Guilt

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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Pelagia inhabited the vibrantly bilingual world of late antique Syria. The legends of the penitent prostitutes passed easily between the interconnected worlds of Greek and Syriac. At least one of the legends of a penitent prostitute, Mary the niece of Abraham, was originally composed in Syriac. The tale of her repentance belonged to a longer cycle of narratives about her uncle, the hermit Abraham of Qidun. The Life of Abraham is an early text, preserved in a manuscript as old as the fifth century. Thus, the legend of Mary is almost exactly contemporary with the spread of the Sayings of the Fathers beyond Egypt and the elaboration of the story of Pelagia. Although her story was written in Syriac, the narrative betrays an intimate familiarity with Greek fiction—indeed, the text depends as much on its inversions of romance as do the lives of Thais and Pelagia. Unsurprisingly, the text was translated into Greek and Latin, and like the other legends of the penitent prostitutes, it was popular across the Mediterranean.65 Mary was an only child, orphaned by her parents and left in the charge of her uncle, Abraham, a monk in a village near Edessa. For the first twenty years of her life she imitated her uncle and lived “like a chaste lamb, like a spotless dove.” Then she became the target of a satanic plot: she was seduced by a devious monk. Having lost her purity, Mary is distraught, but her distress is that of a romantic heroine subjected to the unthinkable. Unchastity is a sort of death. “I am now as good as dead.” Darkened by guilt, she cannot so much as look on her uncle’s face, and she exiles herself, trading her ascetic habits for life in a tavern. Mary is the perfect opposite of the romantic heroine. At the first, slight assault on her virginity, she caves. Rather than being taken to a brothel by force, she deposits herself in a den of ill repute, a self-imposed sentence that represents a willful submission to the rules of romance: the girl without honor belongs in the house of shame.66

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He knew the major understood everything, like the men who whispered softly on the chow line and the men who stood talking by their tents. No one wants to say, he thought, no one wants to talk about it. Who wanted to approach him and ask if he had done it, if he had killed the corporal that night? No one. No one would ever do it, he thought. * * * There was a night not long after he had killed the corporal when he was walking on the wooden path that snaked around all the tents past the bunkers like a sidewalk. He was sort of tiptoeing along the casings and he opened up what seemed to be his tent. He had seen this light in the long crack at the bottom of it and he walked in to find he had just walked into the battalion commander’s tent. It was very dark, so dark somebody, anybody, could get lost in a place like that, he thought. Just like that goddamn patrol a few months ago when he had read the map wrong, when he had led the men in the wrong direction. He had been a thousand meters off. He was a mile from where he was supposed to be, and now he was doing it again. He was walking in on the goddamn battalion commander who was in his pajamas getting ready to go to bed or something. “Yes, what do you want, sergeant?” he heard the battalion commander saying to him. “Ahhh, nothing,” he said. “I made a mistake, sir. I thought this was my tent.” The battalion commander looked at him for a moment, looked at him like he had done a very stupid thing. “Well, carry on,” he said. * * * It was his friend the major who gave him his second chance. He called him into the command bunker one day and told him he wanted him to become the leader of his new scout team. The major who understood him told him he liked the way he operated and said he knew the sergeant could do a good job. Here was his chance, he thought, to make everything good again. This young, strong marine was getting a second crack at becoming a hero. He knew, he understood, the thing the major was doing for him, and he left the tent feeling stronger and better than he’d felt for a long time. Here was his chance, he thought over and over again. He walked down the twisting ammo-box sidewalk and saluted one of the officers as smartly as ever, much too smartly for anyone who had been over there as long as him. The thoughts of the night he’d killed the corporal were already becoming faded as he began to think more and more about the scout team, how he would train them and the things they would do to make up for all the things that had come before.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had a very young face and now he was in that hole, mangled in that hole, stinking with the others. The lieutenant came by and ordered the men to put the pieces on a stretcher. Sergeant Bo was my friend and now he was dead. They were going to put him in a plastic bag. They were going to do that with the pieces just like they were going to do with MacCarthy and like they’d done with the corporal from Georgia whom I’d killed the month before. Out by the command bunker they had all the dead lined up in a neat long line. They were all stripped of their clothes and staring up at the sky. Bo and Mac were there with a lot of others I hadn’t seen before. About eleven men had been killed in the attack. There were scores of wounded. Sergeant Peters had been hit in the eye and Corporal Swanson was lying in the command tent with a large piece of metal still stuck in his head. I went up to him and held his hand, telling him everything was going to be all right. He told me to send a letter right away to his wife in California and tell her what had happened. I promised him I’d do it that night but I never did and I never heard from him again. The men were beginning to relax a little more now. Everyone was smoking cigarettes and feeling a little closer to everyone else. Maybe, I thought, the men would stop talking about me behind my back now. Maybe with all that blown-away flesh the killing of the corporal from Georgia wouldn’t mean that much anymore. * * * He was just another body, he thought, just like the rest of them, the ones who had all been blown to pieces. For some crazy reason he began feeling a lot better about everything. The more the better, he thought, the more that looked like the corporal the better. Maybe, he thought, they would get confused and forget in all the madness that he had murdered the kid from Georgia. Maybe they would understand the mistake of putting the slug in the corporal’s neck. He wanted to cry for all his friends who had died that day but he couldn’t. He couldn’t feel too much anymore. WE STOPPED going out on patrols in the beginning of the new year. We began to take showers every morning and even eat three meals a day again. It seemed like the perfect time to fix up the tent. Michaelson brought in a can of dark oil that we swept all over the wood floor. Even more work was put in on the bunker. There was news one morning of a big fight a little up north and we began getting restless and edgy. A lieutenant from the battalion had been killed there.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And now he felt his body go numb and heavy, feeling awful and sick inside like the night the corporal had died, as they moved along in the dark and the rain behind the lieutenant toward the graveyard. IT WAS GETTING very cold and it was raining almost every day now. Some guy was sent back home because a booby trap had blown up on him. And it was about then I started looking for booby traps to step on, taking all sorts of crazy chances, trying to forget about the rain and the cold and the dead children and the corporal. I would go off alone sometimes on patrol looking for the traps, hoping I’d get blown up enough to be sent home, but not enough to get killed. It was a rough kind of game to play. I remember walking along, knowing goddamn well exactly what I was doing, just waiting for those metal splinters to go bursting up into my testicles, sending me home a wounded hero. That was the only way I was getting out of this place. I took more chances than ever before, daydreaming as I strolled through the minefields, thinking of the time I saw a guy named Johnny Temple play in Ebbets Field or the time Duke Snyder struck out and tossed that old bat of his up in the air when the umpire threw him out of the game. One morning the battalion was blown almost completely apart by an artillery attack. We had been out on patrol most of the night lying in the rain. We weren’t even awake when the first couple of rounds began to pound in all around us. There was a whistle, then a cracking explosion. They had us right on target. We all ran for our lives, trying to make it to the bunker we had dug for ourselves. I was still half-asleep and not quite conscious of what was happening to me. All I remember was that I had to get to the bunker. Finally, after what seemed a long time, we all crawled down into the sandbags. We huddled together like children and I heard myself saying “Oh God please God I want to live.” Artillery rounds kept crashing in and there was a tremendous explosion in the tent right next to ours. I wondered if anyone had been in it. I continued to pray with all the strength in me that I wouldn’t be killed. When the barrage finally lifted we all looked at each other feeling a little embarrassed for acting so frightened and praying behind the sandbags. Outside the bunker there was a sharp smell of gunpowder and people were beginning to move. I grabbed my green medical bag and told the rest of the men to stay in the bunker and I went out into the sand looking for anyone who was wounded. The first thing I saw was our tent all blown to shit.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was starting to be very different now, very different from what he had ever thought possible. * * * He opened his eyes slowly as the light came into the tent like a bright triangle. They were all starting to stir, the other men, starting to get up. And then he remembered again what had happened. He hadn’t killed any Communist, he thought, he hadn’t killed any Communist. Panic swept through his body. In some wild and crazy moment the night before he had pulled the trigger and killed one of his own people. He tried to slow everything down. He had to think of it as an accident. A lot of guys were firing their guns, there was so much noise and confusion going on. And maybe, he tried real hard to think, maybe he didn’t kill the corporal at all, maybe it was someone else. Didn’t everyone else start firing after his first three shots? Didn’t they all start screaming and shooting after that? Yes, he thought, that’s exactly what happened. They were all firing too, he thought. I wasn’t the only one. It could have been any of them. Any of them could have put the slug through the corporal’s neck. Maybe it was the Communists who killed him. Maybe. But that was awfully hard to believe, that was even harder now to believe than the other men shooting the corporal. Something had gone wrong, something crazy had happened out there and he didn’t want to think about it. He was getting tired of turning it over in his mind, over and over again. He was getting real tired of the whole thing. It was all playing so fast and so hard. It all hurt too much. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He wanted to forget it, but it wouldn’t stop. * * * He went back to the big sandbagged bunker to see the major. “That was a pretty rough night, sergeant,” the major said, looking up from the green plastic maps on his desk. “Yes sir,” he said. “It was pretty bad.” “Ran into a lot of them, didn’t you?” the major said, almost smiling. “Yes, we sure did. I mean they just sort of popped up on us and started firing.” The major looked down at the maps again and frowned slightly. “What happened?” he said. “What happened out there?” “Well, major, like I said, we were moving toward the village and we had just grabbed the woman.” “The woman?” the major said. “Yes, we had just grabbed the pregnant woman.” “She was pregnant?” “Well yes sir, but we didn’t find out until later. We didn’t even think she was a woman. She didn’t have any chest major, she was flat like a board and we tied her hands behind her back. And there was a boy with her, maybe her small son. We tied his hands too.” “And then?” said the major.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It made him unhappy to remember that night when, with Beautiful Sex lying open on their bed to reveal a series of glossy pink-and-white photos, she cooperatively arranged herself into one of the more conventional positions illustrated, sighing as she did so. “Now, honey,” she said, “tell the truth. Don’t you feel foolish doing this?” He clicked off the TV and left the room, making a mental note to put the plates in the dishwasher before he went to bed. — The next day he drove to Manhattan right after work, without stopping at home for a shower. Perhaps Jane would notice the vague animal smell on him. She might ask him about it and he could tell her the truth about what he did. It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising The Spanking of Cindy. There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter. As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose. “Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her. “Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?” “No. I just had some...things to do. Did you miss me?” “Yeah.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  Jenkins has lately been thinking a lot about kindness, and the polarity between kindness and cruelty. In a deep, philosophical way. Being poly, she says, means working very hard at allowing someone else to do something that might be hurtful to you: to see someone else. On the other side of the coin, it means being exquisitely sensitive to your spouse or long-term partner with whom you are being open, if you have that type of arrangement. Or being sensitive to everyone’s needs equally if you are part of a “throuple.” Whatever the specific poly arrangement, it requires kindness that is deliberate and painstaking. “You can learn about communication. You can learn about yourself and others. You can learn empathy too. But kindness may not be learnable,” Jenkins muses. Being polyamorous and writing about it, she says, has been a learning experience in many regards. “You have to work at forgiveness, both interpersonally and in a larger sense,” she says. “I think one thing that has really become clear to me is that social change and social justice are not just about large-scale politics. It’s about how we respond to and police one another.” And how we police ourselves. For in addition to all the threats and roadblocks women like Jenkins are up against when they decide monogamy is not for them and choose to be open about it, or when they decide to be non-monogamous without disclosing it (they might create incredible unhappiness in their home lives, or be divorced, or be harassed as Jenkins was by infuriated total strangers, or be subjected to physical violence, raped, or even killed), they mirror and intensify society’s contempt for the woman who is untrue, doubling it back onto themselves. Subjected to slut-shaming, many women join in and pile on themselves. With the exception of Annika, most women I interviewed were like thirty-three-year-old Mara. She had an older, possessive ex-Marine boyfriend who would not or could not have sex with her and refused to seek treatment for his erectile dysfunction. Eventually, Mara had an affair. “I can’t tell you what it meant to me, to be desired,” she said, as if reading from a script written by Marta Meana’s study participants. It was like a tonic for Mara to be wanted, finally. She was a beautiful young woman in her late twenties at the time, and it struck me as healthy and normal that she had wanted and sought out sexual and emotional satisfaction, that she got the latter from the former. But years later, happily married, the fact that she had “cheated” on her then-boyfriend—who found out because he invaded her privacy by opening her mail—brought her to tears. Her guilt hung in the diner where I interviewed her, and I wished I could wave a magic wand to absolve her of it.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Behaviors are shaped subtly at first, then more forcefully. The material that will make up the new identity is doled out gradually, piece by piece, only as fast as the person is deemed ready to assimilate it. The rule of thumb is, “Tell the new member only what they are ready to accept.” When I was a lecturer in the Moonies, I remember discussing this policy with others involved in recruiting. I was taught this analogy: “You wouldn’t feed a baby thick pieces of steak, would you? You have to feed a baby something it can digest, like formula. Well, these people (potential converts) are spiritual babies. Don’t tell them more than they can handle, or they will die.” If a recruit became angry because they were learning too much about the real workings of our organization, the person working on them would back off and let another member move in to spoon-feed them some pablum. The formal indoctrination sessions can be very droning and rhythmic—a way to induce hypnotic states. It is fairly common for people to fall asleep during these programs. When I was a cult lecturer, I was taught to chastise people and made them feel guilty if they fell asleep, but in fact they were merely responding well to hypnosis. Even while lightly dozing, a person is still more or less hearing the material and being affected by it, with their normal intellectual defenses down. Another potent technique for change is the induced “spiritual experience.” This is often contrived in the most artificial manner. Private information about the recruit is collected by the person’s closest buddy in the group and then secretly passed to the leadership. Later, at the right moment, this information can be pulled out suddenly to create an “experience.” Perhaps weeks later, in another state, a leader suddenly confronts a recruit about their brother’s suicide. Knowing that they didn’t tell anyone in this new place about it, the recruit thinks the leader has read their thoughts or is being informed directly by the spirit world. The recruit is overcome and begs forgiveness for not being a better member. Destructive religious cults are not the only ones to engineer “mystical” experiences. One martial artist and self-professed mentalist who formed his own cult secretly paid hoodlums to mug his students on the street, in order to heighten their fear of the outside world and become more dependent on him. Another cult leader, a psychotherapist, manipulated one of his clients by confronting her inability to stay on her diet. She believed that he had special powers. He didn’t tell her that he had seen her earlier that day eating an ice cream sundae. She believed that he had special “powers.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  Tim feels convinced that being open is the right way for him and for Lily. He has little in the way of advice for others, and unlike many people in open marriages I spoke to, he never talks about monogamy as “impossible” or “hypocritical” or even “difficult.” He is beyond that point in the process, and when it came to his marriage, he seems to have very little to prove. He prefers to keep his private life private, to the extent that he can, but he is in no sense embarrassed by it, and he seems to enjoy thinking through what it all might mean and why it works for them. During one of our talks, Tim told me that he himself was emerging from the very sudden and bruising crack-up of a longish relationship with a married woman. I was surprised; I had never heard about her before. Tim explained that he had entered into the affair believing that the woman’s husband knew about it. He did not. And when he found out, he told his wife to end the relationship immediately via text. She did. “This was someone I spoke to daily for nearly three years,” Tim said, shaking his head. He spoke of feeling tremendously guilty and said, “I can only imagine what was happening on the other side of that text. The anger. The fireworks.” He said he felt this breakup had altered him at the cellular level, and that he would never again be involved with a woman if he wasn’t sure her husband knew. I wondered about the logistics of confirming such a thing, how it could be done. With a permission slip? A conversation between The Guys? Tim wasn’t sure. This breakup was fresh, though, and what upset him most, he said, was that he had caused pain, and that his ex-girlfriend’s husband would hold this over her forever as punishment. “This will be how he controls the relationship,” Tim explained, shaking his head again. “And I bear some responsibility for that. It makes me feel ill.” He says he would rather be open. “I have struggled with it sometimes. But it means that something like this—the breakup of a family over a deception, or a long terrible stalemate in a marriage with kids because someone was dishonest—won’t happen.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Thought control can effectively block out any feelings that do not correspond with the group doctrine. It can also serve to keep a cult member working as an obedient slave. In any event, when thought is controlled, feelings and behaviors are usually controlled as well. Emotional Control Emotional control, the fourth component of the BITE model, attempts to manipulate and narrow the range of a person’s feelings. All or nothing. Either you feel wonderful as a “chosen” member of the elite, someone really special and loved and part of a wonderful movement; or you are broken, unspiritual, have bad karma, are guilty of overts, are sinful and need to repent, try harder and become a better, more devoted member. Guilt and fear figure mightily. However, most cult members can’t see that guilt and fear are being used to control them. They are both essential tools to keep people under control. Guilt comes in many forms. Historical guilt (for instance, the fact that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), identity guilt (a thought such as “I’m not living up to my potential”), guilt over past actions (“I cheated on a test”) and social guilt (“People are dying of starvation”) can all be exploited by destructive cult leaders. Members are conditioned to always take the blame, so that they respond gratefully whenever a leader points out one of their “shortcomings.” Fear is used to bind the group members together in several ways. The first is the creation of an outside enemy, who is persecuting the group and its members. For example, the FBI will jail or kill you; Satan will carry you off to Hell; psychiatrists will give you electroshock therapy; armed members of rival sects will shoot or torture you; and, of course, ex-members and critics will try to persecute you. Second is the terror of discovery and punishment by cult members and leaders. Fear of what can happen to you if you don’t do your job well can be very potent. Some groups claim that nuclear holocaust or other disasters will result if members are lax in their commitment. In order to control someone through their emotions, feelings themselves often have to be redefined. For example, everyone wants happiness. However, if happiness is redefined as being closer to God, and God is unhappy (as He apparently is in many religious cults), then the way to be happy is to be unhappy. Happiness, therefore, consists of suffering so you can grow closer to God. This idea also appears in some non-cult theologies, but in a cult it is a tool for exploitation and control. In some groups, happiness simply means following the leader’s directions, recruiting a lot of new members, or bringing in a lot of money. Or, happiness is defined as the sense of community provided by the cult to those who enjoy high status within it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I felt genuinely sorry for her and I was perplexed as to what to do for her. Suddenly she threw her arms around my neck and she kissed me passionately. We stood there a long while embracing each other and then I thought to myself no, it’s a crime, and besides maybe the wife didn’t go to the movies at all, maybe she’ll be ducking back any minute. I told the kid to pull herself together, that we’d take a trolley ride somewhere. I saw the child’s bank lying on the mantelpiece and I took it to the toilet and emptied it silently. There was only about seventy-five cents in it. We got on a trolley and went to the beach. Finally we found a deserted spot and we lay down in the sand. She was hysterically passionate and there was nothing to do but to do it. I thought she would reproach me afterwards, but she didn’t. We lay there a while and she began talking about Balzac again. It seems she had ambitions to be a writer herself. I asked her what she was going to do. She said she hadn’t the least idea. When we got up to go she asked me to put her on the highway. Said she thought she would go to Cleveland or some place. It was after midnight when I left her standing in front of a gas station. She had about thirty-five cents in her pocketbook. As I started homeward I began cursing my wife for the mean bitch that she was. I wished to Christ it was she whom I had left standing on the highway with no place to go to. I knew that when I got back she wouldn’t even mention the girl’s name. I got back and she was waiting up for me. I thought she was going to give me hell again. But no, she had waited up because there was an important message from O’Rourke. I was to telephone him soon as I got home. However, I decided not to telephone. I decided to get undressed and go to bed. Just when I had gotten comfortably settled the telephone rang. It was O’Rourke. There was a telegram for me at the office—he wanted to know if he should open it and read it to me. I said of course. The telegram was signed Monica. It was from Buffalo. Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the morning with her mother’s body. I thanked him and went back to bed. No questions from the wife. I lay there wondering what to do. If I were to comply with the request that would mean starting things all over again. I had just been thanking my stars that I had gotten rid of Monica. And now she was coming back with her mother’s corpse. Tears and reconciliation. No, I didn’t like the prospect at all. Supposing I didn’t show up? What then?

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Tom was taught to believe that the Mormon Church represented everything in life that was good and true—and the only way to eternal happiness. He was also taught that anything contrary to the teachings of the church was false, evil and of the Devil—and, of course, would lead to unhappiness. Tom loved his parents, his family, and his Mormon friends. They were good people, and Tom wanted them to love him, accept him and be proud of him. To Tom, this meant not taking seriously his doubts about the church. He felt stuck—like he had to play the game, believe in extraordinary events and theology and dedicate his life to the church. In his late twenties, one of Tom’s guitar students, a lawyer and former missionary, told him some very disturbing facts about the Mormon Church. Some he’d heard before; some he hadn’t. Some of what Tom was told made sense, rang true and disturbed him more than any other discussion about the church that he’d had previously. That night, after he came home, Tom cried in secret, seriously wondering for the first time in his life if Church doctrine might not be true. But he didn’t want to look into any of the things he’d been told that day. Instead, he pushed them aside, and redoubled his efforts to increase his testimony and his faith. For the next 15 years, he lacked the courage to investigate what his student had told him. Meanwhile, the more perfectly Tom practiced his Mormon faith, the more he lived in a world of guilt and shame, always seeking forgiveness. He became obsessed with trying to be worthy, in order to have “the spirit” with him. The routine of daily prayer, scripture study, church activities, seminary and institute classes, regular temple attendance, weekly sacrament meetings, priesthood meetings, and Sunday school constantly indoctrinated Tom and reaffirmed his faith. When he took the sacrament, or went to the temple, he made covenants to be obedient to the strict commandments of God and Church standards. But he also knew that, even as he made those promises, he—like everyone else—would fall short of perfection, and would need to repent over and over again. This routine often led to shame, hopelessness, two-faced hypocritical behavior and a habit of breaking commitments. This can be the perfect recipe to create addiction. Yet Tom was determined to be a man of integrity. With help, he eventually came to the point where he felt that he would rather lose everything, face public humiliation and die with his integrity intact, than to live without it. Integrity became more important to him than his need to believe in the Mormon Church. Armed with this new courage to be completely honest, and to follow his own convictions no matter what the cost, he was finally willing to deeply investigate his questions and concerns about the Church.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I’m thinking now about the rock fight one summer’s afternoon long long ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My cousin Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn’t know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies. That’s how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they had caught us I don’t know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home; we had cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey Kasselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding, Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dress and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them, that it was almost like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys—we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight. When I left my cousin the end of the summer I didn’t see him again for twenty years or more.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.” “Didn’t anybody see you?” “Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn’t seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.” “What time was this?” said the major. “Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was starting to get dark and I told all the men to eat their rations. Then it became very dark and there were a few small lights in the village and then the shooting started to the left. It was maybe a hundred meters from the big sand dune and I ran to the woman and the kid. I knew she was a woman now and pregnant. Then men started running toward the ocean, away from the dune. Some of them were very frightened. I kept yelling for them to stay, but everyone sort of scattered. Then they all seemed to be running in a line toward a long trench near the ocean. Most of them got back.” “Most of them?” said the major. “Yeah,” he said, “they all got back in the trench except one.” “Who was that?” “That was corporal, he was the last to come back. And that was when it happened,” he said. “What happened?” said the major. “That was when the corporal was killed.” The bald sergeant who worked for the major walked in just as he told the major the thing that had been rolling around in his head all night. “What happened?” said the major. The bald sergeant was putting some papers on the major’s desk. He did that and walked out. “There were a bunch of shots,” he said carefully. “Everybody was shooting, it was a bad firefight.” He paused. “It was pretty bad and then corporal was shot. He was shot and he fell down in front of us and a couple of the men ran out to get him. They pulled him back in. I think the others were still firing. The corpsman tried to help . . . the corporal was shot in the neck . . . The corpsman tried to help . . .” It was becoming very difficult for him to talk now. “Major,” he said, “I think I might have . . . I think I might have killed the corporal.” “I don’t think so,” said the major quickly. “It was very confusing.

• From Untrue (2018)

  This book, then, is a work of interdisciplinary cultural criticism. It distills and synthesizes the research of experts on female infidelity in a range of fields, melding it with my own opinions and interpretations of everything from articles in academic journals to studies by social scientists to pop culture songs and movies. I interviewed thirty experts in fields including primatology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology, sex research, sociology, medicine, and “lifestyle choice advocacy and activism.” I also wanted to include the perspectives of those who have experienced female infidelity firsthand. To that end there are anecdotes and longer stories from women and men I interviewed, who ranged in age from twenty to ninety-three, as well as insights and observations from those I spoke to more informally about infidelity (see the Author’s Note for details). There was not a single dull conversation. Women who refuse to be sexually exclusive can’t be pigeonholed—mostly they struck me as profoundly normal. But what they all have in common is that they dared to do something we have been told is immoral, antisocial, and a violation of our deepest notions of how women naturally are and “should be.” As the sociologist Alicia Walker has suggested, in being untrue, women violate not just a social script but a cherished gender script as well. The women I spoke to were obviously not a representative sample—that wasn’t and isn’t the point. They were storytellers—sometimes remorseful, often guilty or ambivalent, occasionally defiantly unrepentant and even enthused about what they’d done—who added vibrant color and detail to the realities of female infidelity I read about in academic studies and journals and learned about from experts. They were the flushed faces of statistics and the protagonists of their own narratives, as well as the larger narrative of our culture’s ambivalence about women who cheat. I come honestly to my interest in our culture’s obsession with women who are untrue. In my twenties, I struggled, like a lot of young women, with monogamy and the specter of the adulteress. I moved to New York for the vibrant intellectual culture, the vivid nightlife, the like-minded people—and the large pool of potential romantic and sexual partners. Yes, New York seemed like a great place to find a boyfriend, or a few of them. And I did. I intended to date these guys one at a time, to break it off neatly with one before moving on to another, until I found The One I would marry, in the semi-accepted tradition of serial monogamy. That’s what people did.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of becoming a Master. One must beat with his own rhythm—at any price. I accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the experience was wasted because I had no need of it. I had already been crucified and marked by the cross; I had been born free of the need to suffer—and yet I knew no other way to struggle forward than to repeat the drama. All my intelligence was against it. Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily . Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability. The whole drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten. Another thing . . . the mystery which enveloped my behavior grew deeper the nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives. The mother from whose loins I sprang was a complete stranger to me. To begin with, after giving birth to me she gave birth to my sister, whom I usually refer to as my brother. My sister was a sort of harmless monster, an angel who had been given the body of an idiot. It gave me a strange feeling, as a boy, to be growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to remain all her life a mental dwarf. It was impossible to be a brother to her because it was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a “sister.” She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian primitives. She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as I said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil. But so far as living the civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire to kill but she had no desire to thrive at the expense of others. She was incapacitated for work, because even if they had been able to train her to make caps for high explosives, for example, she might absent-mindedly throw her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a beggar in the street. Often in my presence she was whipped like a dog for having performed some beautiful act of grace in her absent-mindedness, as they called it. Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  One of my clients, from Germany, flew to the United States against his doctor’s advice to try to see his son in the Moonies. He had a heart attack and died. Imagine the guilt the son might have experienced when he found out. Trying to suppress that guilt might have actually prolonged his cult involvement. Remember that you are in a kind of war with the cult. As part of the preparatory process, identify and address everyone’s concerns and emotional needs. Good individual and family counseling can be enormously helpful. Parents and other family members should try to keep the cult problem in a balanced perspective. Life for them and their family has to go on, particularly if the person has been a member for a long time. Let me repeat: life has to go on. Consolidate Your Resources Following the example of the Johnsons, involve as many family members and friends in your rescue efforts as you feel comfortable with. But also help to educate them. Invite them to attend workshops on cults, undue influence or mind control. Contact knowledgeable clergy, mental health professionals, former cult members, families who have had a cult problem, and anyone else who might be able to offer assistance. When it comes to helping cult members exit their groups, people can be extremely helpful and generous. If a family member is very close to the person in a cult, do everything within your power to involve that person. Countless times, a brother or sister who had a lot of clout with the cult member has turned out to be a key player. But also quite often, that person initially did not want to help with a rescue effort. Either they didn’t understand mind control or they felt a misplaced loyalty to their sibling. If necessary, plan a mini-intervention with that person first. Then, with them on your side, it may well be much easier to help the cult member exit the group. Lastly, don’t just consolidate your resources: use them as wisely as possible. Coordination, teamwork and good communication all combine for success. Get Organized and Make a Plan Learn as much as you can. Study the enemy—the specific cult group—as well as similar cults. Learn how they think and how they operate. Become knowledgeable about mind control. The more clearly you understand it, the more easily you will be able to explain it to others—including, when the time comes, the cult member. Start with the Freedom of Mind website, freedomofmind.com, which offers a very wide range of free resources, plus links to other helpful websites. Keep organized files. Make copies of important articles to share with everyone concerned. Make copies of every letter written to the cult member and every letter received from them. These may turn out to be quite important during or after any rescue effort. I have frequently shown cult members letters they had written in which they lied to their families, or made promises that they later broke.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was hard to tell what was happening.” “Yes I know,” said the major. “Sometimes it gets very hard out there. I was out a couple of weeks ago and sometimes it’s very hard to tell what’s happening.” He stared down at the floor of the bunker until he could make himself say it again. He wasn’t quite sure the major had heard him the first time. “But I just want you to know, major, I think I was the one who killed him. I think it might have been me.” There, he had said it. And now he was walking away. For some reason he was feeling a lot better. He had told the major everything and the major hadn’t believed it. It was like going to confession when he was a kid and the priest saying everything was okay. He walked by the men outside the radio shack. They turned their faces away as he passed. Let them talk, he thought. He was only human, he had made a mistake. The corporal was dead now and no one could bring him back. * * * The chaplain held a memorial service that afternoon for the man he had killed and he sat in the tent with the rest of the men. There was a wife and a kid, someone said. He tried to listen to the words the chaplain was saying, the name he kept repeating over and over again. Who was this man he’d just killed? Who had he been? He wanted to scream right there in the church tent, right there during the ceremony. He kept hearing the name too many times, the name of the dead man, the man with the friends, the man with the wife, the one he didn’t know or care to know, the kid from Georgia who was now being carefully wrapped up in some plastic bag and sent back in a cheap wooden box to be buried in the earth at nineteen. He had panicked with the rest of them that night and murdered his first man, but it wasn’t the enemy, it wasn’t the one they had all been taught and trained to kill, it wasn’t the silhouette at the rifle range he had pumped holes in from five hundred yards, or the German soldiers with plastic machine guns in Sally’s Woods. He’d never figured it would ever happen this way. It never did in the movies. There were always the good guys and the bad guys, the cowboys and the Indians. There was always the enemy and the good guys and each of them killed the other. He went back to his tent after the ceremony was over and sat down. There was some mail but he couldn’t get interested in it. Someone had sent him a Sergeant Rock comicbook. But it wasn’t funny anymore. The good guys weren’t supposed to kill the good guys.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He walked on it like a man on a tightrope, it was so dark and so very hard to see. A couple of times he stumbled on the wooden boxes. It was quiet as he opened the tent flap, as quiet and dark as it had been outside the major’s bunker. He dragged in carrying his rifle in one hand and the map case in the other. They were all asleep, all curled up on their cots, inside their mosquito nets. He walked up to his rack and sat down, his head sinking down to the floor. Panic was still rushing through him like a wild train, his heart still raced through his chest as he saw over and over again the kid from Georgia running toward him and the crack of his rifle killing him dead. I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself. He’s dead, he thought. Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him. “He’s dead—go get him!” someone was yelling to his right. “Go get him he’s hit!” Someone was running now, running to the body and they were pulling the guy in. They were bringing him back to the trench where they all lay scared and shivering. “Doc—Doc—where’s the corpsman!” somebody was yelling. “Hey Doc, hurry up!” Then somebody said it. Somebody shouted real loud, “It’s corporal. They got corporal . . .” “He’s dead,” somebody said. “He’s gone.” Slowly he turned the rifle around and pointed the barrel toward his head. Oh Jesus God almighty, he thought. Why ? Why? Why? He began to cry slowly at first. Why ? I’m going to kill myself, he thought. I’m going to pull this trigger. He was going mad. One minute he wanted to pull the trigger and the next he was feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone. He laid the weapon down by the side of his rack and crawled in with his clothing still on. I killed him, he kept thinking, and when I wake up tomorrow, he thought, when I wake up tomorrow it will still be the same. He wanted to run and hide. He felt like he was in boot camp again and there was no escape, no way off the island. He would wake up with the rest of them the next day. He would get up and wash outside the tent in his tin dish, he would shave and go to chow. But everything would not be all right, he thought, nothing would be all right at all.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * The next few weeks passed in a slow way, much slower than any time in his whole life. Each day dragged by until the night, the soft soothing night, when he could close himself off from the pain, when he could forget the terrible thing for a few hours. Each night before he slept he prayed to his god, begging for some understanding of why the thing had happened, why he had been made into a murderer with one shot. Why him? he thought over and over again. He first pleaded with God, then he became angry, demanding. Oh God, he thought, why did this happen, for what reason? What kind of god, he thought, would do this to him? What kind of god would give him these terrible feelings and nightmares for what seemed to be the rest of his life? The time passed in big gaps of deadness. Nights when he could sleep and forget and mornings when it all came back and the men stood by the tents looking at him in their peculiar way, whispering on the chow line. He found himself reading a small pocket Bible so he would not have to look at them and writing long letters to his mother and father. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to become a priest, and that was what he told his parents in the letter about the corporal that he finally wrote home. He told them the story he had told the major, the story about the firefight. And the whole thing in the letter took on a new and beautiful meaning. He had seen a man killed and something, something very deep and wonderful, had happened to him. In some wonderful way, he wrote to them, he had become something very different than he had ever been before. And now, he told them, he wanted to be a priest. He wanted to be like the guy up on the altar, the healer and the guy who gave communion. He finished the letter and he sent it. There, he thought, it’s through. And now deep down inside him he still felt the angry pain, but it became a little easier to live now, easier to live—even though the war was going on a little worse than before, artillery and rockets were hitting the camp almost every day, sending the men into the little bunkers they had built. The major was still sitting behind his desk in the big sandbagged battalion bunker, and whenever he walked past him the major would return his sharp salute with a very confident smile on his face. He thought of the major as his friend. He had understood the whole terrible thing. He had said that maybe it didn’t happen, things got confusing out there, and the major said he knew, that he had been out there himself under heavy fire and he knew.