Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  In making these experiments I had several companions, the chief of whom was Hermann Kallenbach. I have already written about this friend in the history of Satyagraha in South Africa, and will not go over the same ground here. Mr. Kallenbach was always with me whether in fasting or in dietetic changes. I lived with him at his own place when the Satyagraha struggle was at its height. We discussed our changes in food and derived more pleasure from the new diet than from the old. Talk of this nature sounded quite pleasant in those days, and did not strike me as at all improper. Experience has taught me, however, that it was wrong to have dwelt upon the relish of food. One should eat not in order to please the palate, but just to keep the body going. When each organ of sense subserves the body and through the body the soul. Its special relish disappears, and then alone does it begin to function in the way nature intended it to do. Any number of experiments is too small and no sacrifice is too great for attaining this symphony with nature. But unfortunately the current is now-a-days flowing strongly in the opposite direction. We are not ashamed to sacrifice a multitude of other lives in decorating the perishable body and trying to prolong it existence for a few fleeting moments, with the result that we kill ourselves, both body and soul. In trying to cure one old disease. We give rise to a hundred new ones: in trying to enjoy the pleasures of sense, we lose in the end even our capacity for enjoyment. All this is passing before our very eyes, but there are none so blind as those who will not see. Having thus set forth their object and the train of ideas which led up to them, I now propose to describe the dietetic experiments at some length. 107KASTURBAI’S COURAGEThrice in her life my wife narrowly escaped death through serious illness. The cures were due to household remedies. At the time of her first attack Satyagraha was going on or was about to commence. She had frequent haemorrhage. A medical friend advised a surgical operation, to which she agreed after some hesitation. She was extremely emaciated, and the doctor had to perform the operation without chloroform. It was successful, but she had to suffer much pain, she, however, went through it with wonderful bravery. The doctor and his wife who nursed her were all attention. This was in Durban. The doctor gave me leave to go to Johannesburg, and told me not to have any anxiety about the patient.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  When Jake was in seventh grade, kids beat him up on the St. Francis playground so viciously that my parents transferred him to the public school. Not only had I done nothing to stop the harassment, I pretended not to notice. Once, I even laughed nervously. Like Peter in the garden at Gethsemane, I knew instantly that I had just betrayed the one person in my life who most consistently modeled love and compassion, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for being so weak.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  In the cafeteria one day, as I was grabbing my typical lunch—a Diet Coke and an ice cream sandwich—my pager announced an incoming major trauma. I ran to the trauma bay, tucking my ice cream sandwich behind a computer just as the paramedics arrived, pushing the gurney, reciting the details: "Twenty-two-year-old male, motorcycle accident, forty miles per hour, possible brain coming out his nose…" […] After thirty minutes, we let him finish dying. […] I slipped out of the trauma bay just as the family was brought in to view the body. Then I remembered: my Diet Coke, my ice cream sandwich…and the sweltering heat of the trauma bay. With one of the ER residents covering for me, I slipped back in, ghostlike, to save the ice cream sandwich in front of the corpse of the son I could not. Thirty minutes in the freezer resuscitated the sandwich. Pretty tasty, I thought, picking chocolate chips out of my teeth as the family said its last goodbyes. I wondered if, in my brief time as a physician, I had made more moral slides than strides.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A few days later, I heard that Laurie, a friend from medical school, had been hit by a car and that a neurosurgeon had performed an operation to try to save her. She’d coded, was revived, and then died the following day. I didn’t want to know more. The days when someone was simply “killed in a car accident” were long gone. Now those words opened a Pandora’s box, out of which emerged all the images: the roll of the gurney, the blood on the trauma bay floor, the tube shoved down her throat, the pounding on her chest. I could see hands, my hands, shaving Laurie’s scalp, the scalpel cutting open her head, could hear the frenzy of the drill and smell the burning bone, its dust whirling, the crack as I pried off a section of her skull. Her hair half shaven, her head deformed. She failed to resemble herself at all; she became a stranger to her friends and family. Maybe there were chest tubes, and a leg was in traction… I didn’t ask for details. I already had too many. In that moment, all my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize—they all returned, vengeful, angry, and inexorable. I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focused on the rote treatment of disease—and utterly missing the larger human significance. (“Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from.”) A mother came to me, newly diagnosed with brain cancer. She was confused, scared, overcome by uncertainty. I was exhausted, disconnected. I rushed through her questions, assured her that surgery would be a success, and assured myself that there wasn’t enough time to answer her questions fairly. But why didn’t I make the time? A truculent vet refused the advice and coaxing of doctors, nurses, and physical therapists for weeks; as a result, his back wound broke down, just as we had warned him it would. Called out of the OR, I stitched the dehiscent wound as he yelped in pain, telling myself he’d had it coming. Nobody has it coming.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Ah’ve thought hard on it, wondered if I’da started up the cruiser real quick and drove it off, if she’da been all right. There mightn’t’ve been time. No knowing now. But it don’t matter, t’ my mind, whether it were an accident or it weren’t. It’s a goddamned shame either way.” “There was nothing you could have done,” the Colonel said softly. “You did your job, and we appreciate it.” “Well. Thanks. Y’all go ’long now, and take care, and let me know if ya have any other questions. This is mah card if you need anything.” The Colonel put the card in his fake leather wallet, and we walked toward home. “White tulips,” I said. “Jake’s tulips. Why?” “One time last year, she and Takumi and I were at the Smoking Hole, and there was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it. She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little. Maybe she wanted to die with white flowers.” “Maybe she was going to return them to Jake,” I said. “Maybe. But that cop just shit sure convinced me that it might have been a suicide.” “Maybe we should just let her be dead,” I said, frustrated. It seemed to me that nothing we might find out would make anything any better, and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her chest out of my mind, her chest “fairly well crushed” while she sucked for a last breath that would never come, and no, this was not making anything better. “What if she did do it?” I asked the Colonel. “We’re not any less guilty. All it does is make her into this awful, selfish bitch.” “Christ, Pudge. Do you even remember the person she actually was? Do you remember how she could be a selfish bitch? That was part of her, and you used to know it. It’s like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.” I sped up, walking ahead of the Colonel, silent. And he couldn’t know, because he wasn’t the last person she kissed, because he hadn’t been left with an unkeepable promise, because he wasn’t me. Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. Whatever their faults, I’d never known my school friends in Florida to die on me. After a considerable distance, the Colonel jogged up to me and said, “I just want it to be normal again. You and me. Normal. Fun. Just, normal. And I feel like if we knew—” “Okay, fine,” I cut him off. “Fine. We’ll keep looking.” The Colonel shook his head, but then he smiled.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Once in a Midtown hotel, a client arranged me on the bed and directed me to masturbate for him. I felt a bit like a painting, albeit one in motion, but barely—the composition just so, only one appendage slowly moving. He stood off to the side, watching. I don’t remember if he was touching himself or not; I was consumed by my own experience as a prop. A timer on his phone went off, signifying the end of the hour he’d paid for, and he abruptly began getting dressed to leave, with barely a word. I flipped over, pulling my stockings back on so as not to remain the only exposed party, now watching him. I felt I had failed at something. His sudden willingness to abandon our built world exactly at the moment previously delineated—so unlike most clients—seemed to indicate that I had failed to seduce him. Perhaps, though, he just needed to adhere to the boundary for his own reasons. Rules and walls are often what allow people to feel free to fully inhabit their desires; to direct another to touch themselves, or to otherwise demand precisely what they want. And artists need rules and walls, too. Though rules narrow the scope of what might happen, they are also a precursor to any action happening at all. A total lack of boundaries, on the other hand, often means creative paralysis. In his 1969 work Following Piece, Acconci followed a different stranger every day, for one month, in New York City; the piece’s only rule was that he followed until the person went into a private place he could not enter. Abiding by this rule allowed Acconci to fully embody his work; of it, he said, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of this scheme.” In November 1974, Lynda Benglis’s now-infamous dildo-adorned self-portrait was published in the advertising pages of Artforum. She paid double for the ad, to cover the possibility of the magazine incurring additional costs if their printer was aghast at the content. She ran the piece as an ad only when it was rejected as an art centerfold. She wears a massive double-ended dildo, hand on her hip, elbow jutted out, body glistening, spray tan lines visible, hair slicked back, sunglasses covering her gaze, which, I imagine, is pointed directly at the camera. Her nipples are bare; her rib cage is protruding. The image is more humorous than erotic, but it is also bold and arresting. Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of the New York Times—and the first woman to hold the position—recalled, “It really was an amazing photograph. I remember the shock of seeing it and am always surprised at how shocking it remains. It is laugh-out-loud thrilling, and the phallus is the least of it.”

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Fit to write nothing. Dreams last night troubled: Mother and Warren in puritanical, harsh, snoopy poses. I bit her arm (repeat of my biting the delinquent), and she was old, thin, ever-watchful. Warren discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review. Old shames and guilts. But a sense of joy and eagerness at living in England. Partly, too, because of the recent hospitality my poems, and my story, have found there. Much closer to my mind. November 15, Sunday . Have had a series of bad, sleepless nights. The coming unsettling? As a result, tired, without force, full of a sour lassitude. Late last night made the mistake of having coffee, thinking it would keep me awake for the movie. We didn’t go, and I lay in a morbid twit till the hollow dark of the morning, full of evil dreams of dying in childbirth in a strange hospital unable to see Ted, or having a blue baby, or a deformed baby, which they wouldn’t let me see. My one salvation is to enter into other characters in stories: the only three stories I am prepared to see published are all told in first person. The thing is, to develop other first persons. My Beggars story a travesty: sentimental, stiff, without any interest at all. And the horror is that there was danger, interest. Slangy language is one way of breaking my drawing room inhibitions. Have I learned anything since college writing days? Only in poetry. There I have. Ted’s good story on the caning. Very fine, very difficult. He advances, unencumbered by any fake image of what the world expects of him. Last night, consoling, holding me. Loving made my nerves melt and sleep. I woke drained, as after a terrible emotional crisis. Today am good for little. Submerged in reviews of reviews. How good is it to read other people? Of other people? Read their stories, their poems, not reviews. I am well away from the world of critics and professors. Must root in life itself. Yet Iris Murdoch has a brilliant professorial intellect operating in her work. Mesmerize myself into forgetting the waiting world. The IDEAS kill the little green shoots of the work itself. I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me. A bad day. A bad time. State of mind most important for work. A blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme. In December the Hugheses left for England, where they planned to live in London. Frieda Rebecca was born at home in London in April 1960. Plath signed a contract with Heinemann for the publication of her first collection of poems , The Colossus, and the book was published in October.

• From Like Family

  There’s nothing worse than a liar.” He stood up disgustedly and walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Hilde followed, tugging on the hem of her blouse. “This is so unfair,” I said, when their door was shut. “Yeah, whatever,” said Teresa. “They don’t think you did it.” She looked around the living room as if she was thinking about burning it down, then went into the kitchen and got on the phone. Was she calling her friend Stephanie? Sascha? Maybe it was Kenny. I thought about the way Teresa and Kenny had been on her bed in the cabin, their bodies knotted like pipe cleaners. They were having sex, they had to be, but I knew it would never occur to Teresa to share that information with me. Somehow, we’d fallen into ourselves over the years, into privateness and silence. Or maybe we’d always been separate, my bubble and hers and Penny’s bobbing side by side through all the homes and harms. Why had I never said anything to my sisters about Mr. Clapp and his chair? He had never called it a secret, but I had made it one anyway. And what were the odds that Mr. Clapp had targeted me alone? After Becky Bodette left, Teresa was by herself in the back bedroom. How easy it would have been for Mr. Clapp to go to her there. And he had, of course. It was suddenly as clear to me as the puzzle of Kenny and Teresa’s bodies on the cabin bed. Teresa was as much a bed-wetter as I was in those years with the Clapps, as nervous and as numb. Was Mr. Clapp the reason she wanted to run away that time? I wouldn’t ask. Just like I wouldn’t ask if she had stolen the ten dollars. I went to bed and lay there in the dark while Teresa crouched in the kitchen with the phone. I could hear the murmur, pause, murmur of phone talk, but nothing specific. She could have been confessing. She could have been crying or spitting with rage, ready to walk out the door that very night. How was I to know? I lay as still as I could, straining to make out a single word, and heard only my breath, my busy heart, my listening. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] “I CAN’T TELL YOU how disappointed I am that it’s come to this,” Bub said the next night after dinner. On the table next to his plate was a sheet of notebook paper folded twice, clipped closed with a ballpoint pen. He placed his right hand on top of the paper like one does a Bible. “Everyone outside but Penny,” he said. Penny looked alarmed—did he know something she didn’t? —pinned to her chair like a bug, expecting anything. The rest of us bolted. We threw ourselves onto the lawn, picked at tufts of clover and waited for the verdict. Over in our concrete pond, the dogs were fishing.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I could see that there were two strategies to cutting the time short, perhaps best exemplified by the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. As a result, the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it’s not optimally placed. The tortoise, on the other hand, proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything moves in a precise, orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins. The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you race frenetically or proceed steadily, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours could feel like a minute. Once the final stitch was placed and the wound was dressed, normal time suddenly restarted. You could almost hear an audible whoosh. Then you started wondering: How long until the patient wakes up? How long until the next case is rolled in? And what time will I get home tonight? It wasn’t until the last case finished that I felt the length of the day, the drag in my step. Those last few administrative tasks before leaving the hospital were like anvils. Could it wait until tomorrow? No. A sigh, and Earth continued to rotate back toward the sun. — As a chief resident, nearly all responsibility fell on my shoulders, and the opportunities to succeed—or fail—were greater than ever. The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters. One day, Matthew, the little boy with the brain tumor who had charmed the ward a few years back, was readmitted. His hypothalamus had, in fact, been slightly damaged during the operation to remove his tumor; the adorable eight-year-old was now a twelve-year-old monster. He never stopped eating; he threw violent fits. His mother’s arms were scarred with purple scratches. Eventually Matthew was institutionalized: he had become a demon, summoned by one millimeter of damage. For every surgery, a family and a surgeon decide together that the benefits outweigh the risks, but this was still heartbreaking. No one wanted to think about what Matthew would be like as a three-hundred-pound twenty-year-old.

• 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 The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  169 o In 640, he wrote several tractates against the monophysites and monothelites, arguing that Christ had a full humanity, including a human will. o He secured the condemnation of monotheletism at several African synods and helped secure its condemnation by the Lateran Council (in Rome) of 649. o In 653, Maximus was forcibly brought to Constantinople, where the emperor Constans II used pressure (and even torture) on the theologian and finally exiled him to the Caucasus, where he shortly died as a result of what he had suffered. • The Third Council of Chalcedon in 680–681 defined orthodoxy in terms of two wills in Christ (the divine will and the human will), corresponding to the two distinct but united natures in one person. Monotheletism was condemned. • The duration and fierceness of the Christological battle in Byzantium indicates how fragile any agreement or unity was in this form of Christianity that placed such an emphasis on right teaching (orthodoxy). The Battle over Iconoclasm • An even more divisive controversy arose in Byzantine Christianity some 40 years later that caused even deeper divisions, namely, the battle over iconoclasm (meaning the breaking of icons or images), which raged for more than a century (725–842). • Icons are painted representations of Christ, Mary, or other saints that had traditionally been used by the faithful in prayer, both liturgically and privately. The use of such images affirms in a fairly direct fashion the deep convictions of orthodoxy concerning the humanity of Jesus and the sanctification of the material order by the divine. Because God entered into humanity, the artistic depiction of Jesus as human can symbolize the presence of the divine.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  During our first conversation, Cole had told me that he’d decided to join the military after learning in his high school history class about the Mai Lai massacre: the infamous 1968 slaughter by US troops of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians along with the mass rape of girls as young as ten. “I want to be able to be in the same position as someone like that commanding officer and not order people to do something like that,” he’d said. I’d been impressed. But given that noble goal, that ideal of ethical resistance, was a single failure in the attempt to call out sexism a reason to stop trying? I understood that it was hard, that it was uncomfortable, that it was risky. I understood the personal cost might be greater than the impact. I also understood that, developmentally, adolescents want and need to feel a strong sense of belonging. No one wants to be excluded. And no one wants to court physical or emotional harm. But if Cole didn’t practice standing up, if he didn’t find a way to assert his values and find others who shared them, who was he? “I knew you were going to ask me something like that,” he said. “I don’t know. In this hypermasculine culture where you call guys ‘pussies’ and ‘bitches’ and ‘maggots’—” “Did you say ‘maggots’ or ‘faggots?’” I interrupted. “Maggots,” he said. “Like worms. So you’re equating maggots to women and to women’s body parts in order to convince young men like me that we’re strong. To go up against that, to convince people that we don’t need to put others down to lift ourselves up . . . I don’t know. I would need to be some sort of Superman.” Cole fell silent for a moment, his expression morose. “I think maybe the best I can do is to just be a decent guy,” he continued. “The best I can do is lead by example.” He paused again, furrowed his brow, then added, “I really hope that will make a difference.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Once this kid was beat to shit, Abel dragged him over to the car and held him up in front of me. “Say you’re sorry.” The kid was whimpering, trembling. He looked me in the eye, and I had never seen fear in someone’s eyes like I saw in his. He’d been beaten by a stranger in a way I don’t think he’d ever been beaten before. He said he was sorry, but it was like his apology wasn’t for what he’d done to me. It was like he was sorry for every bad thing he’d ever done in his life, because he didn’t know there could be a punishment like this. Looking in that boy’s eyes, I realized how much he and I had in common. He was a kid. I was a kid. He was crying. I was crying. He was a colored boy in South Africa, taught how to hate and how to hate himself. Who had bullied him that he needed to bully me? He’d made me feel fear, and to get my revenge I’d unleashed my own hell on his world. But I knew I’d done a terrible thing. Once the kid apologized, Abel shoved him away and kicked him. “Go.” The kid ran off, and we drove back to the house in silence. At home Abel and my mom got in a huge fight. She was always on him about his temper. “You can’t go around hitting other people’s children! You’re not the law! This anger, this is no way to live!” A couple of hours later this kid’s dad drove over to our house to confront Abel. Abel went out to the gate, and I watched from inside the house. By that point Abel was truly drunk. This kid’s dad had no idea what he was walking into. He was some mild-mannered, middle-aged guy. I don’t remember much about him, because I was watching Abel the whole time. I never took my eyes off him. I knew that’s where the danger was. Abel didn’t have a gun yet; he bought that later. But Abel didn’t need a gun to put the fear of God in you. I watched as he got right in this guy’s face. I couldn’t hear what the other man was saying, but I heard Abel. “Don’t fuck with me. I will kill you.” The guy turned quickly and got back in his car and drove away. He thought he was coming to defend the honor of his family. He left happy to escape with his life.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Please, to hear this woman, she’s totally insane!” Ms. Harvey refuses. “Your siblings are in the hands of another state now, Regina. For the last time, I’ll tell you: There is nothing we can do.” “Ms. Harvey, you promised me you all would protect my brother and sister if I signed that report telling everything my mother has done.” I slam down the phone so hard, I see Pete rise from his recliner as I run down the hall to my room. In trying to help the kids, I’ve made it worse for them. Without me there to take Cookie’s abuse, Rosie bears the brunt of my attempts to save them. I’ve failed to protect her the way Cherie and Camille protected me. I want to tell Rosie that the brutality she’s enduring is torturing me, too. IT’S THE FALL of tenth grade when the new county phone book arrives at Addie’s. I quickly rip it open and thumb my way to A : Accerbi, Paul & Joan I sigh with relief: My father’s still close; and if the phone book’s factual, so are all his relatives. I haven’t worked up the courage to contact him, but for now it’s enough to know that I could. On November 9, 1981—my fifteenth birthday—I begin a countdown for the thirty-six months I have to reach out to him before I might actually need to ask him for some help. I hope he’ll be proud. I’m getting solid grades in all my classes, but history and English are where I’m earning easy A’s. I make sure I tell Mr. Kelly and Mr. Maguire how hard I’m studying, and they both begin to discuss college with me. “I know you’re a foster kid,” Mr. Kelly says after class one day, “but don’t believe what anyone else tells you. There is a way out of your situation: It’s through continuing your education past high school.” Then they both co-opt my guidance counselor to get in on the cause. I feel torn for Camille’s sake. She also wants to go to college, but her senior class guidance counselor told her at the beginning of the year not to bother trying to get into the Fashion Institute of Technology, her dream school. “Concentrate on getting married and having babies,” her counselor told her. Unfortunately, that advice only further confused Camille because Ms. Harvey had recently told her that she was so detrimentally affected by how we grew up that she probably would never have a functional family of her own. Through all of my sophomore year, I watch Camille quietly prepare to move out of the Petermans’. The summer before my junior year, she moves out and lives with friends. She’s begun dating a handsome, gentle-spirited, blue-eyed boy named Frank, whom she met while out dancing, and she tells me that he’s starting to talk about marriage. See? I want to tell the social workers and counselors.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “I’d like to know why things happen. I wanna get clean.” He sat for a while looking down into his beer bottle and then he went on. “That stuff I was into last year was such bullshit. If there really is an Everywhere Spirit, he oughta be plenty pissed off at me for that.” Kuch was talking about the way he’d acted last wrestling season and on into the spring. He’d wear nothing to school but a pair of deerskin pants and vest and some coyote teeth on a leather thong—in the dead of winter! He’d sit cross-legged on the floor and eat lunch with his hands. And he’d dance and sing and warcry before, during, and after all his matches. I never figured he was being pretentious exactly, because he was sincere. And he really did look like a noble savage. He was heavily tanned from going half-naked all the time and he was in incredible shape from fasting and working out for wrestling. He glowed with suntan and belief and his braided hair hung down to his ass. He was just overzealous, and looking back, I guess he didn’t have his beliefs too well in hand. I feel able to comment on pretension because I pulled some similar shit when I was going through my “I’m-going-to-be-a-doctor” phase. I wrote a monograph on the clitoris and submitted it to the school paper. Thurston Reilly, the editor, figured it for a public service feature and printed it right away. Thurston was expelled from school just seconds after the papers hit the halls, and I joined him a few seconds later. That was the point at which the David Thompson Explorer lost its editorial freedom. Kuch was out of school at the time, too. He had refused a directive from the vice principal to wear more clothes. He was threatening to attack the vice principal’s house, rape his wife, and cut his nuts off and use the scrotum for a medicine bag. They let us back in before Kuch had finished his research on tanning human hide. Kuch talked on slowly. I popped another beer. “I’m gonna try to use this whole next season like the Plains Indians used their sweat lodge,” he said. “And when the season’s over, I’m gonna keep a decent diet and try to keep a straight head through the spring races. And when summer comes, I oughta be ready to go somewhere quiet and sit and learn something.” “Who’ll you get to talk about the vision with?” I asked. “I’ll get you, if you’re still around. But it doesn’t matter, really. There’s no sense in tryin’ to do it right. Hell, I’m no fuckin’ Indian. There probably aren’t even any Indians left who could do it right. Where’d they go to find a shield maker or a medicine man?” He popped a final beer and rummaged among the bones for a meaty rib. “Why wait till next summer?” “That’s just the thing,” Kuch replied.

• From Augustine: Philosopher and Saint (2005)

  36 noitanitsederP dna ,niS lanigirO ,lliW eerF ,livE :8 erutceL inferior, even punishment, all contribute to the overall good of the universe and therefore are not ultimately evil. (cid:405) Evil originates from our free will. • Free will: (cid:405) Will is the power of choice. (cid:405) For Augustine, every act of the will is an act of love. (cid:405) Love seeks to be united to some good. (cid:405) Sin is perversity of the will, i.e., its turning away from God, the supreme good. (cid:405) Free will (for Augustine) means freedom from external coercion—not autonomy or freedom from God, who is our ultimate and innermost good. (cid:405) For Augustine, as for Plato and Paul, true freedom means the freedom to love that which will make us ultimately happy. (cid:405) Hence for Augustine all sin is a form of bondage, not freedom. Sin stems from a defect in our free will, as blindness stems from a defect in our eyes. Original Sin • Because of Adam’s sin, we are born with a corrupted nature (as if human nature itself, and not just individual human beings, suffered from a disease). • Because of this corrupted nature, we (cid:191) nd it impossible not to sin. We still have free will, but our free will is too weak (corrupted, diseased) to be free from sin. • Original Sin means more than this corrupted nature. It means that we share in the guilt of Adam’s sin. Original sin is not just Adam’s sin but ours! • In addition to Original Sin, we are of course guilty of committing our own sins (“actual sin”). • Because every human being after Adam is born in (Original) Sin, even infants are not innocent and suffer damnation if not baptized.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Cooke consented, and in January 1986, Linda married Tom Green in Los Molinos, Mexico, a polygamous outpost on the Baja Peninsula. “I was happy for my daughter because she was happy and it was what she wanted,” Cooke said afterward. “I was happy to share her with a man I loved very dearly and thought was a very special person.” Linda Kunz Green was pregnant with Green’s child before her fourteenth birthday. Even though Beth Cooke left Green, she defends her daughter’s marriage to him. “Fifteen years later,” she said in a 2001 interview with journalist Campbell, “I feel that time has proven it was a good decision. . . . They are prosecuting Tom based on nineteenth-century morals. Now, who cares who sleeps with who? They are all consenting adults. Right now, there are lesbians, homosexuals and single people living together all the time. There are married people living with others who they are not married to.” David Leavitt doesn’t consider Green’s plural marriages a matter of religious freedom or a harmless sexual relationship between consenting adults. Leavitt views Green as a pedophile, plain and simple. “He preyed on little girls who, from the cradle, knew no other life but polygamy,” Leavitt told Holly Mullen, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, in August 2002. “He robbed them of their childhood. When I looked at this picture I realized it was about five women, all of them given in marriage by their mothers, all of them raised by their fathers to marry as children. They are victims of pedophiles, and they are victims of the state of Utah, which turned its back on polygamy for sixty years.” Leavitt’s case proved convincing in court. In August 2001, Green was convicted of four counts of bigamy and one charge of criminal nonsupport of his family. He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $78,868 in restitution. A year later, Leavitt put Green on trial again, for the additional—and considerably more serious—charge of having sex with Linda Kunz when she was thirteen, a crime that could have put him in prison for life. This time around, however, Green got lucky: although he was found guilty of first-degree felony child rape, the judge gave him the minimum sentence, five years to life, to be served concurrently with his previous five-year sentence for bigamy. The relatively soft punishment riled many Utahans. Two days after Green was sentenced, an editorial in the Spectrum —the daily paper of St. George, Utah, an LDS stronghold less than forty miles from Colorado City—opined, Taxpayers and—most importantly—children lost during Tuesday’s sentencing hearing for now-infamous polygamist Tom Green. . . . In some polygamist relationships, particularly those involving young girls, there is a bit of brainwashing that goes on both before and after the illegal “marriages.” Girls are led to believe that such a relationship is one way to salvation. Then, they typically are taken as wives by men twice their ages.

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

  “And your father. Can you stop and think about what it was like for him?” I added. Phil said. “Dad was always the closest to Tom. It hit him real hard.’’ “Yes,” I said. “Now can you imagine what it felt like to watch your other son become suicidally depressed and then a few months later change his name, shave his head, and move in with a controversial group?” “It would be horrible,” he repeated. “I would feel angry. I would feel like I lost two sons.” “That’s exactly how they told me they felt,” I said. “Can you see that now? That is why they were so critical of the group when you got involved.” I paused and let him think for a few more moments before I went on. “I’m curious to know what was going on in your mind when you first met the member of the group. What was it that caught your attention and attracted you to learn more?” I asked. Phil looked up at the sky for a moment, looked down at the ground, took a deep sigh, and said, “Well, when he asked me why I looked so depressed, I told him about Tom’s death. I told him that I just couldn’t understand why it would happen to such a wonderful person. It just didn’t seem right. He began to explain the laws of karma to me and how this material world is just illusion anyway, and how I should be happy that Tom left his material consciousness, so that he could come back as a more highly evolved being in his next life.” “I see—so the devotee helped you understand what had happened to Tom in a way that took away your fear and confusion,” I said. “And guilt,” he added. “And guilt?” I probed. “Yes, you see, I had asked Tom to go to the store that day to buy me another guitar string. He was on his way there when he was killed,” Phil said. “So you blamed yourself for his death because you figured that if you hadn’t asked him to go to the store, he never would have been in the accident?” I asked. “I guess so,” Phil said, sadly. It occurred to me that I had better try to offer Phil some other perspectives on the incident. I began by saying; “If Tom had been killed in a swimming accident, at the far end of the lake, would you have blamed yourself for not staying closer to him?” He thought for a moment. “Maybe.” “Can you imagine any way Tom could have died that wouldn’t have been your fault?” I asked. He paused again before answering. “I guess not. But the fact remains that he was going to the store for me.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  ALTHOUGH MASON VIEWED more porn and more extreme content than most of the boys I talked to, he was hardly alone. “I don’t consider the porn I watch to be representative of the person I am,” said Daniel, a freshman at an elite Midwestern college. Daniel had a lantern jaw and hipster glasses; he wore a backward baseball cap that he continually adjusted, running a hand over his curly hair. “Like, the whole category of ‘Unwilling’ [women who say no to sex, then change their mind when ‘force fucked’]. It’s very appealing to me even though I know it’s wrong. And I do truly believe it’s wrong. I would never do it. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching it.” Daniel was from Michigan and grew up in a very different family from Mason’s: his parents were happily married, and they identified, at least nominally, as Jewish. His mom, an instructor at a community college, was a feminist. In real life, Daniel was consciously trying to curb his use of the thoughtlessly sexist, homophobic language that had been common in his high school. He also said he considered any form of sexual interaction to have “spiritual significance” and claimed to prize intimacy over “raw sex.” But that’s not what got him off. He’d had three hookups in college; while he could get an erection, he wasn’t able to orgasm in any of them. He’d also found it “a bit of a struggle” to climax during intercourse with his high school girlfriend, with whom he’d been in love. Their sex wasn’t stimulating enough; it wasn’t intense enough—it just wasn’t enough. “I felt like I was never really satisfied,” he said. “There was always more to try. Like, ‘Oh, this is pretty good, she’s letting me do a lot, but we haven’t done this yet, we haven’t done this, done this, done this . . .’” The girl herself, who was a year younger than him, also seemed to have taken her cues from porn. She would writhe and moan when Daniel jackhammered a finger into her vagina. When he told her he wanted to “take a break” from their relationship, she offered up anal sex to change his mind (although that idea could equally have been inspired by mainstream films such as Kingsman, in which the hero’s incentive for saving a Scandinavian princess is her promise that “we can do it in the asshole”). He accepted, but the experience was nothing like what he’d seen on-screen. “It was really difficult,” he recalled, “and it hurt her intensely. She was in pain. That was nothing I wanted to see. It was fucked up. And I felt like shit afterward.”

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s what matters and is even more a travesty here, that having this kind of story is utterly common. I hope that by sharing my story, by joining a chorus of women and men who share their stories too, more people can become appropriately horrified by how much suffering is born of sexual violence, how far-reaching the repercussions can be. I often write around what happened to me because that is easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that day, to what happened after. It’s easier than facing myself and the ways, despite everything I know, in which I feel culpable for what happened. Even now, I feel guilt not only for what happened, but for how I handled the after, for my silence, for my eating and what became of my body. I write around what happened because I don’t want to have to defend myself. I don’t want to have to deal with the horror of such exposure. I guess that makes me a coward, afraid, weak, human. I write around what happened because I don’t want my family to have these terrible images in their heads. I don’t want them to know what I endured and then kept secret for more than twenty-five years. I don’t want my lover seeing only a moment from my assault when they look at me. I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I want to protect the people I love. I want to protect myself. My story is mine, and on most days, I wish I could bury that story, somewhere deep where I might be free of it. But. It has been thirty years and, inexplicably, I am still not free of it. I all too often write around my story, but still, I write. I share parts of my story, and this sharing becomes part of something bigger, a collective testimony of people who have painful stories too. I make that choice.