I knew he wouldn’t let this drop, that he would keep at it until he caught me. I got scared. Even more than his anger, his righteousness scared me to the point where my stomach cramped up. As the afternoon went on the cramp got worse and I had to go to the nurse’s office. That was where the vice-principal finally came for me. He kicked at the cot where I lay doubled up and sweating. “Get up,” he said. I gave him a confused look and said, “What?” “Get moving. Now!” I sat up partway, still miming incomprehension. The school nurse came to the doorway and asked what the problem was. The vice-principal told her I was faking. “I’m not either,” I said hotly. “He’s definitely in pain,” she told him. “He’s faking it,” the vice-principal said, and explained that this was nothing but a stratagem to avoid punishment for something disgusting I had done. The nurse turned to me with a quizzical expression. She had been warm and gentle; I couldn’t bear for her to think that I was the kind of person who took advantage of other people’s kindness, or wrote filth on bathroom walls. And at that moment I wasn’t. I began to say something along this line, but the viceprincipal wasn’t having any. “Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed one of my ears and brought me to my feet. “I’m not here to bandy words with you.” The nurse stared at him. “Now wait just a minute,” she said. He pulled me into the corridor and down toward his office, jerking on my ear so that I had to walk sideways and keep my face toward the ceiling, stumbling all the way and spastically waving my arms. “I’m going to call his mother,” the nurse said. “Right now!” “I already did,” the vice-principal said. BY THE TIME my mother arrived, I’d spent almost an hour with the vice-principal and had become completely convinced of my own innocence. The more I insisted on it the angrier he got, and the angrier he got the more impossible it was for me to believe that I had done anything to deserve such anger. He was, I knew, very close to hitting me; this made me feel a contempt for him that he could see, which in turn brought him closer to violence, inflating even further my sense of injury and innocence. And as his rage grew so did my contempt, because I saw that it was not self-restraint that kept him from hitting me but some kind of institutional restraint. But he still had me scared. It was like being lunged at by a dog on the end of its leash. Things stood thus when my mother came in.