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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In her ponderous old station wagon we drove to Flint to spend the weekend with a college dance teacher, Anita, who’d been Maria’s first love. Around Anita I was demoted back to being a kid, and Maria would literally pinch my cheeks and roll her eyes as though to remind us that kids will say the darnedest things. Anita was not only on the school staff but also toured with a company versed in the Graham technique, all to earn money to send her sister to graduate school and to support a widowed mother. Her family responsibilities somehow neutralized her lurid status as a lesbian. Although I pretended to be sophisticated and could listen to tales of erotic mayhem without blinking, privately I still considered us all damned. This disparity between my surface smile and inner anguish condemned me to savoring my guilt in silence, a guilt I couldn’t expiate since it was thoroughly secular. Back in my white room after the weekend, Maria stopped playing the big sister. Now that we’d lived together for five days, we’d pressed beyond a border into companionable silence. Much as we might protest our devotion to each other, until now our bodies, tense, edgy animals, had stayed on guard. On this fifth day, they sighed and lay down to sleep side by side like two cats who’ve finally stopped prowling and hissing their rival claims to the sewing basket and squabbling over precedence at the water bowl. Now we sprawled on the bed, smoking and reading and listening to Bartók. One afternoon we started kissing. In a second we’d undressed. Maria thrashed with shocking passion in my arms and in my ear her smoky mouth breathed with short, voiced gasps. She was so fragile, so supple in contrast to all the big clumsy men I’d known. I’d thought a heterosexual man must weary of always having to instigate things, but there was no question of aggression and passivity, we were both swept like lovers into a tempest that raged around us, and, yes, for us. We were its victims. Maria stayed two more days. When we’d go to the student union, I’d cast hungry looks at the boys and yearn to escape Maria and reenter this anarchic fraternity which had, instead of secret handshakes, matched taps on the toilet floor, and instead of one hell night, endless nights of perverse pleasure and excruciating remorse. Once we were alone again I’d forget these distractions, and Maria and I would lie on white sheets fading to blue in the long, late May evening light. I asked her if she’d marry me, and she laughed, rubbed my cheek with the back of her cool hand, and whispered, “My child groom …” She sketched me as I wrote. In the warm summer rain we walked through the night. We sat for hours in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It doesn’t take long for kids to exceed their parents’ competence online. By eighth grade, Amber was savvy enough to erase her browsing history, create untraceable free e-mail accounts, cover her tracks. Posing as a boy named Jake, she built a fake MySpace page, posting a profile picture she’d downloaded of a cute guy from her school and claiming to be from Los Angeles. If you’d asked her at the time, she wouldn’t have been able to say why she was doing it; only in retrospect can she connect her behavior to her sexual orientation. For two years she used the page as a cover to flirt with what she described as “oodles and oodles” of girls. None of them ever caught on, even when they spoke to her on the phone. (Amber demonstrated her quite credible imitation of a teenage boy’s voice.) She did make one mistake, though: she gave them her real cell phone number, attributing its midwestern area code to a recent move. That was six years ago: she still gets texts from some of those girls. “I got one the other day out of the clear blue sky that said, ‘I miss you,’” she said. “It’s sort of weird.” It occurred to me that perhaps the ideal imaginary boyfriend for a teenage girl might very well be another girl pretending to be a guy. Who would better know what she wanted to hear? Amber agreed. “I think they look back to when they were in high school and think, ‘Oh, I remember that one guy: he was so nice, and he always really understood.’” Recalling that period herself, though, brings Amber pain. She feels ashamed and guilty about deceiving other girls. “It bothered me for a long time,” she said. “I’m mostly over it now, but then I get these text messages and I’m like, What the hell? They come out of the woodwork. You’d think after you’ve watched enough Catfish episodes, you’d realize that I probably wasn’t actually a real person with the wrong area code. “It’s sort of sad,” she added, “when you think about it.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  18 “When you see a thief, you are pleased with him and condone his behavior, And you associate with adulterers. 19 “You give your mouth to evil And your tongue frames deceit. 20 “You sit and speak against your brother; You slander your own mother’s son. 21 “These things you have done and I kept silent; You thought that I was just like you. Now I will reprimand and denounce you and state the case in order before your eyes. 22 “Now consider this, you who forget God, Or I will tear you in pieces, and there will be no one to rescue [you]. 23 “He who offers a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving honors Me; And to him who orders his way rightly [who follows the way that I show him], I shall show the salvation of God.” Psalm 51 A Contrite Sinner’s Prayer for Pardon. To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David; when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had sinned with Bathsheba. 1 H AVE MERCY on me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; According to the greatness of Your compassion blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and guilt And cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I am conscious of my transgressions and I acknowledge them; My sin is always before me. 4 Against You, You only, have I sinned And done that which is evil in Your sight, So that You are justified when You speak [Your sentence] And faultless in Your judgment. [Rom 3:4 ] 5 I was brought forth in [a state of] wickedness; In sin my mother conceived me [and from my beginning I, too, was sinful]. [John 3:6 ; Rom 5:12 ; Eph 2:3 ] 6 Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being, And in the hidden part [of my heart] You will make me know wisdom. 7 Purify me with a hyssop, and I will be clean; Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. 8 Make me hear joy and gladness and be satisfied; Let the bones which You have broken rejoice. 9 Hide Your face from my sins And blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a right and steadfast spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me away from Your presence And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of Your salvation And sustain me with a willing spirit. 13 Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, And sinners shall be converted and return to You. 14 Rescue me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation; Then my tongue will sing joyfully of Your righteousness and Your justice. 15 O Lord, open my lips, That my mouth may declare Your praise. 16 For You do not delight in sacrifice, or else I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Speaking thus, I am reminded of certain passages in the Court’s decision which reflect on my sincerity as well as on my ability to think straight. These passages contain the implication that I am often deliberately obscure as well as pretentious in my “metaphysical and surrealistic” flights. I am only too well aware of the diversity of opinion which these “excursi” elicit in the minds of my readers. But how am I to answer such accusations, touching as they do the very marrow of my literary being? Am I to say, “You don’t know what you are talking about?” Ought I to muster impressive names—“authorities”—to counterbalance these judgments? Or would it not be simpler to say as I have before, “Guilty! Guilty on all counts, your Honor!” Believe me, it is not impish, roguish perversity which leads me to pronounce, even quasi-humorously, this word ‘‘guilty.” As one who thoroughly and sincerely believes in what he says and does, even when wrong, is it not more becoming on my part to admit “guilt” than attempt to defend myself against those who use this word so glibly? Let us be honest. Do those who judge and condemn me—not in Oslo necessarily, but the world over—do these individuals truly believe me to be a culprit, to be “the enemy of society,” as they often blandly assert? What is it that disturbs them so? Is it the existence, the prevalence, of immoral, amoral or unsocial behavior, such as is described in my works, or is it the exposure of such behavior in print? Do people of our day and age really behave in this “vile” manner or are these actions merely the product of a “diseased” mind? (Does one refer to such authors as Petronius, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sade, to mention but a few, as “diseased minds”?) Surely some of you must have friends or neighbors, in good standing too, who have indulged in this questionable behavior, or worse. As a man of the world, I know only too well that the appanage of a priest’s frock, a judicial robe, a teacher’s uniform provides no guarantee of immunity to the temptations of the flesh. We are all in the same pot, we are all guilty, or innocent, depending on whether we take the frog’s view or the Olympian view. For the nonce I shall refrain from pretending to measure or apportion guilt, to say, for example, that a criminal is more guilty, or less, than a hypocrite. We do not have crime, we do not have war, revolution, crusades, inquisitions, persecution and intolerance because some among us are wicked, mean-spirited, or murderers at heart; we have this malignant condition of human affairs because all of us, the righteous as well as the ignorant and the malicious, lack true forbearance, true compassion, true knowledge and understanding of human nature.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Yet something kept me from answering her letters. I resolved every morning to write her; but every night I went to bed without having mailed off a letter. Her letters dropped regularly into my box. Then two weeks of silence. Then this letter: “Dumpling, you haven’t written or called in a month, an insulting silence I can only assume is intended as a rejection. No lover would act the way you have. I accuse you of gross neglect. “It’s just as well, anyway. Boys really don’t thrill me. Last week I met a fabulous dyke named Maeve at the Volley Ball who looks just like Anthony Quinn and who’s bombarded me with champagne and kilos of chocolates. Thank heaven for dykes, or where else would a girl find a little gallantry? Certainly not from you, you naughty neglectful Dumpling.” [image file=image_rsrc1CA.jpg] In my senior year of college I was accepted into a graduate program in Chinese at Harvard, but my father was unwilling to keep me on his payroll, and his income was too high for me to qualify for a fellowship. That summer after graduation I didn’t know what to do with myself. I lived with a childhood friend, Tommy, in the basement of his family’s house. He found a job as an apprentice bus driver and entered a training program. I was driving a pickup truck in Des Plaines delivering fruit juice and eggs door to door. When I heard middle-class executives, my father’s crowd, say they deserved to be highly paid because their jobs involved assuming responsibilities and making decisions, I snorted with impatience. I knew that such exercises of the will were gratifying, whereas driving a truck in the July sun through the Chicago suburbs was no picnic. Lou told me he was moving to New York. He invited me to come along. Just like that I decided to go, even though I had only two hundred dollars to my name. “I’ll send you the busfare back to the Middle West when you strike out,” my father told me. Lou and I stayed in the YMCA on West Sixty-third Street. I spent ten of my precious dollars having my resumé typed and duplicated. I mailed it out to a few places, but that seemed hopeless, or at least abstract. I had a single suit too heavy for the heat, three wash-and-wear short-sleeved white shirts, a greasy tie, two pairs of black stockings, and one pair of black lace-up shoes badly scuffed on the sides. I had never learned how to groom myself. My mother had ignored the whole issue. In prep school I’d showered because I’d had to, but in college my hygiene and wardrobe had become impressionistic. I was a sleepwalker.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My general moral discomfort was so swollen it could be lanced at any moment by anyone. The rain lashing the four-lane highway was turning to sleet. Big trucks buffeted our little Volkswagen, bison rushing past our ladybug. “I’m sure he told you about my father.” “Just that he was a character out of Dostoevsky.” “Literature has nothing comparable,” she said grimly. “Tell me about him, won’t you?” Annie told me of her father, a drunk madman who would be sober and sane a month at a time. Then he’d snap. Annie and her little brother would come home from school to their remote country house, and there Dad would be, grinning knowingly, pistol in hand. “Okay, wise guys, I found out what you’ve been cooking up. I’m going to give you one last chance to make it up to me.” And for the next three days he’d force them to work at gunpoint as he kept pulling at his bottle of scotch. In the snow, in the mud, they’d haul bricks, sniveling, pleading for forgiveness, but he’d keep them at it, laughing, sometimes brushing off voices and wings he alone perceived. Annie stopped talking. Then she said, “Someday I’ll show you the barn my brother and I built with our own hands.” She seemed very close to tears again. I wanted to say something right, to make it all up to her, not because I felt such sympathy (I feared her too much to pity her), but because I wanted that sort of power over her—the sort O’Reilly wielded. Maybe I envied the horror of her childhood; she had a legitimate reason to be messed up now. “The worst of it was when he would come out of it. Then he’d be so repentant he’d crawl across the floor, kiss our feet, and cry. He’d force us to hold the gun to his head and beg us to pull the trigger. We’d kiss him and comfort him and forgive him. Though he’d hurt us , though it was our nails that were torn, our faces covered with dirt—we’d forgive him so quickly.” Now she was crying, and the huge semis hurtling past, creating a momentary vacuum that sucked us into their wake, seemed for a second like the passions that grown-ups wreaked on their children. In this little car every revolution of the wheels, every segment in the pavement, was registered as a shock; we worked for every mile we gained. But perched high above us, comfortable in their crow’s nests of nude pinups, dangling foam dice, family snapshots, a dashboard twinkling with lights, the truckdrivers were smoothly guiding their liners through the night, politely saluting each other with doffed brights.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Gerald, the doorman, had of course figured it all out. Every free moment he was studying the floor indicator above the elevator. Since there were only four apartments on each floor and he knew who was at home, by a simple process he’d deduced that I was coming down from my mother’s to Lou’s all the time. When she returned from Munich, my mother told me she was worried because I had taken up with a friend ten years older, a notorious homosexual and drug addict whose family, though once nice, could by no means be considered nice now. “Honey,” she said, looking at me from brown eyes as sweet as mine but far more intense, “what’s going to happen to you? All your fine gifts of mind will be destroyed, your reputation and character.” I knew she was right, and I considered her small warm hand in mine to be an intolerable reproach. I jumped up from the couch and started pacing. “I know what I’m doing.” “Don’t bite my head off,” she said, clouding over. “Anyhow, honey, I don’t think you do know. You’ve compromised me, and I have to live in this building. Besides, you wasted the summer. You didn’t earn any money for school. You look pale and unhealthy; you didn’t even have good, wholesome fun with kids in your own age bracket.” She was so short that when she settled back in her seat, her feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Although she was trying to generate calm (her head was lifted back to a noble angle suitable for framing), her face seemed to be filling up, turning darker with emotion. She was being flooded by it. “You’re a special person, a quality person. I don’t know why you have to throw yourself away on cheap people. We’ve never been cheap in our family. I work so hard, and your father, well, he may have horrible faults but he’s always been honorable. He’s observed the divorce agreement to the letter, you can’t take that away from him. But maybe we overestimated you; after all, we never had you properly tested, we don’t even know for sure you’re so bright.” The minute the terrible possibility of my having merely normal intelligence presented itself, my mother’s bruise of a face took on a nasty expression. She lifted the tailored jacket of her suit away from her body and let it relax in new, more satisfied folds. “I don’t know where these urges in you come from— perhaps from your father’s mother’s side. My family is completely normal on both sides. My own father, bless his heart, had a real romance with his sweetheart, my mother, and my mother’s father sired twelve children, nothing wrong there, nothing homo there or—ha!” and she let out a cry of delight at the recollection, “no morphrodites, for that’s what they called homosexuals down South.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She bent her head farther and farther down and her hands continued to scoop up water and fling it over her shoulders, splashing her back and the varnished floor behind her. “For chrissake, Ophelia, give us a break. Medical help is on the way in the form of bourbon and amphetamines and Big Sheila, so just hold tight. Or get tight. Here’s a bottle.” I couldn’t bear either her suffering or his vitriol. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted them to make each other happy and how sickened I was by the mess they’d—wow, maybe I’d made. I put an arm around Annie’s shoulder, dried her off, and seated her on a chair. She was surprisingly docile, but the instant I turned to find her blouse she’d risen and was pacing the room, touching everything as though she were a miser counting her possessions. “I can’t bear this,” William said. “I thought I was getting a girlfriend, but I’ve come up with one of Sheila’s botches, just scrambled eggs for brains.” He threw a tweed jacket on over his striped button-down shirt and headed for the door, but Annie sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around his legs. “Don’t go,” she said in a normal hostessy voice, “I promise to be more amusing,” and she actually managed a beguilingly sociable smile, but then a high moan, an Algerian widow’s moan, started in the back of her throat and grew louder. William went white. He said, “You’ve spoiled everything,” kicked free of her, and headed out. Then we were all three out in the brilliant blue-and-white

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We can’t leave her in the hall like that.” “Why not, Miss Priss? Are you afraid she’ll tattle to Sheila?” That was William’s name for Dr. O’Reilly. “Too late. You’re already in the bitch house with Sheila, who incidentally is on her way up here now (if she doesn’t nod off first) to rescue Sam—so careless of you to hire a shrinker who’s a juicehead and goofball artist; I mean , my dear, I talked to the old fright on the blower and she was as incoherent as I get with ten inches up my bum, only she wasn’t happy about it. She got more foam on the receiver than you get on your skirt when you see a film starring Montgomery Clift, who’s not even worth soppy panties since Monty’s just a tired old fruit herself.” “O’Reilly’s coming here? My God!” and I felt the most terrible guilt. The day was brilliantly cold and sunny. William had thrown a window open, which let in the cold above the sizzling steam heater. Annie came in. Her eyes were huge, enlarged by the smudges she’d made of her mascara. Her body looked all the more emaciated in her slip, and when she started to sob I could see her poor flat belly shaking under the flimsy fabric. William and I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at her as she bent over the sink. She studied her face in a small mirror. Then she splashed cold water all over herself, which at first seemed ordinary except that she didn’t stop. She bent her head farther and farther down and her hands continued to scoop up water and fling it over her shoulders, splashing her back and the varnished floor behind her. “For chrissake, Ophelia, give us a break. Medical help is on the way in the form of bourbon and amphetamines and Big Sheila, so just hold tight. Or get tight. Here’s a bottle.” I couldn’t bear either her suffering or his vitriol. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted them to make each other happy and how sickened I was by the mess they’d—wow, maybe I’d made. I put an arm around Annie’s shoulder, dried her off, and seated her on a chair. She was surprisingly docile, but the instant I turned to find her blouse she’d risen and was pacing the room, touching everything as though she were a miser counting her possessions. “I can’t bear this,” William said. “I thought I was getting a girlfriend, but I’ve come up with one of Sheila’s botches, just scrambled eggs for brains.” He threw a tweed jacket on over his striped button-down shirt and headed for the door, but Annie sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around his legs.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  After this he asked him if he had ever offended against God in the sin of gluttony; whereto Master Ciappelletto answered, sighing, Ay had he, and that many a time; for that, albeit, over and above the Lenten fasts that are yearly observed of the devout, he had been wont to fast on bread and water three days at the least in every week,--he had oftentimes (and especially whenas he had endured any fatigue, either praying or going a-pilgrimage) drunken the water with as much appetite and as keen a relish as great drinkers do wine. And many a time he had longed to have such homely salads of potherbs as women make when they go into the country; and whiles eating had given him more pleasure than himseemed it should do to one who fasteth for devotion, as did he. 'My son,' said the friar, 'these sins are natural and very slight and I would not therefore have thee burden thy conscience withal more than behoveth. It happeneth to every man, how devout soever he be, that, after long fasting, meat seemeth good to him, and after travail, drink.' 'Alack, father mine,' rejoined Ciappelletto, 'tell me not this to comfort me; you must know I know that things done for the service of God should be done sincerely and with an ungrudging mind; and whoso doth otherwise sinneth.' Quoth the friar, exceeding well pleased, 'I am content that thou shouldst thus apprehend it and thy pure and good conscience therein pleaseth me exceedingly. But, tell me, hast thou sinned by way of avarice, desiring more than befitted or withholding that which it behoved thee not to withhold?' 'Father mine,' replied Ciappelletto, 'I would not have you look to my being in the house of these usurers; I have nought to do here; nay, I came hither to admonish and chasten them and turn them from this their abominable way of gain; and methinketh I should have made shift to do so, had not God thus visited me. But you must know that I was left a rich man by my father, of whose good, when he was dead, I bestowed the most part in alms, and after, to sustain my life and that I might be able to succour Christ's poor, I have done my little traffickings, and in these I have desired to gain; but still with God's poor have I shared that which I gained, converting my own half to my occasion and giving them the other, and in this so well hath my Creator prospered me that my affairs have still gone from good to better.'

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I wondered how much I’d been responsible for his breakdown. The worst thing had been my inability to remember that he was weak. For an instant I would grasp he was fragile, but a second later I’d resent his intransigence, his casting me back out into the darkness. I missed Sean so much I started to fester with it. I’d lie in bed and cry it and turn in it until I’d soiled myself with it. Everything, feebly, spoke it, even the neighbor’s laundry palpitating shadows on my blinds. “Woke up this morning, blues around the bed. Sat down to eat, blues in my bread,” said the song, and I sang it. I’d played a game, pretending to fall in love, but now the game had tricked me; I was caught. I started hyperventilating, although it felt as though I was getting too little air, not too much. Pins and needles started in my hands and feet and spread upward. If the numbness reached my heart, I thought, I would die. I carried a brown paper bag and breathed into it on the subway as a way of cutting down on the amount of oxygen. My hands would jerk and fly around all on their own, and if I was in public I’d cover by pretending to pat my hair. When the weather became warm, I lay on a towel in the park in hopes of getting a tan. I basted myself in suffering. If Sean had stopped loving me, I was unlovable. My memory would wander back to his apartment, to the blue gas jets by which we’d showered, to the salad we’d eaten out of a saucepan, to our mortally young faces in the candlelit mirror—but then I’d slap myself awake as you must treat someone who’s swallowed too many sedatives. In the park on my towel I searched for something to like. If I could find one thing in the whole world to like, I could start again. I saw a cop on a horse riding toward me and I thought, looking up at this centaur, admiring the shiny flanks and gleaming leather boots, hearing now the creak of the tack, here’s something beautiful, something I can like. The cop rode up, looked down and said, “Get your shirt on, this isn’t a beach. You’re breaking the law.” Sean wrote me twice. Flat notes, and each sentence I saw as a safe compromise between several dangerous ways of saying things. The joke was that the great love of my life was a man who knew nothing about me and next to nothing about himself. Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  What I desired most was a man; desiring men was sick; therefore, to become well I must kill desire itself. “Or kill men!” O’Reilly shouted, triumphant, half rising from his chair behind the analytic couch where he usually dozed out of sight or bit his broad white mustache and fiddled with his drink. “You want to murder men! You see, old boy, you think I’m sleeping, that I’m counter-transferent, but even when I’m dozing I’m listening, putting the pieces together in the preconscious, creative part of my brain. You want to murder men by sleeping with them. The stiff cock is the torero’s sword. There’s a lot of bullfighting imagery here.” Any reference to my own penis embarrassed me; moreover, I was reluctant to explain that my penis played little or no part under the partition. I had no desire (no vulgar desire I might have said) to obtain sexual release. In my eyes, my preference for service to others over personal pleasure mitigated my corrupt desires. Annie Schroeder was also a student at my school. I gave her a ride the fifty miles back to our campus. She told me she planned to be a model. I wondered out loud if she’d photograph differently than she looked. “Do you think I’m fat?” She poured scorn into the word. “On the contrary.” “I suppose O’Reilly’s instructed you to say that. Don’t play dumb. I know he thinks I have an eating disorder. But if so, I’m not like all those little Jewish girls at school fretting over their waistlines. I have a real reason to obsess over food.” “Oh?” I had the sensation I was giving a lift to a fire. And yes, her hair was red, twisted around her head in a beehive too old for her thin young face, the face of a soldier wearing a bloody bandage. “Didn’t O’Reilly tell you?” She looked at me searchingly. I took my eyes off the slippery road to look into hers, outlined in kohl, her lips painted almost black, her face a long slice of Persian melon. “Tell me what?” I asked guiltily. My general moral discomfort was so swollen it could be lanced at any moment by anyone. The rain lashing the four- lane highway was turning to sleet. Big trucks buffeted our little Volkswagen, bison rushing past our ladybug. “I’m sure he told you about my father.” “Just that he was a character out of Dostoevsky.” “Literature has nothing comparable,” she said grimly. “Tell me about him, won’t you?” Annie told me of her father, a drunk madman who would be sober and sane a month at a time. Then he’d snap. Annie and her little brother would come home from school to their remote country house, and there Dad would be, grinning knowingly, pistol in hand. “Okay, wise guys, I found out what you’ve been cooking up.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Do you hear the typewriters? They keep that up night and day, typing up class notes, they never stop. Or do you think it’s just a tape of typing on a loop to torment me? I may be smart, but more in the sense of isn’t-that-a-smart-hat, anyway, there’s no way to fake an exam on the tort, which I persist in seeing as a soggy onion quiche—or as what you are, a cheap Southern tart who’s plumb wore out.” “But what about Annie? We can’t leave her in the hall like that.” “Why not, Miss Priss? Are you afraid she’ll tattle to Sheila?” That was William’s name for Dr. O’Reilly. “Too late. You’re already in the bitch house with Sheila, who incidentally is on her way up here now (if she doesn’t nod off first) to rescue Sam—so careless of you to hire a shrinker who’s a juicehead and goofball artist; I mean, my dear, I talked to the old fright on the blower and she was as incoherent as I get with ten inches up my bum, only she wasn’t happy about it. She got more foam on the receiver than you get on your skirt when you see a film starring Montgomery Clift, who’s not even worth soppy panties since Monty’s just a tired old fruit herself.” “O’Reilly’s coming here? My God!” and I felt the most terrible guilt. The day was brilliantly cold and sunny. William had thrown a window open, which let in the cold above the sizzling steam heater. Annie came in. Her eyes were huge, enlarged by the smudges she’d made of her mascara. Her body looked all the more emaciated in her slip, and when she started to sob I could see her poor flat belly shaking under the flimsy fabric. William and I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at her as she bent over the sink. She studied her face in a small mirror. Then she splashed cold water all over herself, which at first seemed ordinary except that she didn’t stop. She bent her head farther and farther down and her hands continued to scoop up water and fling it over her shoulders, splashing her back and the varnished floor behind her. “For chrissake, Ophelia, give us a break. Medical help is on the way in the form of bourbon and amphetamines and Big Sheila, so just hold tight. Or get tight. Here’s a bottle.” I couldn’t bear either her suffering or his vitriol. Until now I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted them to make each other happy and how sickened I was by the mess they’d—wow, maybe I’d made. I put an arm around Annie’s shoulder, dried her off, and seated her on a chair. She was surprisingly docile, but the instant I turned to find her blouse she’d risen and was pacing the room, touching everything as though she were a miser counting her possessions.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  justified and that you have done something wrong you wish to make up for. We can’t always right the wrongs we’ve caused, but we can take steps to do what is possible. Those steps will likely start with an apology. Even once you’ve removed defensiveness from the equation, apologizing can be difficult for people. It’s a really important thing to do, though, as it can help repair the damaged relationship and open the door to a meaningful resolution regarding the specific situation where you are in error. There is also the added benefit that it can help you experience less guilt over the mistake because you’re taking steps to address it. With all that in mind, here are three important steps to apologizing: First, take responsibility for what you did and make sure that is reflected in the language you use as you apologize. Saying “I’m sorry, but...” or “I’m sorry if...” doesn’t necessarily reflect a true and sincere apology. But saying, “I’m sorry I [hurt your feelings/didn’t finish that report/forgot to call you]” does acknowledge that you made a mistake and you’re taking responsibility for it. Second, make sure they know you feel remorse or sadness over what you did. Again, this can be reflected in the language you use when you apologize by saying things like, “I really regret having done this” or “I feel sad for having made you feel this way.” Third, make an attempt, or at least offer, to fix the parts you are able to fix. If you didn’t get something done at work they are counting on, help problem- solve with them to minimize the impact. If you broke their trust, tell them you will work to avoid doing that in the future. Of course, some of these situations will take time to resolve and it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect people to suddenly become less angry simply because you apologized. Forgiveness can take time and energy and even the most deep and sincere apology doesn’t undo the potential damage. Not Every Angry Person Lets You Know It Of course, not every angry person wants to communicate. As you know already, anger can be expressed in a lot of different ways and sometimes angry people

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  What I do recall was my ritual of stepping off the trolley one stop before his home to snack at a Little Tavern hamburger stand—a chain in Washington, DC, each stand with a green tiled roof, offering three burgers for twenty-five cents. That they were forbidden made them all the more delicious: it was the first traif (non-kosher food) I had ever eaten! If an adolescent like the young Irvin, in the midst of an identity crisis, were to request a professional psychiatric consultation with me today and tell me that he could not learn to read Hebrew (even though he was an excellent student) and had been expelled from his religious school (though at no other time did he have significant behavioral problems), and moreover, that he had his first non-kosher meal on his way to his Hebrew teacher, then I believe he and I would have a consultation that ran something like this: D R. Y ALOM : Irvin, all these things you’ve said about your Bar Mitzvah cause me to wonder if you may be unconsciously rebelling against your parents and your culture. You tell me you are an excellent student, always at the top of your class, and yet, at this momentous time, the very moment when you are about to take your place as a Jewish adult, you suddenly develop an idiopathic pseudo-dementia and cannot learn to read another language. I RVIN : With all due respect, Dr. Yalom, I disagree: it is entirely explicable. It is a fact that I am very bad with languages. It is a fact that I’ve never been able to learn another language and I doubt if I ever will. It is a fact that I have made all A’s in school except for B’s in Latin and C’s in German. And it is a fact, also, that I’m tone deaf and cannot carry a tune. During class singing, the music teachers pointedly ask me not to sing but to hum softly. All my friends know this and know that there is no way I could chant the melody of a Bar Mitzvah reading or learn another language. D R. Y ALOM: But, Irvin, let me remind you this is not a matter of learning a language—probably less than 5 percent of American Jewish boys understand the Hebrew text they read at their Bar Mitzvah. Your task was not to learn to speak Hebrew, nor to understand Hebrew: your only task was to learn a few sounds and read a few pages aloud. How hard can that be? It is a task that tens of thousands of thirteen-year-olds accomplish every year. And let me point out that many of them are not A students but B and C and D students. No, I repeat, this is not a case of acute focal dementia: I am certain there is a better explanation. Tell me more about your feelings about being Jewish and about your family and your culture.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  What did you do, what prompted it, how might they have interpreted it, and so on. Here are a couple of suggestions, though, to guide your thinking: Don’t Let Their Anger Make the Decision for You Sometimes, we unintentionally let another person’s emotions dictate our own feelings of culpability or guilt. We think that because the other person is mad at us, we must have done something wrong. Try to avoid thinking and feeling that way. Other people’s anger is not necessarily an indicator of our mistake. It might mean that we have made an error, but there are plenty of times when other people are simply wrong and their feelings toward us are not justified. They may have misinterpreted the situation or they may be overreacting. Frankly, they may be using their anger as a weapon and gaslighting you. You need to separate their reaction to what you did from what you actually did. Evaluate What You Did and the Impact on Them and Not Why You Did It You will sometimes hear people say, “I realize it came across as mean, but I was just trying to...” and then they fill in that blank with a justification of whatever they did. Obviously, for our own emotional wellbeing, growth, and development, that justification matters. It’s good for us to unpack the various factors that influence why we do the things we do. But from the perspective of the other person who is mad at us, what we were trying to do or why we did it doesn’t really matter that much. What matters most is what we did and the impact it had on them. What we really need to ask ourselves is “Did I treat them poorly or unfairly?” or “Did I somehow unreasonably block their goals?” Regardless of what motivated it, did my actions harm them by making them feel badly, taking away an opportunity, or slowing them down. If so, their anger is justified. Defensiveness Defensiveness is an emotional response to being (or believing you are being)

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  Even though I never saw him angry, I saw him sad and scared plenty of times. This was the other predictable part of the pattern. He would experience intense guilt, sadness, and shame after these incidents. This young guy who was such a villain to his girlfriend and her friends would be a puddle in my office, sobbing over what he had done and said.* He would tell me how much he hated all of this about himself, and that he just couldn’t seem to stop himself in the moment. One day, through sobs and tears, he said “I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want to be a tyrant. I don’t want people to be scared of me.” Nathan had grown up with a tyrant. His father was an angry person, but in a very different way than Nathan was. Nathan’s anger was largely situational. To use Allport’s terminology, it was a secondary trait . He got angry in a specific set of circumstances and it seemed to be rooted in jealousy and a desire to control his girlfriend. He was scared of losing her and that fear came out in a really awful way. Nathan’s dad, though, wanted to control everything and everyone. He was quick to snap, not just at Nathan, but at anyone he interacted with. For Nathan’s dad, the anger was a central trait. His anger was wildly unpredictable. You could essentially count on it to be two things: frequent and intense. Otherwise, Nathan had a hard time knowing when or why that anger would come up. He would encounter a situation he didn’t like and he would get angry about it. He also tended to voice that anger in a way that was really scary to Nathan. He would yell and he would swear. Sometimes at Nathan, his siblings, or Nathan’s mom, but often just at strangers. Nathan told me that he spent his entire life scared of his dad. Whenever they were together, he was worried his dad would snap – maybe at him or maybe at someone else around them. He told me that both of those things were scary to him. He hated the sound of his dad yelling, even when it wasn’t at him. He spent his life on eggshells* anxious that he would do something that made his dad angry. Worse yet, he would worry that someone around him would do something to make his dad angry. It was an odd fear for him because he knew that he couldn’t control what the people around him did, yet he spent quite a bit of time thinking about it. He would go to a restaurant with his dad and he would start to panic if it seemed like the waiter was taking too long, scared it would make his father angry. He would start to get anxious if one of his siblings was doing something that might frustrate his dad, worried his dad would yell at them.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I was here in a bed with cool sheets we were heating up, and each part of my body he stroked released some new thought in him and feeling in me. The heroics of sexual frenzy had been replaced by this voice, confiding secrets to me in the dark, lit by reflections off the deep lovely miles of snow outside. And yet the next day I didn’t phone him. And the day after I couldn’t, and the third day confirmed my silence, and I couldn’t understand why I’d betrayed Fred, betrayed myself. It seemed after all that I was just another gay man who lost interest after the deed of darkness. Maria called me from Chicago to tell me that Paul had killed himself—Paul, the painter I had so much admired when I was at Eton and who’d told me, “Someday you’ll have more freedom than you’ll want.” Maria had heard the story from Paul’s girlfriend, who’d found Maria’s phone number in Paul’s address book. Apparently Paul had moved to the Brooklyn suburb of Sheepshead Bay, where he’d rented the attic in someone’s old wooden house. He’d painted a bit but grown so despondent that he’d thrown himself off the Staten Island ferry. There was talk of organizing a memorial show of his work at the Eton museum. The friends I’d chosen seemed to be going crazy or dying or getting arrested or succumbing to drugs. The self-destruction all around me scared me. Maria cried over the phone. I knew she and I must take care of each other. Paul had once told me that art should be a consolation for life, not a reflection of its ugliness. Until now I’d seen my own writing as nothing but a polygraph test, but now the suffering I witnessed led me to reconsider my work. Since I was a Freudian, I told myself that wish fulfillment should join the repetition-compulsion as a motive for making art. According to Freud, people repeated the most painful events of their past in order to gain mastery over them—my fiction until now had seemed born out of just such an urge. But now the fresh colors of a wished-for world, a utopia in which kindness reigned, called to me. The puritan in me was afraid to falsify this vale of tears by rendering it as Happy Valley, but Lou had said truth must be sacrificed to beauty, which made Freudian sense if truth means repetition and beauty our fondest wishes in search of fulfillment. I hitchhiked the three hundred miles to Chicago and stayed with Maria. Again we set sail every night, flying the colors of art and love. Again we drank wine and played Manon Lescaut, an opera in which the jumbled text scarcely justifies the pell-mell duets and ecstatic high notes—a disparity that resembled our love, Maria’s and mine, so reticent though ardent. Half playfully, we flirted with the idea of marrying. “Would I have to change my name?” she said.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Or Mississippi.” “Then why do you keep on painting?” “I tell myself,” she said, lowering her eyes and laughing, “that I’m painting for the masses a hundred years from now. Too crazy. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’ll stop.” Maria’s political conscience struck me as admirable but superfluous, like some unusually harsh act of religious penance. I myself embraced the worm’s- eye view of the world. I thought no one would stick by me in a pinch. I owed nothing to anyone. My drive to ingratiate myself with other people was scarcely a moral urge, but rather the reverse, since I’d betray anyone or any principle to win the approval of whoever happened to be next to me at the moment. Although I had scarcely acted on my sexual impulses, I knew that if they were discovered I’d be an outcast, no matter in which society. When I repeated Maria’s socialist doctrines to the kids at my school, it was only to thrill them, to demonstrate my Christian willingness to sacrifice my comfort for the betterment of mankind. My socialist posturing was also a way of social climbing, since I always included my father among the capitalists I was determined to dethrone, whereas he was just a small entrepreneur. Not that I was selfish. I never hoarded candy or dollars or ideas; in fact I anxiously gave them away to buy off hostility or to bribe affection. Far from being indifferent to suffering, I winced so much at the sight of pain that I couldn’t sit through a horror movie. The only condition for my sympathy was proximity. Unheard trees that fell made no sound to my ears, and hoards of the starving in India made no demand, at least not on me. Yet even those people near to me I cared for in some way that was more immediate than the sentiment politics required. If I’d been a king, I would have been more likely to have cared for the sick by touching them than by building a hospital. I was neither as warm as people thought nor as cold as I feared. After an exhausting day of smiling and asking interested questions of everyone, I’d be kept awake by feelings not of hate but of unreality. I discovered that every day I looked forward to seeing Maria. She was more curious about me than was Ivan or Paul. With them I was typecast as the precocious kid. I suppose they felt sorry for me too; people who knew me then tell me that I was terribly nervous, always fidgeting and biting my nails. I had a tic, a constant bobbing of my head, that was so bad I hated to have anyone sit behind me in a movie or, worse, a play. Although I thought of myself as a sinister young man, now I realize that most people back then felt sorry for me. Not Maria. She liked my mind.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  46 The latter would include regulations involving the cult, dietary laws, purity laws and the like. The charge of formalism and externalism seems unfounded. 47 It is not necessary to discuss here Rabbinic speculation on the origin of sinful disobedience. This sort of theological speculation, like speculation concerning the nature of the world to come, lies outside the scope of the Rabbinic pattern of religion. Yet it is important to note that the Rabbis did not have a doctrine of original sin or of the essential sinfulness of each man in the Christian sense. 48 It is a matter of observation that all men sin. Men have, apparently, the inborn drive towards rebellion and disobedience. But this is not the same as being born in a state of sinfulness from which libera- tion is necessary. Sin comes only when man actually disobeys; if he were not to disobey he would not be a sinner. 49 The possibility exists that one might 44 On Makkoth 23b-24a, see Schechter, Aspects, pp. 138-40. 45 See Moore, Judaism II, p. 88. 46 See below, section 7 nn. 16o-5, and the discussion in the text. 4 ' On the view that all mitst"ol are equal, the contradictory tendency to make gradations, and the pre- dominance of ethical considerations, see Kadushin, Organic Thinking, pp. 107-10. 48 See Moore, Judaism I, pp. 474-8. For recent literature, see Brandenburger, Adam und Chmtus, pp.44f 49 On the origin of sin, see Moore, Judaism I, pp. 474-96; Schechter, Aspects, pp. 24:.-63; Mach, Der Zaddik, pp 147ff 5] Obedience and disobedience; reward and punishment not sin. Despite the tendency to disobey, man is free to obey or disobey. 50 The lack of a doctrine of original sin in the Augustinian sense is an important point to be grasped if one. is to understand Rabbinic 'soteriology' or the nature and quality of Jewish religious life. Sin as disobedience and rebellion has been so thoroughly discussed by others 51 that further discussion is not necessary. We may, however, pause to consider Rabbinic sayings which cast some light on their attitude toward guilt, for here we may gain an insight into how their religion functioned. Guilt, of course, is the concomitant of the conception of sin as disobedience. It may be psychologically f.elated to, but is different from, such other feelings of human inadequacy as shame and uncleanness.