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.

Page 47 of 99 · 20 per page

• From White Oleander (1999)

  “If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked.” I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. “That could take a long time. I need out now.” “But what about the other children? Don’t you care what happens to them?” Joan Peeler’s eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids. I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn’t even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn’t how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they’d do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I’d feel the wind as they hit the door. “I’ve stopped having my period,” I said. “I eat out of the trash. Don’t ask me to wait.” Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now. She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly. JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what . I’d been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn’t tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already. She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw. During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I never quite understood it. Ray drank. My mother drank. Michael drank from the moment he finished reading his Books on Tape at noon until he passed out at midnight. It didn’t seem to hurt him any. If anything, Starr looked happier now. I wondered why she’d tried so hard to be some kind of saint, when it wasn’t really her nature. What was the big deal? “He’s crazy about me, you know,” she said. “That Ray. There’s a man that needs a real woman.” She rolled her hips in their tight cutoffs as if she were sitting on him right now. “His wife wouldn’t do shit for him.” She took another hit on her cigarette, lowering her mascaraed eyelashes, remembering. “That man was starving for a piece. I saw her once, you know. The wife.” She drank from her coffee cup, and now I could smell it. “Sailor’s delight. Sensible shoes, you know what I’m saying. Wouldn’t give head or anything. He’d come to the Trop and just sit and watch us girls with those sad eyes, like a starving man in a supermarket.” She squared her shoulders, rolled them forward, so I’d get an idea of what Ray had been watching, the cross caught in her cleavage, Jesus drowning in flesh. She laughed, dropped cigarette ash on the white-patched kitten. “I just had to fall in love with him.” It made me queasy thinking of Ray in some strip club, goggling at the girls with their enormous breasts. He just didn’t know where else to go. I picked up the stick again, rustled the ribbons, trying to get the kitten interested so she wouldn’t see my red face. “I must have been crazy to think you and him…,” she said into her coffee cup, drained it and put it on the mosaic-topped table with a thud. “I mean, look at you, you’re just a baby. You didn’t even wear a bra until I got you that one.” She was convincing herself there was nothing between Ray and me, that nothing could possibly be going on, because she was a woman and I was nothing. But I could still feel how he knelt in front of me on the unfinished floor, how he held me around the thighs, kissed my bare belly. I could smell the odor of the raw wood, feel the clutch of his fingers, and we burst into flame like oilfat chaparral in oleander time. A FULL MOON poured white through the curtains. The refrigerator cycled around in the kitchen, ice cubes dropping in the ice-maker. “I can’t believe she’d go out after all this time,” Carolee said. “Never trust an alcoholic, Astrid. Rules one, two, and three.” Carolee sat up in bed, peeled off her nightgown, put on her miniskirt, nylons, and a shiny shirt. She opened the window, pushed the screen out, and clambered onto the dresser, high-heeled shoes in her hand. I heard her drop down on the porch outside.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Our memories of things impose some order on the past and give it its meaning. As I grew older, it thus seemed to me that my whole life had been but a series of breaks and interruptions, each one in turn more serious and definitive. Still, I had long continued to hope that some harmony might be achieved, and had even thought that I might be able to impose on myself and my relationships with the outside world some kind of order, if only by using my own will power and my ability to choose. I thought I would end up as a member of the middle class, not so much because belonging to this class was a kind of ideal as because my education, the tastes that I was discovering, and my concern with the arts, in fact all my future position in life, were already forcing me into this position. Still, I continued not to like the middle class, though I was forced to admit that I really felt at ease only in its midst. They were the only people to read books, to understand my preoccupations, to enjoy and practice poetry and the arts. One day, however, I became brutally aware of the fact that I was not a member of the middle class and could never become one. All my childhood friends were now becoming tailor’s apprentices, their shoulders rounded by their work, their whole appearance weak and sickly in their black waistcoats; or else, grocery clerks, pale from working in the shade of the covered bazaars; or office workers who were already becoming flabby, with yellowish fat. We scarcely even greeted each other any longer; they were ashamed of their own condition and respectful towards me, and I was full of feelings of guilt, though God knows why. Only Levi, an orphan who was a baker’s assistant and rode a tricycle for the deliveries remained quite spontaneous in his manner and always shouted, the moment he spotted me in the street: “Shalom, Mordekhai!” Such a public utterance of my name that smacked of the ghetto displeased me considerably, but I was afraid of hurting his feelings if I asked him to be more discreet about it. So I suffered each time I saw him emerge on the horizon, dancing like a puppet on his wheel.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I acted inhumanly. For us to make such love—beautiful love, love that I’ve never imagined possible—and then for me to desert you without a word, it’s indefensible—I can’t put it any other way—I acted inhumanly. My thoughtlessness must have devastated you. You must have wondered again and again what kind of man I am and why I treated you so vilely.” “I’ve told you before, I don’t worry about such things. Naturally I was disappointed, but I understood fully. Ernest,” she added gravely, “I know why you left me that night. ” “You know, do you?” Ernest said playfully, finding her naïveté charming. “I don’t believe you know as much as you think you do about that night.” “I’m certain,” she said emphatically, “I know far more than you think I do.” “Artemis, you couldn’t even imagine what happened to me that night. How could you? I left you because of a dream—a horrible and very private vision. What can you know of it?” “I know it all, Ernest. I know about the cat and about the poisonous water and about the statue standing in the middle of the lake.” “You’re making my blood run cold, Artemis!” Ernest exclaimed. “That was my dream. Dreams are a private domain, each person’s most private, sovereign sanctuary. How could you know my dream?” Artemis sat silent, head bowed. “And so many other questions, Artemis. The depth of my feelings that evening—that magical glow, that irresistible desire. Not to take anything away from you and your charm, but that desire was of an unnatural intensity. Could it have been chemical? Maybe the chanterelles?” Artemis bowed her head lower. “And then when we were in bed, I touched your cheek. Why were you weeping? I felt wonderful; I thought it was mutual. Why the tears? Why pain for you?” “I wasn’t crying for me, Ernest, but for you. And not because of what had happened between us—that was wonderful for me too. No, I wept because of what was about to happen to you.” “ About to happen? Am I going mad? This is getting worse and worse. Artemis, tell me the truth!” “I don’t think the truth will satisfy you, Ernest.” “Try me. Trust me.” Artemis stood up, left the room briefly, and returned with a vellum folder from which she extracted a sheaf of paper, yellowed and old. “The truth? The truth is here,” she said, holding it out, “in this letter my grandmother wrote a long time ago to my mother, Magda. It’s dated June 13, 1931. Shall I read it to you, Ernest?” He nodded. And, by the light of three candles as the redolent food waited in its containers, Ernest listened to Artemis’s grandmother’s story, the story behind his dream.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  She was still in the half-zipped dress, but she’d also thrown a coat on her shoulders, with fawn cashmere so thick and soft that, at parties, I used to be able to reach into a pile of coats and find hers by touch. Its lush cloth wings dangled down. I wish I could explain how helpful he’s been, she said. I feel light again. Will, I’m jubilant. I’m glad to be alive. If I could just have you with me, as well— You haven’t enjoyed living, I said. But you know what I mean. It’s the peace that passeth understanding. Phoebe’s smile flared, the old outsize grin. It belonged to someone I’d known. Last fall, caught in a flash storm, we were rushing through Noxhurst when Phoebe’s shoe strap broke. I picked her up, but the hold slipped. She laughed, or I did. Legs flailed, fish-bright. The beige raincoat bunched, slid; wet hairs, like blown seaweed, filled my mouth. She writhed, but I held on. I’d carried Phoebe home. She’d left the bedroom door open. It had to be on purpose: she wished me to learn what he’d done. She joined her hands on the table. I pulled one loose, and I kissed the inside of Phoebe’s wrist. The pulse flitted, urgent with life. When I licked the trapped blue of a vein, she shivered. I kissed an eyelid. She lifted open lips, at first, to meet mine. We slid down, the planks cold, but then she stopped responding, mouth rigid. Beneath the kitchen lights, Phoebe’s face was a mask of gold. It hid the living girl. If I could crack it apart—she pushed herself up, sitting cross-legged, and I saw the logical solution, so simple I wanted to laugh. I told Phoebe we should get married. You’re joking, she said. No. I watched as she realized I was serious. I think, she said, Will, I— Phoebe— I’m late for Julian, and you’ve had a few drinks—we’ll talk about this in the morning, when you’ll— Since I didn’t want to let Phoebe refuse, I pushed my mouth on hers again. The shift dress had come loose. Bra-strap nicks, like the lines dividing a doll’s joints, indented Phoebe’s skin. It’s possible she struggled awhile before I noticed she wasn’t, as I thought, excited, but I’d waited a long time. If I pretended I didn’t understand, I could postpone letting go. The fitted bottom half of Phoebe’s dress had twisted at waist-level. With my body pressing hers down, I could easily move the panties aside, unzip my jeans. Stop, she said; I slipped inside. She went still. I finished, then I went to the bathroom. I locked myself in. –

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  Heidegger's Being and Time, which, whilst Sartre took issue with some of its conclusions, was a significant influence on his philosophy. Due to his poor health and eyesight Sartre was released in April 1941. He returned to Paris in the same year and immediately set about helping to found the underground group Socialisme et Liberté. Lacking sufficient support it soon broke up. Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. His major philosophical work Being and Nothingness was published in 1941 and two plays, The Flies and No Exit, followed in 1943 and 1944 respectively. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 Sartre wrote Anti-Semite and Jew, a work of non-fiction in which he explored anti-Semitism through four typically Sartrean characters: the anti-Semite, the democrat, the authentic Jew and the inauthentic Jew. He was also a contributor to Combat, a newspaper created by Albert Camus during the German occupation. Later, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the occupation, interpreting his political writings as an attempt to assuage his guilt. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote. After the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes, a quarterly literary and political review. He drew on his experience of war for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), published between 1945 and 1949. His play Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) (1948) explored a typical Sartre theme: the dilemma of the politically ‘engaged’ intellectual. He strongly opposed French rule in Algeria as did many intellectuals of the time. His support of the FLN in Algeria made him a domestic target of the paramilitary Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) and he escaped two bomb attacks in the early 1960s. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose US war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal, in 1967. The first volume of Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960. Sartre argued that Marx's notion of ‘class’ as objective was wrong and he attempted to provide a new philosophical foundation for Marxism. Never a member of the Communist party, Sartre's emphasis on humanism in Marx's work led to a quarrel with Louis Althusser, one of France's radical left-wing intellectuals. However, Sartre visited Cuba in the 1960s where he met with both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre said he was ‘not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age’. In October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but he declined it; because in his view the personal commitments of a writer should not be associated with institutions. He was the first Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, having previously refused the Légion d'honneur in 1945. He remained committed to political causes until the end

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Had I helped her? I doubted it. Although the residents considered my final interpretation “powerful,” and indeed, my words had felt so as I said them, in my heart I knew that it was all a sham: my interpretation had no real chance of being useful to Magnolia. Her symptoms—the inexplicable paralysis of her legs, the hallucinations of insects on her skin, her delusion that a conspiracy was behind the insect infestation of her home—were grave and far beyond the reach of psychotherapy. Even under the most favorable circumstances—unlimited time with a skilled therapist—psychotherapy would probably offer Magnolia little. And there were zero favorable possibilities here: Magnolia had no money and no insurance and would undoubtedly be discharged to some bare-bones nursing facility without a prayer of obtaining follow-up psychotherapy. My rationale that my interpretation would prime Magnolia for future work was pure illusion. Given these conditions, how “powerful,” then, was my interpretation? Powerful to what end? The power was a phantom; in fact, my persuasive rhetoric was directed not at the forces that shackled Magnolia but at my student audience. She had been a victim to my vanity. I was closer to the truth now. And yet my disquiet persisted. I turned to the question of why my judgment had been so poor. I had broken a fundamental rule of psychotherapy: do not strip away a patient’s defenses if you have nothing better to offer in their stead. And the force behind my actions? Why had Magnolia assumed such importance to me? The answer to this question lay, I suspected, in my response to my mother’s death. I reviewed again the course of the meeting. When had things started to affect me so personally? It was that first sight of Magnolia: that smile, those cushiony forearms. My mother’s arms. How they drew me! How I wished to be encircled and comforted by those soft, doughy arms. And that song, that Judy Collins song—how did it go? I searched for the words. But instead of the song lyrics, the events of a long-forgotten afternoon drifted into mind. On Saturday afternoons when I was about eight or nine and living in Washington, D.C., my friend Roger and I often bicycled to picnic in a park called the Old Soldiers’ Home. One day, instead of roasting hot dogs, we conspired to steal a live chicken from a house bordering the park and cook it over a campfire we built in a sunny clearing in the park forest.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Besides, modern education didn’t lead anywhere; a good artisan is worth more than a scribbler, and business is more certain than a diploma. Without his having to ask them overtly, the children started quitting school, one after the other, very early. Worn away by my father’s daily reminders of their expense, frightened by his asthma attacks, they felt guilty and spontaneously began to want to find a job. When I managed insidiously to persuade them to stay till the sixth year, all they gained thereby was a final examination at the end of the year. Convinced of their failure in spite of the heavy sacrifices already made, they were sure that the struggle was futile, and didn’t even dare turn up for the test. But I myself had now gone too far and was too conscious of my own ambition to turn back. On the contrary, the constant aggression, the mournful speeches which ceaselessly strengthened my feelings of guilt, all this gave a considerable importance to my studies. I brought to them a kind of passion, an avidity that my schoolmates could not understand, pleasant amateurs that they were. Like Loriot’s chocolates, so expensive for me, I swallowed as much of it all as I could. For whole years, I raced against time, making each day, each hour of my life count and conform literally to a strict schedule. I wanted to come up in the world, to succeed, but succeed at what? I wasn’t sure, but still had to keep going. I set myself provisional goals, stations on the long road I traveled: to win this prize and get ahead of that student. Since, at that age, knowledge and experience are so easily confused, my teachers believed me very mature and told me so. My major teacher in the third year noted “an energetic intellect” on my report card at the end of the year. I had the highest average in the second year and was probably Marrou’s best student in the first. The kids at school told me, and they would certainly not have made it up to please me, that Poinsot, our philosophy teacher, had said: “He’s the most intelligent student I’ve ever had, and I’ve been teaching for sixteen years.” One day I read that intellectual and sexual precociousness went together, and that many famous men had also been sexually very gifted. After questioning my friends, I came to believe that I was clearly ahead of them there too. I no longer doubted my genius and my pride was thereby increased.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was less brilliant in the exams for the school certificate than had been expected: I was too confident and, carried away by the impetus of my enthusiasm, had already embarked, in my mind at least, on my high school career. ~ 3. AT HOME ~ After school, my classmates scattered throughout the nearby middle-class neighborhoods, and I would find myself alone as soon as I reached the edge of the modern quarters. In the course of these long walks through familiar streets, I made most of my important resolutions, or rather found them already ripe after days and days of unconscious maturing. Despite the number of serious decisions I have made, and even kept with a grim determination, I don’t believe I am willful by nature. I think things over at length, and, even after I have made a decision, I continue thinking about it and suffering over it. How often, as I returned home at five o’clock, with the night already seeping into the narrow streets and the sky a deep blue-black, did I plan to make my peace with my parents and to be a considerate and useful son! I thought I knew the necessary gestures: salted almonds or pistachio nuts for my mother on Friday nights, sympathy for my father over his asthma and a show of interest for his business worries, to offer to run errands, fix the electric iron and the light switches. All these flickers of filial devotion generally sparked up in me after family rows and were the ultimate product of the remorse that I never admitted. I would be touched by the exemplary behavior of famous men who had remained faithful sons throughout their lives. The more the parents lacked understanding for the career, the work, and the ambitions of their sons, the more the latter must have enjoyed the feeling of having done their duty with a model filial piety. I needed but to cross the threshold of our flat to find again its ambivalent atmosphere so full of bitterness, of slight but constant hostility, of claims on my feelings, all justified up to a point; at once, I became grouchy, deprived of my gratitude, discouraged. On Friday nights, when dinner had been varied and plentiful, family life was like a cloudless sky. No sooner had the first star appeared than my parents entered upon their day of rest; they would then be in good spirits, ready for a pleasant chat of which I was often the subject: “Remember what you wrote us from the summer camp: ‘You must carry me up! You must!’“ The whole family would laugh and I would try to smile although the story had already been repeated a thousand times. I found it more painful to be reminded now of the nonsense I had written than of my childhood panic. I could spot in their insistence on this little story a reproach that was also a revenge, half-resentful and half-affectionate.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I felt trapped. Finally, after all these years, Paula was making a direct appeal to me. I could see only one way to respond: to consider her a highly disturbed individual and treat her—“treat” in the dark, false sense of the word, in the sense of “handling.” That had been what I had always wanted to avoid with Paula—with anyone, for that matter—because “handling” someone is to relate to him or her as an object and, thus, is the antithesis of being with that person. So I empathized with her dilemma. I listened, probed gently, and kept my opinions to myself. Finally I suggested that she write a softer letter to the medical board: “Honest but softer,” I said. “Then the doctors will get only a reprimand rather than a license forfeiture.” All this, of course, was in bad faith. No medical board in the world was going to take her letter seriously. No one was going to believe that all the clinic physicians were conspiring against her. There was no possibility of either reprimand or revocation of license. She lapsed into thought, weighing my advice. I believe she felt my caring for her, and I hoped she would not know that I was being false. Finally she nodded. “You’ve given me good, sound counsel, Irv. It’s just what I needed.” I felt painfully the irony that it was only now, when I had acted in bad faith, that she considered me helpful and trustworthy. Despite her sensitivity to the sun, Paula insisted on walking with me to my car. She put on her sun hat, wrapped herself in her veil and linens, and, as I started the ignition, leaned into the car window to give me a last hug. As I drove away I looked back through the rearview mirror. Silhouetted against the sun, her hat and linen wrapping gleaming with light, Paula was incandescent. A breeze came up. Her clothes fluttered. She seemed a leaf, trembling, twisting on its stem, readying itself for the fall. In the ten years before this visit, I had dedicated myself to my writing. I turned out book after book—a productivity due to a simple strategy: I put the writing first and let nothing and no one interfere with it. Guarding my time as fiercely as a mother bear guards her cubs, I eliminated all but absolutely essential activities. Even Paula fell into the nonessential category, and I did not take the time to call her again. Several months later my mother died, and while I was flying to her funeral, Paula slipped into my mind. I thought of her farewell letter to her dead brother—the letter containing all the things she had never said to him. And I thought of what I had never said to my mother. Almost everything! My mother and I, though loving one another, had never spoken directly, heart to heart, as two people reaching out with clean hands and clear minds.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Tell me, Oyvin, you listen to me? Do you know about me?” “You’re right, Momma. Neither of us has been good at listening to the other.” “Not me, Oyvin, I listened good. I listened to the silence every night when I came home from the store and you don’t bother to come upstairs from your study room. You don’t even say hello. You don’t ask me if I had a hard day. How could I listen when you didn’t talk to me?” “Something stopped me; there was such a wall between us.” “A wall? Nice to say to your mother. A wall. I built it?” “I didn’t say that. I only said there was a wall. I know I retreated from you. Why? How can I remember? This was fifty years ago, Momma, but everything you said to me was, I felt, some sort of reprimand.” “ Vos ? Reperand?” “I mean criticism. I had to stay away from your criticism. Those years I was feeling bad enough about myself as it was, and I didn’t need more criticism.” “What did you have to feel bad about? All those years—Daddy and I working in the store for you to study. Till midnight. And how many times did you phone for me to bring home something for you? Pencils or paper. Remember Al? He worked in the liquor store. The one who got his face cut during a robbery?” “Of course I remember Al, Momma. The scar all the way down the front of his nose.” “Well, Al would answer the phone and always holler, right across the crowded store, ‘It’s the king! The king is calling! Let the king go buy his own pencils. The king could use a little exercise.’ Al was jealous; his parents gave him nothing. I never paid attention to what he said. But Al was right; I treated you like a king. Any time you called, day or night, I’d leave Daddy with a store full of customers and run down the block to Mensch’s Five & Dime. Stamps, too, you needed. And notebooks, and ink. And then ballpoint pens. All your clothes smeared with ink. Like a king. Not criticism.” “Ma, we’re talking now. And that’s good. Let’s not accuse each other. Let’s understand. Let’s just say I felt criticized. I know you said good things about me to others. You bragged about me. But you never said it to me. To my face.” “Not so easy to talk to you then, Oyvin. And not just for me, for everybody. You knew everything. You read everything. Maybe people were a little afraid of you. Maybe me too. Ver veys? Who knows? But let me tell you something, Oyvin, I had it voise than you. First, you never said anything nice about me either. I kept house; I cooked for you. Twenty years you ate my food. You liked it, I know. How did I know?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  He spent the early morning on the phone talking through his experience with good friends, and some twenty-four hours later the terrible cramping, anxious oppression in his chest began to lessen. The process of talking to his friends, the sheer confessional act, was helpful even though none of them seemed able to grasp what had happened. Even Paul, his closest and oldest chum, who had been his confidant since residency training, was off the mark: he tried to persuade Ernest that the nightmare was a blessing, a cautionary tale warning Ernest to be more circumspect about honoring professional boundaries. Ernest defended himself vigorously: “Remember, Paul, Artemis is no friend of my patient. And I did not intentionally use my patient to supply me with women. And throughout, my intentions were high-minded. My purpose in seeking her out was not carnal but simply to repair the damage my patient had done. I did not visit her for a sexual assignation—it just seemed impossible to stop that from happening.” “Prosecuting attorneys wouldn’t see it that way, Ernest,” Paul responded somberly. “They’d make mincemeat out of you.” Ernest’s former supervisor, Marshal, offered him a fragment of the cautionary lecture he routinely delivered to his Sea Scout troop: “Even if you’re doing no wrong, don’t get into any situation where a snapshot of you would suggest the semblance of doing wrong.” Ernest was sorry he had phoned Marshal. The snapshot homily did not impress him; on the contrary, he thought it outrageous to advise children to behave circumspectly simply to avoid misrepresentation in the media. In the end Ernest paid little heed to his friends’ advice. They were all pusillanimous, preoccupied with issues of appearance and potential malpractice litigation. From the inside perspective, the one that counted, Ernest was entirely persuaded that he had acted with integrity. After twenty-four hours’ recuperation, Ernest took up his practice again and, four days later, met with Halston, who announced that he had decided after all to terminate therapy. Ernest knew he had failed Halston, who had undoubtedly sensed Ernest’s disapproval of him. Ernest’s guilt about his poor therapy was brief, however, because shortly after saying goodbye to Halston he had a stunning revelation: in the last seventy-two hours, ever since his phone conversations with Paul and Marshal, he had entirely forgotten the existence of Artemis! That breakfast with her, everything afterward! Not once had he thought of her! My God, he thought, I have acted in precisely the same repugnant manner as Halston, deserting her without a word of explanation and never bothering to phone or see her. For the rest of that day and the next, Ernest encountered the same strange phenomenon: again and again he tried to think about Artemis but could not keep his focus; within a few moments his mind would wander to inconsequential topics. Late the next evening he decided to phone her, and it was only with the greatest effort—Ernest visualized himself curling eighty pounds—that he succeeded in dialing her number.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability.” Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I’d phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection. “We need Christ’s antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences.” It wasn’t surreal anymore. What Reverend Thomas was saying was true. I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop. She was just like the Manson kid. She didn’t believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted. She didn’t even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That’s what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That’s what the Fall was. Satan would not serve. An old lady stepped forward from the choir and began to sing, “The blood that Jesus shed for me, way back at Calvary…” and she could really sing. And I was crying, my tears coming down. We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life. IN JULY , I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn’t even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr’s dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God’s plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me. Afterward, we went out to Church’s Fried Chicken to celebrate. Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said, “Praise the Lord,” but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized. “You can’t really believe in this crap,” he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on. I held up my hair so he could fasten it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How often, as I returned home at five o’clock, with the night already seeping into the narrow streets and the sky a deep blue-black, did I plan to make my peace with my parents and to be a considerate and useful son! I thought I knew the necessary gestures: salted almonds or pistachio nuts for my mother on Friday nights, sympathy for my father over his asthma and a show of interest for his business worries, to offer to run errands, fix the electric iron and the light switches. All these flickers of filial devotion generally sparked up in me after family rows and were the ultimate product of the remorse that I never admitted. I would be touched by the exemplary behavior of famous men who had remained faithful sons throughout their lives. The more the parents lacked understanding for the career, the work, and the ambitions of their sons, the more the latter must have enjoyed the feeling of having done their duty with a model filial piety. I needed but to cross the threshold of our flat to find again its ambivalent atmosphere so full of bitterness, of slight but constant hostility, of claims on my feelings, all justified up to a point; at once, I became grouchy, deprived of my gratitude, discouraged. On Friday nights, when dinner had been varied and plentiful, family life was like a cloudless sky. No sooner had the first star appeared than my parents entered upon their day of rest; they would then be in good spirits, ready for a pleasant chat of which I was often the subject: “Remember what you wrote us from the summer camp: ‘You must carry me up! You must!’“ The whole family would laugh and I would try to smile although the story had already been repeated a thousand times. I found it more painful to be reminded now of the nonsense I had written than of my childhood panic. I could spot in their insistence on this little story a reproach that was also a revenge, half-resentful and half-affectionate. In effect, they were saying: “Remember, once you were weak and helpless. You think you are strong now and can do without us. When you needed us, we protected you.” I could see their increasing bitterness and disapproval of the turn my life was taking. It was neither pride nor resentment that separated me from my parents, but a far more penetrating emotion, that of guilt. I had been tutoring other kids ever since my fourth year in high school, so I was almost completely independent — financially, at least. I never dreamed of reproaching my parents with failing to give me what they had not given me: they had never had anything to give. But they made me feel guilty for what I didn’t give to them.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When one of them once went into a fit of hysterics and I clumsily tried to comfort her, she screamed at me and asked what I was doing safe in an office while her son was in a camp. Again, I thought of trying to find some hiding-place in the town, but I had seen too much. I no longer felt I had the right to run away from the catastrophe. What demoralized me completely was my finding out the real reason why I had been spared. In the offices I learned that the middle class had assumed these responsibilities to save themselves and their children. Rich men’s sons were everywhere in the auxiliary offices: food supplies, ambulances, transport and medical services. But they had also decided that certain categories of men were to be spared, for instance the intellectuals. So I had been granted the advantage of the undeserved privilege of a group. It was because I was a student, not because of my lungs, that I had been saved. Now I understood the hurried medical examination much better. “We wanted to save the elite of the community,” explained one of our leaders without even smiling. By some stroke of luck, as it turned out, most of the intellectuals were of the middle class. So the intellectual and the economic elites were confused. It seemed to the middle class only fair, since they had to pay the heavy cost of the camps, that their own sons should be exempted. But I could not forget that I was poor, nor accept this ambiguous situation. How was it possible to stay in the offices while all those young Jews were being beaten, humiliated, and killed in the camps? To the astonishment of our directors and the half-ironic surprise and respect of my colleagues, I asked to be allowed to join the camp workers. I am not trying to pride myself on my decision, and perhaps I behaved like a fool. But I do not remember the details of my argument. I only know that the action I took seemed necessary to me, and I refuse to discuss the matter today. I asked to go because it seemed intolerable to stay. Painfully but definitely, I was discovering that others really existed, and moreover that I would never be content merely with my own happiness. I was simple enough to think that I could be of help to them. I was fortunate to enjoy some culture and a few ideas; I would go to the camps to help the others live. I believe that, in the midst of the despair of those days, my move was optimistic.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It is impossible to deny that I was an outrageous luxury, considering our position. I was no longer dependent on my family as I had been, but I didn’t help my father provide for our large family budget. Now, though I had ceased to believe in my parents, I hadn’t yet shaken off the values of my community. I hadn’t yet realized that I might also refuse to be responsible for my brothers and sisters, for their state of malnutrition, their shabby clothes, the haste with which, one after another, they had to leave school. I needed other ways of breaking with the past and achieving freedom. It was difficult enough for me to find money for my food, the suit I bought at a discount from Uncle Aroun, and a little pocket money. Fortunately, my tuition and school supplies were assured through Monsieur Bismuth. Ever since the fourth year, I had been fortunate enough to have students sent to me for tutoring. A friend’s little sister had broken her leg, and I was called upon to keep her Latin from getting rusty. As my schoolmates found it extraordinary that I was willing to have any truck with Latin and French after school hours, I soon acquired a reputation. From that time on, I never stopped tutoring; and I prepared for each hour of it with great care. None too sure of my own knowledge, I would go over my Latin grammar or my literature textbook before visiting my students. So I soon acquired a reputation for competence, confirmed by my own success in school, and was often consulted after discussions. Wealthy students in my grade, or even in the grade above me, sometimes entrusted me with writing whole essays when they were preoccupied with the organization of their leisure, particularly with days at the races. They paid me, of course, my hourly tutoring fee. Once a middle-class boy asked me to do a whole report which had been assigned to him despite his stupidity. I worked ten hours and I was embarrassed to ask for the large sum due me. But my client did not seem to find the price of his freedom at all excessive. Still, I didn’t care for that kind of work and I never took it on without feeling ill at ease. I felt we were cheating our teachers. Contrary to school ethics, I refused, without being a sneak, to join my classmates in their solid opposition to the faculty; I somehow failed to feel a community of interests with them. I knew what my pupils thought of me: they despised me. Of course, I despised them, too, for being dumb and for needing me, but my feeling wasn’t pure because it was mixed with resentment and envy. They could treat me with indifference, as the fees they paid me helped them to re-establish a balance between us.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Radical Faith as Gift As I reflect on ministry, and especially my ministry, I know in the hidden places that the real restraints are not in my understanding or in the receptivity of other people. Rather, the restraints come from my own unsureness about this perception. I discover that I am as bourgeois and obdurate as any to whom I might minister. I, like most of the others, am unsure that the royal road is not the best and the royal community the one which governs the real “goodies.” I, like most of the others, am unsure that the alternative community inclusive of the poor, hungry, and grieving is really the wave of God’s future. We are indeed “like people, like priest” (Hos 4:9). That very likely is the situation among many of us in ministry, and there is no unanguished way out of it. It does make clear to us that our ministry will always be practiced through our own conflicted selves. No prophet has ever borne an unconflicted message, even until Jesus (compare Mark 14:36). Thus the Beatitudes end in realism (Luke 6:22-23). Also, it reminds us again that such radical faith is not an achievement; for if it were, we would will it and be done. Rather, it is a gift, and we are left to wait receptively, to watch and to pray. Perhaps our own situation credits what we have suggested here. We ourselves shall likely move in and out, precisely because of our poor capacity to grieve the death in our own lives and to be amazed at the new futures. We are not more skilled in that than all the other children of the royal community, and therefore we must engage in the same painful practices of becoming who we are called to be. I have come to think that there is no more succinct summary of prophetic ministry than the statement of Jesus: “Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:21), or, more familiarly, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt 5:4). Jesus’ concern was, finally, for the joy of the kingdom. That is what he promised, and to that he invited people. But he was clear that rejoicing in that future required a grieving about the present order. [1] Jesus takes a quite dialectical two-age view of things. He will not be like one-world liberals who

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The Austrian Wittgenstein, in this same tradition, wrote that “the body is the best picture of the mind.” And the Australian F. M. Alexander, around the turn of the nineteenth century, made an extensive study of peoples’ postures and concluded, “When psychologists speak of the unconscious, it is the body that they are talking about.” The current lack of the appreciation of the body in psychotherapy caused the analyst Musad Kahn 96 to lament, “I have not come across any paper that discusses the contribution made to our knowledge and experience of a patient from our looking at him or her in their person as a body as against looking at merely the verbal material and affective responses in the analytic situation. ” Somatically oriented therapists provide their clients with carefully paced feedback in the form of invitations to explore their emerging bodily sensations. This feedback is based largely on the therapist’s ability to observe and track the postural, gestural, facial (emotional) and physiological shifts throughout a session in order to bring them into a client’s conscious awareness. This allows both client and therapist to uncover unconscious conflicts and traumas that are well beyond the reach of reason. Freud seems to have grasped this concept in his early work when he says, “The mind has forgotten, but the body has not—thankfully.” Yes, thankfully! Though Freud seems to have abandoned this premise, his student Wilhelm Reich spent his entire career studying how conflicts are lodged in the body. “When it comes to the consulting room,” he remarked, “there are really just two animals and two bodies.” 97 In this chapter, I will use examples from my own cases to illustrate the principles outlined in Chapters 5 through 7 . In the very beginning of session work, a client may not understand the therapist’s feedback about her unconscious attitudes. But as the client becomes more conscious of her sensations, she is able to use them to access innate resources and to deepen her capacity to “know” herself through the subtle promptings of her body. In the first case (Miriam), I introduce expressive, but hidden, body language. This case is relatively straightforward and demonstrates some basic body-oriented observational skills that therapists can utilize with their clients to facilitate their awakening and to enhance integration of their sensations, feelings, perceptions and meanings . Miriam: In the Unspoken Language of the Body Miriam enters the room, tentatively sits down, and folds her arms tight across her chest. This posture gives the impression of rigid self-protection. Of course, one may have many reasons for folding one’s arms: she could be comforting herself or even keeping herself warm. It is the overall context that tells the story. Miriam is agitated, pumping her crossed legs repeatedly.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Our memories of things impose some order on the past and give it its meaning. As I grew older, it thus seemed to me that my whole life had been but a series of breaks and interruptions, each one in turn more serious and definitive. Still, I had long continued to hope that some harmony might be achieved, and had even thought that I might be able to impose on myself and my relationships with the outside world some kind of order, if only by using my own will power and my ability to choose. I thought I would end up as a member of the middle class, not so much because belonging to this class was a kind of ideal as because my education, the tastes that I was discovering, and my concern with the arts, in fact all my future position in life, were already forcing me into this position. Still, I continued not to like the middle class, though I was forced to admit that I really felt at ease only in its midst. They were the only people to read books, to understand my preoccupations, to enjoy and practice poetry and the arts. One day, however, I became brutally aware of the fact that I was not a member of the middle class and could never become one. All my childhood friends were now becoming tailor’s apprentices, their shoulders rounded by their work, their whole appearance weak and sickly in their black waistcoats; or else, grocery clerks, pale from working in the shade of the covered bazaars; or office workers who were already becoming flabby, with yellowish fat. We scarcely even greeted each other any longer; they were ashamed of their own condition and respectful towards me, and I was full of feelings of guilt, though God knows why. Only Levi, an orphan who was a baker’s assistant and rode a tricycle for the deliveries remained quite spontaneous in his manner and always shouted, the moment he spotted me in the street: “Shalom, Mordekhai!” Such a public utterance of my name that smacked of the ghetto displeased me considerably, but I was afraid of hurting his feelings if I asked him to be more discreet about it. So I suffered each time I saw him emerge on the horizon, dancing like a puppet on his wheel.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: One due circumstance does not suffice to make a good act, and consequently it does not follow that, no matter how one use one’s own property, the use is good, but when one uses it as one ought according to all the circumstances. Reply to Objection 4: Although it is not evil in itself to intend to keep oneself in good health, this intention becomes evil, if one intend health by means of something that is not naturally ordained for that purpose; for instance if one sought only bodily health by the sacrament of baptism, and the same applies to the marriage act in the question at issue. Whether it is a mortal sin for a man to have knowledge of his wife, with the intention not of a marriage good but merely of pleasure?Objection 1: It would seem that whenever a man has knowledge of his wife, with the intention not of a marriage good but merely of pleasure, he commits a mortal sin. For according to Jerome (Comment. in Eph. 5:25), as quoted in the text (Sent. iv, D, 31), “the pleasure taken in the embraces of a wanton is damnable in a husband.” Now nothing but mortal sin is said to be damnable. Therefore it is always a mortal sin to have knowledge of one’s wife for mere pleasure. Objection 2: Further, consent to pleasure is a mortal sin, as stated in the Second Book (Sent. ii, D, 24). Now whoever knows his wife for the sake of pleasure consents to the pleasure. Therefore he sins mortally. Objection 3: Further, whoever fails to refer the use of a creature to God enjoys a creature, and this is a mortal sin. But whoever uses his wife for mere pleasure does not refer that use to God. Therefore he sins mortally. Objection 4: Further, no one should be excommunicated except for a mortal sin. Now according to the text (Sent. ii, D, 24) a man who knows his wife for mere pleasure is debarred from entering the Church, as though he were excommunicate. Therefore every such man sins mortally. On the contrary, As stated in the text (Sent. ii, D, 24), according to Augustine (Contra Jul. ii, 10; De Decem Chord. xi; Serm. xli, de Sanct.), carnal intercourse of this kind is one of the daily sins, for which we say the “Our Father.” Now these are not mortal sins. Therefore, etc. Further, it is no mortal sin to take food for mere pleasure. Therefore in like manner it is not a mortal sin for a man to use his wife merely to satisfy his desire.