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 Boys & Sex (2020)

  “Hilarious” makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive, rebellious rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. It also puts boys’ hearts and heads into conflict, silencing conscience: they may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—should compel them to speak up. At the same time, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of other boys’ derision. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—even when they wish they could. It blocks them from considering women’s points of view, hardens them against compassion. Psychologist Michael Thompson has pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how boys become men. Charis Denison, a youth advocate and sex educator in the Bay Area, put it another way: “At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?” The Sound of Silence Cole and his girlfriend, like most high school couples, broke up at the end of senior year. They were headed for colleges in different parts of the country, but that wasn’t the only reason. She was feeling “used” in their relationship, she said, as if Cole was only interested in spending time with her if they were having sex. “I wasn’t . . .” he started to tell me, then broke off and began again. “No guy is trying to be a user. But I can’t deny that was what was going down. I’d tell her I couldn’t hang out because I had morning crew practice, or that I had to do homework during lunch because the night before I’d watched YouTube videos instead of working. I mean, say it however you want, but I was putting YouTube videos in front of her. “When we broke up, she said, ‘You’re a really nice person, Cole, but you do a lot of things for yourself.’ And what I think she meant was: I’m not someone who wants to hurt anybody, but I also don’t care enough to go out of my way for people. She was definitely right. And she talked about my dad. . . . He always has to be the ‘good guy.’ And he is a good guy—when it doesn’t cost him much, when it’s easy. He’s good with the big gesture. And I’m kind of like that, too. But also”—Cole paused and took a deep breath—“he wasn’t a good guy to my mom. And I hope when I have a wife someday I can be more like her than like him.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  There was this one time after his junior year of high school, he said, when he hooked up with an “absolutely gorgeous” girl at camp. One thing led to another. He went down on her; she went down on him. Then they moved on to intercourse. Or, to be more accurate, Liam did. The girl didn’t say no to the act, but she also didn’t say yes. Nor did they talk about it afterward. Liam was left uneasy, concerned that she hadn’t wanted to do it. They did hook up a few more times, and each time she clearly consented to intercourse, but then she abruptly broke things off without saying why; she just stopped talking to him. At first, Liam felt victimized. “It hurt,” he said. “It sucked. And the pressure I felt as a guy was, ‘You had sex with her, so you can’t complain.’ But the truth was, she fucked me up. She made me really sad, confused, whatever. And I didn’t recognize that the fact that I took advantage of her could have been the reason why she ended things.” He tried to put the incident out of his mind, and for months he had, more or less—he went home and became busy with school and friends and college applications. But lately, the memory has been troubling him. “I did take advantage of her,” he said. “I did. And part of me is like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.’ And I regret it. But there’s also a part of me that’s confused. Because I know people who have really been taken advantage of in a forceful, aggressive manner. This seems different—I think it is different. But I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” “No One Ever Thinks They’re a Rapist”

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I can say from personal experience that to give someone an impossible task like that and then make it their fault when they fail is an excellent way to keep people under control. My journal entries from this year reflect this and are a pitiful thing to read. I was filled with the self-loathing of someone who can’t stop feeling. It’s impossible to not feel, yet I was convinced that the road to salvation lay that way and I continually chastised myself for the love I felt for Michael, the jealousy I felt toward Jessica and the monstrous discomfort and confusion I felt about the situation itself. It is painfully sad to realize in hindsight how low I was willing stoop for God. Jessica and I were both humiliated in this situation; she, because her marriage was a façade (don’t forget, she had been told over and over again that the responsibility and blame for this situation was hers – if she had loved Michael with less selfishness she would have been spared), and I, because my relationship with Michael was a secret. I felt that the underlying message from God was that I wasn’t good enough to be an actual girlfriend, just a pseudo one. And don’t think that the man in the middle of all this got off scot-free, either. Michael mentioned at several points along the way how difficult the situation was for him. No matter what he did, he upset or wounded someone he loved. If he went away for the weekend with me, Jessica was deeply hurt, of course. And if he took her to a family event, I was the one pouting. He couldn’t win. But, again and again, like a broken record, the message was repeated that we were “learning” from this experience and “getting over our ego positions” and that this was far more important than petty things like propriety or conventionality. If we were learning, then whatever kind of hell we were going through was justified. Limori could treat people as badly as she wanted because they would learn from it. I put up with a year of agony, as did Michael and Jessica, because I was learning. In several instances in my journal I confess that I wanted to give up, but didn’t, because I was learning: “This is just torture. God is torturing us. I feel like it’s too much. I can’t do it. I can’t be all benevolent and detached. I’m not capable. And yet I can’t say no to this because I’d be turning down all these lessons.” (October 19, 1997) After a year of the Mistress Period, all three of us were close to the breaking point. I felt like each and every nerve I had had been individually rubbed raw. I was almost ready to call a stop to the whole thing and break up with Michael (such an absurd phrase when the man was already married).

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Art Thou not mighty, God Almighty, so as to heal all the diseases of my soul, and by Thy more abundant grace to quench even the impure motions of my sleep! Thou wilt increase, Lord, Thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to Thee, disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence; that it rebel not against itself, and even in dreams not only not, through images of sense, commit those debasing corruptions, even to pollution of the flesh, but not even to consent unto them. For that nothing of this sort should have, over the pure affections even of a sleeper, the very least influence, not even such as a thought would restrain,—to work this, not only during life, but even at my present age, is not hard for the Almighty, Who art able to do above all that we ask or think. But what I yet am in this kind of my evil, have I confessed unto my good Lord; rejoicing with trembling, in that which Thou hast given me, and bemoaning that wherein I am still imperfect; hoping that Thou wilt perfect Thy mercies in me, even to perfect peace, which my outward and inward man shall have with Thee, when death shall be swallowed up in victory. There is another evil of the day, which I would were sufficient for it. For by eating and drinking we repair the daily decays of our body, until Thou destroy both belly and meat, when Thou shalt slay my emptiness with a wonderful fulness, and clothe this incorruptible with an eternal incorruption. But now the necessity is sweet unto me, against which sweetness I fight, that I be not taken captive; and carry on a daily war by fastings; often bringing my body into subjection; and my pains are removed by pleasure. For hunger and thirst are in a manner pains; they burn and kill like a fever, unless the medicine of nourishments come to our aid. Which since it is at hand through the consolations of Thy gifts, with which land, and water, and air serve our weakness, our calamity is termed gratification.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  This hast Thou taught me, that I should set myself to take food as physic. But while I am passing from the discomfort of emptiness to the content of replenishing, in the very passage the snare of concupiscence besets me. For that passing, is pleasure, nor is there any other way to pass thither, whither we needs must pass. And health being the cause of eating and drinking, there joineth itself as an attendant a dangerous pleasure, which mostly endeavours to go before it, so that I may for her sake do what I say I do, or wish to do, for health’s sake. Nor have each the same measure; for what is enough for health, is too little for pleasure. And oft it is uncertain, whether it be the necessary care of the body which is yet asking for sustenance, or whether a voluptuous deceivableness of greediness is proffering its services. In this uncertainty the unhappy soul rejoiceth, and therein prepares an excuse to shield itself, glad that it appeareth not what sufficeth for the moderation of health, that under the cloak of health, it may disguise the matter of gratification. These temptations I daily endeavour to resist, and I call on Thy right hand, and to Thee do I refer my perplexities; because I have as yet no settled counsel herein.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He said, gently, “But I’m going to be in rehearsal very soon, Cass, and I may be going to the Coast, and besides—” He looked over at Vivaldo with a heavy, helpless frown. “Yes, I understand that, Cass. Yes. At four. Okay. You hold on, baby, you just hold on.” He hung up. He sat for a moment, turned, staring toward the rain, then lowered his gaze to Vivaldo with a small smile, both sad and proud. He looked at his watch again, put out his cigarette, and lay back, staring at the ceiling, his head resting on his arms. “Well. Guess what. The shit has hit the fan. Cass got in late last night and she and Richard had a fight—about us. Richard knows about us.” Vivaldo whistled, his eyes very big. “I knew you shouldn’t have answered that phone. What a mess. Is Richard on his way down here with a shotgun? and how did he find out?” Eric looked strangely guilty, then he said, “Oh, Cass wasn’t at her most coherent, I don’t really know. Anyway, how he found out hardly matters now, since he has .” He sat up. “Apparently, he has been suspicious—but he was suspicious of you—— ” “Of me? He must be crazy!” “Well, Cass kept coming to see you all the time, that’s what she told him, anyway—” “And what did he think Ida was doing while Cass and I were screwing? Reading us bedtime stories?” Again, Eric looked uncomfortable, but he laughed. “I don’t know what he thought. Anyway, Cass says that he’s very bitter against you because”—he faltered for a moment and looked down—“because you knew about the affair and you’re supposed to be his friend and you didn’t tell him.” He watched Vivaldo. “Do you think you should have told him?” Vivaldo put out his cigarette. “What a wild idea. I’m nobody’s goddam Boy Scout. Besides, you and Cass are my friends, not Richard. ” “Well, he didn’t know that; you’ve known him much longer than you’ve known me, and—Richard doesn’t really like me very much—so he’d naturally expect you to be loyal to him.” Vivaldo sighed. “There’s a hell of a lot that Richard doesn’t know and that’s too bad but it’s not my fault. And he’s being dishonest. He knows that we haven’t really been friends for a long time. And I won’t be made to feel guilty.” Then he grinned. “I’ve got enough to feel guilty about.” “ Do you feel guilty?” They stared at each other for a moment. Vivaldo laughed. “That wasn’t what I had in mind. But, no, I don’t feel guilty and I hope to God that I never feel guilty again. It’s a monstrous waste of time.” Eric looked down. “Yes, Cass says that Richard may try to see you today.” “Sounds just like him.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Before he got involved with this project, Hancock had worked in the area of “business intelligence,” helping clients customize Microsoft software to extract useful information from large datasets. He had the right skill set to work on CETS, but he didn’t at first think he had the temperament. “They came to me and said, hey, we have this great new project we’d like you to volunteer for; it’s about helping Toronto Police with child pornography. I thought for fourteen seconds and said, ‘Thank you, no.’ “I could not imagine myself going in to help these people if I had to deal with the daily subject matter that they deal with,” Hancock said. “But I went home and I thought about it some more and I talked to my wife. Over a week I came to realize that this was a chance to do something important. Any tiny little thing that you can do to help these guys makes you feel like you are actually having a significant impact on the world.” This is why I had approached Hancock for an interview. I wanted to know how it felt to be one of the people who turned the technology back on the criminals—who used the Internet to fight crime rather than perpetrate it. When I spoke to him by phone, he said that the hurdles he had to overcome were at least as much about police culture as they were about technology. Many police forces had a well-established culture of jurisdictional independence—nobody liked having another police force (or the FBI) horning in on a big case. Images of child pornography changed that culture, though they did so by perverting one of the common influences of conventional pornography. With media from cable television to BBSs, pornography was the compelling product, the “killer content” that drew in early adopters and made them master the new technology. Child pornography images were the opposite: they were so heinous and repellent that police forces all over the world were driven to transcend their territorial instincts, and to cooperate and share information on a deeper level than they ever had before. “Pedophiles have always had this culture of adopting brand-new technologies,” Hancock said. “They would cross all boundaries to do what they do, whereas police officers have always had a jurisdictional approach. These jurisdictional conflicts, they happen all the time. The only difference in this area is that all of the police officers who are doing the work are sitting there staring at images of babies being abused. So this area, like no other, lets them overcome those legacies. We could never have built the Child Exploitation Tracking System if it was going to be used for conventional policing because there would not have been the incentive for people to overcome the cultural barriers. It’s only because it is this particular topic that we managed to get the results that we did.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Chapter 8A Better ManThroughout this book, I have told you about boys. I have written about their understanding of themselves as men and as sexual beings: about their insecurities, their hopes, their occasional breakthroughs, and their flaws. I have described the harm they have caused others, whether out of thoughtlessness, recklessness, indifference, ignorance, or malicious intent. Sometimes harm had been done to them as well. And through it all I have wondered: How can we raise boys to be better men? How can we ensure that they see women and girls as full human beings worthy of dignity, empathy, and value in intimate encounters? How can we reduce sexual violence, and, when it does happen, how can we create appropriate accountability? What do we do with boys like Liam in chapter six, who was afraid that admitting to possible sexual misconduct would make him a pariah? Or Jackson, a high school senior who, while drunk, sent pictures to his friends of a girl giving him a blow job? When the incident went public, his female classmates shunned him, folding their arms when he crossed the stage at graduation and banishing him from the year’s final party. He ended up feeling aggrieved, like he was the victim. Or Trent, a junior at a West Coast college, who was banned from parties after being anonymously placed on a list of alleged campus assailants? He left school for a semester (without telling his parents why) to commit himself to reading books on feminism, sexuality, and sexual violence; an accomplished musician, he also decided to give up performing to “make more space” for women and other underrepresented groups. Despite all that, he faced hostility on returning to campus and more than once contemplated suicide. And what about Darren, a fraternity brother and a junior, also at a West Coast college, who “stealthed” a freshman girl, secretly removing his condom during intercourse and ejaculating inside of her? The lack of basic sexual ethics revealed by the cascade of #MeToo allegations is clearly well established at younger ages, and, just as in the adult world, colleges (and high schools) have struggled with how to address it: survivors of assault can feel invalidated by school bureaucracy; perpetrators might be punished yet remain resentful, never truly acknowledging the hurt they caused.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Another more pertinent question might be, If I think that it is wrong to steal a dollar bill from an open cash register, and if I feel guilty about stealing two fresh shrimp from a hotel restaurant, why don’t I have qualms about hugging an otherwise engaged glove saleswoman at Filene’s? She doesn’t know me; she doesn’t know that I’m hugging her and mock-proposing to her. Do I really think I have the right to hike Joyce’s wool dress up around her hips and tie a knot in it? How can I be sure that she would want me to have my fingers in her pubic hair? The question of my wrongdoing is a fair one, but I’m going to table it for the time being and instead sketch in a few more of my early Fold experiences—not because they will explain anything, but because when I try to imagine defending my actions verbally I find that they are indefensible, and I don’t want to know that. I honestly do not feel as if I have done anything wrong. I have never deliberately caused anyone anguish. In fact I have with the Fold’s help saved a few women from small embarrassments, adjusting the occasional awry slip before an important sales meeting and pushing a vagrant underwire in a bra back in place, that kind of thing. I mean well. But I know that meaning well is not any kind of satisfactory defense. I first stopped time because I liked my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Dobzhansky, and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on. She might not seem beautiful to me now, but I certainly thought she was beautiful then. Everyone did. She had shorter hair than was usual for elementary-school teachers in 1967, and she was an enthusiast of stop-sign-red lipstick—she must have worn down a stick every fortnight, so full were her lips. She also had one of those wide soft tongues that just naturally like to rest a little way out of the doorstep of the mouth, beyond the teeth. (Not that it lolled!) She always smiled with her mouth open. She wore long, droopy, soft-looking navy-blue cardigan sweaters over sleeveless dresses. I listened to her with great attention as she described the system of locks on a nineteenth-century canal and the Indian technique of manufacturing a dugout canoe. In sharp contrast to Mrs. Blakey, my talented and demanding third-grade teacher, whose loose arm-flesh flapped around in chaotic rhythms as she wrote on the board, Miss Dobzhansky’s chalkboard arm was revealed to be fine and firm, gracefully fitted at the shoulder with a flame-shaped muscle, when in the afternoons she removed her sweater and draped it over the back of her chair.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I said, “I’m tired of having this big secret life and not being able to tell anyone.” And suddenly I did feel enormously tired of it. I felt as if I was going to get slightly weepy, but fortunately I didn’t. “I like you and I just want to tell you. I’ve written about it in the memoiry thing that I’ve been working on, and though I haven’t shown that to anyone, having done that, gone public on the page, I seem able to accept more easily the fact that people will know. It feels inevitable now, though of course it isn’t. It’s the next step. Also, I’ve used the Fold to do things that might make you uncomfortable, if you knew about them, and if they are going to make you uncomfortable, I’d rather that happened now and not later.” “The Told’?” I went into the terminology in some detail. We ordered. I told her about the equation with the garment-care symbols, and about colliding with the parking meter and stealing two shrimp. I gave her a bowdlerized account of my experience in the electromagnet. Finally I worked up the nerve to mention that at selected times in the past I had used the Fold to take off women’s clothes without their knowledge. “Ah—now I see where we’re going,” Joyce said. “That’s not so good. That is not so hot.” “I know, I know, I know, I know,” I said, shaking my head. “But when I’m doing it it doesn’t seem bad. It seems wonderful, good, positive—it seems like the most constructive thing I could possibly be doing. I just don’t understand why it should be so bad and wrong for me to take a woman’s clothes off, as long as she doesn’t know about it. I mean really, what’s the big deal?” “How much of their clothing do you take off?” She sipped some wine, looking at me intently. Her eyes were the color of peat moss; her pupils were dilated. “Oh, it depends,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t take any off, sometimes I go down to the bra, sometimes I do go a touch further.” “You’ve never told anyone about this practice of yours?” “Not directly. I’ve come close several times, but no.” She touched her mouth with her napkin. Then she narrowed her eyes. “But now you’ve decided to tell me. And you know why? I know why. You’re telling me because you took my clothes off, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” “Yes.” She let her hand fall to the table. Now she looked sad—sad rather than shocked. “I can’t believe you did that.” To draw her attention away from her disappointment in me, I asked, “You mean you can’t believe that I am telling the truth, or you can’t believe that I would do something that rude and crude?”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  A Fold then can deepen infinitely—since in a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again, pets will not be given enough water, feelings will be needlessly hurt, killings, crashes, miscarriages of justice, bureaucratic harassment, infidelity, artistic disappointments, and worse will all go forward, and you begin to think that you will be in a sense their cause, you will be directly responsible for them, since you have a choice whether to let them happen, by opting to restart time or not. When I am in a Fold, I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or feeling betrayed, and since I want above all for women not to cry, I can begin to believe, irrationally, that it is my duty to live out my entire life in this artificial solitude, eating canned foods. “He died suddenly,” they would say on discovering my abruptly aged body. But when I died, all the misery-in-progress that I had so heroically held at bay for forty-odd years would resume anyway. I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts should in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep and pained. I should mention here, though, under the heading of nonsexual uses of the Fermata, one of my least attractive episodes. Three black kids, age eighteen or so, stopped me one afternoon and asked which way the Boston Common was, and when I put on my usual “Yes, I’d be delighted to help you find your way, and I will of course be discreet about your sketchy knowledge of this area of the city, and when you walk away you will be cheered by the conviction that you did the right thing asking me and not those other, less amiable people for directions” face, one of the kids placed a gun to my jaw (this was near the medical center downtown), and asked me to give him my wallet and watch. I timed out by pushing on the lead-advance button of my mechanical pencil (in my back pocket), and took the gun out of play. I was trembling, outraged that these kids would feel entitled to my wallet and watch and were willing to threaten me with death to get them. I was put in mind of the old jokey way of teaching genuflection: “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.” So I got some wire from the back of a New England Telephone truck that was parked nearby and tied all three of them by the balls to a nearby stop sign.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Most sex research is touched by a slight whiff of erotophobia, written dryly and pedantically, tainted by what Kenneth Tynan once called the “whiff of evasiveness.” When literary critics do deign to discuss sex, they pinch their prose up into tight knots, lest anyone think they were aroused by their subject. Unlike, say, particle physics or eighteenth-century landscape styles, the erotic as a study causes its students to repress and contain their enthusiasm. They must be careful not to wax too pleased. A surprising amount of intellectual material on sex discusses the subject as though it were a form of garbage, interesting in an anthropological way for all it says about the culture that makes it, but unpalatable nonetheless. Over the years I’ve read a lot of the research and I’ve read theory and I’ve read plenty of mannerly and overblown literary prose on the subject, but what I really longed for all along was material that addressed the real experience of sex. My own study has never been an intellectual exercise even when I wanted it to be, even when I knew exactly why so many scholars write as though they have never had a sexual thought. Sex has always been, and remains, intensely emotional and socially powerful for me. Studying it was part of my reconciliation with a large and demanding aspect of my life. The most important part of that reconciliation is understanding just how individualistic sex is. I see how much pain people can feel around the subject of sex, how injured and afraid of sex a lot of people are—how injured I am in certain ways. I can see why people sometimes want so much to avoid the topic, why other people seem unable to avoid it. Either way, sex counts. This book, even when it’s about other people’s fantasies and other people’s myths, is largely about me. It has to be. These are my concerns, my interests, my own little fetishes, as it were. This behavior that is so much a part of our community and personal relations is very much a behavior of the single, lone self. All I’ve read of sex in history, in anthropology, in religion, in other people’s lives, I’ve read more for my own reassurance, to assuage my own guilt and clear up my confusion than for anything else. And I’ve been reassured.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Gradually I began to wonder why every other element of my life felt acceptable within sexual fantasy except the element of oppression and power. Every time I fall asleep, my dreams fill with the details of the day, with a name or a bit of news, a place I’d been, a person I’d seen, with waves if I’ve been to the beach and fruit if I’ve baked pies. And every single day of my life I see power, control, oppression, suppression, repression, sexism, anger, hunger, thwarted desire, loss of control, wrestling over control. Should sexual fantasies somehow be bound so tightly none of our daily experience intrudes? What kind of psychic fence must I build to keep often-contradictory feelings about the cultural dance I do outside my sexual imagination? I know now that it’s impossible, that only by gagging and binding my own imagination could I stop imagining a gag now and then. Women suffer twin guilts: Not so long ago, we were punished for feeling or imagining unbridled desire; now we punish ourselves for imagining submission. Is only some bloodless moderation to be allowed? And how am I to account for the millions of men who close their eyes and dream of being gagged and bound themselves? “O wondered why there was so much sweetness mingled with her terror. Or why she found her terror so delicious.” Read The Story of O as an example of how pornography tries to teach women to submit to men and love their abuse. Read The Story of 0, written by a woman, as a revolutionary document of sexual surrender. (Or just read it as a masterpiece of bondage porn.) O is the cipher, the orifice; she shows her lovers, and her readers, the empty door of herself, her own emptiness, her gradual surrender and release, her submission to internal forces. The book is a tragedy, an intersection of unbidden fantasies and the real world. I used to hide my copy in a box in the back of my closet; I didn’t want anyone to know I’d read the book, let alone that my copy was fairly well thumbed. Then I realized how ironic that was—hiding O’s story the way O hides her chains. I reached a point where I could laugh about a fantasy I had, without embarrassment, laugh at its silliness, its obviousness, and its ability to arouse me no matter what—and that’s when the guilt, not the fantasy, disappeared. And the result of that was the fantasies began to diminish. Their power over my conscious mind seemed to exist in direct proportion to my resistance. They will be there, and comfortably so, as long as I don’t waste a lot of time trying to excise them.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Oh, but you are my life—you and the children. What would I do, what would I be, without you? I’m just as self-centered as anybody else. Can’t you see that?” He grinned and rubbed his hand roughly over her head. “No. And I’m not going to argue about it any more.” But, after a moment, he persisted. “I didn’t love Rufus, not the way you did, the way all of you did. I couldn’t help feeling, anyway, that one of the reasons all of you made such a kind of—fuss—over him was partly just because he was colored. Which is a hell of a reason to love anybody. I just had to look on him as another guy. And I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Leona. You once said you couldn’t, either.” “I’ve had to think about it since then. I’ve thought about it since then.” “And what have you thought? You find a way to justify it?” “No. I wasn’t trying to justify it. It can’t be justified. But now I think—oh, I just don’t know enough to be able to judge him. He must—he must have been in great pain. He must have loved her.” She turned to him, searching his face. “I’m sure he loved her.” “Some love,” he said. “Richard,” she said, “you and I have hurt each other—many times. Sometimes we didn’t mean to and sometimes we did. And wasn’t it because—just because—we loved—love—each other?” He looked at her oddly, head to one side. “Cass,” he said, “how can you compare it? We’ve never tried to destroy each other—have we?” They watched each other. She said nothing. “I’ve never tried to destroy you. Have you ever tried to destroy me?” She thought of his face as it had been when they met; and watched it now. She thought of all they had discovered together and meant to each other, and of how many small lies had gone into the making of their one, particular truth: this love, which bound them to one another. She had said No, many times, to many things, when she knew she might have said Yes, because of Richard; believed many things, because of Richard, which she was not sure she really believed. He had been absolutely necessary to her—or so she had believed; it came to the same thing—and so she had attached herself to him and her life had taken shape around him. She did not regret this for herself. I want him, something in her had said, years ago. And she had bound him to her; he had been her salvation; and here he was. She did not regret it for herself and yet she began to wonder if there were not something in it to be regretted, something she had done to Richard which Richard did not see. “No,” she said, faintly. And then, irrepressibly, “But I wouldn’t have had to try.” “What do you mean by that?”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When I was writing on the poet James Schuyler in graduate school, my adviser noted in passing that I seemed oddly compelled by the idea of Schuyler’s flaccidity. His comments on this account made me feel guilty, as if he thought I were trying to neuter or castrate Schuyler, a closet Solanas. I wasn’t, at least not consciously. I just liked the way that Schuyler seemed to be performing, especially in his long poems, a drive to speech or creation not synonymous with desire in any typical sublimated-lust kind of a way. He had a cruising eye, to be sure (here he is in a grocery store: “I grabbed / a cart, went wheeling / up and down the aisles trying to get a front view of / him and see how he was / Hung and what his face was like”). But his poetics struck me as refreshingly without a will to power, or even a will to perversity. They feel triumphantly wilted, like so many of the flowers Schuyler paid tribute to. This wiltedness may have had, in part, a chemical root. As Schuyler writes in “The Morning of the Poem”: “Remember what / The doctor said: I am: remembering and staying / off [the sauce]: mostly it’s not / So hard (indeed): did you know a side effect of / Antabuse can be to make / You impotent? Not that I need much help in that / department these days.” The climactic expulsion at the poem’s end is not come, but urine. Recalling a night long ago, drunk on Pernod in Paris, Schuyler writes: “I made it: there I was, confronting a urinal: I / inched down my zipper and put my right hand into / The opening: hideous trauma, there was just no way I could / transfer my swollen tool from hand to hand without a great / Gushing forth (inside my pants), like when Moses hit the rock: so / I did it: there was piss all over Paris, not to mention my shirt and pants, light sun tans.” “The Morning of the Poem” takes place, as do many of Schuyler’s poems, against the backdrop of his mother’s home in East Aurora, New York. As he moves in and out of memory and anecdote, his mother shuffles around the house, plays the radio all night, leaves out the dishes just so, watches her TV programs, jokes about the size of a skunk in the trash, and bickers with Schuyler about his desire to leave the windows open to the rain (“‘I’m the one who will have to clean it up,’” she snarls, the maternal refrain). Schuyler’s other great epic poem, “A Few Days,” finishes his mother’s story, ending with the lines: “Margaret Daisy Connor Schuyler Ridenour, / rest well, / the weary journey done.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “But I wasn’t,” I snapped, stung momentarily out of my frozen calm. “I didn’t know that I was going to take the wretched pills. It was like the other times. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed. “And I have been telling you how bad I’ve been feeling,” I went on, hopelessly. “I’ve told you again and again.” “But don’t you see that this is another evasive tactic?” Dr. Piet shook his head. “We’re going to have to work really hard now on the underlying causes of all this.” My heart sank. “But you do need a bit of a rest, I think,” Dr. Piet continued more kindly. “You’re going to need looking after. The hospital will let you out tomorrow. Where do you intend to go?” “I can’t go back to the Harts’,” I said. This was one aspect of the whole debacle that I could not contemplate with equanimity. They had been so kind, and how had I repaid them? “No.” I waved away Dr. Piet’s next question. “I can’t ask them; it would put them in an intolerable position! How could they decently say no?” We ran through my options. My parents were away on holiday, and I did not want them to know about any of this. I could not bear to think of their distress if they realized how bad things were. And whatever Dr. Piet thought, this was not their fault. If they had had their way I would never have set foot in the convent. Nobody had forced me into the religious life; nobody had compelled me to stay there for so long. I had been responsible for the damage of my own mind. “Well, you can’t live by yourself,” Dr. Piet said testily. “We’ll have to keep an eye on you now.” The only alternative that I could come up with was Cherwell Edge. The nuns there had made a few wan overtures to me, implying that if I needed anything, I had only to ask. It was by no means an ideal solution, and I could see that Dr. Piet was not entirely happy about it, but it was better than being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which was the only other option. So we left it that I would ring the nuns and ask if I might stay in the convent for a while. It would at least be familiar, and a holiday from the endless struggle of trying to fit into secular life. And perhaps a little rest was all that I needed.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  That was the big moment of the evening. We ignored each other from then on. Just after she asked for her check, she walked past me to the bathroom. I whisked out my mechanical pencil and restored the complete Inequality on my placemat and used the Fold’s ideal privacy to count the number of tampons in her purse. There were five. I erased time back on and let her use the bathroom. When she emerged, I Dropped again and counted tampons: there were now four. Since I have had miserable luck befriending women at the height of their periods, I didn’t try to say hello to her then. Instead, on my calendar I marked a day two weeks later, when she was likely to be at or near ovulation, and on that day I staked out her address on Marlborough Street after work. She got home around six-thirty. Half an hour later she reappeared in jeans. I followed her discreetly to the Harvard Book Store Café on Newbury. Just before she went into the store, I completed the Inequality on a pad of paper and slipped in ahead of her. I crouched in one of the aisles, near the Mrs. Humphry Wards, and erased my way into time. (I didn’t want to seem to have materialized out of thin air to anyone in the store.) I stood up, holding a random book; I put the book away; and then I pulled a Virago paperback off the shelf. I heard someone step into the fiction aisle, and I was almost sure that it was Rhody, and it was. I turned and regarded her blankly, innocently, and then went through a pleased frown of recognition. She returned the favor. (Naturally I was holding the book in such a way that my watch was plainly visible.) I will skip the “Weren’t you at the Thai Star a few weeks ago?” exchange that followed, since there was nothing newsworthy in it—I will just observe that, despite my having produced and directed the entire coincidence, I was as overjoyed and nervous and relieved when she started talking away about the subdued greatness of Mrs. Humphry Ward as if I really had fortuitously run into her. “You know what really interested me about you?” she said several weeks later, after we had been on a harbor cruise and had had lunch twice. “You may not remember this, but while you were reading that time at Thai Star, you took your watch off and put it just above your book.” “So you were watching me!” I said. “I was very aware of you.” “Yes, I was watching you. You took your watch off, and you seemed to luxuriate in every tiny step of the process. I’ve always liked the sight of a man taking off his watch. It doesn’t need to be an expensive watch, though I prefer leather to metal bands.” She lowered her voice. “I like the rubbing of the wrist afterward.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He turned his pale, troubled face toward her but she felt that he was staring at the high, hard wall which stood between himself and his past. “I don’t just mean that I used to spend a lot of time in Harlem,” and he looked away, nervously, “I was hardly ever there in the daytime anyway. I mean, there were the same kids on the block that used to be on my block—they were colored but they were the same, really the same—and, hell, the hallways have the same stink, and everybody’s, well, trying to make it but they know they haven’t got much of a chance. The same old women, the same old men—maybe they’re a little bit more alive—and I walked into that house and they were just sitting there, Ida and her mother and her father, and there were some other people there, relatives, maybe, and friends. I don’t know, no one really spoke to me except Ida and she didn’t say much. And they all looked at me as though—well, as though I had done it—and, oh, I wanted so bad to take that girl in my arms and kiss that look off her face and make her know that I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it, whoever was doing it was doing it to me, too.” He was crying, silently, and he bent forward, hiding his face with one long hand. “I know I failed him, but I loved him, too, and nobody there wanted to know that. I kept thinking, They’re colored and I’m white but the same things have happened, really the same things, and how can I make them know that?” “But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here”—and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look—“happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.” And, after a moment, she dared to add, “You’ll be kissing a long time, my friend, before you kiss any of this away.” He looked out of the window, drying his eyes. They had come out on Lenox Avenue, though their destination was on Seventh; and nothing they passed was unfamiliar because everything they passed was wretched. It was not hard to imagine that horse carriages had once paraded proudly up this wide avenue and ladies and gentlemen, ribboned, be-flowered, brocaded, plumed, had stepped down from their carriages to enter these houses which time and folly had so blasted and darkened. The cornices had once been new, had once gleamed as brightly as now they sulked in shame, all tarnished and despised. The windows had not always been blind.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  But who am I kidding? This book may already be doing wrong. I’ve heard many people speak with pity about children whose parents wrote about them when they were young. Perhaps the stories of Iggy’s origins are not mine alone, and thus not mine alone to tell. Perhaps my temporal proximity to his infancy has led me into a false sense of ownership over his life and body, a sense that is already fading, now that he weighs two pounds more than the heaviest baby ever born, and I no longer have the visceral sense, when beholding him, that he ever could have emerged from me. The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much? What is good is always being destroyed: one of Winnicott’s main axioms. I considered writing Iggy a letter before he was born, but while I talked to him a lot in utero, I stalled out when it came to writing anything down. Writing to him felt akin to giving him a name: an act of love, surely, but also one of irrevocable classification, interpellation. (Perhaps this is why Iggy is named Iggy: if territorialization is inevitable, why not perform it with a little irreverence? “Iggy: Not a good choice unless you’re planning for a rock star or the class clown,” one baby names website warned.) The baby wasn’t separate from me, so what use would it be to write to him as if he were off at sea? No need to rehash Linda Hamilton in the final scenes of The Terminator, recording an audiotape for her unborn son, the future leader of the human resistance, before she sets off toward Mexico in her beater jeep, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. If you want an original relation to the mother/son dyad, you must turn (however sadly!) away from the seduction of messianic fantasy. And if your baby boy is going to be white, you must become curious about what will happen if you raise him as just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any other. This is a deflation, but not a dismissal. It is also a new possibility.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Some of the boys I met were aware that they’d crossed lines, but, especially when their actions fell short of forcible rape, they weren’t sure how to address it. Reza, the sophomore at a Boston college I spoke with in chapter two, counted nine high school hookups in which he’d found himself in what he described as “a gray area.” One time, he recalled, a girl at a party told him she’d taken a prescription drug that made her woozy, but he chose to ignore that. “It was just in one ear and out the other. I didn’t think about it at all,” he said. He ended up touching her breast under a blanket. “She was like, ‘Yes! Yes!’ But when she got up, she couldn’t stand straight. And I was like, ‘Shit.’” When he texted her the next day to apologize, she didn’t remember the encounter and told him not to tell her what had happened. “I felt awful,” he said. “I still do. But you’re trying to work it out: How aggressive is too aggressive? How much is too much? What counts as okay? My parents always told [me], ‘Respect women!’ But that’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.” Sometimes, listening to guys like Reza, I found myself privately dismissing their transgressions as no big deal. Because in some ways they weren’t: they were the classic teenage fumbling of someone trying to learn the rules. But what if that learning curve comes at girls’ expense? Maybe, as a woman myself, my standards were warped by my own inevitable experiences of violation. I’m not talking about rape, but the years of catcalling or being groped on the subway or swatting men’s hands away at a party or staying “safe” on a date. Those were not “microaggressions”: they were actual aggression, the kind to which one becomes more or less inured. Looking back, I feel lucky that I didn’t endure worse. So perhaps that leads me to reflexively dismiss or excuse misconduct up to a certain threshold, though I couldn’t tell you what that threshold is or how it compares to someone else’s. I still wouldn’t want Reza punished, at least based on his accounts of what happened, but I’m glad he’s reflecting on his behavior and, hopefully, growing as a result.