Gratitude

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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [64] Nevertheless, Ignatius was able to advance his cause with the authorities by deploying his particular gifts: not merely his exceptional pastoral skill but a courtier’s ability to charm influential women in the greatest palaces of Catholic Europe. Great ladies proved the essential support for the new venture in its precarious early years. Most significant in these contacts was Loyola’s pastoral care for Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Emperor Charles V, who had the misfortune to be married to one of the loutish grandsons of Pope Paul III. Loyola’s concern for Margaret in her misery saved her blighted marriage, which had important diplomatic as well as personal significance, and this was the main reason for the surprising papal readiness to grant a generous Bull of Foundation in 1540 to a new organization that still lacked a clear agenda. [65] The Society’s constitution, deftly crafted by Ignatius, gave its General (the first being himself) life powers over a meticulously centralized organization: those powers were not shared with the Pope, despite the conspicuous loyalty of the Society’s leadership. That made for significant freedom of manoeuvre during its astonishingly rapid expansion across Europe and the world. The name of the group was distinctive; it was in Latin a Societas , originally in Italian Compagnia , relating it not to the monastic life but to the lay- dominated guilds or ‘confraternities’ characteristic of late medieval Europe. They could have many purposes from trade association to particular religious devotion, but in late fifteenth-century Italy they had produced a number of elite ‘Oratories’ with a variety of penitential or charitable purposes. Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, did note with irritation similarities to their own vocation in the Jesuits’ commitment to communal life and public preaching, together with the centralized organization that Ignatius created: these characteristics also annoyed a choleric future Pope (as Paul IV), Giampietro Carafa, who had founded a somewhat similar austere company of priests, known as Theatines after his then diocese ( Teate in Latin, Chieti in Italian). In 1545, Ignatius adroitly sidestepped an offer of amalgamation from the Theatines, who remained a much smaller company, but Carafa was not a good enemy to make. [66] The Society of Jesus has remained a Society of celibates, not a religious Order, without an obligation to the regular round of daily liturgical offices observed by monks, friars or nuns (nor even a distinctive form of dress, a ‘habit’). That has freed its members to pursue their particular callings in the world. It would take a little time and some trial and error to discover what those callings might be. One emerged from the early success of the Society in establishing advanced schools for the rigorous and prolonged training that Ignatius demanded for Jesuits. Influential people in Italy took an interest and demanded that their sons be allowed to take advantage of this; Jesuit schools became a worldwide brand, advancing Catholic comeback in parts of Europe inclining to Protestantism such as Poland.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  It was the same man who had exchanged whispers with the procurator in a darkened room of the palace before the sentencing, and who during the execution had sat on a three-legged stool playing with a twig. Heedless of puddles, the man in the hood crossed the garden terrace, stepped on to the mosaic floor of the balcony, and, raising his arm, said in a high, pleasant voice: ‘Health and joy to the procurator!’ The visitor spoke in Latin. ‘Gods!’ exclaimed Pilate. ‘There’s not a dry stitch on you! What a hurricane! Eh? I beg you to go inside immediately. Do me a favour and change your clothes.’ The visitor threw back his hood, revealing a completely wet head with hair plastered to the forehead, and, showing a polite smile on his clean-shaven face, began refusing to change, insisting that a little rain would not hurt him. ‘I won’t hear of it,’ Pilate replied and clapped his hands. With that he called out the servants who were hiding from him, and told them to take care of the visitor and then serve the hot course immediately. The procurator’s visitor required very little time to dry his hair, change his clothes and shoes, and generally put himself in order, and he soon appeared on the balcony in dry sandals, a dry crimson military cloak, and with slicked-down hair. Just then the sun returned to Yershalaim, and, before going to drown in the Mediterranean Sea, sent farewell rays to the city hated by the procurator and gilded the steps of the balcony. The fountain revived completely and sang away with all its might, doves came out on the sand, cooing, hopping over broken branches, pecking at something in the wet sand. The red puddle was wiped up, the broken pieces were removed, meat steamed on the table. ‘I wait to hear the procurator’s orders,’ said the visitor, approaching the table. ‘But you won’t hear anything until you sit down and drink some wine,’ Pilate replied courteously and pointed to the other couch. The visitor reclined, a servant poured some thick red wine into his cup. Another servant, leaning cautiously over Pilate’s shoulder, filled the procurator’s cup. After that, he motioned for the two servants to withdraw. While the visitor drank and ate, Pilate, sipping his wine, kept glancing with narrowed eyes at his guest. The man who had come to Pilate was middle-aged, with a very pleasant, rounded and neat face and a fleshy nose. His hair was of some indeterminate colour. Now, as it dried, it became lighter. It would be difficult to establish the man’s nationality. The chief determinant of his face was perhaps its good-natured expression, which, however, was not in accord with his eyes, or, rather, not his eyes but the visitor’s way of looking at his interlocutor. Ordinarily he kept his small eyes under his lowered, somewhat strange, as if slightly swollen eyelids. Then the slits of these eyes shone with an unspiteful slyness.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Shhh,” I quieted her as I felt her pussy muscles squeeze around my fingers with the pressure of a boa constrictor. “Something that feels this good has to be right. Age ain’t nothin’ but a number,” I assured her. “I know what I’m doing. I know what I want, and right now I want to make you feel good, Sam. Am I making you feel good, Sam?” By then I was all up in her shit, pumping my ass like I actually had a dick up in her soaking-wet pussy. “Oh, Sin, baby,” Sam said as she grabbed me by my head. That was the prelude to her about to nut, so I quickly pulled away and tasted her creamy stream of sugar water. It was crazy, but I think I actually nutted on myself too. My panties were so wet and sticky that it was unbelievable. Just the feeling of making Sam feel so good actually made me cum. I knew I had to take care of her, take care of our situation, and that’s when I got the idea to start the phone-sex line. It only made sense. Niggas loved pussy, and this was the next best thing, and it proved to be a good money-maker. Within a few months we were able to move out of the projects and into the nice little condo we lived in now. In the beginning, Sam and I would alternate taking the calls, then eventually Sam got a “real” job, according to society’s standards, working in a check-cashing place. Within two years, we each owned a car. I started placing ads in the back of magazines, and my business shot through the roof. Just last year I bought Sam and me matching motorcycles, and paid for us to go on a Carnival Cruise that ported in Mexico and the Bahamas. While in Mexico we got someone to perform a civil ceremony, which, of course, isn’t legally recognized in the United States, but in Sam’s and my eyes, we are married. Out of the blue I drove Sam to New York and took her on a shopping spree. We stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, just because, while we were there. It only took me about a week of phone calls to replenish what I had spent on our weekend getaway. Something inside made me buy my moms a really nice headstone to replace the little cheap one the state gave her. I got her one of those huge marble ones that stands about three feet tall, with a crystal vase for keeping flowers. I guess it was just my way of saying that I forgave her, and at the same time a way to let her know that, to be whore’s daughter, I wasn’t doing that bad at all in life. Keep It in the Closet “Yes, yes, that’s right! Fuck me! Fuck me in my ass,” I yelled to the down-low homo-thug on the other end of my 900 line.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Throughout my adolescence, I was fortunate in being actively encouraged to pursue my medical and scientific interests, not just by my parents and the physicians at Andrews, but by many of my parents’ friends as well. Families in the Air Weather Service tended to be posted to the same military bases, and one family in particular overlapped with ours in assignments and was especially close to us. We went on picnics together, took vacations together, shared babysitters, and went as a herd of ten to movies, dinners, and parties at the Officers’ Club. As young children, my brother, sister, and I played hide-and-seek with their three sons; as we grew older, we went on to softball, dancing lessons, staid parties, slightly wilder parties, and then inevitably we grew up and went our separate ways. But we were almost inseparable as children in Washington and Tokyo, and then back together again in Washington. Their mother—a warm, funny, fiery, independent, practical, red-haired Irish Catholic—created a second home for me, and I would wander in and out of their house as I would our own, staying long enough to inhale pie and cookies and warmth and laughter and hours of talk. She and my mother were, and indeed still are, best friends, and I always was made to feel a part of her extended brood. She was a nurse, and she listened carefully to me as I went on at great length about my grand plans for medical school, writing, and research. Now and again she would break in with “Yes, yes, that’s very interesting,” “Of course you can,” or “Had you thought of …?” Never, but never, was there an “I don’t think that’s very practical” or “Why don’t you just wait and see how it goes?”

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  We placed a strong emphasis upon the combined use of medications and psychotherapy, rather than medications alone, and stressed the importance of education about the illnesses and their treatments to patients and their families. My own experience as a patient had made me particularly aware of how critical psychotherapy could be in making some sense out of all the pain; how it could keep one alive long enough to have a chance at getting well; and how it could help one to learn to reconcile the resentments at taking medication with the terrible consequences of not taking it. In addition to the basics of teaching differential diagnosis, psychopharmacology, and other aspects of the clinical management of mood disorders, much of the teaching, clinical practice, and research revolved around a few central themes: why patients resist or refuse to take lithium and other medications; clinical states most likely to result in suicide, and how to mitigate them; the role of psychotherapy in the long-term outcome of depressive and manic-depressive illness; and the positive aspects of the illness that can arise during the milder manic states: heightened energy and perceptual awareness, increased fluidity and originality of thinking, intense exhilaration of moods and experience, increased sexual desire, expansiveness of vision, and a lengthened grasp of aspiration. I tried to encourage our clinic doctors to see that this was an illness that could confer advantage as well as disadvantage, and that for many individuals these intoxicating experiences were highly addictive in nature and difficult to give up.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt. Kind, fair, and generous, she has the type of self-confidence that comes from having been brought up by parents who not only loved her deeply and well, but who were themselves kind, fair, and generous people. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a college professor and physicist by training. By all accounts, he was a witty man, as well as inordinately kind to both his students and colleagues. My grandmother, whom I knew well, was a warm and caring woman who, like Mother, had a deep and genuine interest in people; this, in turn, translated into a tremendous capacity for friendship and a remarkable ability to put people at their ease. People always came first with her, as they did with my mother, and a lack of time or a busy schedule was never an excuse for being thoughtless or unavailable. She was by no means an intellectual; unlike my grandfather, who spent his time reading, and rereading, Shakespeare and Twain, she joined clubs instead. Being both well liked and a natural organizer, she unfailingly was elected president of whatever group in which she became involved. She was disconcertingly conservative in many ways—a Republican, a Daughter of the American Revolution, and very inclined to tea parties, all of which gave my father apoplexy—but she was a gentle yet resolute woman, who wore flowered dresses, buffed her nails, set a perfect table, and smelled always of flowered soaps. She was incapable of being unkind, and she was a wonderful grandmother. My mother—tall, thin, and pretty—was a popular student in both high school and college. Pictures in her photograph albums show an obviously happy young woman, usually surrounded by friends, playing tennis, swimming, fencing, riding horses, caught up in sorority activities, or looking slightly Gibson-girlish with a series of good-looking boyfriends. The photographs capture the extraordinary innocence of a different kind of time and world, but they were a time and a world in which my mother looked very comfortable. There were no foreboding shadows, no pensive or melancholic faces, no questions of internal darkness or instability. Her belief that a certain predictability was something that one ought to be able to count upon must have had its roots in the utter normality of the people and events captured in these pictures, as well as in the preceding generations of her ancestors who were reliable, stable, honorable, and saw things through.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  I had a lovely suite of rooms at Merton overlooking the playing fields, and I read (albeit with difficulty) and wrote in total peace, interrupted only by a college servant who brought coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons. Lunch was almost always with the senior fellows, a remarkably interesting, if occasionally odd, group of senior lecturers and professors representing all fields of study within the university. There were historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and literary scholars, but whenever possible I would sit next to Sir Alister Hardy, the marine biologist, who was a fascinating man and an extraordinary storyteller; I listened for hours to his accounts of his early scientific explorations to Antarctica, as well as his discussions of his ongoing research into the nature of religious experiences. We shared strong common interests in William James and the nature of ecstatic experiences, and he leapfrogged fields, from literature to biology to theology, without effort or pause. Merton was not only among the oldest and wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, it was also widely acclaimed for having the best food and the finest wine cellar. For that reason, I not infrequently found myself in Oxford for college dinners. Those evenings were evenings far far back in time: sipping sherry and talking with the dons before dinner began; walking together, in procession, into the old and beautiful dining hall; watching with amusement as the black-gowned, scraggly undergraduates rose to their feet as the dons came in (the deference had a certain appeal; curtsying, perhaps, was not such a bad thing after all). Heads bowed, quick prayers in Latin, students and dons alike, we all would wait for the college warden to sit; this then, would be followed by an immediate and overpowering din of undergraduates scuffling with chairs, laughing, and shouting loudly up and down the long dining tables. At the high table, the conversations and enthusiasm were more restrained, and, always, there was vintage Oxfordtalk, usually clever, often hilarious, occasionally stifling; excellent dinners with superb wines were all noted on elegantly calligraphied and crested menus; then we filed out into a smaller, private dining room for brandies and ports and fruit and candied ginger with the warden and fellows. I cannot imagine how anyone got any work done after these dinners, but, as everyone I met who taught at Oxford seemed to have written at least four definitive books on one obscure topic or another, they must have inherited, or cultivated, very different kinds of livers and brains. For my part, the wine and port would inevitably catch up with me, and, after pouring myself onto the last train to London, I would stare out of the window into the night, caught up, for an hour or so, in other centuries, and happily lost between worlds and eras.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Several other friends have been particularly important. I am deeply indebted to David Mahoney for his support, many long and helpful conversations, and marvelous friendship. Dr. Anthony Storr has been one of the most important people in my life, and I am very grateful to him for our relationship. Lucie Bryant and Dr. Jeremy Waletzky, both close friends for many years, have been unbelievably kind and generous with their support. John Julius Norwich has, for some time, encouraged me to discuss my manic-depressive illness more openly, and repeatedly stressed his belief that good will come from writing such a book; he has countered all of my arguments for privacy with yet stronger ones for straightforwardness. He has been a wonderful friend, and I am indebted to him for his persuasiveness. Peter Sacks, a poet and professor of English at Johns Hopkins, read over all of the drafts of this book, made many invaluable suggestions, and gave me much needed encouragement. I cannot thank him enough for the time and care he took with my work. Many other people have provided friendship over the years, and several of them were kind enough to read early drafts of my manuscript as well: Dr. and Mrs. James Ballenger, Dr. Samuel Barondes, Robert Boorstin, Dr. Harriet Braiker, Dr. Raymond De Paulo, Antonello and Christina Fanna, Dr. Ellen Frank, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Gallo, Dr. Robert Gerner, Dr. Michael Gitlin, Mrs. Katharine Graham, Congressman and Mrs. Steny Hoyer, Charles and Gwenda Hyman, Earl and Helen Kindle, Dr. Athanasio Koukopoulos, Dr. David Kupfer, Alan and Hannah Pakula, Dr. Barbara Parry, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Post, Victor and Harriet Potik, Dr. Norman Rosenthal, William Safire, Stephen E. Smith, Jr., Dr. Paula Stoessel, Dr. PerVestergaard, Dr. and Mrs. James Watson, and Professor Robert Winter. During very difficult times in Los Angeles, Dr. Robert Faguet was an extraordinary friend; as I have written, he looked after me during my absolute darkest days, and he did so with great grace and wit. My former husband, Alain Moreau, also was remarkably kind and loyal during those days, and I am grateful to him for our continuing and close relationship. Drs. Frederick Silvers, Gabrielle Carlson, and Regina Pally in quite different ways helped keep me going during those long, terrible months. Later, when David Laurie died, several people in England were exceptionally kind, and they have remained friends over the years: Colonel and Mrs. Anthony Darlington, Colonel James B. Henderson, the late Brigadier Donald Stewart, his wife, Margaret, and Ian and Christine Mill.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The chairman of my department at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Paul McHugh, has been singularly supportive, as was, earlier, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chairman of psychiatry during the time I was on the medical school faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. I will always owe a great personal as well as intellectual debt to the two men who were my mentors when I was an undergraduate and graduate student, Professors Andrew L. Comrey and the late William H. McGlothlin. I have learned more than I can say, or adequately acknowledge, from both my students and my patients. I, like many others, was devastated by the death in 1994 of publisher Erwin Glikes. He was not only a remarkable intellect and a profoundly wise human being, he was also a close friend. He published my book Touched with Fire, and I found it virtually impossible to imagine entrusting something as personal as these memoirs to anyone else. Fortunately, I was able to work with Carol Janeway at Knopf. She has been everything one could wish for in an editor: deeply intuitive, extremely intelligent, witty, and unrelenting in her determination to make the book a more complete and better one. It has been a pleasure and privilege to work with her. Dan Frank, the excellent editor of Chaos, lent his formidable editing abilities to a somewhat different kind of chaos, and helped give structure to this book. Working with the staff at Knopf has been delightful. Maxine Groffsky has been a wonderful literary agent—warm, lively, engaged, perceptive, supportive—and I am grateful that Erwin Glikes introduced us. I am indebted to Oxford University Press for granting me permission to use material that I had written first for teaching purposes, and then incorporated—as a few brief clinical description passages—into a book I coauthored with Dr. Frederick Goodwin, Manic-Depressive Illness. Mr. William Collins, who typed my manuscript, was invaluably accurate, reliable, pleasant, and intelligent. I have discussed my family at some length in this book. All meaningful relationships are complicated, but I cannot imagine choosing any family other than the one I have: my mother, Dell Temple Jamison; my father, Dr. Marshall Jamison; my brother, Dr. Dean Jamison; my sisters, Phyllis, Danica, and Kelda; my sister-in-law, Dr. Joanne Leslie; my nephews, Julian and Eliot Jamison; and my niece, Leslie Jamison. My debt to my husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, is beyond words. He encouraged me to write this book, supported me through all of my doubts and anxieties about doing so, read each draft of my manuscript, and made many helpful suggestions that I took to heart. I am grateful to him for a love that has endured, grown, and been wonderful. PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTSGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  David worked at the hospital during the days so I reinvolved myself in the London I had once cared so much about. I went for long walks in the parks, visited and revisited the Tate, wandered aimlessly around the Victoria and Albert, as well as the Natural History and Science Museums. One day, on David’s suggestion, I took the boat from Westminster Pier to Greenwich and back; another day I took the train to Canterbury. I hadn’t been to Canterbury in years and had seen it only, but unforgettably, through rather manic eyes. I had long-lasting, mystical memories of the dark gorgeous stained glass, the chilled sounds, the simple, grim place of Becket’s murder, and the intense, transient light patterns on the cathedral floor. This time, however, I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger. It was, all the same, a quieter and gentler sense of Canterbury that I got. In the midst of this godless kneeling, I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to take my lithium the night before. I reached into my purse for my medication, opened the bottle, and immediately dropped all of the pills onto the cathedral floor. The floor was filthy, there were people all around, and I was too embarrassed to bend over and pick up the pills. It was a moment not only of embarrassment, but of reckoning as well; it meant I would have to ask David to write a prescription for me, and that meant, of course, that I would have to tell him about my illness. I couldn’t help thinking, with more than a trace of bitterness, that God seldom opens one door that he doesn’t close another. However, I couldn’t afford not to obtain new medication: the last time I had stopped my lithium I had gotten manic almost immediately. I could not survive another year like the one I had just been through. That night, before we went to bed, I told David about my manic-depressive illness. I dreaded what his reaction would be and was furious with myself for not having told him earlier. He was silent for a very long time, and I could see that he was sorting through all of the implications, medical and personal, of what I had just said. I had no doubt he loved me, but he knew as well as I did how uncertain the course of the illness could be. He was an army officer, his family was extremely conservative, he desperately wanted children, and manic-depressive illness was hereditary. It also was not talked about. It was unpredictable, and not uncommonly fatal. I wished I had never told him; I wished I was normal, wished I was anywhere but where I was. I felt like an idiot for hoping that anyone could accept what I had just said and resigned myself to a subtle round of polite farewells. We were not married, after all, nor had we been seriously involved for any extended time.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Centuries of such seeming steadiness in the genes could only very partially prepare my mother for all of the turmoil and difficulties that were to face her once she left her parents’ home to begin a family of her own. But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come. She could not have known how difficult it would be to deal with madness; had no preparation for what to do with madness—none of us did—but consistent with her ability to love, and her native will, she handled it with empathy and intelligence. It never occurred to her to give up. Both my mother and father strongly encouraged my interests in writing poetry and school plays, as well as in science and medicine. Neither of them tried to limit my dreams, and they had the sense and sensitivity to tell the difference between a phase I was going through and more serious commitments. Even my phases, however, were for the most part tolerated with kindness and imagination. Being particularly given to strong and absolute passions, I was at one point desperately convinced that we had to have a sloth as a pet. My mother, who had been pushed about as far as possible by allowing me to keep dogs, cats, birds, fish, turtles, lizards, frogs, and mice, was less than wildly enthusiastic. My father convinced me to put together a detailed scientific and literary notebook about sloths. He suggested that, in addition to providing practical information about their dietary needs, living space, and veterinary requirements, I also write a series of poems about sloths and essays about what they meant to me, design a habitat for them that would work within our current house, and make detailed observations of their behavior at the zoo; if I did all this, he said, my parents would then consider finding a sloth for me. What they both knew, I am sure, was that I was simply in love with the idea of a strange idea, and that given some other way of expressing my enthusiasms, I would be quite content. They were right, of course, and this was only further driven home by actually watching the sloths at the National Zoo. If there is anything more boring than watching a sloth—other than watching cricket, perhaps, or the House Appropriations Committee meetings on C-SPAN—I have yet to come across it. I had never been so grateful to return to the prosaic world of my dog, who, by comparison, seemed Newtonian in her complexity.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description. I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that’s the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn’t say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living. He was terribly direct, which was terribly important, and he was willing to admit the limits of his understanding and treatments and when he was wrong. Most difficult to put into words, but in many ways the essence of everything: He taught me that the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still, but—with steely effort, the grace of God, and an inevitable break in the weather—that I could make it. My mother also was wonderful. She cooked meal after meal for me during my long bouts of depression, helped me with my laundry, and helped pay my medical bills. She endured my irritability and boringly bleak moods, drove me to the doctor, took me to pharmacies, and took me shopping. Like a gentle mother cat who picks up a straying kitten by the nape of its neck, she kept her marvelously maternal eyes wide-open, and, if I floundered too far away, she brought me back into a geographic and emotional range of security, food, and protection. Her formidable strength slowly eked its way into my depleted marrowbone. It, coupled with medicine for my brain and superb psychotherapy for my mind, pulled me through day after impossibly hard day. Without her I never could have survived. There were times when I would struggle to put together a lecture, and, having no idea whether it made sense or not, I would deliver it through the din and dreadful confusion that masqueraded as my mind. Often the only thing that would keep me going was the belief, instilled by my mother years before, that will and grit and responsibility are what ultimately make us supremely human in our existence. For each terrible storm that came my way, my mother—her love and her strong sense of values—provided me with powerful, and sustaining, countervailing winds.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Theodore’s later return to paganism would make Augustine revise his opinion of the man who had loaned him Neoplatonic books from his library. He is the nameless person “puffed with outsized self-inflation” at T 7.13 (O’Donnell 2.420). But Augustine’s debt to him at the time of his conversion appears in the dialogue he dedicated to him, Happiness in This Life (1.45). There he refers to conversations with “our priest friend” about the nature of the soul—which has been taken as a reference to Ambrose. But we know Augustine had not had any philosophical conversations with Ambrose at this point, and Simplician was the center of the Neoplatonist group that included Theodore. “Our priest friend” (noster sacerdos) is a bit chummy for the aloof Ambrose, but not for the generous Simplician. Augustine’s dedication shows how important Theodore was to him as he began his Christian studies: Since, my Theodore, I look only to you for what I need, impressed by your possession of it, consider what type of man is presented to you, what state I believe I am in, what kind of help I am sure you can give me. . . . I came to recognize, in the conversations about God held with our priest friend and you, that He is not to be considered as in any way corporeal. . . . After I read a few books of Plotinus, of whom you are a devotee, and tested them against the standard of the sacred writings, I was on fire. . . . So I beg you, by your own goodness, by your concern for others, by the linkage and interaction of our souls, to stretch out your hand to me—to love me and believe you are loved in return and held dear. If I beg this, I may, helped by my own poor effort, reach the happiness in this life that I suspect you have already gained. That you may know what I am doing, how I am conducting my friends to shelter, and that you may see in this my very soul (for I have no other means to reveal it to you), I thought I should address you and should dedicate in your name this early discourse, which I consider more religious than my other ones and therefore worthy of you. Its subject is appropriate, since together we pondered the subject of happiness in this life, and I hold no gift of God could be greater than that. I am not abashed by your eloquence (why should that abash me which, without rivaling it, I honor?) nor by the loftiness of your position—however great it is, you discountenance it, knowing that only what one masters can turn a truly favorable countenance on one.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In one view it depends all on the grace of God, in another view it depends all on the exertion of man. There is a mysterious co-operation between the two agencies, which is expressed in the profound paradox: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure."806 The believer is mystically identified with Christ from the moment of his conversion (sealed by baptism). He died with Christ unto sin so as to sin no more; and he rose with him to a new life unto God so as to live for God; he is crucified to the world and the world to him; he is a new creature in Christ; the old man of sin is dead and buried, the new man lives in holiness and righteousness. "It is no longer I (my own sinful self) that lives, but it is Christ that lives in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live in faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me."807 Here is the whole doctrine of Christian life: it is Christ in us, and we in Christ. It consists in a vital union with Christ, the crucified and risen Redeemer, who is the indwelling, all- pervading, and controlling life of the believer; but the union is no pantheistic confusion or absorption; the believer continues to live as a self-conscious and distinct personality. For the believer "to live is Christ, and to die is gain." "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s."808 In Romans 12, Paul sums up his ethics in the idea of gratitude which manifests itself in a cheerful sacrifice of our persons and services to the God of our salvation.809 (5.) Glorification (doxavzein). This is the final completion of the work of grace in the believer and will appear at the parousia of our Lord. It cannot be hindered by any power present or future, visible or invisible, for God and Christ are stronger than all our enemies and will enable us to come out more than conquerors from the conflict of faith. This lofty conviction of final victory finds most eloquent expression in the triumphal ode which closes the eighth chapter of Romans.810 IV. The Historical Progress of the gospel of salvation from Jews to Gentiles and back again to the Jews.811 Salvation was first intended for and offered to the Jews, who were for centuries prepared for it by the law and the promise, and among whom the Saviour was born, lived, died, and rose again. But the Jews as a nation rejected Christ and his apostles, and hardened their hearts in unbelief.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Over the next many years, except when I was living in England, I saw him at least once a week; when I was extremely depressed and suicidal I saw him more often. He kept me alive a thousand times over. He saw me through madness, despair, wonderful and terrible love affairs, disillusionments and triumphs, recurrences of illness, an almost fatal suicide attempt, the death of a man I greatly loved, and the enormous pleasures and aggravations of my professional life—in short, he saw me through the beginnings and endings of virtually every aspect of my psychological and emotional life. He was very tough, as well as very kind, and even though he understood more than anyone how much I felt I was losing—in energy, vivacity, and originality—by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. He was at ease with ambiguity, had a comfort with complexity, and was able to be decisive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. He treated me with respect, a decisive professionalism, wit, and an unshakable belief in my ability to get well, compete, and make a difference. Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me, by example, for my own patients, the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain. My temperament, moods, and illness clearly, and deeply, affected the relationships I had with others and the fabric of my work. But my moods were themselves powerfully shaped by the same relationships and work. The challenge was in learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy. At this point in my existence, I cannot imagine leading a normal life without both taking lithium and having had the benefits of psychotherapy. Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. But, always, it is where I have believed—or have learned to believe—that I might someday be able to contend with all of this.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Sometimes, after I had told him that I simply had to be alone, he would call me later, at one or two o’clock in the morning, to see how I was doing. He could tell from my voice what state I was in, and, despite my pleas to be left alone, he would insist on coming over. Often this was in the guise of “I can’t sleep. You wouldn’t refuse to keep a friend company, would you?” Knowing full well that he was only checking up on me, I would say, “Yes. Trust me. I can refuse. Leave me alone. I’m in a foul mood.” He would call back again in a few minutes and say, “Please, please, pretty please. I really need the company. We can go somewhere and get some ice cream.” So we would get together at some ungodly hour, I would be secretly and inexpressibly grateful, and he somehow would have finessed it so that I didn’t feel like I was too huge a burden to him. It was a rare gift of friendship. Fortuitously, he also worked as an emergency room physician on weekends. After my suicide attempt, he and my psychiatrist worked out a plan for my medical care and supervision. My friend kept a constant watch on me, drew my blood for lithium and electrolyte levels, and walked me repeatedly to pull me out of my drugged state, as one would move a sick shark around its tank in order to keep the water circulating through its gills. He was the only person I knew who could make me laugh during my truly morbid moments. Like my husband, from whom I was legally separated but still frequently in contact, he had a gentling and calming effect on me when I was vastly irritable, perturbed, or perturbing. He nursed me through the most awful days of my life, and it is to him, only next to my psychiatrist and family, that I most owe my life.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Feeling a bit trapped, but also relieved, I decided to be honest about my own and my family’s history, and soon the two of us were drawing our pedigrees on the backs of table napkins. I was amazed at how many of my squares and circles were darkened, or darkened with a question mark placed underneath (I knew, for instance, that my great-uncle had spent virtually all of his adult life in an asylum, but I didn’t know what his diagnosis had been). Manic-depressive illness occurred repeatedly, throughout the three generations I had knowledge of, on my father’s side of the family; asterisks, representing suicide attempts, showed up like a starfield. My mother’s side of the family, in comparison, was squeaky clean. It would not have taken a very astute observer of human nature to figure out that my parents are terribly different, but here was one very concrete example of their differences—and, quite literally, in black and white. Mogens, who had been sketching out his own family tree, took one look over my shoulder at the number of affected members in mine and promptly, laughingly, conceded the “battle of the black boxes.” He noted that the circle representing me was solid black and had an asterisk next to it—how remarkable to be able to reduce one’s suicide attempt to a simple symbol!—so we talked for a long time about my illness, lithium, its side effects, and my suicide attempt. Talking with Mogens was extremely helpful, in part because he aggressively encouraged me to use my own experiences in my research, writing, and teaching, and in part because it was very important to me to be able to talk with a senior professor who not only had some knowledge of what I had been through, but who had used his own experiences to make a profound difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Including my own. No matter what struggles I had had with lithium, it was painfully clear to me that without it I would have been long dead or on the back wards of a state hospital. I was one of many who owed their lives to the black circles and squares in Schou’s family tree.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He lives in Suresnes where there is a little colony of émigrés and run-down artists. Before the revolution Serge was a captain in the Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged feet and drinks vodka like a fish. His father was an admiral, or something like that, on the battleship “Potemkin.” I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances. Sniffing about for food I found myself toward noon the other day in the neighborhood of the Folies-Bergère—the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship “Potemkin”—above all, Serge’s gentleness. He is big and tender, a man every inch of him, but with a woman’s heart. In the café nearby—Café des Artistes—he proposes immediately to put me up; says he will put a mattress on the floor in the hallway. For the lessons he says he will give me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any reason the meal is lacking then five francs. It sounds wonderful to me—wonderful . The only question is, how will I get from Suresnes to the American Express every day? Serge insists that we begin at once—he gives me the carfare to get out to Suresnes in the evening. I arrive a little before dinner, with my knapsack, in order to give Serge a lesson. There are some guests on hand already—seems as though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in. There are eight of us at the table—and three dogs. The dogs eat first. They eat oatmeal. Then we commence. We eat oatmeal too—as an hors d’oeuvre. “Chez nous,” says Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, “c’est pour les chiens, les Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ça va.” After the oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon omelet, fruit, red wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes. Not bad, the Russian meal. Everyone talks with his mouth full. Toward the end of the meal Serge’s wife, who is a lazy slut of an Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Fortunately, before my mania could become very public, this colleague—a man whom I had been dating during my separation from my husband, and someone who knew and understood me very well—was willing to take on my manic wrath and delusions. He confronted me with the need to take lithium, which was not a pleasant task for him—I was wildly agitated, paranoid, and physically violent—but it was one he carried out with skill, grace, and understanding. He was very gentle but insistent when he told me that he thought I had manic-depressive illness, and he persuaded me to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist. Together we tracked down everything we could find that had been written about the illness; we read as much as we could absorb and then moved on to what was known about treatment. Lithium had been approved for use in mania only four years earlier, in 1970, by the Food and Drug Administration, and was not yet in widespread use in California. It was clear from reading the medical literature, however, that lithium was the only drug that had any serious chance of working for me. He prescribed lithium and other antipsychotic medications for me, on a very short-term, emergency basis, only long enough to tide me over until I saw my psychiatrist for the first time. He put the correct number of pills out for me to take each morning and evening, and he spent hours talking with my family about my illness and how they might best handle it. He drew blood for several lithium levels and provided encouragement about the prognosis for my recovery. He also insisted that I take a short time off from work, which ultimately saved me from losing my job and my clinical privileges, and arranged for me to be looked after at home during those periods when he was unable to. I felt infinitely worse, more dangerously depressed, during this first manic episode than when in the midst of my worst depressions. In fact, the most dreadful I had ever felt in my entire life—one characterized by chaotic ups and downs—was the first time I was psychotically manic. I had been mildly manic many times before, but these had never been frightening experiences—ecstatic at best, confusing at worst. I had learned to accommodate quite well to them. I had developed mechanisms of self-control, to keep down the peals of singularly inappropriate laughter, and set rigid limits on my irritability. I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind was off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions. My work and professional life flowed. But nowhere did this, or my upbringing, or my intellect, or my character, prepare me for insanity.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I could see from the way Fillmore looked at her that she must have given an unusual performance and I began to feel lecherous myself. Fillmore must have sensed how I felt, and what an ordeal it was to sit and look on all night, for suddenly he pulled a hundred franc note out of his pocket and slapping it in front of me, he said: “Look here, you probably need a lay more than any of us. Take that and pick someone out for yourself.” Somehow that gesture endeared him more to me than anything he had ever done for me, and he had done considerable. I accepted the money in the spirit it was given and promptly signaled to the Negress to get ready for another lay. That enraged the princess more than anything, it appeared. She wanted to know if there wasn’t anyone in the place good enough for us except this Negress. I told her bluntly NO. And it was so—the Negress was the queen of the harem. You had only to look at her to get an erection. Her eyes seemed to be swimming in sperm. She was drunk with all the demands made upon her. She couldn’t walk straight any more—at least, it seemed that way to me. Going up the narrow winding stairs behind her I couldn’t resist the temptation to slide my hand up her crotch; we continued up the stairs that way, she looking back at me with a cheerful smile and wiggling her ass a bit when it tickled her too much. It was a good session all around. Everyone was happy. Macha seemed to be in a good mood too. And so the next evening, after she had had her ration of champagne and caviar, after she had given us another chapter out of the history of her life, Fillmore went to work on her. It seemed as though he was going to get his reward at last. She had ceased to put up a fight any more. She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around and fool around and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap. He rolled off her like a log. I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for the black soap he used on special occasions, and in a few moments he was standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying—“can you beat that? that son-of-a-bitch of a princess has the clap!” He seemed pretty well scared about it. The princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling for her Russian newspapers. It was quite a joke to her. “There are worse things than that,” she said, lying there in her bed and talking to us through the open door.