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.

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• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Indeed, so great was the esteem in which they were held that any Jew who hoped for a political career had to study civil law with the Pharisees. Josephus, the first-century-CE Jewish historian, for example, probably became a disciple of the Pharisees to acquire the legal education that qualified him for public life, although he may never have become a full member of the sect. 15 Once colonized, a people often depends heavily on their religious practices, over which they still have some control and which recall a time when they had the dignity of freedom. In the Jewish case, hostility toward their rulers tended to reach new heights during the important temple festivals, which spoke explosively to the Jews’ political subjugation: Passover commemorated Israel’s liberation from Egypt’s imperial control; Pentecost celebrated the revelation of the Torah, a divine law that superseded all imperial edicts; and the harvest festival of Weeks was a reminder that the land and its produce belonged to Yahweh and not the Romans. This simmering discontent erupted in 4 BCE, when Herod was on his deathbed. He had recently installed in the temple a large golden eagle, symbol of imperial Rome, and Judas and Matthias, two of the most respected Torah teachers, denounced it as an offensive challenge to Yahweh’s kingship. 16 In a well- planned protest, forty of their students climbed onto the temple roof, hacked the eagle to pieces, and then courageously awaited the attack of Herod’s soldiers. 17 Galvanized by fury, Herod rose from his bed and sentenced the students and their teachers to death, before dying in agony himself two days later. 18 It is important to note that most of the protests against imperial rule in Roman Palestine were nonviolent; far from being fanatically driven to suicidal aggression by their faith, as Josephus would later suggest, Jews conducted principled demonstrations that resorted to armed force only under extreme pressure. When angry crowds protested against the cruel death of their beloved teachers, Archelaus, Herod’s eldest son, asked them what he could do for them. The response reveals that their hostility to Rome was not solely inspired by religious intransigence: “Some clamoured for a lightening of direct taxation, some for the abolition of purchase-tax, others for the release of prisoners.” 19 Even though Jerusalem still rang with lamentation, there was no violence against the authorities until Archelaus panicked and sent troops into the temple. Even then the crowds merely pelted them with stones before returning to their devotions. The situation could have been contained, had not Archelaus sent in the army, which killed three thousand worshippers. 20 Protests then spread to the countryside, where popular leaders, acclaimed as “kings,” waged guerrilla warfare against Roman and Herodian troops. Again, taxation rather than religion was the main issue.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.” Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things. I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did. We almost died because of what she did. But it changed me. The change that Isaac started, before I filed a restraining order to keep him out, Saphira Elgin finished in that house in the snow. A part of me is grateful to her, and it makes me feel sick to admit that. [image file=image46.jpg] On the day I am scheduled to leave, I find a brown envelope on my windshield. I briefly think that I received a parking ticket somewhere, and failed to notice it until now. But when I lift my wiper and pull it away the paper is crisp, not something that’s been sitting outside in the wet, Seattle air. It’s also heavyish. My universe tilts. I spin in a circle looking for him in the trees and down the driveway. I know he’s not here. I know that. But he was, and I can feel him. Everything is boxed up in my house, including my sound system, so I turn the car on and push the silver disc into the car radio. It has just started to snow, so I open all of the windows and blast my heat so I can have the best of both worlds. I hit play, and hold on to the steering wheel. I’m about to careen off a cliff. I know it. I can hardly breathe as I listen to the last song that Isaac will ever give me. I listen to it while my breath freezes and smokes into the air. And while snow flies into the car windows. And while my heart beats, and then aches, and then beats. I listen to my soulmate’s heart with saltwater seeping out of my eyes. He’s speaking to me through a song. Like he always has. It’s a hard thing to know that I’m never going to see him again or hear his music, which woke me up from a long, restless sleep. The shadows still chase me. And I know that when I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, he won’t be there to climb in bed behind me and command them away with the complex way he loves me. The song crushes me. Our cosmic love, our cosmic connection.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He angrily told Prince that Pat had made a fool of himself at the Palladium. Prince was surprised. Until that night in the Liberace mansion, he had been convinced that Miscavige had no interest in leading the church; now he realized that Miscavige felt compelled to remove the Broekers in order to keep Scientology from being destroyed. Whatever reservations Miscavige had had about seizing power had fallen away. David Miscavige speaking at the inauguration of the Church of Scientology in Madrid, 2004 Over the past six years, Pat Broeker and David Miscavige had forged a powerful alliance. Broeker had been on one side of the gate, controlling all access to Hubbard; Miscavige had been on the other, acting as the conduit for the church. Broeker deliberately stayed in the shadows, setting up elaborate drops for the messages that had passed to and from Hubbard’s hideaway, sometimes adopting disguises and carrying an Uzi machine gun when he left the ranch. He fancied himself a crafty undercover operative. The consequence of his secrecy, however, was that even Scientology insiders knew little about him. Miscavige was also well schooled in intrigue. Although he was still quite a young man, he had been running operations for Hubbard for several years, with brutal efficiency. In order to eliminate Hubbard’s designated successors, however, Miscavige needed a lieutenant with similar qualities of remorselessness and total commitment. MARK RATHBUN CAME FROM a distinguished but deeply troubled family. His father was a graduate of the US Naval Academy. His artistic mother was the daughter of Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who created some of the most enduring images in American commercial history—Aunt Jemima, the Quaker Oats man, and the famous Santa Claus drinking a Coca-Cola beside the Christmas tree. The Rathbun family lived in Marin County, a Bohemian enclave just north of San Francisco. When Mark was a young child, his mother had a series of nervous breakdowns. On five or six occasions she received what was the standard treatment of the day, electroshock therapy. In September 1962, when Mark was five, his mother’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Her car was parked on the Golden Gate Bridge. Mark turned into a restless young man. He went to college to study creative writing but dropped out in order to experience the real world. In 1976 he was living in a camp of migrant workers, hoping to become the next Jack London, when he learned that his brother Bruce had become catatonic and had been committed to a state hospital in Oregon. Mark hitchhiked to Portland to oversee Bruce’s care.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Physical violence remains present in some competitive sports, as heirs to Roman gladiator spectacles, and is consistently rehearsed by varied forms of entertainment in movies, television, and the Internet. Physical violence is also abundantly present in the surgical strikes of modern warfare, terrorist and otherwise. As for nonphysical, psychological violence, it is present via unrestrained abuses of power well exemplified by the invasion of privacy made possible by modern technologies. One of the jobs of cultures has been to tame the beast that has been so often present and that remains alive as a reminder of our origins. Samuel von Pufendorf’s definition of culture addresses these points: “the means by which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human.” 7 Pufendorf does not mention homeostasis, but my take on his words is that barbarism leads to suffering and disturbed homeostasis, while cultures and civilizations aim at reducing suffering and thus restore homeostasis by resetting and constraining the course of the affected organisms. Today a significant number of cultural instruments and practices turn out to be responses to grievances and violations of rights that manifest themselves not merely as factual descriptions of certain predicaments and circumstances but as powerful and energizing emotions such as anger and revolt and as the consequent feeling states. Here we find affect and reason as two components of social movements. The anthems and poetry that celebrate the crushing of enemies in bloody victories are part of the history behind that process. From Religious Beliefs and Morality to Political Governance Early medicine was not prepared to address the traumas of the human soul. But a case can be made that religious beliefs, moral systems and justice, and political governance were largely aimed at those traumas and at recovering from their consequences. I see the development of religious beliefs as most closely related to the grief of personal losses, which forced humans to confront the inevitability of death and the myriad ways in which it could come about: accidents, diseases, violence perpetrated by others, and natural catastrophes, anything but old age, a rare condition in prehistoric times. But many traumas of the human soul were inflicted by public events in the social space, and religious beliefs were appropriate responses in varied ways. 8 — The response to losses and to the grief caused by violence was varied, and depending on the subject, it included empathy and compassion but also rage and more violence. We can comprehend that the grief would have been countered by an adaptive conception of suprahuman powers in the form of gods capable of resolving large-scale conflicts and putting an end to a high degree of violence. In an animistic period of cultures, such gods would have been asked to help not just with personal suffering but with the protection of personal and community property—crops, domesticated animals, vital territory.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I said. “Oh no,” he answered promptly. “My peers know better. I mean other kids.” * First published in Conditions: Four (1979). * From “School Note” in The Black Unicom (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978), p. 55. An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich * Adrienne: What do you mean when you say that two essays, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” are really progressions? Andre: They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t know what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever wrote. One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions — pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever ... Adrienne: And however much they were denied. Audre: And however painful some of them were. When I think of the way in which I courted punishment, just swam into it: “If this is the only way you’re going to deal with me, you’re gonna have to deal with me this way.” Adrienne: You’re talking about as a young child? Audre: I’m talking about throughout my life. I kept myself through feeling. I lived through it. And at such a subterranean level that I didn’t know how to talk. I was busy feeling out other ways of getting and giving information and whatever else I could because talking wasn’t where it was at. People were talking all around me all the time — and not either getting or giving much that was useful to them or to me. Adrienne: And not listening to what you tried to say, if you did speak. Audre: When you asked how I began writing, I told you how poetry functioned specifically for me from the time I was very young. When someone said to me, “How do you feel?” or “What do you think?” or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response. Adrienne; Like a translation into this poem that already existed of something you knew in a preverbal way. So the poem became your language? Audre: Yes. I remember reading in the children’s room of the library, I couldn’t have been past the second or third grade, but I remember the book. It was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a book of poems. These were old books; the library in Harlem used to get the oldest books, in the worst condition. Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” — I will never forget that poem. Adrienne: Where the traveler rides up to the door of the empty house?

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  BODILY RESURRECTION. No doubt the Roman conquerors and the Jewish conquered would never quite agree on the specifics of utopia, but both could at least imagine, even if differently, a transformed world and an idealized leader. There was, however, one special theme within Jewish apocalyptic eschatology that would have struck Greco-Roman paganism as utterly alien and totally absurd, namely, the general bodily resurrection. Where did that come from and why? It came from one very general background and one very specific foreground. First, the general background. Jewish covenantal faith believed that the world was created in goodness by a God who was just. It must therefore be administered fairly and equitably for itself, for its animals, and for its humans. But the world is normally unjust (say the conquered) so, someday, God must make it just once again. That divine righteousness, or making right, was to be effected here below upon this good earth among embodied humans and not in heaven among disembodied spirits. In other words, a transformed world, whether with Isaiah’s vegetarian lions or Virgil’s multicolored lambs, whether with animal-animal, animal-human, or human-human peaceful coexistence, would demand transformed bodies. If, therefore, you imagine a this-earthly utopia or a this-worldly eschaton, you have to think about transfigured bodies and not just about disembodied spirits or immortal souls. But all of that was but a very general focus on world, earth, and body. Second, the specific foreground. In the 160s B.C.E., the Syrian monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes launched a religious persecution against those Jews who resisted his enforced hellenization and urbanization of the Jewish homeland. Where, many Jewish writers asked, was God’s justice when martyrs were being brutalized, tortured, and murdered? There would have to be, some Jewish writers answered, a day of global reckoning, a tribunal of cosmic justice, a general bodily resurrection in which those who had suffered in the flesh could be openly, publicly, and officially declared vindicated by the just God for whom they had died. In other words, the general bodily resurrection was not about the survival of individuals, but about the justice of God. The chant was this: God will overcome someday. And soon! The eschaton involved for Pharisaic but not for Sadducean Jews both the bodily transformation of world and the bodily vindication of martyrdom. Daniel 12:2–3 is the classic text: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.” There are even clearer texts in 2 Maccabees as the martyrs insist that their tortured bodies will be returned to them by God’s future justice:

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

  Although a layman he had received at different times since 815 a number of church preferments. Louis made him abbot of Fontenelle in the diocese of Rouen, of St. Peter’s of Blandigny and St. Bavon’s at Ghent, of St. Servais’ at Maestricht, and head of the church of St. John the Baptist at Pavia. On Jan. 11, 815, Louis gave Einhard and Imma the domains of Michelstadt and Mulinheim in the Odenwald on the Main; and on June 2 of that year he is first addressed as abbot.1181 As the political affairs of the empire became more complicated he withdrew more and more from public life, and turned his attention to literature. He resigned the care of the abbey of Fontenelle in 823, and after administrating other abbeys sought rest at Michelstadt. There he built a church in which he put (827) the relics of the saints Marcellinus and Petrus which had been stolen from the church of St. Tiburtius near Rome.1182 A year later, however, he removed to Mulinheim, which name he changed to Seligenstadt; there he built a splendid church and founded a monastery. After his unsuccessful attempt to end the strife between Louis and Lothair he retired altogether to Seligenstadt. About 836 he wrote his now lost work upon the Worship of the Cross, which he dedicated to Servatus Lupus.1183 In 836 his wife died. His grief was inconsolable, and aroused the commiseration of his friends;1184 and even the emperor Louis made him a visit of condolence.1185 But he carried his burden till his death on March 14, 840. He is honored as a saint in the abbey of Fontenelle on February 20. His epitaph was written by Rabanus Maurus. He and his wife were originally buried in one sarcophagus in the choir of the church in Seligenstadt, but in 1810 the sarcophagus was presented by the Grand Duke of Hesse to the count of Erbach, who claims descent from Einhard as the husband of Imma, the reputed daughter of Charlemagne. The count put it in the famous chapel of his castle at Erbach in the Odenwald. Einhard was in stature almost a dwarf, but in mind he was in the esteem of his contemporaries a giant. His classical training fitted him to write an immortal work, the Life of Charlemagne. His position at court brought him into contact on terms of equality with all the famous men of the day. In youth he sat under Alcuin, in old age he was himself the friend and inspirer of such a man as Servatus Lupus. His life seems to have been on the whole favored, and although a courtier, he preserved his simplicity and purity of character. His Writings embrace:

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It was said that Dionysius had Plato sold into slavery, and that he was rescued only at the last minute by his friends. Bruised by this experience, he returned home to Athens in 387. There was little to cheer him there. Athens had tried to recover from the Peloponnesian War by making an alliance with Thebes against Sparta. But there was no lasting peace. The events of the next thirty years demonstrated the chronic instability of intercity politics on the Greek mainland. The poleis continued to fight, no city was able to implement a coherent foreign policy, and all were debilitated by the ceaseless conflict; trade declined; and there was renewed conflict between rich and poor. These internal disputes sometimes exploded in atrocity. In 370, democrats in Argos brutally clubbed twelve hundred aristocrats to death, and in Tegea the leaders of the oligarchy were slaughtered by a violent mob. Plato’s response to this mayhem was to found a school of mathematics and philosophy. It was called the Academy, because the scholars met in a sacred grove on the outskirts of Athens dedicated to the hero Academius. Teaching was conducted by discussion in the Socratic manner rather than by lectures. Plato did not seek at this early stage to impose his own views on his pupils, but encouraged independent thinking. At the same time, he developed his personal ideas in writing and became the first philosopher whose oeuvre has survived in its entirety. He did not record his insights dogmatically, but used the dialogue form, in which different viewpoints were expressed. As Socrates was the hero of these dialogues, they arrived at no firm conclusions. Plato’s dialogues were not definitive arguments but invitations to further thought that drew his readers into a deeper appreciation of the complexities of the issues discussed. Plato was not like a modern academic. Instead of expounding his ideas solemnly and logically, he often presented them playfully, indirectly, and allusively, speaking in parables and referring to fundamental truths elliptically and obscurely. He believed that the process of arriving at truth was hard, and required long, rigorous training in dialectic, but in his writing he also preserved the ancient methods of oral transmission, which recognized that truth could not be imparted by a simple recitation of facts, but demanded intuition, aesthetic insight, and imagination as well as empirical observation and disciplined logic. Plato’s philosophy is dominated by what is usually called the “doctrine of the forms,” even though this never really became a consistent theory. Modern scholars have traced a development in his thought, and some believe that at the end of his life he abandoned the forms altogether, but it is a mistake to seek a clear intellectual evolution in Plato’s work. 77 He probably started a new dialogue before finishing one that was already in progress, working on several at once. Sometimes he would try one approach, sometimes another; occasionally he described the forms mystically as divine figures; at other times he defined them more cerebrally.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  STEP 5:COME TO YOUR SENSESDifficult turn-ons come in as many varieties as fulfilling ones. Yet one feature is shared by virtually all problematic erotic scenarios: they ultimately disrupt the relationship between a person and his or her body. The vast majority of troublesome turn-ons are rooted in antisexual messages that contaminate opportunities for children and adolescents to express playful curiosity about their own and others’ bodies. The fact that most people develop ways to express their sexuality in spite of antisexual training is a tribute to the resiliency of the human spirit. Yet many continue to honor early restrictions by subconsciously imposing limits on the amount or types of pleasure they allow themselves to give and receive. One pleasure-limiting strategy—so widespread that it is considered normal—involves focusing erotic attention primarily or exclusively on the genitals and other erogenous zones, relegating the sensuous capacities of the rest of the body to “foreplay.” In the last chapter you saw how the good feelings of arousal can fuse together with painful or traumatic experiences, producing either intractable inhibitions or obsessions. Men and women who were abused as children or assaulted as adults may find that even simple touches are so thoroughly associated with trauma that they can’t be enjoyed. Others become trapped in ultra-focused, ritualized patterns of behavior or fantasy or both that are long on intensity but short on pleasure. It’s not unusual for those caught up in the pleasure-pain bind, particularly men, to seek out maximum genital stimulation and orgasmic intensity, with little or no interest in sensuality or affection. One of the most effective ways to facilitate erotic healing is to rediscover the sensuous capacities of your entire body. The body has a wisdom that transcends logic. By “coming to your senses” you begin to reconnect with the first source of all positive eroticism. TOUCHING FOR PLEASUREOne of the best ways to reconnect with your sensuality is to use what sex therapists call sensate focus. Originally designed as a set of experiential exercises to help people with sexual dysfunctions calm debilitating performance pressures, sensate focus is the most enduring contribution of sex therapy pioneers Masters and Johnson. Directing your attention to the concrete world of your senses can be particularly helpful when you’re in the gray zone, unsure of what to do next. Whether you’re trying to resolve a sexual problem or expand your repertoire for pleasure, you can benefit from experimenting with sensate focus by yourself, with a partner, or both.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The most gifted would be subjected to a long, arduous education, which would culminate in their ascent from the cave. At the end of their initiation into enlightened civic life, they would see the Good for themselves and thereby attain an inner stability that would bring peace and justice to the republic. Thus, for you and for us, the city will be governed, not like the majority of cities nowadays, by people who fight over shadows and struggle against one another in order to rule—as if that were a great good—but by people who are awake rather than dreaming, for the truth is surely this: A city whose prospective rulers are least eager to rule must of necessity be most free from civil war. 92 Plato almost certainly did not regard his imaginary republic as a blueprint for an actual state and probably used it simply to stimulate discussion, but the inherent cruelty of his utopia departed from the compassionate ethos of the Axial Age. The Republic was authoritarian. It imposed its vision on others—an expedient that the Buddha, for example, would have found “unskillful.” Plato had no time for the humanities. He looked askance at traditional Greek education, with its emphasis on poetry and music, because he believed that the arts aroused irrational emotion. Plato’s republic would not encourage personal relationships: sex was simply a means to the end of breeding genetically acceptable citizens. And Plato wanted to ban tragedy from his ideal polis. In the fourth century, new tragedies continued to attract large audiences from all over Attica, 93 but Athenians looked back with nostalgia to the great days of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and still hankered after their tragic insight. 94 But Plato turned his back on tragedy. He distrusted its pessimism, its negative appraisal of human potential, and believed that its skeptical view of the gods could induce a fatal nihilism. To sympathize with the tragic heroes was implicitly to condone their bleak valuation of life, and thus to encourage inconsolable grief and ungovernable rage. Tragedy had the power to “maim” even the souls of the virtuous citizens and make the lives of those exposed to it “worse and more wretched.” Above all, tragedy tapped a natural tendency to sorrow and could inspire an “emotional surrender.” 95 Grief for oneself and pity for others must be controlled and held in check. Indeed, to sympathize with others and share their suffering, as the chorus directed the audience to do, dangerously undermined the moderation and self-control of the good man. Society must take active measures to repress this natural sympathy, since it was incompatible with virtue. 96 Instead of cultivating the “shoots” of compassion, like Mencius, Plato wanted to eliminate it.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Bhagavad-Gita (“The Song of the Lord”) may originally have been a separate text, but at some point it was inserted into the sixth book of the Mahabharata. It takes the form of a dialogue between Arjuna, the greatest warrior of the Pandava brothers, and his friend Krishna. The terrible war that Yudishthira, Arjuna’s eldest brother, had hoped to avoid was about to begin. Standing in his war chariot, with Krishna as his driver, Arjuna gazed in horror at the battlefield. Until this point in the story, Arjuna had been less disturbed than Yudishthira about the prospect of war, but now he was struck by the enormity of what was about to happen. The family was tragically divided against itself; the Pandavas were about to attack their kinsfolk. According to ancient teaching, a warrior who killed his relatives consigned the entire family to hell. He would rather give up the kingdom than slaughter his brave cousins and his beloved teachers Bhishma and Drona. There would be anarchy; the social order would be destroyed. If he was responsible for the death of his cousins, he would never know happiness again, and evil would haunt the Pandavas for the rest of their lives. “What use to us is kingship, delights, or life itself,” he asked Krishna.78 It would be far more glorious to be killed in battle, unarmed, and offering no resistance. Saying this in the time of war Arjuna slumped into his chariot And laid down his bow and arrows His mind tormented with grief.79 The Bhagavad-Gita was one of the last great texts of the Axial Age, and it marks a moment of religious transition. As so often in our story, a new religious insight was inspired by revulsion from violence. Krishna tried to put some heart into Arjuna by citing all the traditional arguments for war. The warriors who fell in the coming battle would not really die, he said, because the atman was eternal; and since a warrior who died in battle would go straight to heaven, Arjuna would be doing his cousins a favor. If he refused to fight, Arjuna could be accused of cowardice and, more seriously, would violate the dharma of the kshatriya class. As a warrior, it was his sacred duty to fight. It was required of him by the gods, by the divine order of the universe, and by society. Like his brother Yudishthira, Arjuna was facing the tragic dilemma of the kshatriya dharma. The emperor Ashoka had been committed to nonviolence but he could not decommission his army. Brahmin priests could abjure warfare; renouncers could turn their backs on the whole sorry mess and take refuge in the forest. But somebody had to defend the community, and to preserve law and order. That, most unfortunately, would mean fighting, if only in self-defense. How could a warrior do his sacred duty to society without incurring the bad effects of the violent karma that he was forced to commit?

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  80 But at the very end of the poem, Achilles recovered his loving heart in an extraordinary scene, when King Priam of Troy came to beg him to return the body of his son Hector. The old man had left Troy, walked unnoticed into the enemy camp, and to the astonishment of Achilles’ companions, silently appeared in his tent, “caught the knees of Achilles in his arms, and kissed the hands that were dangerous and man-slaughtering and had killed so many of his sons.” 81 The Greeks believed that weep-ing together created an important bond between men. The utter self-abasement of the old man stirred in Achilles “a passion of grieving for his own father.” He took Priam’s hand . . . and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled At the feet of Achilles and wept close for man-slaughtering Hector, And Achilles wept now for his own father, now again For Patroclus. The sound of their mourning moved in the house. Then When great Achilles had taken full satisfaction in sorrow And the passion for it had gone from his mind and body, thereafter He rose from his chair and took the old man by the hand, and set him On his feet again, in pity for the grey head and the grey beard. 82 In an act of compassion for the father of the man who had killed his beloved friend, Achilles recovered his humanity and his philotes. He handed back Hector’s corpse with great tact and tenderness, concerned that the heavy body would be too much for the old man. Then, while they shared a meal, the erstwhile enemies contemplated each other in silent awe. Priam, son of Dardanos, gazed upon Achilles, wondering At his size and beauty, for he seemed like an outright vision Of gods. Achilles in turn gazed on Dardanian Priam And wondered, as he saw his brave looks, and listened to him talking. 83 This experience of self-emptying sympathy enabled each to see the divine and godlike in the other. 84 In this scene, if not in the rest of the poem, Homer had perfectly expressed the spirit of the Axial Age. Homer’s gods, however, felt no compassion. Where some of the Hebrew prophets were beginning to explore the pathos of God, Homer depicted the Olympians as entirely indifferent to the suffering of humanity. If Zeus felt a passing pang for Hector, it was only a fleeting sensation and caused no lasting pain. The gods were mere spectators, who observed the antics of men and women like aristocrats watching a race at the games. 85 After the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ divine horses wept for the fallen hero, their warm tears streaming to the ground. Zeus felt a momentary pity, breathed new vigor into them, and immediately they shook the dust from their manes and returned to the field, their transient pain in stark contrast to the wrenching, ugly grief of Achilles.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  67 Adorno's model of t otal fulfilment comes from the old e xp ressivist source, via Marx and Lukacs. But he was enough of a post-Schopenhauerian, and lived through such a traumatic p eriod of disappointment o f the Marxist hope, that he ceased to conceive full reconciliation as a li ve possibility. What we can look for, and what the best art can give us, are hints an d intimations of full "redemption", in addition to a keenly critical eye for the shortcomings of the present reality. Thus fulfi lm ent or reconciliation is understood in expressivist terms: it would mean the full flowering of particularity, its integral recognition. This is something which can only take place through articulati on in concepts, in u niversals. The reconciliation eludes us, because universal concepts alway s suppress from sight something of the reality of the particular. The perfect, non-distorting, non-reductive appell ation wo uld be the 'name ' , a term drawn by A d orno from the Cabbalist tradition. We have lost the power truly t o na me things. But we can approximate to it, we can strive after this kind of gr asp o f things; and here Adorn o borrow s a k ey ide a from Walter Benjamin. Unable to "name' thi n gs, we can nevertheless frame them in 'constellations', clust ers of terms and images whose mutual affinity creates a space within which th e particular can emerge. This doesn't realize the full reconciliation, but point s towards it, gives it a kind of pr e sence in our lives, and constitutes a sort o f messianic pr emonitio n, in Benjamin's reli gious language. The Benja min-Adorno constellation i s another form of interspatial o r fra m i n g epiphany. Its el ements don't express what they indicate; they fram e a space, and bring something close which would otherwise be infinite l y remote. This casts light on Benjamin's preference for allegory over sy mb ol and hi s affinity with baroque tragedy. This was a reversal of the central or dering o f E p i p hanies of Modernism • 479 the Romantic age. The symbol was the vehicle of a higher art than allegory, because it presented so m ething which was not accessible in any other way; and it was thus otherwise inaccessible, because the symbol was inseparable from what it revealed.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  As an adolescent Maggie found comfort in romantic stories and daydreams, most of which revolved around themes of postponed fulfillment—but always with happy endings. The imagery of yearning dovetailed with the affection-starved atmosphere of her home. In her high school boyfriend she saw the key characteristics that would consistently attract her: a devil-may-care but good-natured rebelliousness that was a natural complement to her nice-girl persona combined with a capacity for exuberant emotionality that was noticeably lacking in both her parents. For two years their relationship went well, though Maggie always wanted more closeness than what she got. After graduation they went their separate ways. A few years later when she heard he had fallen in love and married his college sweetheart, Maggie confronted another key feature of her eroticism: a persistent undercurrent of grief and loss. Subsequent relationships all had similar outcomes—often with another woman getting, with apparent ease, the very things Maggie had struggled for unsuccessfully. Each time a man broke a date, stood her up, or withheld affection, she experienced a flood of grief, as if she were being abandoned yet again. She could only be comforted by the apologetic voice and soothing touch of her lover. When that happened her sadness would melt in a tidal wave of passion, and for a moment she would feel whole. Her affair with the married man had been the most painful of all. From their first encounter she was convinced that he was the man she had been searching for, the man who possessed all the characteristics that fascinated her. He appeared to be crazy about her too and would often express the wish that they could be together always. He never actually promised to leave his wife, but Maggie assumed he eventually would, since he regularly spoke of a lack of love and sex in his marriage. Yet each time he chose to spend holidays or other special occasions with his wife, Maggie sank into despair. Eventually, she could stand it no longer and broke off the relationship. Unfortunately, she had been depressed and obsessed ever since. Sometimes she resorted to desperate acts such as parking in front of his house for hours waiting to catch a glimpse of him and his wife together or telephoning them and hanging up. REPETITIONS AND REVERSALSMaggie’s story highlights one of the most puzzling questions about all troublesome attractions, whether or not they revolve around longing: Why do so many of us repeat erotic patterns that have proven to be sources of suffering and lack of fulfillment? The most obvious answer is that our attractions, no matter how troublesome, work. Despite the pain they ultimately cause, at critical moments they are gloriously successful at generating ecstatic passion. It is difficult to overestimate what potent rein-forcers such passions are. Luckily, most of us learn from our failed relationships lessons that eventually steer us toward more workable partnerships.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  It wasn’t just that he had irrevocably altered my present – he had forced me to reconsider my past and to reshape my future. I think back to the fury and despondency I felt a year ago. I picture myself shifting shapes, molting skin, digging deeply inside myself to unearth the person who was in there all along, but so afraid of not getting things right that she was willing to bury herself until she was nearly impossible to find. As I groped my way through the dark months that followed my learning of Michael’s affair, I fought with the child in me who wanted back the precious item that had been so unceremoniously ripped away, who questioned if I was willing to walk away from Michael, to give up on the notion of the ideal family I had so carefully cultivated over the course of my life. I could have stayed, and the realization of this astounds me. I could have stayed. At a crossroads, I had a choice: go back and salvage what I could, or forge ahead alone. I had been terrified, but I gave myself a chance anyway; I had run headfirst into a wall and decided not to retreat, but to claw my way over it to see what was on the other side. This did not happen to me, I made it happen, and now I know this about myself, that I am a person who can transform and endure. I don’t know if this part of my story is an ending or a beginning, but just as grief has no clear beginning, middle or end, I know that my story is a work in progress. Some days I feel like a warrior, fierce and reawakened; other days like a zen master, serene and grateful to have emerged with a new understanding of myself and determined to take one day at a time; and still other days, I still feel wounded, vulnerable, alone and scared. Yet every day I carry with me a newfound, life-affirming, woman-hear-me-roar knowledge. I gave so much of myself away over the years, gradually disappearing as I put all of my love and energy into my children and maintaining as perfect a home as I could. The fault lines were there all along, but I had been unwilling to acknowledge them until the earthquake erupted and gave me no choice. I embraced motherhood so completely that I neglected the woman beneath the mother, and the worst thing that had ever happened to me – Michael’s betrayal – had set her free. I didn’t lose my sense of self all at once and I won’t find myself all at once either.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Again, Aeschylus depicted a clash between old and new—between the Erinyes and the more modern, “political” gods of Olympus. The trilogy traced the emergence of the polis from tribal chaos and vendetta to the relative order of Athens, where citizens could take control of their lives; it marked the painful passage from an ethos of blind force to nonviolent debate. Yet Aeschylus made it clear that the ideal differed from the reality, that there were no easy answers, and that the final vision of law and order could only be an aspiration rather than an achieved fact. The Oresteia confronted the problem of violence, a central preoccupation of the Axial Age. It told the story of the house of Atreus, a family contaminated by unnatural murder and caught up in an unstoppable cycle of revenge killing. It began with the slaying of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra; continued with her murder by her son, Orestes, who was avenging the death of his father; and it ended with Orestes’ headlong flight from the Erinyes, whose terrifying appearance onstage caused some women in the audience to miscarry. The protagonists could not stop the violence because each killing unleashed a fresh miasma, and the Olympians, who, as patrons of the poleis, were supposed to be on the side of law and order, seemed to take perverse delight in giving mortals impossible commands that involved them in no-win situations. Human life was, therefore, full of inescapable grief. “He who acts must suffer,” observed the chorus; “that is the law.” 97 But in his “Prayer to Zeus,” Aeschylus offered a frail thread of hope. As long as Zeus —“whoever Zeus may be”—presided over heaven and earth, suffering would remain part of the human condition, and yet Zeus had “taught man to think,” and set humanity on the path to wisdom: He issued the law: Learn through suffering. Sorrow enters even sleep, dripping into the heart, Sorrow which cannot forget suffering. And even those who are unwilling learn to be wise. All life was indeed dukkha, but pain educated human beings, so that they learned to transcend their apparently hopeless plight. In Eumenides, the last play of the trilogy, Orestes, still pursued by the Erinyes, arrived in Athens, and flung himself at the feet of Athena, who convened the Areopagus Council to judge his case. The brutal justice of the vendetta must yield to the peaceful process of law. The Erinyes argued that by slaying his mother Orestes had violated the sacred law of blood and must suffer the correct punishment.

• From Between Us

  Sounds right? That would be because a MINE model of emotions prevails in Western contexts. Having the emotions that are required by others or by the setting is thought to be demanding and unnatural in MINE contexts. It is quite the norm in contexts that favor an OURS model. Take the example of a Buddhist community in Northern Thailand. During her field trip in 2005, anthropologist Julia Cassaniti recorded the emotions of a family of an alcoholic thirty-three-year-old man named Sen. After a long period of disease, Sen was finally taken to the hospital, where the doctors found that he suffered from advanced liver disease, and was untreatable. Sen’s family gathered around his bed, being “upset by the turn of events: Most had expected that he would eventually get help and be healthy again.” Despite the general sense of devastation, Sen’s relatives “crafted their emotions so that they could accept what had happened. . . . Sen’s father and sister went to the temple to make offerings every morning. His sister, brother, relatives, and friends, at least at first, for the most part, displayed what seemed to be blank faces: faces that did not show emotion at all.” Cassanti assures us that the blank faces of Sen’s friends and family neither meant that they were indifferent, nor that they just faked it for others’ benefit. Instead, she writes, they were working towards a state that they felt to be appropriate—to accept what had happened (tham jai), and to be calm (jai yen). Acceptance is quite the opposite idea to “grief work.” Where grief work makes sure that inner feelings are expressed, acceptance is the effect of becoming detached from these inner feelings. Julia Cassaniti tells us that family and friends who show distress when Sen was hospitalized (herself included) were kindly reminded by others to “not think about it” and “not talk about it.” The Buddhist Thai community thought that talking and thinking about negative feelings would exacerbate them, and this was to be avoided at all cost. It was important to accept, be calm, and detach, rather than getting the grief out. The Buddhist Thai practice of grief is reminiscent of the Utku Inuit stance towards anger: anger was unacceptable among the Inuit, and equanimity was valued instead. Briggs could not force her feelings, or so she felt—her inner feelings needed out. In contrast, her Inuit hosts managed to achieve the valued state of equanimity, even in the face of frustrated goals.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  To be experienced, the patterns of operations related to pain or pleasure had to be turned into feeling, which is the same as saying that they had to acquire a mental face, which is the same as saying that the mental face had to be owned by the organism in which it occurred, thereby becoming subjective, in brief, conscious. Non-experienceable pain and pleasure mechanisms, by which I mean nonconscious and nonsubjective pain-related and pleasure-related mechanisms, clearly assisted early life regulation in an automatic and undeliberated way. But in the absence of subjectivity, the organism in which such mechanisms occurred would not have been able to consider either the mechanism or the results. The respective body states would not have been examinable. The collection of questions, explanations, consolations, adjustments, discoveries, and inventions that make up the noblest part of human history required a motive. Felt pain and suffering, on their own, but especially when contrasted with felt pleasure and flourishing, did move the mind and call for action. Provided, of course, that there was something to be moved in the mind, and there certainly was, especially as Homo sapiens developed, in the form of the expanded cognitive and language abilities discussed earlier. In the most practical terms, that movable something was the ability to think beyond what could be immediately perceived and the ability to interpret and diagnose a situation, understanding causes and effects. How correct the interpretations and diagnoses were, over the ages, is not the point. Obviously, they were often incorrect. The point was having an interpretation, correct or not, firmly motivated by a strong feeling, positive or negative. On that basis, it was possible for intensely social humans to motivate the invention, individually and in the collective space, of previously nonexisting responses. This movable, mental something involves not just what we sense as reality here and now, but reality as it might have happened or as it might have been forecast to happen. I am referring to recalled reality, a reality that can be altered by our imagination, processed in chains of remembered images of every sensory stripe—sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—images that can be cut in pieces and moved about, playfully recombined to form new arrangements and address specific goals: the construction of a tool, a practice, an explanation. None of this is incompatible with the earlier appearance, prior to Homo sapiens, of some limited cultural manifestations such as stone tools. 19 The movable something identified the relationships between certain objects, people, events, or ideas and the onset of either suffering or joy; it provided an awareness of the immediate and not so immediate antecedents to pain and pleasure; and it identified possible and even likely causes.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson calls social insects “robotic” and for good reason. Now, back to humans. We humans do ponder alternatives for our behavior, do mourn the loss of others, do want to do something about our losses and about maximizing our gains, and do ask questions about our origin and destiny and propose answers, and we are so disorderly in our bubbling and conflicting creativities that we are often a mess.

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

  One may get angrier in thinking over one's insult than at the moment of receiving it; and we melt more over a mother who is dead than we ever did when she was living. In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word object of emotion indifferently to mean one which is physically present or one which is merely thought of. It would be tedious to go through a complete list of the reactions which characterize the various emotions. For that the special treatises must be referred to. A few examples of their variety, however, ought to find a place here. Let me begin with the manifestations of Grief as a Danish physiologist, C. Lange, describes them: [413] "The chief feature in the physiognomy of grief is perhaps its paralyzing effect on the voluntary movements. This effect is by no means as extreme as that which fright produces, being seldom more than that degree of weakening which makes it cost an effort to perform actions usually done with ease. It is, in other words, a feeling of weariness; and (as in all weariness) movements are made slowly, heavily, without strength, unwillingly, and with exertion, and are limited to the fewest possible. By this the grieving person gets his outward stamp: he walks slowly, unsteadily, dragging his feet and hanging his arms. His voice is weak and without resonance, in consequence of the feeble activity of the muscles of expiration and of the larynx. He prefers to sit still, sunk in himself and silent. The tonicity or 'latent innervation' of the muscles is strikingly diminished. The neck is bent, the head hangs ('bowed down' with grief), the relaxation of the cheek- and jaw-muscles makes the face look long and narrow, the jaw may even hang open. The eyes appear large, as is always the case where the orbicularis muscle is paralyzed, but they may often be partly covered by the upper lid which droops in consequence of the laming of its own levator. With this condition of weakness of the voluntary nerve- and muscle-apparatus of the whole body, there coexists, as aforesaid, just as in all states of similar motor weakness, a subjective feeling of weariness and heaviness, of something which weighs upon one; one feels 'downcast,' 'oppressed,' 'laden,' one speaks of his 'weight of sorrow,' one must 'bear up' under it, just as one must 'keep down' his anger.