Joy

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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We used to make a fine noise, which any surprised wanderer in our part of town may yet hear if he goes into the heart of the ghetto. Out of the windows of the chedarim the voices escape toward freedom, a cacophony of the tones of fifty children of all ages as they repeat constantly, in every kind of nasal singsong, a mysterious text that is meaningless to the listener outside and, it would seem, to the children themselves. One morning, as he had to go away, the rabbi entrusted the supervision of the class to the oldest among the boys, who submissively promised to watch us carefully: “Yes, Rabbi, yes...,” repeating this after each one of the rabbi’s remarks, so that our collective recitation continued: “Yes, Rabbi...,” without being interrupted once until he returned, “Yes, Rabbi...”; only the smaller boys were to be allowed to leave the room to go to the toilet, the older boys only in extremely urgent cases; nothing in the old synagogue that served us as a kouttab was to be touched; our new supervisor would be allowed to report to the rabbi all those among us who were guilty of breaking any rule, and they would be punished with ten strokes of the cane on the soles of the feet — ”Yes, Rabbi. Yes, Rabbi. Yes, Rabbi...“ We all listened carefully, sneaking glances of complicity at one another and anticipation for the gala of wild jubilation that we would soon be celebrating. The rabbi’s gouty foot may still have been on the last step of the narrow and steep stone staircase that twisted and turned before leading straight into the street downstairs, when a wild clamor rose throughout the cheder. We jumped up so hastily from our wooden seats that they toppled over onto our heels. Those of us who were seated on the floor on esparto-grass mats climbed in turn onto the benches and chairs. We all began to shout as if only to prove to ourselves that our voices were still capable of producing other euphonic sounds besides the monotonous singing of the prayers we were there to learn. Never had the old synagogue’s walls resounded to such a collective hymn of joy. But it didn’t seem to stir up a crowd in the neighborhood, where the senses of most people had probably become blunted to any musical charm in the usual singsongs of kouttab schools. Once we had had our fill of screaming, gesticulating, climbing onto the benches, rolling ourselves on the grass mats and saying anything that went through our heads without even trying to be at all understandable, merely for the joy of shouting all together at the tops of our voices in this place of prayer and of contemplation, we then began to wonder what we might organize in the way of fun.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In my state of absurd frustration and defeat, I wanted to feel assured at least of this foundation beneath me; so I folded my overcoat in four, placed it on the floor, and sat on it, calmly waiting for another guest to come to my rescue. Fortunately, I was spared having to wait long. There was suddenly light, unexpectedly brilliant, recreating the whole universe around me. I saw that I was seated in the middle of a landing between two floors, and Jean-Jean, a huge boy whose nickname was Hippo, was slowly and heavily climbing the stairs, carrying a bottle in either hand. With him, I entered Michel’s apartment, as disturbed as if I had been visited by signs and portents. I spotted Ginou at once. She had a crowd of boys around her and was beaming with pleasure, her cheeks already flushed with happiness. I took my fill of her vitality, till my eyes and heart were satiated with the bursting health of her complexion, the delicacy of her hair, the dappled colors of her dress, all green and purple. Nearly all the boys had already arrived, but there were still only a few girls at the party. Mina seemed pale from her constant coughing; she threw me a knowing glance that made me ill at ease. Most of the boys were expensively dressed, with custom-made suits of imported English cloth and silk shirts and smart sport shoes; they were already surprisingly like their own parents. Their very natural ease, in such fine clothes, made a deep impression on me, and I felt stiff and solemn in my only good suit. But there was Pinhas too, the leader of the working-class scout outfit! I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like meeting him here. His suit had certainly seen better days too and suffered worse treatment than my own overcoat: his wasn’t even a once-a-year suit. But what was he doing here, so much out of place and so badly dressed? The scout movement, in order to make a show of its interest in ghetto affairs, and also to satisfy some of its own scruples, now wanted to organize a working-class scout group and had asked Pinhas to take charge of it. This whole business, to me, seemed hateful and absurd. Was it at all possible to bring rich men’s boys, well dressed, with their pockets full of petty cash, accustomed to spending enough pocket money on a single outing to feed a whole family on a holiday, together with undernourished urchins dressed in rags? Now the girls who had chosen to come late were arriving too, always two at a time and laden with cakes that they themselves had baked.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My father’s store was not far from my sponsor’s office, so I went first to see my father. I showed him, almost without any self-consciousness, how deeply I was moved. He told me all about his talk with the principal that same morning; he had come back from it very proud and convinced that I should continue my studies. The principal had been very complimentary indeed, and this had confirmed my father in his faith in his own intelligence and in that of his offspring. Then I went to the drugstore. Monsieur Bismuth was no longer there, but his clerk reassured me: Monsieur Bismuth had expected me, but now asked me to come back in two weeks. So the various threads were indeed all tied together. The city’s siren that announced noon now rang. I rushed into the street, at last aware of my own appetite, but also because I felt a need to run. I wanted to sing, to announce my unbelievable adventure to everyone, to make polite remarks to utter strangers in the street. Some Moslem laborers were repairing the streetcar tracks, and the sun was glistening on the metal. I shouted out to them: “May God be with you!” This is how we greet, in the countryside, laborers whom we do not necessarily know, but merely to reaffirm, in the face of loneliness, the solidarity of all mankind. Now, these men were surprised, because such conventions are generally respected only among believers in their faith; still, they answered me: “The blessing of Allah be upon you!” This feeling of communion with all of mankind made me happy. I gave a couple of coins to a Bedouin beggar, now that I would henceforth be so wealthy! An old idea that disappointments had caused to wilt now blossomed again, binding my adolescence that was beginning more closely to my childhood that was gone: I had been chosen among many, ahead of Lévy, who could not be surpassed in mathematics, ahead of Spinoza, who was Monsieur Marzouk’s favorite! I was surely better than all my classmates, all the students in the school, perhaps all the students in all the Alliance schools! Surely, I would go far and be very powerful. True, I couldn’t yet foresee the nature of this power, but it was a kind of broad movement toward the future, a lunging that was almost muscular. Following the advice of my father, who was more aware of such necessities, my mother began inspecting my wardrobe. “You know,” he explained to her, “only rich men’s sons attend high school, and our boy must be decently dressed, too.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  For humans, as well as other animals, this includes expectancy, surprise, alertness and curiosity. Let’s end this chapter by tracking what Pavlov taught us back to its therapeutic application with clients: In virtually every session, as (formally) traumatized individuals emerge from immobility and shutdown, they are biologically wired to have the nascent impulse to orient to the room, to the therapist and others (as in group sessions) and to the here and now. So as Pavlov showed us how we lose our way, he also illuminated the way back. Recall for a moment an example of this during the session with Adam (the Holocaust survivor in Chapter 8 ). By embodying the image of the slum children joyfully flying their kites, Adam was able to emerge from his profound shutdown and began to orient to the various objects in the room and, then, to engage with me in a fresh and vital way. In that moment he came back into life long enough to embody new possibilities. So you see, we are, in the final analysis, just a bunch of animals—instinctive, feeling and reasoning. In closing, I would like to repeat the quote from Massimo Pigliucci that opened this chapter because it seems to sum it all up succinctly: “We may be special animals, we may be particular animals with very special characteristics, but we’re animals nonetheless.” * Oxytocin and the endorphins have been implicated in this feel-good and trust-promoting chemical cascade. † These include Ivan Pavlov, Sir Charles Sherrington, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and Roger W. Sperry. ‡ Jim Anderson, a psychologist and primate researcher at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, described a recent videoing of the death of Chimp and the reaction of others in the same pen ( BBC News , April 26, 2010): “As the breathing of the old female chimp slowed, and finally stopped, the others bent down to look intently into her face … We had never seen that before.” They poked and gently shook her body for 30 or 40 seconds. They looked puzzled, Anderson reported, and slept more fitfully that night than usual. The dead chimp’s adult daughter slept on the platform where her mother’s body lay—close but not touching or inspecting it. Reporting in the April 27, 2010, issue of the scientific journal Current Biology , Anderson said that these observations add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that chimps have a rich emotional life. “It might well be that they do have some awareness of death. We know from other work that chimpanzees, more than monkeys, are capable of showing empathy toward others who have a problem, or have been attacked. We see consolation behavior.” Chimps clearly have a sense of self, Anderson said, and some sense of future and past. § In the tradition of St.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I made a few wisecracks about that dumb cluck Hippolytus and his horrified surprise when his stepmother propositioned him, but otherwise we studied seriously and with great concentration. When we had finished the job, she asked me not to accompany her downstairs and I heard her footfalls grow fainter and fainter as she went down the stairs and left me alone. I was calm, but as if I had just recovered from a moment of drunkenness, of happy drunkenness that left me no hangover and no headache. “It’s the first time I have ever touched a girl,” I repeated to myself, “the first time, a girl...” I felt proud of myself, as if this had all been some kind of promotion or of admission into a world of initiates, and I came to a clear conclusion, that Ginou’s answer could only be interpreted as an admission of her love. But she seemed, when I next saw her, to have already forgotten the fabulous experience that we shared in common. All my references to it called forth no response, and my enthusiasm remained fruitless, matched by no admission, on her part, of any complicity or of any tenderness. At all of our meetings that followed, I scarcely dared remind her of our wonderful Saturday, and I had to return to my old devices and random hints. One day, we had reached the end of a long walk in a public park. It had been raining, and the autumn shower had summoned forth heavy and deeply moving scents from the damp earth. I love the smell of the afternoon, the damp breath of plants, the leaves shining with drops of rain that quiver, the flowers that are ready to droop. We had been very talkative about everything except what mattered to me, and I at last broached this subject too, affirming, though in an abstract manner, as usual: “If only a girl would really trust me, I would be ready to do anything for her!” Without any hesitation, she answered me: “Well, you can count on me, for always!” She had come to this decision reasonably and was expressing her consent: we would now be able to marry. But I remained speechless with surprise, though I had prepared everything and had long been expecting this confirmation. Ginou was ready to accept me as her husband! I scarcely knew what to do, what to say, how to express my joy. “And to think that you waited until now to say so,” I remarked reproachfully. “We have been together for the past two hours. Don’t you think it was selfish of you to deprive me of two hours of sheer happiness?” She smiled with great tenderness as we reached the gate of the park. The tall trees at the entrance bore mauve-colored blossoms, like flowers pinned in a girl’s hair. We were no longer by ourselves for there were other people around us.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  And with that the true God was shockingly unveiled to the world as the true focus of worship, displacing the idolatries that had lain at the heart of sin. Israel’s past sins, the faithlessness that had apparently thrown the covenant into jeopardy, had been passed over, while the purpose of the covenant was gloriously fulfilled in the creation of a worldwide justified people. The “covenant of vocation”—Israel’s vocation to be the light of the world—was fulfilled. As a result, God and Israel “met” in Jesus. In Jesus, as Israel’s representative, God and Israel, God and the human race, God and the world met and were reconciled. “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19). The Messiah is, in Paul’s mind, the unique place where Israel’s God really does meet with his people. He embodies Israel as the king who sums up his people in himself and whose faithfulness stands in for their faithlessness. He embodies Israel’s God himself come to rescue his people. The divine rescuing purposes and Israel’s vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event. That is what Paul is saying here. This passage does not, then, focus on the point that most of us, including myself in earlier writings, have assumed. Paul is not simply offering a roundabout way of saying, “We sinned; God punished Jesus; we are forgiven.” He is saying, “We all committed idolatry, and sinned; God promised Abraham to save the world through Israel; Israel was faithless to that commission; but God has put forth the faithful Messiah, his own self-revelation, whose death has been our Exodus from slavery.” That larger context is vital and nonnegotiable. If it seems suddenly complex for readers today, that is our problem; at least its complexities are biblical complexities rather than the endless ramifications of theory that seem to be required with every step that different traditions take away from that biblical home base. If we take what Paul says out of its Jewish context—and ultimately out of its Jewish eschatological context, replacing that with a Platonized vision of the “goal”—then we will end up with a moralized vision of the human vocation and a paganized view of the means of redemption. That has happened again and again. It is time to put things back as they should be. So what, in the light of all this, would Paul say had actually happened by six o’clock on the first Good Friday evening? If Romans 3:21–26 was all we had to go on, what might we conclude?

• From White Oleander (1999)

  You had to mail them, a package from family was allowed four times a year. The slam of the gate behind us made us jump. We were locked in. They told me to wait at an orange picnic table under a tree. I was nervous and sick from the ride. I didn’t even know if I’d recognize her. I shivered, wishing I’d brought a sweater. And what would she think of me, in my bra and high heels? Women milled around behind the covered area of the visiting yard. Prisoners, their faces like masks. They jeered at us. One woman whistled at me and licked between her fingers, and the others laughed. They kept laughing, they wouldn’t stop. They sounded like the crows. The mothers started coming in from the prison through a different gate. They wore jeans and T-shirts, gray sweaters, sweat-suits. I saw my mother waiting for the woman guard to bring her through. She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. I stood up and then I couldn’t move, I waited trembling as she came over and hugged me to her. Just to feel her touch, to hold her, after all those months! I put my head on her chest and she kissed me, smelled my hair, she didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim. She lifted my face in her hands and kissed me all over, wiped my tears with her strong thumbs. She pulled me to sit down next to her. I was thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside café. She pulled me down to sit next to her at the picnic table, whispered to me, “Don’t cry. We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?” I nodded, but my tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt. One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out, something about my mother or me. My mother looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Annie continues to practice yoga and to write to me about her experiences: “Today I went to a morning yoga class at my new yoga studio. The teacher talked about breathing to the edge of where we can and then noticing that edge. She said that if we notice our breath we are in the present because we can’t breathe in the future or the past. It felt so amazing to me to be practicing breathing in that way after we had just talked about it, like I had been given a gift. Some of the poses can be triggering for me. Two of them were today, one where your legs are up frog like and one where you are doing really deep breathing into your pelvis. I felt the beginning of panic, especially in the breathing pose, like oh no that’s not a part of my body I want to feel. But then I was able to stop myself and just say, notice that this part of your body is holding experiences and then just let it go. You don’t have to stay there but you don’t have to leave either, just use it as information. I don’t know that I have ever been able to do that in such a conscious way before. It made me think that if I notice without being so afraid, it will be easier for me to believe myself.” In another message, Annie reflected on the changes in her life: “I slowly learned to just have my feelings, without being hijacked by them. Life is more manageable: I am more attuned to my day and more present in the moment. I am more tolerant of physical touch. My husband and I are enjoying watching movies cuddled together in bed…a huge step. All this helped me finally feel intimate with my husband.” Chapter 17Putting the Pieces Together: Self-Leadership This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.…Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. —Rumi A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him. —William James, The Principles of Psychology

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As for me, I greedily accepted the little drop of alcohol that they often offered me; and as the feast went on, my eyelids began to grow heavy and I was already slightly drunk by the time we got around to eating dinner. I cannot remember ever having gone to bed on a Friday night; I suppose I used to fall asleep while still at table, as I have often seen Kalla fall asleep, her white face disappearing beneath her beautiful black hair. Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey. We woke up without haste, and found ourselves in a morning filled with an unusual happiness. We stayed longer in bed, where Father helped us perform complicated acrobatics. Then, once we had annoyed Father and driven him out of bed, we stared at the world upside down, with our heads down and our legs propped against the wall, enjoying the exquisite vertigo that made us dizzy. Oh, these Saturday mornings! In our room, through the wide-open window, the blue stretches of sky with their slow white clouds and the streaming sunlight, the sun swimming in the limitless universe as in those dreams where I felt myself rise and rise in the open sky, my heart and my breast so brimful... So far away, I still suffer whenever I think of Saturday mornings. All my life, the bitter and oily odor of the narcissus, their fresh explosion of gold in the transparent glass of the bowl, will remain rich with implications of holiday. My father was in no hurry to finish dressing and took unusual pains, letting a few drops of eau de Cologne fall on his shining hair. I always demanded the same ritual for myself, but immediately protested when the alcohol made my eyes and my scalp smart. But it was already too late: “Let it be and don’t be silly, it’s good for the skin.” Mother would hasten to dress me and always ask my father: “Will you be taking your son along?” My father would ask me: “Do you want to come along?” as if it were possible for me to refuse the greatest joy of the whole week. Then we would wait for the faithful Joseph. Ten years earlier my father’s only workman had renounced his Italian origin and had changed his name from Giuseppe to Joseph so as to become part of our family. My father trusted him fully in the shop and chose him also as his companion for all holiday pleasures. When, one day, Joseph talked of getting married, my father opposed this project so violently that we were all astonished. Obscurely, my father sensed that Joseph would then belong to his wife and become Giuseppe again; his opposition was so successful that Joseph remained an old bachelor.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My pocket money had cost me too much hard work and I always had too many better uses for it. So our outings always left me some bitterness, more disappointed by myself than by Ginou and the others. As soon as we were together in a crowd, Ginou no longer paid any attention to me but returned at once to her flirtatious manner, her teasing and her constant references to the details of middle-class life that transformed her, in my eyes, into a stranger. I would then feel alienated from her and her friends and often began to wonder how it could be possible for me to court a girl who had so little in common with me and so much in common with the others. Still, we happened to be alone, on this specific occasion, by the breakwater, playing ball together. I was quite obviously her favorite companion. It was five in the afternoon and we had been on the seashore in the sunshine since morning. Between two swims, we had lunched off sandwiches on the beach. Now the violet-colored hills seemed peaceful on the other side of the bay; the seagulls hovered dreamily, almost motionless, in the air, and we were all drowsy, weary of so much light and heat, our skins caked with salt from the sea. The water was warm, lazy; it cast up on the sand short and foamy waves which blended the pale pink of the setting sun, the yellowish green of the sea water itself, and the pale blue-violet of the sky. Suddenly, I was seized with so unbelievable a happiness and could feel so fully the richness of the whole universe that I almost wanted to weep. After an initial failure in her exams, Ginou had made up her mind to come up again for the baccalaureate in October. She pretended to be very serious about it and I offered to coach her in literature, which she accepted vaguely, always postponing any action till the following week. As for me, I was beginning to be sick of all this comedy of hints and double meanings. Quite obviously, I was marking time, and I began to feel a bit foolish too, almost guilty about never having dared a more direct approach. All my classmates constantly talked of petting, of kissing, and even of other things that I disapproved of. Ginou, in my eyes, was more than a mere crush that one has to make the most of while it lasts. I respected her and I owed her a certain gratitude, though I might be able to allow myself more daring liberties within the framework of this respect. The very health of my love for her demanded more. Perhaps, after all, her new swim suit, a silver-colored knitwear model with red dots that revealed every contour of her exquisite figure, had something to do with it all.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As the song by Dory Previn suggests, mystical experiences that are not experienced in the body just don’t “stick”; they are not grounded. Trauma sufferers live in a world of chronic dissociation. This perpetual state of disembodiment keeps them disoriented and unable to engage in the here and now. As mentioned earlier, trauma survivors, however, are not alone in being disembodied; a lower level of separation between body/mind is widespread in modern culture, affecting all of us to a greater or lesser degree. Recall the distinction made in the German language between the word Körper, meaning a physical body, and Leib, which translates to English as the “lived (or living) body.” The term Leib reveals a much deeper generative meaning than does the purely physical Körper, which is not unlike “corpse.” A gift of trauma recovery is the rediscovery of the living, sensing, knowing body. The poet and writer D. H. Lawrence inspires us all with this reflection on the living, knowing body: My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos. Trauma sufferers, in their healing journeys, learn to dissolve their rigid defenses. In this surrender they move from frozen fixity to gently thawing and, finally, free flow. In healing the divided self from its habitual mode of dissociation, they move from fragmentation to wholeness. In becoming embodied they return from their long exile. They come home to their bodies and know embodied life, as though for the first time. While trauma is hell on earth, its resolution may be a gift from the gods. Finally, Jack London describes the enlightenment afforded by meeting and transforming trauma. He writes, in The Call of the Wild, “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” This awakening of our life force, transmuted from survival to ecstatic aliveness, is truly the intrinsic gift laid at our feet and waiting to be opened through this journey of sweet surrender to the sensate world within, whether we are survivors of trauma or simply casualties of Western culture.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It would now become true, and I would be a physician. I could hear the word repeated rhythmically in my head: physician, physician, physician... Monsieur Louzel understood my emotion and my absent-mindedness. He was kind enough to pretend not to notice it, and set about explaining to me the ingenious institution of which I was a beneficiary. Each year the school brought to the attention of the community a brilliant student who needed help. The community then entrusted him to the care of one of its own former scholars who now, in turn, paid for the new scholar’s studies. Later, once his studies were completed and his position assured, the new scholar was expected to assume some day the responsibility for a younger scholar’s studies. I found this idea of a chain that went on forever quite wonderful, and looked upon the men who had invented it as benefactors of mankind. The principal then paused, with some solemnity. He still had to ask me my opinion, whether I was prepared to continue my studies. The Jewish community of Tunis, on the recommendation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, would undertake to finance my studies, at first my high-school years, then the university too. What had I to say? The principal was already asking me what I had to say! Here I was, already acquiring importance. Did I want to study? Good God, did I want to continue my studies... “Well,” the principal concluded by himself, “you’ve agreed. Of course, we first had to get the approval of your father, and it has meant his accepting a heavy sacrifice and agreeing to carry on without any help from you until you have received your final diplomas.” The principal thus revealed to me that my father had already been consulted several days earlier, and that nothing had then been said to me, to avoid any possible disappointment. Only that same morning had my father at last given a favorable answer. So, my father had accepted! How could he possibly have said no! I was utterly aghast, full of revolt against the mere possibility of my father’s objecting. Obscurely, I imagined an argument with my father, but he never would have been able to prevent me from choosing the path toward glory. Monsieur Louzel continued to speak in his dictatorial tone, and I continued to remain silent. Still, I had an answer for every question, repartee came spontaneously to my lips, I was bubbling over with promises, gratitude, and dreams. I reacted to every one of his sentences with gestures that were born of my whole body, approving, denying, committing me. There had been some hesitation, Monsieur Louzel confided in me, between choosing Lévy, the son of the widow, and myself. His financial status deserved more consideration, but I was the better student.

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

  I answer that, The Divine essence is a sufficient medium for knowing all things, and this is evident from the fact that God, by seeing His essence, sees all things. But it does not follow that whoever sees God’s essence knows all things, but only those who comprehend the essence of God [*Cf. [5045]FP, Q[12], AA[7],8]: even as the knowledge of a principle does not involve the knowledge of all that follows from that principle unless the whole virtue of the principle be comprehended. Wherefore, since the souls of the saints do not comprehend the Divine essence, it does not follow that they know all that can be known by the Divine essence—for which reason the lower angels are taught concerning certain matters by the higher angels, though they all see the essence of God; but each of the blessed must needs see in the Divine essence as many other things as the perfection of his happiness requires. For the perfection of a man’s happiness requires him to have whatever he will, and to will nothing amiss: and each one wills with a right will, to know what concerns himself. Hence since no rectitude is lacking to the saints, they wish to know what concerns themselves, and consequently it follows that they know it in the Word. Now it pertains to their glory that they assist the needy for their salvation: for thus they become God’s co-operators, “than which nothing is more Godlike,” as Dionysius declares (Coel. Hier. iii). Wherefore it is evident that the saints are cognizant of such things as are required for this purpose; and so it is manifest that they know in the Word the vows, devotions, and prayers of those who have recourse to their assistance. Reply to Objection 1: The saying of Augustine is to be understood as referring to the natural knowledge of separated souls, which knowledge is devoid of obscurity in holy men. But he is not speaking of their knowledge in the Word, for it is clear that when Isaias said this, Abraham had no such knowledge, since no one had come to the vision of God before Christ’s passion. Reply to Objection 2: Although the saints, after this life, know what happens here below, we must not believe that they grieve through knowing the woes of those whom they loved in this world: for they are so filled with heavenly joy, that sorrow finds no place in them. Wherefore if after death they know the woes of their friends, their grief is forestalled by their removal from this world before their woes occur. Perhaps, however, the non-glorified souls would grieve somewhat, if they were aware of the distress of their dear ones: and since the soul of Josias was not glorified as soon as it went out from his body, it is in this respect that Augustine uses this argument to show that the souls of the dead have no knowledge of the deeds of the living.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  4. Communal Rhythms and SynchronyFrom the moment of our birth, our relationships are embodied in responsive faces, gestures, and touch. As we saw in chapter 7, these are the foundations of attachment. Trauma results in a breakdown of attuned physical synchrony: When you enter the waiting room of a PTSD clinic, you can immediately tell the patients from the staff by their frozen faces and collapsed (but simultaneously agitated) bodies. Unfortunately, many therapists ignore those physical communications and focus only on the words with which their patients communicate. The healing power of community as expressed in music and rhythms was brought home for me in the spring of 1997, when I was following the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In some places we visited, terrible violence continued. One day I attended a group for rape survivors in the courtyard of a clinic in a township outside Johannesburg. We could hear the sound of bullets being fired at a distance while smoke billowed over the walls of the compound and the smell of teargas hung in the air. Later we heard that forty people had been killed. Yet, while the surroundings were foreign and terrifying, I recognized this group all too well: The women sat slumped over—sad and frozen—like so many rape therapy groups I had seen in Boston. I felt a familiar sense of helplessness, and, surrounded by collapsed people, I felt myself mentally collapse as well. Then one of the women started to hum, while gently swaying back and forth. Slowly a rhythm emerged; bit by bit other women joined in. Soon the whole group was singing, moving, and getting up to dance. It was an astounding transformation: people coming back to life, faces becoming attuned, vitality returning to bodies. I made a vow to apply what I was seeing there and to study how rhythm, chanting, and movement can help to heal trauma. We will see more of this in chapter 20, on theater, where I show how groups of young people—among them juvenile offenders and at-risk foster kids—gradually learn to work together and to depend on one another, whether as partners in Shakespearean swordplay or as the writers and performers of full-length musicals. Different patients have told me how much choral singing, aikido, tango dancing, and kickboxing have helped them, and I am delighted to pass their recommendations on to other people I treat. I learned another powerful lesson about rhythm and healing when clinicians at the Trauma Center were asked to treat a five-year-old mute girl, Ying Mee, who had been adopted from an orphanage in China. After months of failed attempts to make contact with her, my colleagues Deborah Rozelle and Liz Warner realized that her rhythmical engagement system didn’t work—she could not resonate with the voices and faces of the people around her. That led them to sensorimotor therapy.[25]

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I don’t believe I had either, but somehow I felt what he was trying to say. Without raising my hand, I read aloud in the perplexed silence: “Je ne l’ai point encore embrassé d’aujourd’hui.” Marrou gazed at me with his somewhat heavy look. “That’s right,” he said slowly. My heart cried with joy. I, son of an Italian-Jewish father and a Berber mother, had discovered in Racine’s work the line that is most typical of Racine. Sometimes, at night, in bed, I would weep with joy when, as I read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, I felt that I could recognize, in his passion and his humble background, his rejection of his own surroundings, my own ambitions and my own future. But I was alone with my book and wept real tears that fell to the pillow, tears of pain and of pride. ~ 3. AT HOME ~ After school, my classmates scattered throughout the nearby middle-class neighborhoods, and I would find myself alone as soon as I reached the edge of the modern quarters. In the course of these long walks through familiar streets, I made most of my important resolutions, or rather found them already ripe after days and days of unconscious maturing. Despite the number of serious decisions I have made, and even kept with a grim determination, I don’t believe I am willful by nature. I think things over at length, and, even after I have made a decision, I continue thinking about it and suffering over it. How often, as I returned home at five o’clock, with the night already seeping into the narrow streets and the sky a deep blue-black, did I plan to make my peace with my parents and to be a considerate and useful son! I thought I knew the necessary gestures: salted almonds or pistachio nuts for my mother on Friday nights, sympathy for my father over his asthma and a show of interest for his business worries, to offer to run errands, fix the electric iron and the light switches. All these flickers of filial devotion generally sparked up in me after family rows and were the ultimate product of the remorse that I never admitted. I would be touched by the exemplary behavior of famous men who had remained faithful sons throughout their lives. The more the parents lacked understanding for the career, the work, and the ambitions of their sons, the more the latter must have enjoyed the feeling of having done their duty with a model filial piety.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  A Secure BaseAs we enter this world we scream to announce our presence. Someone immediately engages with us, bathes us, swaddles us, and fills our stomachs, and, best of all, our mother may put us on her belly or breast for delicious skin-to-skin contact. We are profoundly social creatures; our lives consist of finding our place within the community of human beings. I love the expression of the great French psychiatrist Pierre Janet: “Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.” As we grow up, we gradually learn to take care of ourselves, both physically and emotionally, but we get our first lessons in self-care from the way that we are cared for. Mastering the skill of self-regulation depends to a large degree on how harmonious our early interactions with our caregivers are. Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage—a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them. John Bowlby realized that children are captivated by faces and voices and are exquisitely sensitive to facial expression, posture, tone of voice, physiological changes, tempo of movement and incipient action. He saw this inborn capacity as a product of evolution, essential to the survival of these helpless creatures. Children are also programmed to choose one particular adult (or at most a few) with whom their natural communication system develops. This creates a primary attachment bond. The more responsive the adult is to the child, the deeper the attachment and the more likely the child will develop healthy ways of responding to the people around him. Bowlby would often visit Regent’s Park in London, where he would make systematic observations of the interactions between children and their mothers. While the mothers sat quietly on park benches, knitting or reading the paper, the kids would wander off to explore, occasionally looking over their shoulders to ascertain that Mum was still watching. But when a neighbor stopped by and absorbed his mother’s interest with the latest gossip, the kids would run back and stay close, making sure he still had her attention. When infants and young children notice that their mothers are not fully engaged with them, they become nervous. When their mothers disappear from sight, they may cry and become inconsolable, but as soon as their mothers return, they quiet down and resume their play.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The sensory integration clinic in Watertown, Massachusetts, is a wondrous indoor playground filled with swings, tubs full of multicolored rubber balls so deep that you can make yourself disappear, balance beams, crawl spaces fashioned from plastic tubing, and ladders that lead to platforms from which you can dive onto foam-filled mats. The staff bathed Ying Mee in the tub with plastic balls; that helped her feel sensations on her skin. They helped her sway on swings and crawl under weighted blankets. After six weeks something shifted— and she started to talk.[26] Ying Mee’s dramatic improvement inspired us to start a sensory integration clinic at the Trauma Center, which we now also use in our residential treatment programs. We have not yet explored how well sensory integration works for traumatized adults, but I regularly incorporate sensory integration experiences and dance in my seminars. Learning to become attuned provides parents (and their kids) with the visceral experience of reciprocity. Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an interactive therapy that fosters this, as is SMART (sensory motor arousal regulation treatment), developed by my colleagues at the Trauma Center.[27] When we play together, we feel physically attuned and experience a sense of connection and joy. Improvisation exercises (such as those found at http://learnimprov.com/) also are a marvelous way to help people connect in joy and exploration. The moment you see a group of grim-faced people break out in a giggle, you know that the spell of misery has broken. 5. Getting in TouchMainstream trauma treatment has paid scant attention to helping terrified people to safely experience their sensations and emotions. Medications such as serotonin reuptake blockers, Respiridol and Seroquel increasingly have taken the place of helping people to deal with their sensory world.[28] However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. [image "Drawing by Rembrandt van Rijn titled 'Christ Healing the Sick,' depicting two figures kneeling and holding hands in a gesture of comfort and connection." file=image_rsrc77T.jpg] Rembrandt van Rijn: Christ Healing the Sick. Gestures of comfort are universally recognizable and reflect the healing power of attuned touch. Touch, the most elementary tool that we have to calm down, is proscribed from most therapeutic practices. Yet you can’t fully recover if you don’t feel safe in your skin. Therefore, I encourage all my patients to engage in some sort of bodywork, be it therapeutic massage, Feldenkrais, or craniosacral therapy.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  All the men looked at me with benevolence; so much attention made me feel important. I pretended to hesitate before ordering a grenadine in regal tones. This was the high point of the day, a voluptuous triumph of color and taste. Abdesselam brought me a big glass of a wonderful red; holding it tight with both hands and concentrating my senses of sight and of smell on it, I lost myself in a world of sweetness, all harmony and perfume, which was the very world of my childhood. All around me the grownups were joking, laughing at something or other. I had abandoned the superficial pleasures of society for sublime ecstasies; I had become an exquisite thread in a web of silk, a melting color in a rainbow, a light bubble kissed by the breeze. As soon as we were hungry we returned home. Here an atmosphere of more concentrated solemnity greeted us. With the afternoon, the holiday burst into bloom. In the room that had been specially prepared, the Bride of Sabbath was awaiting us, with the bed all covered with light-pink spreads, the narcissus flowers drooping in the bowl, and the table ready, covered with a flowered cloth. The women, like Oriental dolls dressed in bright silks, were sagely gossiping in the yard, all in chorus, as excited as little girls. My mother had darkened her eyes with long black lines of kohl and was wearing all her jewelry. As we, the men, now came home, the bride began to show some emotion; my mother and sister abandoned their meditations to busy themselves in the kitchen. The feast of black and oily Pquela, of rice-stuffed sausage, of tripe, and of oxtail would last for two hours. Then we generally entrusted our heavy digestion to sleep, and we concluded our Sabbath at the movies. ~ 3. OLD CLOTHES ~

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They were perhaps astonished to see me summoned like this by the principal; perhaps Monsieur Marzouk had announced to them my new and sudden glory. But I was sure that they all stared at me. So as not to have to compete against this general lack of concentration in the class, Monsieur Marzouk interrupted his teaching. In the silence that ensued, my heart beat cheerfully, with big, heavy beats, as if it were dancing. My father’s store was not far from my sponsor’s office, so I went first to see my father. I showed him, almost without any self-consciousness, how deeply I was moved. He told me all about his talk with the principal that same morning; he had come back from it very proud and convinced that I should continue my studies. The principal had been very complimentary indeed, and this had confirmed my father in his faith in his own intelligence and in that of his offspring. Then I went to the drugstore. Monsieur Bismuth was no longer there, but his clerk reassured me: Monsieur Bismuth had expected me, but now asked me to come back in two weeks. So the various threads were indeed all tied together. The city’s siren that announced noon now rang. I rushed into the street, at last aware of my own appetite, but also because I felt a need to run. I wanted to sing, to announce my unbelievable adventure to everyone, to make polite remarks to utter strangers in the street. Some Moslem laborers were repairing the streetcar tracks, and the sun was glistening on the metal. I shouted out to them: “May God be with you!” This is how we greet, in the countryside, laborers whom we do not necessarily know, but merely to reaffirm, in the face of loneliness, the solidarity of all mankind. Now, these men were surprised, because such conventions are generally respected only among believers in their faith; still, they answered me: “The blessing of Allah be upon you!” This feeling of communion with all of mankind made me happy. I gave a couple of coins to a Bedouin beggar, now that I would henceforth be so wealthy! An old idea that disappointments had caused to wilt now blossomed again, binding my adolescence that was beginning more closely to my childhood that was gone: I had been chosen among many, ahead of Lévy, who could not be surpassed in mathematics, ahead of Spinoza, who was Monsieur Marzouk’s favorite! I was surely better than all my classmates, all the students in the school, perhaps all the students in all the Alliance schools! Surely, I would go far and be very powerful. True, I couldn’t yet foresee the nature of this power, but it was a kind of broad movement toward the future, a lunging that was almost muscular.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Today Quintana is walking back up that hill. She’s not the towhead with the plaid jumper and the blue lunchbox and the ponytail. She’s the Princess Bride—and at the top of that hill stands her Prince. Will you join me please in toasting Gerry and Quintana. We did. We joined him in toasting Gerry and Quintana. We toasted Gerry and Quintana at St. John the Divine and a few hours later, in their absence, at a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-fifth Street with my brother and his family, we toasted Gerry and Quintana again. We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.” 5Seven years later. July 26 2010. Laid out on a table in front of me today is a group of photographs sent to me only recently but all taken in 1971, summer or fall, in or around the unheated house in Malibu mentioned in the wedding toast. We had moved into that house in January 1971, on a perfectly clear day which turned so foggy that by the time I drove back to the house from a late-day run to the Trancas Market, three-and-a-half miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, I could no longer find the driveway. Since sundown fogs in January and February and March turned out to be as much a given of that stretch of coast as wildfires would be in September and October and November, this disappearance of the driveway was by no means an unusual turn of events: the preferred method for finding it was to hold your breath, avert your mind from the unseeable cliff below, rising two-hundred-some feet from open ocean, and turn left. Neither the fogs nor the wildfires figure in the photographs. There are eighteen images. Each is of the same child at the same age, Quintana at five, her hair, as noted in the wedding toast, bleached by the beach sun. In some she is wearing her plaid uniform jumper, also noted in the toast. In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park. In a few she is wearing a checked gingham dress trimmed in eyelet, a little faded and a little too big for her, the look of a hand-me-down. In others she has on cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs, a bamboo fishing pole against her shoulder, artfully arranged there (by her) in a spirit less of fishing than of styling, a prop to accessorize the outfit.