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 Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The thing about the extension cord is I was pretty sure I had one in the basement, in a box with some other cords, but if I looked I might have found it, and then I would not have been able to go to Home Depot. What we needed was a new extension cord, the latest technology, I thought to myself. I put my boots on very quickly. The good voice, the frugal voice, the Penny voice started inside my head: Don, please, there are children who could use this money for Christmas presents. It’s August, I said out loud. What about environmental movements, Good Voice said, what about the rain forests that could hold a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS. Tree hugger, I said to Good Voice while putting on my motorcycle helmet. You have a problem, Good Voice said. You’re a pansy, I said back. You’re irresponsible! Good Voice shouted. Shut your gaping pie hole, I yelled back. The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know. There are people who get addicted to buying new stuff. Things. Piles and piles of things. But the new things become old things so quickly. We need new things to replace the old things. I like things with buttons. [image "9780785263708_0205_003" file=Image00079.jpg] A writer I like named Ravi Zacharias says that the heart desires wonder and magic. He says technology is what man uses to supplant the desire for wonder. Ravi Zacharias says that what the heart is really longing to do is worship, to stand in awe of a God we don’t understand and can’t explain. I started thinking about what Penny was saying and what Ravi Zacharias says. I was riding my motorcycle down to Home Depot, wondering if Penny and Ravi would make good friends, when I decided I was being stupid, very wasteful and stupid. I knew we had an extension cord in the basement, and I knew I was really going to Home Depot to get some drill bits or a laser level or one of those tap lights, and that I wasn’t going to get an extension chord but something else, something I would find when I got there, something that would call to me from its shelf. At the time I didn’t have very much money, and the money I had I needed to learn to use wisely. Money does not belong to me, Rick once told me. Money is God’s. He trusts us to dish it out fairly and with a strong degree of charity. I heard an interview with Bill Gates, and the interviewer asked him if he knew how rich he was, if he could really get his mind around it. He said he couldn’t. The only way I can understand it, he said, is that there is nothing I can’t buy.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It was loud in front, because the little girl was cheering, and Ida joined in with her peculiarly deep, good-natured whinnying. In the middle all three were silent, for Gerda had again become nervously despondent because of the dust, and both the old Consul and her son were deep in thought. It was quiet in the back too... but only apparently, as Tony and the guest from Bavaria were talking in a hushed, intimate manner. - What were they talking about? From Mr Grünlich... Herr Permaneder had made the apt remark that Erika "fei" was far too kind and pretty a child, but that she hardly resembled Frau Mama at all; to which Tony had replied: 'She's quite the father, and one can say: not to her detriment, for outwardly Grünlich was a gentleman - all that is true! So he had gold colored favourites; completely original; I never saw anything like it again..." And then, although Tony had already told him the story of their marriage in detail at Niederpaurs in Munich, he inquired about everything again and in detail and with an anxious, sympathetic blink, asked all the details about the bankruptcy... 'He was a bad man, Herr Permaneder, otherwise Father wouldn't have taken me away from him, believe me. Not all people on earth always have a good heart, life has taught me that, you know, as young as I am for a person who's been a widow for ten years or something like that. He was evil, and Kesselmeyer, his banker, who was as silly as a puppy, was even more evil. But that's not to say I consider myself an angel and blameless...don't get me wrong! Grünlich neglected me, and when he was sitting with me, he read the newspaper, and he deceived me and kept leaving me in Eimsbüttel because I could have found out about the morass in the city, he was in it... But I'm also just a weak woman and I have my flaws and I certainly didn't always do my job properly. For example, by recklessness and extravagance and new dressing gowns I gave my husband cause for concern and lamentation... But one thing I may add: I have an excuse, and that is that I was a child when I married, a goose I was, a stupid thing. For example, do you think that, a short time before my engagement, I would have known that four years earlier the federal laws governing the universities and the press had been renewed? Beautiful laws, by the way!... Oh, yes, it really is so very sad that you only live once, Herr Permaneder, that you can't start life again; one would handle many things more skilfully..." For example, by recklessness and extravagance and new dressing gowns I gave my husband cause for concern and lamentation...

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I was shell-shocked. This is how the bomb fell: For my mother that year I had purchased a shabby Christmas gift—a book, the contents of which she would never be interested in. I had had a sum of money with which to buy presents, and the majority of it I used to buy fishing equipment, as Roy and I had started fishing in the creek behind Wal-Mart. My extended family opens gifts on Christmas Eve, leaving the immediate family to open gifts the next morning, and so in my room that night were wonderful presents—toys, games, candy, and clothes—and as I lay in bed I counted and categorized them in the moonlight, the battery-operated toys of greatest importance, the underwear of no consequence at all. So in the moonlight I drifted in and out of anxious sleep, and this is when it occurred to me that the gift I had purchased for my mother was bought with the petty change left after I had pleased myself. I realized I had set the happiness of my mother beyond my own material desires. This was a different sort of guilt from anything I had previously experienced. It was a heavy guilt, not the sort of guilt that I could do anything about. It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can’t explain, bad and terrible things. The guilt was so heavy that I fell out of bed onto my knees and begged, not a slot-machine God, but a living, feeling God, to stop the pain. I crawled out of my room and into the hallway by my mother’s door and lay on my elbows and face for an hour or so, going sometimes into sleep, before finally the burden lifted and I was able to return to my room. We opened the rest of our gifts the next morning, and I was pleased to receive what I did, but when my mother opened her silly book, I asked her forgiveness, saying how much I wished I had done more. She, of course, pretended to enjoy the gift, saying how she wanted to know about the subject. I was still feeling terrible that evening when the family gathered for dinner around a table so full of food a kingdom could feast. I sat low in my chair, eye-level with the bowls of potatoes and corn, having my hair straightened by ten talking women, all happy the holiday had come to a close. And while they ate and talked and chatted away another Christmas, I felt ashamed and wondered silently whether they knew they were eating with Hitler. 2 Problems What I Learned on Television SOME PEOPLE SKIP THROUGH LIFE ; SOME PEOPLE are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder whether we are moving through time or time is moving through us.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  That night in bed, my mind played the images over as a movie, and I felt the nervous energy of a river furling through my lower intestines, ebbing in tides against the gray matter of my mind, delivering me into a sort of ecstasy from which I felt I would never return. This new information seemed to give grass its green and sky its blue and now, before I had requested a reason to live, one had been delivered: naked women. All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and wrong in the universe. And it wasn’t only sexual sin that brought about feelings of guilt, it was lies and mean thoughts and throwing rocks at cars with Roy. My life had become something to hide; there were secrets in it. My thoughts were private thoughts, my lies were barriers that protected my thoughts, my sharp tongue a weapon to protect the ugly me. I would lock myself in my room, isolating myself from my sister and my mother, not often to do any sort of sinning, but simply because I had become a creature of odd secrecy. This is where my early ideas about religion came into play. The ideas I learned in Sunday school, the ideas about sin and how we shouldn’t sin, kept bugging me. I felt as though I needed to redeem myself, the way a kid feels when he finally decides to clean his room. My carnal thinking had made a mess of my head, and I felt as though I were standing in the doorway of my mind, wondering where to begin, how to organize my thoughts so they weren’t so out of control. That’s when I realized that religion might be able to hose things down, get me back to normal so I could have fun without feeling guilty or something. I just didn’t want to have to think about this guilt crap anymore. For me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and God. I could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual Being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing. To me, God was more of an idea. It was something like a slot machine, a set of spinning images that doled out rewards based on behavior and, perhaps, chance.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  knowing that sin forges opportunity. She gave herself up wholly to the divine service, shunning all parties of pleasure, and everything worldly, insomuch that she made it a matter of conscience to be present at a wed- ding, or to hear the organ played in church. When her son was seven years old, she chose a man of holy life as his preceptor, to bring him up in piety and sanctity. But when he was between fourteen and fifteen, nature, who is a very mysterious schoolmaster, finding him well grown and idle, taught him a very different lesson from any he had learned from his preceptor ; for under that new in- struction he began to look upon and desire such things as seemed to him fair and among others a demoiselle who slept in his mother's room. No one had the least suspicion of this, for he was regarded as a child, and nothing was ever heard in the house but goodly dis- course. The young gallant having begun secretly to solicit this girl, she went and told her mistress. The mother loved her son so much, that she believed this to be a story told to get him into disgrace ; but the girl repeated her complaints so often that her mistress at last said she would find out the truth of the matter : if it was as the girl -stated, she would punish her son severely, but if not, the accuser should pay the penalty. In order, then, to come at the truth, she ordered the demoiselle to make an appointment with the young gentleman that he should come to her at midnight, to the bed in which she lay alone near the door in his mother's chamber. The demoi- selle obeyed her orders, and that night the mother lay down in the demoiselle's bed, resolving that if her son came thither she would chastise him in such a manner that he should never lie with a woman without remem- bering it. Such were her angry thoughts when her son Third day \ Q UEEJV OF NA VA RRE. 283 actually entered the bed in which she lay ; but unable still to bring herself to believe that he had any unchaste intention, she waited tor some plamer evidence of his bad purpose before she would speak to him But she waited so long, and nature is so frail that her anger ended in an abominable pleasure, and she forgot that she was a mother. As water retained by force is more impetu ous when let loose, so was it with this unfortunate woman, who made her whole pndo consist in the violence she did her body When she began to descend the first step from iier chastity she found herself at once at the bottom, and became pregnant that night by him whom she wished to hinder from getting others with child.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: More is required for an offender to pardon an offense, than for one who has committed no offense, not to be hated. For it may happen amongst men that one man neither hates nor loves another. But if the other offends him, then the forgiveness of the offense can only spring from a special goodwill. Now God’s goodwill is said to be restored to man by the gift of grace; and hence although a man before sinning may be without grace and without guilt, yet that he is without guilt after sinning can only be because he has grace. Reply to Objection 2: As God’s love consists not merely in the act of the Divine will but also implies a certain effect of grace, as stated above ([2215]Q[110], A[1]), so likewise, when God does not impute sin to a man, there is implied a certain effect in him to whom the sin is not imputed; for it proceeds from the Divine love, that sin is not imputed to a man by God. Reply to Objection 3: As Augustine says (De Nup. et Concup. i, 26), if to leave off sinning was the same as to have no sin, it would be enough if Scripture warned us thus: “‘My son, hast thou sinned? do so no more?’ Now this is not enough, but it is added: ‘But for thy former sins also pray that they may be forgiven thee.’” For the act of sin passes, but the guilt remains, as stated above ([2216]Q[87], A[6]). Hence when anyone passes from the sin of one vice to the sin of a contrary vice, he ceases to have the act of the former sin, but he does not cease to have the guilt, hence he may have the guilt of both sins at once. For sins are not contrary to each other on the part of their turning from God, wherein sin has its guilt. Whether for the justification of the ungodly is required a movement of the free-will?Objection 1: It would seem that no movement of the free-will is required for the justification of the ungodly. For we see that by the sacrament of Baptism, infants and sometimes adults are justified without a movement of their free-will: hence Augustine says (Confess. iv) that when one of his friends was taken with a fever, “he lay for a long time senseless and in a deadly sweat, and when he was despaired of, he was baptized without his knowing, and was regenerated”; which is effected by sanctifying grace. Now God does not confine His power to the sacraments. Hence He can justify a man without the sacraments, and without any movement of the free-will.

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

  But in the state of corrupt nature man needs grace to heal his nature in order that he may entirely abstain from sin. And in the present life this healing is wrought in the mind—the carnal appetite being not yet restored. Hence the Apostle (Rom. 7:25) says in the person of one who is restored: “I myself, with the mind, serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin.” And in this state man can abstain from all mortal sin, which takes its stand in his reason, as stated above ([2185]Q[74], A[5]); but man cannot abstain from all venial sin on account of the corruption of his lower appetite of sensuality. For man can, indeed, repress each of its movements (and hence they are sinful and voluntary), but not all, because whilst he is resisting one, another may arise, and also because the reason is always alert to avoid these movements, as was said above ([2186]Q[74], A[3], ad 2). So, too, before man’s reason, wherein is mortal sin, is restored by justifying grace, he can avoid each mortal sin, and for a time, since it is not necessary that he should be always actually sinning. But it cannot be that he remains for a long time without mortal sin. Hence Gregory says (Super Ezech. Hom. xi) that “ a sin not at once taken away by repentance, by its weight drags us down to other sins”: and this because, as the lower appetite ought to be subject to the reason, so should the reason be subject to God, and should place in Him the end of its will. Now it is by the end that all human acts ought to be regulated, even as it is by the judgment of the reason that the movements of the lower appetite should be regulated. And thus, even as inordinate movements of the sensitive appetite cannot help occurring since the lower appetite is not subject to reason, so likewise, since man’s reason is not entirely subject to God, the consequence is that many disorders occur in the reason. For when man’s heart is not so fixed on God as to be unwilling to be parted from Him for the sake of finding any good or avoiding any evil, many things happen for the achieving or avoiding of which a man strays from God and breaks His commandments, and thus sins mortally: especially since, when surprised, a man acts according to his preconceived end and his pre-existing habits, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. iii); although with premeditation of his reason a man may do something outside the order of his preconceived end and the inclination of his habit. But because a man cannot always have this premeditation, it cannot help occurring that he acts in accordance with his will turned aside from God, unless, by grace, he is quickly brought back to the due order.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease—cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis—which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When he violates this image, therefore, he stands in the greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part for our benefit); and, what is not always so apparent but is equally true, we are then in some danger ourselves—hence our retreat or our blind and immediate retaliation. Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his. Time and our own force act as our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless tension between the traditional master and slave. Impossible and fruitless because, literal and visible as this tension has become, it has nothing to do with reality. Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white. When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be finished—at least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing. But, paradoxically, it is we who prevent this from happening; since it is we, who, every hour that we live, reinvest the black face with our guilt; and we do this—by a further paradox, no less ferocious—helplessly, passionately, out of an unrealized need to suffer absolution.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery. The “nigger,” black, benighted, brutal, consumed with hatred as we are consumed with guilt, cannot be thus blotted out. He stands at our shoulders when we give our maid her wages, it is his hand which we fear we are taking when struggling to communicate with the current “intelligent” Negro, his stench, as it were, which fills our mouths with salt as the monument is unveiled in honor of the latest Negro leader. Each generation has shouted behind him, Nigger! as he walked our streets; it is he whom we would rather our sisters did not marry; he is banished into the vast and wailing outer darkness whenever we speak of the “purity” of our women, of the “sanctity” of our homes, of “American” ideals. What is more, he knows it. He is indeed the “native son”: he is the “nigger.” Let us refrain from inquiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we believe that he exists. Whenever we encounter him amongst us in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy. But there is a complementary faith among the damned which involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real. The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro’s heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality. Then he, like the white enemy with whom he will be locked one day in mortal struggle, has no means save this of asserting his identity. This is why Bigger’s murder of Mary can be referred to as an “act of creation” and why, once this murder has been committed, he can feel for the first time that he is living fully and deeply as a man was meant to live.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  In his contemporary Epodes Horace asked, “Does some blind frenzy drive us on, or some stronger power, or guilt?” (7.13–14). Does Rome’s inaugural and fratricidal murder of Remus by Romulus mean that “a bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother’s murder…be a curse upon posterity”? (7.17–20). Now, he said, “a second generation is being ground to pieces by civil war, and Rome through her own strength is tottering” (16.1–2). Maybe Rome, “this selfsame city we ourselves shall ruin, we, an impious generation, of stock accurst,” until wild animals and wilder barbarians will wander through “the ashes of our city” (16.9–12). But, then, on September 2, 31 BCE, off Cape Actium on the northwest coast of Greece, the fleet of Octavian, the soon to be Augustus, defeated the combined fleets of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra in the last great naval battle of antiquity. Even as he pursued them to a double suicide in Alexandria, Octavian left instructions that his command tent on the northern promontory of Actium be turned into sacred ground. His own tent site itself was to become a shrine in which would be imbedded a tithe of the bronze attack rams from captured ships of the enemy. Above that frontal display, Octavian had a declaration carved in very large uppercase Latin letters. It did not simply dedicate the shrine; it said that he had done so. Much of it is still preserved there, by the way, and, although parts recorded before World War II are now gone, others have since been discovered. In any case, we have enough to make the reconstruction quite secure: Imperator Caesar, Son of God [DIVI F], following the victory in the war which he waged on behalf of the republic in this region, when he was consul for the fifth time and imperator for the seventh time, after peace had been secured on land and sea, consecrated to Mars and Neptune the camp from which he set forth to attack the enemy now ornamented with naval spoils. That inaugural proclamation gives in succinct summary the basic structure of Roman imperial theology as centered and incarnated in the emperor himself: Religion War Victory Peace You must first worship and sacrifice to the gods; with them on your side, you can go to war; from that, of course, comes victory; then, and only then, do you obtain peace. That is the full structural sequence of Rome’s imperial program, and you can find it in texts and inscriptions, coins and images, statues and temples across the entire Roman Empire. At its core, Roman imperial theology proclaims peace through victory or, in this inscription, “victory” and “peace secured on land and sea,” with almost a drumbeat rhythm to the Latin pace parta terra marique of that last phrase.

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

  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. If a pall of gloom had hung over my meeting with Dr. Piet, Jane treated the whole sorry affair as a tremendous adventure. She strode into the ward as if into a party, carrying a suitcase filled with my errant sponge bag, some clothes, a bunch of grapes, and a pile of novels. I glanced at the covers: John Updike, Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, and Iris Murdoch. They looked a little daunting. Jane waved aside my embarrassed thanks and apologies. “For God’s sake! It was a marvelous piece of luck for me! I feel enormously noble and resourceful, though it was really just a question of dialing nine-nine-nine and dealing with the Harts.” I winced. “How did they take it?” “They looked pretty aghast, I must say. Jenifer hopped from one leg to another like an anguished stork, and Herbert was put right off his supper. Pity, really. He’d gone to quite a lot of trouble with it.” She explained that she had made an impromptu visit, as she often did when at a loose end. Seeing that my light was on, she had let herself in through the kitchen door, as usual, to find Herbert concocting one of his elaborate late-night snacks in the dim light of the unshaded forty-watt bulb. He had greeted Jane with enthusiasm, knowing that she was a good cook, and asked her advice.

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

  Dr. Piet, who came to visit that afternoon, seemed to take it all rather personally. He had challenged me to surprise him, and I had taken him at his word. I was, he told me, clearly angry with him— and that, in his view, was a step forward. Even in my becalmed state, I felt faintly annoyed that he had placed himself so squarely in the center of my personal drama. He seemed to believe that I had done all this just to grab his attention—whereas, in reality, he was by no means as crucial to me as he seemed to imagine. He had decided that the things that truly distressed me were peripheral, and had thus become a rather marginal figure in my emotional life. If a doctor had failed to respond in this way to Rebecca, I would have been furious. But you get angry only with people who are important to you in a way that Dr. Piet was not. For months— indeed, for years now—I had felt increasingly insubstantial. As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much. I could also see that Dr. Piet was no longer quite so dismissive of my amnesia, however. “It would have been much easier, Karen, if you had made an extra appointment and told me that you were feeling this depressed,” he said, with a certain exasperation. “I’m your doctor and I should know if you are feeling suicidal. ” “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!

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Without saying a word, he caught Randall by the arm and began to swing his belt. Pam and I stood by the cottonwood and watched. Randall yelled and danced as the belt hit his jeans. For about the hundredth time, I wished it were not an abomination for girls to wear pants. Brother Terrell let go of Randall’s arm. “Son, you’ve got to do right. We’re supposed to set an example, and here you are burning down barns. And it ain’t even our barn.” … Pam was next. … “Pamela, you know I hate to whip you more’n anything. But I got to this time.” … When the belt stopped, Brother Terrell caught Pam up in his arms and held her for long time. By the time he came for me, all the anger had left him. He gave me a few swipes with the belt. It wasn’t even as bad as when Mama whipped me. After the whippings, Brother Terrell went back to the woods to pray. He said he’d lost all his sanctification. When the fire had reduced the barn to a pile of blackened rubble, the firemen said they’d see us at the tent and waved good-bye. Mama and Betty Ann put us into the bathtub two by two, washed the soot and grime from us, and dressed us in our church clothes.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Erotically healthy people recognize that sexual fantasies and behaviors operate in two separate yet interrelated spheres. Consequently, they grant themselves greater imaginative freedom than those who are less healthy. People who function in the world effectively and with respect for others are noted not for the purity of their thoughts but for the wisdom of their choices. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who consider imaginative activities trivial or bearing little relationship to the rest of their lives. It is true that the majority of fantasies have little or no significance beyond the immediate stimulation they provide. But as we have seen, key fantasies—especially those based on our CETs—express crucial emotional realities that do affect the way we see ourselves and others and, in turn, how we behave. Erotically healthy people not only enjoy their fantasies but also use them to gain insights into their emotions and motivations. Consider a reasonably informed, well-functioning woman who recognizes undercurrents of hostility and revenge in some of her favorite fantasy turn-ons. She knows that such emotions are common in the erotic landscape and therefore feels little need to berate herself for unloving thoughts. Neither does she deny them or downplay their significance, but she does her best to understand what her fantasies reveal about unresolved emotional conflicts from earlier in her life. She also examines how her fantasies may influence her selection and treatment of actual partners. Another important sign of a healthful relationship with one’s sexual thoughts is the ability to claim a widening sphere of choice, not so much about whether to have a fantasy but rather how and when to give it free rein. Therefore, a man might choose to set aside a titillating image of being serviced by a harem of buxom blonds so he can concentrate on loving feelings toward his wife, even though he realizes that his wife’s body gives him less of a charge than the bodies of the young blonds. When healthy people exercise choice in their fantasy lives, their methods are subtle. Influencing the flow of fantasy is only possible for those who don’t strive for total control. The ability to turn one’s attention temporarily away from a fantasy is fostered by the realization that one can always come back to it later. The man with the buxom-blond fantasy told me he most enjoyed affectionate sex with his wife when he allowed images of the blonds to come and go freely without struggling with or worrying about them. His goal wasn’t to banish the blonds but simply to bring his attention gently back to his wife. The distinction between fantasy and action is particularly crucial when it comes to the dark impulses so prevalent in some of our erotic fantasies. Dr. Stoller makes an important point:

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  He tunneled under the floor of the garage, lined the empty space with rows of old water heaters filled with concrete, and braced the garage floor with railroad ties. A metal hatch lets down into the underground room. The concrete slab of the garage floor spans the excavation. The city inspector believes that the garage floor will collapse if a car is driven on it. The new owner of the house is angry. He should never have bought the house, he says. He doesn’t know how much it will cost to bring the house into compliance with the city’s building ordinances. 111 You and I were trained for a conflict that never came. At my grade school, the Sisters of St. Joseph made me hate Communists, then intolerance, and finally everything that could break the charmed pattern of our lives. I am not sure the Sisters of St. Joseph expected this from their daily lessons on the Red threat. 112 The nuns’ stories made me want to keep everything that I could. First, I would keep my faith. Much later, I would keep our regard for each other, and the ways in which we revealed ourselves in these small houses. 113 A loss of belief is what separates us from the much-handled things we grew up with. 114 My father and I returned to our house from my mother’s funeral, and I never spoke to him of her again. Once, shortly before my father’s death, he broke down in tears and said, “You and your brother never talk about her.” Still, I would say nothing to him. 115 My father’s life seemed to be about this: It was necessary to choose, but only once. Every choice limited God’s choices, and cut you off forever from other graces. 116 I cannot tell you what I care for. I can only tell you what I fear to lose. 117 Three businessmen arranged to buy the Montana Land Company in 1949. With $8.9 million in borrowed money, they bought the company’s stock and ten square miles of indifferent Southern California farmland on the outskirts of Long Beach. The sale included the empty lots—70 feet wide by 120 feet long—in a residential subdivision the Montana Land Company had laid out in 1929. The company’s dead-level acres of former sugar beet fields surrounded a golf course. The Montana Land Company had hoped to sell the land as house lots. To lure middle-class buyers from Long Beach, about six miles away, the company first built the golf course. It was 175 acres of what had been a river bed. In 1978, I wrote a history of the suburb the three businessmen built on the mostly empty land they bought. The suburb had become a city, and city officials had the history printed for students to use in school projects. Boy Scouts still use it to earn a merit badge for citizenship. Clark J.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Let’s go.” You clear some of the books from Alex’s chest and stretch his legs out. Down the hall a phone starts ringing. “He’s fine, for Christ’s sake. We’re dead meat if we get caught in here.” “Get the suitcase,” you say. You take the cushion from Clara’s chair and put it under Alex’s head. His feet are sticking out the door so you can’t close it. The elevator takes days to arrive and makes a racket like an All Points Bulletin. In the lobby, the watchman is still absorbed in his magazine. You keep your hand in your jacket pocket while he unlocks the door to the street. Outside, you both break into a sprint. Neither of you speaks a word until you’re in the cab. At Tad’s place you wash and examine the wound while he changes his pants. At first you’re concerned. You’re trying to remember the last time you had a tetanus shot when suddenly you think of rabies. The signature of the teeth is clearly visible between your thumb and index finger. The punctures are deep but not wide. Tad assures you that stitches aren’t necessary. He says that if the animal was rabid, it would not have been so friendly before you put it in the suitcase. He pours a glass of vodka over the wound. You’re eager to be reassured. You don’t want to go to the hospital. You hate hospitals and doctors. The smell of denatured alcohol nauseates you. Then you think of Alex. Maybe he suffered a concussion. Only the Post could make this funny: FAULKNER FRIEND FALLS AFOUL OF FURRY FIEND . “He’s just sleeping off his drunk,” Tad says. “Let’s hope.” “Love to be there in the morning when the gang starts coming in for work.” Tad gets some cotton pads and adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet and then cuts some lines on the table while you fuss with the first aid. With the application of anesthetics, the pain and guilt recede and the episode becomes a source of hilarity. “Giants,” Tad says. “Fucking giants. I’m thinking, Who is this dwarf calling me a goddamned pygmy. Then—boom. Fred the Ferret to the rescue. De casibus virorum illustrium , as we used to say in Latin class.” “Say what?” “Something about the fall of famous men.” Tad suggests taking the show on the road. He says it’s early yet. You say it’s not that early, and he points out that it’s not as if you had a job to wake up for in the morning. This is a convincing point. You agree to one drink at Heartbreak. In the cab on the way downtown, Tad says, “Thanks for taking Vicky off my hands. Inge is eternally grateful.” “My pleasure.” “Really? Got lucky, did you?” “None of your business.” “Are you serious?” He leans over and looks into your face. “You are serious. Well, well. To each his own.” The cabby swerves between lanes, muttering in a Middle Eastern language.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She’d kept her pregnancy secret for as long as she could, and she was so fat to begin with that this deception came within two months of bringing her to term. Her name was Tina Flood, but everyone just called her The Flood. She was fifteen years old. The sheriff had talked to Tina, and on the basis of what she said he’d persuaded her father to hold off awhile before filing charges. Tina had said she didn’t want to charge anyone with anything, she just wanted Chuck to marry her. Mr. Flood, on the other hand, wanted to send the whole bunch of them to jail. But he must have known that this would do nothing for his daughter, and he must also have known that for Tina to marry into a family like the Bolgers would be a piece of luck wilder than anyone could have sanely imagined for her. So he had taken the sheriff’s advice. He was just waiting for Chuck to say the word. Chuck came back from the house that night and sat on his bed and told me everything. He also told me that he had no intention of marrying Tina Flood. He’d said this to the sheriff, too, said he’d spend the rest of his life in jail first. The sheriff told him not to make up his mind too fast. He would keep Mr. Flood at bay until Chuck had a chance to think about it and talk things over with his folks. But he left no doubt of the outcome if Chuck turned Tina down. He would go to prison. The charge was serious, and the case against him and the others was rock solid. Chuck said he wouldn’t do it. I told him I wouldn’t either. I encouraged him, but in my heart I was glad he was in trouble, and not just because it would take the heat off me. I was still hurt that he had deserted me in my own trouble. It did not displease me to see Chuck on the griddle now, and to have the chance to show him that I was a better friend than he had been. I would stand up for him. No one else did. Not Huff or Psycho, not even his parents. Mrs. Bolger was in too much pain even to speak to him. She wept constantly, and hardly ever left the house. Mr. Bolger’s worry for her expressed itself in implacable anger toward Chuck. He rode Chuck hard, and when he wasn’t riding him he watched him furiously, especially during meals. Dinner was the worst time of the day. No one spoke. The sounds of steel on china, of chewing and swallowing, of chairs creaking, all seemed amplified and grotesque. Chuck’s sisters bolted their food and got out of there. So did I. Chuck had to stay, and then, when everyone else was gone, get browbeaten by his father. Mr. Bolger wanted him to marry Tina Flood.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse. But by the time you’d skinned the limbs, sliced through inconvenient muscles, pulled out the lungs, cut open the heart, and removed a lobe of the liver, it was hard to recognize this pile of tissue as human. Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The Colonel takes all this honor and loyalty shit pretty seriously, if you haven’t noticed.” “I’ve noticed.” Takumi shook his head, his hands pushing aside leaves to dig into the still-wet dirt beneath. “I just don’t get why she’d be so afraid of getting expelled. I’d hate to get expelled, but you have to take your lumps. I don’t get it.” “Well, she obviously doesn’t like home.” “True. She only goes home over Christmas and the summer, when Jake is there. But whatever. I don’t like home, either. But I’d never give the Eagle the satisfaction.” Takumi picked up a twig and dug it into the soft red dirt. “Listen, Pudge. I don’t know what kind of prank Alaska and the Colonel are going to come up with to end this, but I’m sure we’ll both be involved. I’m telling you all this so you can know what you’re getting into, because if you get caught, you had better take it.” I thought of Florida, of my “school friends,” and realized for the first time how much I would miss the Creek if I ever had to leave it. I stared down at Takumi’s twig sticking erect out of the mud and said, “I swear to God I won’t rat.” I finally understood that day at the Jury: Alaska wanted to show us that we could trust her. Survival at Culver Creek meant loyalty, and she had ignored that. But then she’d shown me the way. She and the Colonel had taken the fall for me to show me how it was done, so I would know what to do when the time came. fifty-eight days before ABOUT A WEEK LATER I woke up at 6:30—6:30 on a Saturday!—to the sweet melody of Decapitation: automatic gunfire blasted out above the menacing, bass-heavy background music of the video game. I rolled over and saw Alaska pulling the controller up and to the right, as if that would help her escape certain death. I had the same bad habit. “Can you at least mute it?” “Pudge,” she said, faux-condescending, “the sound is an integral part of the artistic experience of this video game. Muting Decapitation would be like reading only every other word of Jane Eyre . The Colonel woke up about half an hour ago. He seemed a little annoyed, so I told him to go sleep in my room.” “Maybe I’ll join him,” I said groggily. Rather than answering my question, she remarked, “So I heard Takumi told you. Yeah, I ratted out Marya, and I’m sorry, and I’ll never do it again. In other news, are you staying here for Thanksgiving? Because I am.” I rolled back toward the wall and pulled the comforter over my head. I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability—cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next.

• From Action (2014)

  person with a penis/vagina; “they” vs. “she”/“he” pronouns: For the sake of simplicity, and with as much of an eye toward gender neutrality as I could manage without muddling the text, I am using the pronouns “he” and “she” to correspond to diction in which I would have preferred to use “the person with the penis,” “the person with the vagina,” or “they.” I had to make a decision about clarity, and I apologize to readers whose bodies don’t correspond precisely with the pronoun that I’ve used at any point. I thought about this throughout every step of writing this book and have tried to be inclusive while bearing this in mind, but I have only one set of experiences, and it would be really gross if I tried to subvert or circumvent that fact by pretending otherwise. I hope you can find something of value here, despite any discrepancies of language. rape culture: A society that blames and tries to shame a victim of rape and does not properly prosecute or socially condemn the criminals who commit it, regardless of whether the law states that rape is a crime. Also, a society that normalizes the sexual degradation of women. rape/sexual assault: Not just forced penetration. Any sexual act that is committed without the clear permission of all parties involved. sex: “Sex” is not necessarily a synonym for “intercourse”—or any other act that involves skin-on-skin contact. A working definition: Sex can be whatever act fills in the gaps between any number of bodies, which of course includes—and can even extend exclusively to—the brains operating them. Some people prefer to cultivate their sex lives in solitude. Although the majority of non-asexual people partner up at some point or another, plenty of your fellow humans don’t engage in double-sided physical sexuality. Others are down to mess around with another person only if a phone or computer is mediating the distance between them. Nontraditional sexual methods are as much about negotiating the space around a body as any in-the-flesh arrangement. Sex takes the shape of its container, meaning it can adapt to whatever vessel your body and brain decide for it. So: Yes, it means vaginal or anal penetration. But it also means basically whatever you want it to. sex-positive: A term that I really loathe and try to avoid, as it makes me feel like somebody’s beatific aunt who uses an “alternative” form of deodorant. Still I can appreciate the impetus behind “sex positive.” It connotes that something or someone is frank, open, friendly, and communicative about sex, that they see and recognize all genders as equal, and that it doesn’t have to be a seedy, morally repugnant secret if you are titillated by bodies (or most of the other things a person can be turned on by).