Grief

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.

Page 102 of 263 · 20 per page

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

  I answer that, Penance is twofold, internal and external. Internal penance is that whereby one grieves for a sin one has committed, and this penance should last until the end of life. Because man should always be displeased at having sinned, for if he were to be pleased thereat, he would for this very reason fall into sin and lose the fruit of pardon. Now displeasure causes sorrow in one who is susceptible to sorrow, as man is in this life; but after this life the saints are not susceptible to sorrow, wherefore they will be displeased at, without sorrowing for, their past sins, according to Is. 65:16. “The former distresses are forgotten.” External penance is that whereby a man shows external signs of sorrow, confesses his sins verbally to the priest who absolves him, and makes satisfaction for his sins according to the judgment of the priest. Such penance need not last until the end of life, but only for a fixed time according to the measure of the sin. Reply to Objection 1: True penance not only removes past sins, but also preserves man from future sins. Consequently, although a man receives forgiveness of past sins in the first instant of his true penance, nevertheless he must persevere in his penance, lest he fall again into sin. Reply to Objection 2: To do penance both internal and external belongs to the state of beginners, of those, to wit, who are making a fresh start from the state of sin. But there is room for internal penance even in the proficient and the perfect, according to Ps. 83:7: “In his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps, in the vale of tears.” Wherefore Paul says (1 Cor. 15:9): “I . . . am not worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the Church of God.” Reply to Objection 3: These durations of time are fixed for penitents as regards the exercise of external penance. Whether Penance can be continuous?Objection 1: It would seem that penance cannot be continuous. For it is written (Jer. 31:16): “Let thy voice cease from weeping, and thy eyes from tears.” But this would be impossible if penance were continuous, for it consists in weeping and tears. Therefore penance cannot be continuous. Objection 2: Further, man ought to rejoice at every good work, according to Ps. 99:1: “Serve ye the Lord with gladness.” Now to do penance is a good work. Therefore man should rejoice at it. But man cannot rejoice and grieve at the same time, as the Philosopher declares (Ethic. ix, 4). Therefore a penitent cannot grieve continually for his past sins, which is essential to penance. Therefore penance cannot be continuous. Objection 3: Further, the Apostle says (2 Cor. 2:7): “Comfort him,” viz. the penitent, “lest perhaps such an one be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow.” But comfort dispels grief, which is essential to penance. Therefore penance need not be continuous.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Modern Art That winter you go to the Brooklyn Museum, to an exhibition called Hide/Seek. You’re in duress, in the city against your will. You did not want to go to New York, even for a few days, but she insisted. You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief. Inside, you wander ahead of her, far ahead so you don’t have to feel her presence weighing on you like a pillow on the face. You find Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban American artist. When you first see the installation—a pile of candy wrapped in multicolored cellophane, tucked in a corner—you almost laugh. It is so strangely out of place in this space. But when you get closer and read the description, you understand: it is the weight of the artist’s late lover as he began to die of AIDS. Viewers should take a piece of candy, the description says, and at some point it will be replenished. Someone has been replenishing the lost ones since 1991. In 1991 you were five. You didn’t know you were queer. You were living in a Pennsylvania suburb and you didn’t know what AIDS was. You were muttering stories to yourself. You were resentful of your little brother and had newly welcomed a baby sister, of whom you were also resentful. You were so afraid of balloons you invented a device made of a soda bottle and straw that would keep the latex bladder from being sucked into your lungs. You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you. In the new days of 2012, as you stand in front of the pile of candy you feel a direct line to its hopelessness, rage, grief. You read the placard. “An act of communion.” You pick up one, spin the sweet from its wrapper, and put it in your mouth. At that moment, she appears next to you. “What are you doing?” she hisses. You gesture to the sign, the explanation. She doesn’t look. She gets so close to you it’s like she’s going to kiss your ear, except she’s berating you under her breath, a steady stream of rage and profanity that would be indistinguishable from sweet nothings to a nearby stranger. You can’t look at her. You can’t look away from Ross, who is also Untitled, who is also dead, who will also always be alive, immortal. You suck and suck and suck on the candy, which you’re realizing has no identifiable flavor beyond its sugar, and she’s still telling you you’re the worst, you’re worse than the worst, she can’t believe she brought you here. (This exhibit? This museum? This city? Her bed? You’ll never know.) The candy goes from pebble to ice chip, and then it’s gone—one more step toward Ross’s disintegration. One more step toward resurrection.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  One day, you picked her up, put her by the door, and opened it. “Greta,” you said, “go on! Be free! Run!” She just looked at you with the saddest, most mournful expression. She could have run. The door was open. But it was as if she didn’t even know what she was looking at. Dream House as Modern ArtThat winter you go to the Brooklyn Museum, to an exhibition called Hide/Seek. You’re in duress, in the city against your will. You did not want to go to New York, even for a few days, but she insisted. You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief. Inside, you wander ahead of her, far ahead so you don’t have to feel her presence weighing on you like a pillow on the face. You find Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban American artist. When you first see the installation—a pile of candy wrapped in multicolored cellophane, tucked in a corner—you almost laugh. It is so strangely out of place in this space. But when you get closer and read the description, you understand: it is the weight of the artist’s late lover as he began to die of AIDS. Viewers should take a piece of candy, the description says, and at some point it will be replenished. Someone has been replenishing the lost ones since 1991. In 1991 you were five. You didn’t know you were queer. You were living in a Pennsylvania suburb and you didn’t know what AIDS was. You were muttering stories to yourself. You were resentful of your little brother and had newly welcomed a baby sister, of whom you were also resentful. You were so afraid of balloons you invented a device made of a soda bottle and straw that would keep the latex bladder from being sucked into your lungs. You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you. In the new days of 2012, as you stand in front of the pile of candy you feel a direct line to its hopelessness, rage, grief. You read the placard. “An act of communion.” You pick up one, spin the sweet from its wrapper, and put it in your mouth. At that moment, she appears next to you. “What are you doing?” she hisses.

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

  I tell Stella what I’ve told many people who are cherished spouses but famished lovers: “You know he loves you; you’ve never doubted that; and that’s why you’ve stayed all these years. What hurts so much is that you’ve never felt wanted by him. You feel that it’s all on you to make it happen, and indeed it is. You’ve forfeited sensual complicity for emotional security. It’s a cruel bargain.” Like a glacier suddenly melting, tears roll down Stella’s face. They speak volumes about the longing and rejection she’s lived with for so long. It’s virtually impossible not to take such repeated denial personally, to see it as proof that one is undesirable, and to slip into self-doubt. To James I say, “Love and desire are not the same. Cozy is not the same as sexy. Your wife knows you love her. What she wants is to feel desired by you. She wants to know your hunger, to taste the delicate flavors of your craving, and to see it as a match for her own. Your inability to let go, to surrender to your own hedonistic designs, is infuriating to her. Your passivity is irritating, and your considerateness is the opposite of her fantasy of unrestrained rapture. Your lustiness would be an open endorsement for her own ardor. It’s hard to let go with someone who doesn’t.” The masturbation experiment was only a partial success—it went so-so, as these things sometimes do, but there was no dramatic transformation. James’s self-consciousness got the better of him. He had always marshaled masturbation as a private pleasure, and he had no desire to share it. But what happened a few days later was a real turning point. James and Stella had a row. She was upset, convinced that things would never change. His first impulse was to hold her, but he was afraid it wasn’t what she wanted. She seemed so angry with him. But he pushed through his awkwardness and held her anyway. Though she wasn’t responsive at first, he maintained his embrace. In the past, James had always retreated, focusing solely on her cues for readiness. He was organized by her. This time, he made his own choice, laid claim to his own feelings, and was surprisingly aroused. He rubbed her back, and she began to calm down. She knew he was there, and that he could contain her. He could withstand her intensity. One intensity dominoed another, and this led to what they both recounted separately as “wonderful lovemaking.” Theirs wasn’t an ecstatic fulfillment; rather, they reveled in a quiet passion, the simple understanding of two bodies reunited after a long absence.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The counselors spent much time in deliberation, and after three days behind closed doors they brought her a squid, with no small amount of pomp and pageantry. She was utterly delighted. The squid was everything she had ever wanted: pearlescent and damp, sinewy and intelligent. The squid, in turn, was delighted with her own new situation. She had, from afar, admired the queen, and could hardly believe the queen had chosen her as her own. At first, their friendship was a magnificent one. They traveled to the edges of the kingdom, and the squid would bring the queen beautiful baubles from tiny sea caves at the coast. The queen took the squid to visit distant dignitaries, and at night they trawled the shadowed halls in search of midnight snacks. It was a companionship defined by its tenderness, and the two were unspeakably happy. But after a while, the queen grew bored with her companion. Those were difficult times. Sometimes the queen left the squid locked outside her study, and the squid would sit upon the dry, cool stones praying she would be returned to her bowl before her skin turned to paper. And even when the queen and the squid kept each other company, the queen was distant, often cruel. She would flip the squid over and drop little pieces of trash into her gnashing beak. And the queen would scrub whatever surface the squid touched, scolding her for her thoughtless messes. (The squid, as you know, has three hearts, and all of them broke over and over in her time with the queen.) One night, when the queen was sleeping, the squid decided to gambol about the palace. She found her way to a mop bucket and wheeled herself around the corridors, enjoying the silence. After she had traveled some distance she found herself at the end of a hallway, before a very strange and heavy door. The squid was about to turn around and leave when she heard something. She opened the door and slid into the dim room. The smell was terrible. Not the organic stench of death but the wine-dark depths of sorrow—thick and bitter. And the sounds—the squid had never heard anything like that before. The low moan of water draining from a bath; keen wails darting through the room like bright birds. The squid’s large eyes began to adjust to the light. When she realized what she was seeing, she wheeled her bucket as quickly as possible back down the hallway and back to the queen’s room. Some time later, the squid looked out the window and saw that the queen was cavorting with a bear. The bear was beautiful: massive and shaggy and radiant. The squid, heartbroken, knew she could not even begin to compare. When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The bear was beautiful: massive and shaggy and radiant. The squid, heartbroken, knew she could not even begin to compare. When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town. When the queen discovered that her squid was gone, she was enraged. But once her anger receded, she knew what she needed to do. So the queen sat down and wrote the squid a letter. “My dearest creature,” she wrote. “Before I begin, I must ask you to keep an open mind and an open heart about the following missive. “I love you, and I will always love you. The fact that you refuse to come to my chambers, even just as a companion and not as a lover, stills my heart. You seem to believe that the fact that our love has ended means we can never be in proximity to each other, and I beg you to reconsider. I have loved many creatures in my lifetime—a goat, a honeybee, an owl—and despite the fact that our love did not endure, I still see them regularly. We are still friends. Just because I have found happiness in the companionship of a bear does not mean that our time together meant nothing. “I am sorry that things did not work out between us. I have, as I hope you would agree, behaved honorably and beyond reproach. I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings. I would have thought that you—intelligent creature that you are— would know better. “The truth is that you have been with me during a very difficult period of my life, and I am sorry that I have not been on my best behavior. But such is love! What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever. Does that not please you? None of this jealousy or betrayal; just a friendship based on mutual trust. I hope one day we can meet each other in some neutral space, our pain limned with understanding, with all of this behind us. I faithfully await your reply.” When the squid did not reply, the queen wrote another letter: “Sweet squid! The mistakes that I have made number in the thousands, I think. I have spent many days meditating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you. The truth is, you are my past and my future. I miss you. I wish I could

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Think about some of the great country songs, the classics. There’s “She Ripped My Heart Out and Stomped That Sucker Flat,” and there’s “I Sure Do Miss Him, but My Aim Is Improving,” and then there’s my personal favorite, “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.” What do they have in common? Heartbreak. Someone got their heart broken by someone else. And now they are singing about it. And we can all relate. Even if the music gives us a rash.4 Why is this? And why is it that it’s not just about lovers, it’s about parents and their children, friends who have been hurt by friends, business partners who part ways. Why is heartbreak so universal? It’s universal because we’re feeling something as old as the world. Something God feels. The Bible begins with God making people who have freedom. Freedom to love God or not to love God. And these people consistently choose not to love God. It’s written in Genesis 6:6 that God “regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” Another translation reads, “Then YHWH [God] was sorry that he had made humankind on earth, and it pained his heart.” These ancient writers saw God as having a heart.5 That feels. That responds. That hurts. That fills with pain. God . . . grieving. And what is the source of this grieving? People. People God had made who have freedom. Freedom to love anybody they want. And freedom not to love anybody they want. God takes this giant risk in creating and loving people, and in the process God’s heart is broken. Again and again and again. Divine heartbreak. For some, this is an entirely new perspective on God. Many of the popular images of God are of a warrior, a creator, a judge, a system of theology, a set of absolute truths, a father, the writer of an owner’s manual. But a lover? A lover whose heart has been crushed, and expresses it in . . . poetry?6 This raises questions about what is at the base of the universe. What, or maybe we should say who, is behind it all? A list of rules? A set of beliefs, which you either believe or you don’t, and if you do, you’re in, if you don’t, you’re out? A harsh judge and critic, who’s making a list and checking it all the time? An impersonal energy such as fate, destiny, luck, chance, or the force that you can tap into if you know the code or the technique or the philosophy?7 The story the Bible tells is of a living being who loves and who continues to love even when that love is not returned. A God who refuses to override our freedom, who respects our power to decide whether to reciprocate, a God who lets us make the next move. Love Is . . .

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  180 Lecture 41: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem Akhmatova, Requiem. Amert, In a Shattered Mirror. Driver, Anna Akhmatova. 1. As you read the cycle, pay particular attention to the religious images and allusions. What is the function of these references? Is the poet suggesting a religious solace in a literal way or must the cycle be read in a metaphoric way, indicating that whatever comfort there is will have to come from someplace other than religion? How do we decide on the basis of the poem itself how we should read and understand the references? 2. The poems are also full of what is sometimes called intertextuality: references and allusions to a lot of other literature, Russian as well as non-Russian. How many other references to other literature can you discover, remembering that some of the references to Russian history and landscape are also references to literary works? How, besides providing a partial cover for the poet, do they function in the poems? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider 181 Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country Lecture 42 Since our … lecture … on Marcel Proust, we’ve been exploring reactions against Realism in the early 20th century. … This time, [we’ll] look at another modernist ¿ gure, Kawabata Yasunari, and one of his most famous novels called Snow Country. … written in the 1930s, and … published in its ¿ nal form in 1947. I n Snow Country Kawabata Yasunari uses avant-garde techniques that came to Japan from Western literature. When Japanese writers ¿ rst adapted Western techniques for their own works, the most fashionable and up-to-date mode in the West was that of Realism, as we saw in the work of Higuchi Ichiy ǀ. During the 1930s and 1940s, when Snow Country was written and published, many of the “isms” mentioned in past lectures (e.g., Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Dadaism) made their mark on the novel genre in the West—and therefore had an impact on the Japanese novel as well. Kawabata admitted to being much in À uenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses and by the theories of Sigmund Freud. He belonged to a group of young Japanese writers called “New Sensibilities,” whose aim was to rescue Japanese writing from Realism and Naturalism. Around the turn of the 20 th century, Henry James had established that every story is somebody’ s story, so that ¿ rst- or third-person limited point of view had become normative for the psychological Realist novel. In keeping with this Jamesian in À uence, Kawabata’s novel uses a third-person limited point of view, which means that all of our information comes to us through its protagonist, Shimamura. We are inside his head for the entire book, which means that everything we learn has already been colored by his temperament and sensibility. In novels of this sort, we have to get to know our protagonist and his sensibility well enough to make adjustments for his biases and proclivities—a particular issue in this novel because of the nature of Shimamura.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  177 Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem Lecture 41 We start with the Yezhov Terror of the late 1930s in Russia as a political context for Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and the Imagist revolution in poetry early in the century as an aesthetic context. … Requiem describes a sick society in which the poet must speak for voiceless victims everywhere. T he political context for the poem is the Yezhov Terror of 1937 and 1938, when there were perhaps 10 million Russians in prisons and prison camps, and millions more had already been executed. Anna Akhmatova stood outside a prison in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) for 17 months, hoping to see her son (her ¿ rst and second husbands had already been executed). A woman recognized her and asked if she could describe the scene; she answered, “Yes, I can.” The poem Akhmatova wrote in response was Requiem. Prior to all of this, Akhmatova had been a poet well-known for her love poetry, written in the modern style. The Modernist Movement in Russia with which Akhmatova was associated was called Acmeism, but there were analogous movements throughout the Western world. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were involved in a movement called Imagism, the goal of which was to make poetry more concrete, less musical, and more dependent on images rather than explanation. The idea was to make poetry richer and to say more with less—which is one of the reasons Emily Dickinson seems so modern, since in some ways she anticipated this movement across Europe. The movements in various countries also point up the increasing alienation of the writer from his or her culture in the 20 th century. Perhaps all literature is subversive in some ways, an expression of irritation or distress analogous to the pearl that an oyster makes from the irritation of sand. In earlier literature, writers like Cervantes and V oltaire were reacting against some aspects of their cultures. From the Romantic period on, writers tended to stand further outside their cultures than they did in the past (e.g., Emma Bovary, the Underground Man, Huck Finn, and Kafka’s insect-man). Proust and Pirandello focused on

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

  The Hardest Cost to Bear The greater the sunk costs, the harder it becomes to quit. And the greatest cost is, of course, the loss of human life. That makes decisions about whether or when to exit a war heartbreakingly difficult. Retired four-star general Tony Thomas, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), served in Afghanistan on missions between 2001 and 2013 (except for a year when he served in the Iraq War). He attended many military funerals and gave an American flag to many gold star families. He described to me those humbling experiences and how those tragic losses amplify the types of sunk cost problems we all face, making it particularly difficult for a country to extricate itself from a war once it has started to incur those losses. On one occasion, a gold star mother, having just lost her son, gripped his hand and said, “Stay on this and finish it.” The general’s knees almost buckled. At that moment, he wanted to run through a wall for her. The unspoken message, never expressed at these funerals but which he felt was on the minds of all those grieving parents, was, “Tell me my child didn’t die in vain.” It’s understandable why a gold star parent would say, “Keep going so my child didn’t die in vain,” and it’s impossible not to be moved by such an emotional request. We all feel some of that weight, whether we are involved in deciding policy going forward or just members of the public for whom those soldiers and their loved ones made that sacrifice. You can’t be a person with feelings without being sensitive to that. But the reality is that when it comes to decisions about whether to continue or withdraw, what matters is whether the next life is worth putting at risk, as much as we instinctively want to take into account the lives already lost. If we continue, are our chances of getting the outcome we want worth risking additional lives and imposing those losses on other families? The Difference between Knowing and Doing There are lots of intuitions people have about cognitive biases, including the sunk cost fallacy. One of the most common is that if you are educated on the

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  perception of them. As Schopenhauer wrote, “The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him or her alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and inextricably lost.” We want to see that uniqueness of the other person in the present, bringing out those qualities we have taken for granted. We want to experience their vulnerability to pain and death, not just our own. We can take this meditation further. Let us look at the pedestrians in any busy city and realize that in ninety years it is likely that none of them will be alive, including us. Think of the millions and billions who have already come and gone, buried and long forgotten, rich and poor alike. Such thoughts make it hard to maintain our own sense of grand importance, the feeling that we are special and that the pain we may suffer is not the same as others’. The more we can create this visceral connection to people through our common mortality, the better we are able to handle human nature in all its varieties with tolerance and grace. This does not mean we lose our alertness to those who are dangerous and difficult. In fact, seeing the mortality and vulnerability in even the nastiest individual can help us cut them down to size and deal with them from a more neutral and strategic space, not taking their nastiness personally. In general, we can say that the specter of death is what impels us toward our fellow humans and makes us avid for love. Death and love are inextricably interconnected. The ultimate separation and disintegration represented by death drive us to unite and integrate ourselves with others. Our unique consciousness of death has created our particular form of love. And through a deepening of our death awareness we will only strengthen this impulse, and rid ourselves of the divisions and lifeless separations that afflict humanity. Embrace all pain and adversity. Life by its nature involves pain and suffering. And the ultimate form of this is death itself. In the face of this reality, we humans have a simple choice: We can try to avoid painful moments and to muffle their effect by distracting ourselves, by taking drugs or engaging in addictive behavior. We can also restrict what we do—if we don’t try too hard in our work, if we lower our ambitions, we won’t expose ourselves to failure and ridicule. If we break off relationships early on, we can elude any sharp, painful moments from the separation. At the root of this approach is the fear of death itself, which establishes our elemental relationship to pain and adversity, and avoidance becomes our pattern. When bad things happen, our natural reaction is to complain about what life is bringing us, or what others are not doing for us, and to retreat even further from

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Overture I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide? I Eros limbslackener shakes me again— that sweet, bitter, impossible creature. —Sappho, as translated by Jim Powell Dream House as Prologue In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the “violence of the archive.” This concept—also called “archival silence”—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories. The word archive , Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion , “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine , its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death . Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”) 1 The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence…. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence. The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory; somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. But we can try. “How does one tell impossible stories?” Hartman asks, and she suggests many avenues: “advancing a series of speculative arguments,” “exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities),” writing history “with and against the archive,” “imagining what cannot be verified.” The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it—and she—did not exist until about fifty years ago. The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice? The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context. I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound. 1 . Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickock, November 17, 1933.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  194 Lecture 44: Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy The third novel, Sugar Street , follows the fortunes of the family up to 1944. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, the patriarch of the family, dies on the night of an air raid. He has to be carried to his bed by Kamal, one sure sign of the reversal that inevitably happens to father and son. Mahfouz, like Flaubert and Ibsen, also uses realistic details as symbols: Kamal’s seduction from traditional beliefs is symbolized by a half-Westernized woman, and the great traditionalist father dies in an air raid—the airplane being in its time the most advanced product of Western science and technology. Kamal’s mother dies in a coma, unable even to speak to the family she has produced and raised. Kamal realizes when she dies that he has lost the person who loved him most, but he also realizes that he had given up her belief system years ago and is still caught between two worlds—a skeptic even of his own skepticism—and is a representative of the dilemma of modern human beings. In many ways, time is the ultimate protagonist of the trilogy. By the end of Sugar Street, the family has declined: There have been a series of deaths, the certainties of the grandparents’ generation have all been eroded, and two grandchildren are in prison awaiting trial as political subversives. As in Gilgamesh, time has taken the once vital and nearly godlike Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and turned him into a pitiful old man who needs to be carried to his deathbed by his son; it has also sent his wife, whose love and care balanced her husband’s autocratic control, into a coma in which she cannot even say goodbye to those she loves the most. Individual human beings succumb to time’s power, and the trilogy records the process in precise detail. There is also a collective time, an evolutionary time, in which individuals serve as building blocks for mankind, which is eternal and can therefore transcend the ravages of time on the individual. In that collective time, Fahmi wills the time he has not used in his life to the next generation. At the end of the trilogy, two of his nephews (had he lived to be their uncle) are in prison for carrying on the revolution for which he gave his life. At the end of the trilogy, Kamal, still paralyzed with doubt, visits his nephews in [The Cairo Trilogy] is a story … of generations moving forward through time, building on the achievements of the past … moving toward what Kamal’s nephew calls “the ideal.”

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

  250The History of Christianity II õThe Russian Orthodox Church splintered almost immediately. Those who rejected any compromise at all with the communist regime broke away and went underground or set up rival organizations abroad. It’s remarkable that by 1937, 57 percent of Soviet population still called themselves religious believers, even though the Russian Orthodox Church was only a skeleton of what it once was. By 1939, there were only four bishops in the whole country who weren’t in prison. õThen came World War II. Stalin had brokered a non-aggression pact with Hitler that was supposed to guarantee that the Nazis would focus on fighting the Allied powers to the west and leave the Soviet Union alone. When Hitler went back on his word and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin was caught off guard and scrambled to rally his people. õThe communists grudgingly came to the conclusion that if they were going to expect the Russian people to make another colossal sacrifice, then they needed religion. They needed the help of the church. CONCLUSION õThe war years were a time of religious revival in the Soviet Union. Church attendance grew enormously. Stalin reversed his policy of suppressing church activity. Churches, theological schools, and monasteries all started to function again—as long as all church officials supported the war effort and demonstrated total loyalty to Stalin’s policies. õIt is impossible to overstate the devastation that the war wrought on Soviet society. The Soviets lost at least 11 million soldiers. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 7 to 20 million. õIt’s likely Stalin understood that religion had to play a role in helping his people rebuild their lives and their country. But throughout the Cold War, the Soviet state’s relationship with organized religion would prove to be complicated: a mix of cooptation, persecution, and benign neglect, depending on the political needs of the moment. 251Lecture 25—The Church and the Russian Revolution õThere is no doubt that brutal Bolshevik policies and the Orthodox Church’s own corruption destroyed the faith of many people. But the long history of Russians’ deep commitment to the weekly rhythms of their churches and the commitment of religious dissenters—even to the point of self-inf licted pain and martyrdom—give a sense of the tenaciousness of Russian Christianity. SUGGESTED READING Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. Figes, A People’s Tragedy. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow might an ordinary Russian peasant have thought of their parish priest at the turn of the 20 th century? äWhat could motivate a person to join the Doukhobors or the Skoptsy? äOn paper, the Soviet constitution protected freedom of religion. How might the communists have reconciled that commitment with their real-life policy toward religious groups?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But first, the killing—my initiation into the rites of death. Roger took the initiative and bashed the sacrificial chicken with an enormous rock. Though bloodied and crushed, it continued to fight for life. I was horrified. I turned away, unable to bear watching the wretched creature. Things had gone too far. I wanted to undo them. Then and there I lost interest in my project of appearing grown-up. I wanted my mother; I wanted to cycle home so she could hold me. I wanted to reverse time, erase everything, start the day over. But there was no turning back and nothing to do but watch Roger grab the chicken by its battered head and whirl it around like a bolo until, finally, it was still. We must have plucked it, cleaned it, put it on a spit. We must have roasted it over the fire and eaten it. Perhaps with gusto. But, though I remember with an eerie clarity trying to wish away the whole catastrophe, of all we actually did I recall nothing. Still, the memory of that afternoon gripped me until I freed myself by asking why it had emerged now after so many decades in deep storage. What linked the wheelchair-filled hospital group room with the events played out so long ago around the campfire in a copse of the Old Soldiers’ Home? Perhaps the idea of going too far—as I had gone too far with Magnolia. Perhaps some visceral apprehension of the irreversibility of time. Perhaps the aching, the longing, for a mother to protect me from the brute facts of life and death. Though the aftertaste of the group meeting was still bitter, I felt closer to its source: undoubtedly my deep craving for motherly comfort, fanned by my mother’s death, had resonated mightily with Magnolia’s earth-mother image. Had I stripped away that image, secularized her, obliterated her power in an effort to face down my yearning for comfort? That song, that earth-mother song—bits of the lyrics now began to return: “Pack up your sorrows and give them all to me. You would lose them. . . . I could use them....” Silly, puerile words. I could remember only faintly the snug, bountiful, warm place into which they had once led me. Now those words no longer worked. Much as I blink at a Vasarely or an Escher illusion to reinstate the alternate image, I tried to flip my mind back to that place—but in vain.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Barn in Upstate New York Many years later, I wrote part of this book in a barn on the property of the late Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know I was writing the book yet; it would take two more summers to realize it was a book about a house that was not a house and a dream that was no dream at all. But I sketched out scenes and jotted down notes and did a lot of mental excavation staring at the wall of the barn. A few weeks in, while hiking out in the woods, I came upon what looked like a mound of garbage. When I got closer, I realized what it was: a huge pile of broken and discarded bottles of gin and morphine, where Edna’s erstwhile housekeeper had taken the empties and left them. There was something horrifying about the mountain of glass. I had just finished Edna’s biography, wherein I’d learned that weeks after her husband died, she fell to her own death in her house, on the stairs, likely in a haze of intoxication. Was it a terrible accident? Suicide? Everybody has a theory. The biography made me angry. Edna treated her lovers, male and female alike, with no small amount of cruelty. She was talented but arrogant; brilliant but profoundly selfish. And yet, there among the trees, seeing the measure of her pain, the proportions of her problems, I felt a stab of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be married to her, but it couldn’t have been easy to be her, either. One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled backward in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.

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

  77Lecture 8—Puritans, Kings, and Theology in Practice õBy the end of her church trial, Hutchinson had very few friends left, but one person stood up with her and walked by her side out of that church: Mary Dyer. People gossiped that her stillbirth represented God’s punishment for her “monstrous” religious ideas. õHutchinson and most of her family died just a few years later in New York during a brutal Indian massacre. Mary Dyer went on to become a Quaker, and she kept coming back to Boston, determined to preach her message, until the Puritans arrested her and ordered her hanged in 1660. PARADOXES õChristian theology is based on a set of paradoxes: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but still one being; God is all-knowing and all- powerful, yet somehow isn’t to blame for sin or all the bad things in the world; Christ is both human and divine at the same time; people are saved through faith, but they also have to live the right way, too. Over the centuries theologians have worked very hard to keep these opposing ideas in balance and not let orthodoxy teeter too far in one direction or the other. õAcross the expanse of Christian history, almost all the people who have been labeled heretics let this delicate equilibrium slide too far in one direction or another. For example, early heretics argued that the members of the Trinity were actually separate, that God the Father was superior to the Son and Holy Spirit. õWilliams and Hutchinson disrupted the balance between grace and works. In Christianity, it seems people can’t really follow logic too far to its ultimate conclusion. People have to live with paradox and mystery, especially if they want to use this theology to govern a working Christian community. 78The History of Christianity II õThe Puritans had to make their terrifying vision of a wrathful, arbitrary God workable. In practice, they rationalized God. They made God just and logical with their ideas of the covenant. The heretics who outraged them most, who brought out the Puritans’ most savage inhumanity, were those who violated this delicate set of compromises. SUGGESTED READING Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire. Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England. Frasier, Cromwell. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äCould King Charles I have avoided launching a civil war and losing his head? äHow did the radical dissenters’ religious ideas shape their politics? äWhich of these movements were “winners” and which were “losers”? By what measure? 79 LECTURE 9 RELIGIOUS DISSENT AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR T his lecture continues the story of the British Reformation in the 17 th

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  While waiting for Irene to return with Kevin, I tried to square her account of therapy with my own. According to her, I had helped most of all by engaging her, by shrinking away from nothing she said or did. And I had helped too by holding her hand, by improvising, by confirming the horror of her ordeal, and by promising to see it through with her. I bridled at such simplification. Surely my approach to therapy was more complex and sophisticated! But the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that Irene had it quite right. For sure she was right about “engagement”—the key concept in my psychotherapy. I had decided at the very onset that engagement was the most effective thing I could offer Irene. And that did not simply mean listening well, or encouraging catharsis, or consoling her. It meant rather that I would get as close as I could to her, that I would focus on “the space between us” (a phrase I used in virtually every hour I saw Irene), on the “here-and-now”: that is, on the relationship between her and me here (in this office) and now (in the immediate moment). Now, it is one thing to focus on the here-and-now with patients who seek therapy because of relationship problems but another matter completely for me to have asked Irene to examine the here-and-now. Think of it: Is it not both absurd and churlish to expect a woman in extremis (a woman whose husband lay dying of a brain tumor, who was also grieving for a mother, a father, a brother, a godson) to turn her attention to the most minute nuances of a relationship with a professional she hardly knows? Nonetheless, that was just what I did. I began it in the first sessions and never relented. In every session, without fail, I inquired about some aspect of our relationship. “How lonely do you feel in the room with me?” “How far from, how close to me do you feel today?” If she said, as she often did, “I feel miles away,” I was sure to address that feeling directly. “At what precise point of our session did you first notice that today?” Or, “What did I say or do to increase the distance?” And most of all, “What can we do to reduce it?”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility. 11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. 12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough. Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake, the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him. Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation. 13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says. We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go. 11. A cliché born of a necessary evil: the fight for rights. As with race and gender and able-bodiedness, the trope of the saintly and all-sacrificing minority is one that follows on the heels of unadulterated hatred, and is just as dangerous (though for different reasons). 12. This type of characterization was useful during the fight for marriage equality in the United States, but its shortcomings are many. It is, for example, not an accident that people have had trouble wrapping their heads around Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple who starved their six black adopted children before deliberately driving themselves and their kids off a cliff in California in 2018. It is also not an accident that people struggle to conceive of queer women as capable of sexual assault or domestic abuse. (There’s plenty of sexism tied up in this, too, a Lizzie Borden type of conundrum. Who is capable of committing unspeakable violence?) 13.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  9 Achilles and Patroclus or David and Jonathan. The pair cements the friendship and seeks lasting fame by going to the cedar forests and killing their guardian, Humbaba. The ¿ ght with Humbaba is a little disappointing to read because the text is badly damaged at this point, so we are not quite sure what happens. We do know, however, that the killing of Humbaba angers the god Enlil. Modern readers have noted that, because there was no wood or stone in Sumeria, people in this part of the world always had to go abroad to ¿ nd building materials. This part of the epic may therefore have been meant as a necessary quest by a builder-king. This is the world’s ¿ rst “Saint George and the Dragon” story if we can see Humbaba as a threat to Gilgamesh’s community. After the murder of Humbaba, the epic details a sequence of events that culminate in the death of Enkidu, which provides a transition to the second part of the poem. First, Gilgamesh spurns an offer of marriage from Ishtar, the goddess of love. In retaliation, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it. The gods decide that the pair of heroes has crossed into forbidden territory and that one of them—Enkidu— must die. Gilgamesh stays by Enkidu until and after he dies; then, frightened by death, he lays aside his regalia and goes out searching for a more literal immortality than a name that will live after him. The second part of the poem is about the quest for a remedy against death. In this section, Gilgamesh travels to the end of the world, crosses over the Ocean of Death, and arrives at the island of Uta-napishti; he and his wife are the only humans ever granted immortality by the gods. Uta-napishti tells Gilgamesh the Mesopotamian version of the story of the Great Flood, in which he built a boat that saved animals and people. As a reward for this act, he and his wife were given eternal life, but Uta-napishti, says, this is a one- time deal: there’s no way it’s going to happen again. Gilgamesh is about to go back home empty-handed. Uta-napishti’s wife says to give him a special plant that doesn’t confer immortality but does renew youth. Gilgamesh treasures the plant, but a snake eatsit as he is returning to Uruk. The connections between this À ood story and the one in the Old Testament have stimulated much scholarship, which can be reviewed in Heidel’s The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. The poem presents a pattern identi ¿ ed in such books as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces , in which a