Loneliness

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 Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  October 25, 1985 East Lansing I gave a brief talk tonight on “Sisterhood and Survival,” what it means to me. And first off I identified myself as a Black Feminist Lesbian poet, although it felt unsafe, which is probably why I had to do it. I explained that I identified myself as such because if there was one other Black Feminist Lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I wanted her to know she was not alone. I think a lot about Angelina Weld Grimké, a Black Lesbian poet of the Harlem Renaissance who is never identified as such, when she is mentioned at all, although the work of Gloria Hull and Erlene Stetson recently has focused renewed attention upon her. But I never even knew her name when I was going to school, and later, she was the briefest of mentions in a list of “other” Harlem Renaissance writers. I often think of Angelina Weld Grimké dying alone in an apartment in New York City in 1958 while I was a young Black Lesbian struggling in isolation at Hunter College, and I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence: for me to have had her words and her wisdom, and for her to have known I needed them! It is so crucial for each one of us to know she is not alone. I’ve been traveling a lot in the last two years since my children are grown, and I’ve been learning what an enormous amount I don’t know as a Black american woman. And wherever I go, it’s been so heartening to see women of Color reclaiming our lands, our heritages, our cultures, our selves—usually in the face of enormous odds. For me as an African-American woman writer, sisterhood and survival means it’s not enough to say I believe in peace when my sisters’ children are dying in the streets of Soweto and New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Closer to home, what are we as Black women saying to our sons and our nephews and our students as they are, even now, being herded into the military by unemployment and despair, someday to become meat in the battles to occupy the lands of other people of Color? How can we ever, ever forget the faces of those young Black american soldiers, their gleaming bayonets drawn, staking out a wooden shack in the hills of Grenada? What is our real work as Black women writers of the diaspora? Our responsibilities to other Black women and their children across this globe we share, struggling for our joint future? And what if our sons are someday ordered into Namibia, or Southwest Africa, or Zimbabwe, or Angola? Where does our power lie and how do we school ourselves to use it in the service of what we believe?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Someone else is very sick next door, and the vibes are almost too painful to bear. But I must stop saying that now so glibly. Someday something will, in fact, be too painful to bear and then I will have to act. Does one simply get tired of living? I can’t imagine right now what that would be like, but that is because I feel filled with a fury to live—because I believe life can be good even when it is painful—a fury that my energies just don’t match my desires anymore. December 25, 1985 Arlesheim Good morning, Christmas. A Swiss bubble is keeping me from talking to my children and the women I love. The front desk won’t put my calls through. Nobody here wants to pierce this fragile, delicate bubble that is the best of all possible worlds, they believe. So frighteningly insular. Don’t they know good things get better by opening them up to others, giving and taking and changing? Most people here seem to feel that rigidity is a bona fide pathway to peace, and every fiber of me rebels against that. December 26, 1985 Arlesheim Adrienne [Rich] and Michelle [Cliff] and Gloria [Joseph] just called from California. I feel so physically cut off from the people I love. I need them, the sharing of grief and energy. I am avoiding plunging directly into the nightmare of liver cancer as a fact of my life by edging into it like an icy bath. I am trying to edge my friends into it, too, without having to deal with more of their fury and grief than I can handle. There is some we share, and that mutual support makes us closer and more resolved. But there is some that they will have to deal with on their own, just as there is some fury and grief that I can only meet in a private place. Frances has been so true and staunch here. It is more difficult for her sometimes because she does not have the fount of desperate determination that survival is generating inside me. There is so much to keep track of. I think it’s crucial that I not only suffer this but record, in the fullness and the lean, some of the raw as well as digested qualities of now. Last night there was a Christmas full moon, and it felt like a hopeful sign. I stood out in the road in front of the hospital under the full moon on Christmas night and thought about all of my beloved people, the women I love, my children, my family, all the dear faces before my eyes. The moon was so clear and bright, I could feel her upon my skin through Helen’s fur coat. After I had gone to bed she called me back to her twice. The first time I could not pierce through the veil of sleep, but I saw her light and heard her in my dreams.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Everyone who works with patients gives off a similar affect: it is calm, kind, and helpful, but also completely dogmatic. Staff, patients, and visitors eat lunch and dinner together in a spacious, well-draped but sunny dining room with real linens and individualized embroidered napkins. We are seated at tables holding six to ten diners, amid signs of the zodiac and planets sculpted from various kinds of european bedrock, also done in the Steiner artistic tradition of massive, solid lines. Meals are a real chore for me, since it is difficult for me to eat anyway and I loathe eating around strangers. The feeling in the dining room is genteel, cultivated, and totally formal. I take a one-and-a-half-hour class daily in curative eurhythmy with a tiny East Indian woman named Dilnawaz who was raised in Rudolf Steiner schools in India, trained in Germany, and speaks fluent English and German as well as her native tongue. Eurhythmy is a combination of sustained rhythmical body movements and controlled breathing, based upon vowel and consonant sounds. As I learn and practice the stylized movements, they remind me of tai chi and feel like a complement to the Simonton visualization work I’ve been doing for a while. My body feels relaxed and good after eurhythmy, and my mind, too. There is a part of me that wants to dismiss everything here other than Iscador as irrelevant or at least not useful to me, even before I try it, but I think that is very narrow and counterproductive and I don’t want to do it. At least not without first giving myself fully to it, because that is why I came all this way and what do I have to lose at this point? Dilnawaz stresses that the treatment of any disease, and of cancer in particular, must be all of a piece, body and mind, and I am ready to try anything so long as they don’t come at me with a knife. Dilnawaz is the most human, the most friendly, and the most real person I’ve met here, as well as the most spiritual. She is also the most lonely. She is very friendly and helpful toward everyone, and people respond to her with considerable respect, but there is still an air of isolation about her that says to me she is not quite a part. She lives alone in Arlesheim town, and her sister is coming from Germany to spend Christmas with her. I wonder how she feels as a woman of Color among all these white ethnocentric Swiss. She is very cautious about what she says, but she does talk of how reluctant most northern europeans are to give themselves to eurhythmy. I find her a touch of emotional color within a scene of extraordinary blandness. Dilnawaz seems to be relieved to see me, too.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I began to wash and bathe carefully and brush my hair to regulation smoothness (only “cads” used pomatum, Milman said) and when I was asked to recite, I would pout and plead prettily that I did not want to, just in order to be pressed. Sex was awakening in me at this time but was still indeterminate, I imagine; for two motives ruled me for over six months: I was always wondering how I looked and watching to see if people liked me. I used to try to speak with the accent used by the “best people” and on coming into a room I prepared my entrance. Someone, I think it was Vernon’s sweetheart, Monica, said that I had an energetic profile, so I always sought to show my profile. In fact, for some six months, I was more a girl than a boy, with all a girl’s self-consciousness and manifold affectations and sentimentalities: I often used to think that no one cared for me really and I would weep over my unloved loneliness. Whenever later, as a writer, I wished to picture a young girl, I had only to go back to this period in my consciousness in order to attain the peculiar view-point of the girl. * * * LIFE IN AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR SCHOOL. Chapter II. If I tried my best, it would take a year to describe the life in that English Grammar School at R.... I had always been perfectly happy in every Irish school and especially in the Royal School at Armagh. Let me give one difference as briefly as possible. When I whispered in the class-room in Ireland, the master would frown at me and shake his head; ten minutes later I was talking again, and he’d hold up an admonitory finger: the third time he’d probably say, “Stop talking, Harris, don’t you see you’re disturbing your neighbour?” Half an hour later in despair he’d cry, “If you still talk, I’ll have to punish you.” Ten minutes afterwards: “You’re incorrigible, Harris, come up here” and I’d have to go and stand beside his desk for the rest of the morning, and even this light punishment did not happen more than twice a week, and as I came to be head of my class, it grew rarer. In England, the procedure was quite different. “That new boy there is talking; take 300 lines to write out and keep quiet.” “Please, Sir”, I’d pipe up—“Take 500 lines and keep quiet.” “But, Sir”—in remonstrance. “Take 1000 lines and if you answer again, I’ll send you to the Doctor”—which meant I’d get a caning or a long talking to. The English masters one and all ruled by punishment; consequently I was indoors writing out lines almost every day, and every half-holiday for the first year. Then my father, prompted by Vernon, complained to the Doctor that writing out lines was ruining my handwriting.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I feel trapped on a lonely star. Someone else is very sick next door, and the vibes are almost too painful to bear. But I must stop saying that now so glibly. Someday something will, in fact, be too painful to bear and then I will have to act. Does one simply get tired of living? I can’t imagine right now what that would be like, but that is because I feel filled with a fury to live—because I believe life can be good even when it is painful—a fury that my energies just don’t match my desires anymore. December 25, 1985 Arlesheim Good morning, Christmas. A Swiss bubble is keeping me from talking to my children and the women I love. The front desk won’t put my calls through. Nobody here wants to pierce this fragile, delicate bubble that is the best of all possible worlds, they believe. So frighteningly insular. Don’t they know good things get better by opening them up to others, giving and taking and changing? Most people here seem to feel that rigidity is a bona fide pathway to peace, and every fiber of me rebels against that. December 26, 1985 Arlesheim Adrienne [Rich] and Michelle [Cliff] and Gloria [Joseph] just called from California. I feel so physically cut off from the people I love. I need them, the sharing of grief and energy. I am avoiding plunging directly into the nightmare of liver cancer as a fact of my life by edging into it like an icy bath. I am trying to edge my friends into it, too, without having to deal with more of their fury and grief than I can handle. There is some we share, and that mutual support makes us closer and more resolved. But there is some that they will have to deal with on their own, just as there is some fury and grief that I can only meet in a private place. Frances has been so true and staunch here. It is more difficult for her sometimes because she does not have the fount of desperate determination that survival is generating inside me. There is so much to keep track of. I think it’s crucial that I not only suffer this but record, in the fullness and the lean, some of the raw as well as digested qualities of now. Last night there was a Christmas full moon, and it felt like a hopeful sign. I stood out in the road in front of the hospital under the full moon on Christmas night and thought about all of my beloved people, the women I love, my children, my family, all the dear faces before my eyes. The moon was so clear and bright, I could feel her upon my skin through Helen’s fur coat.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  He went with a man named Louis Aggasiz, a naturalist who tried getting James interested in his field. The ultimate goal of the journey was to collect specimens from the river and surrounding area for further study. The trip was expensive for James, and though he began the trip excited for the adventure that lay ahead, he fell into deep depression from the moments of isolation he felt during the voyage. This was the greatest distance he had ever been from his family, which compounded the intensity of his isolation. Within eight months of starting the trip, James quit and returned home to continue his studies at the medical school at Harvard. In April 1867, James once again became afflicted with the symptoms of his neurasthenia. This time, however, the affliction was so painful that he collapsed. This event served as the impetus for his deciding to try and discover a cure for his condition. After telling his family about the incident, he travelled to Europe to continue his medical studies in physiology. This was, however, a masked attempt to find a cure for the physical symptoms he suffered, most notably the back pain. He went to Germany and France, staying in various places on the continent until November 1868. At that point he returned to America to continue his studies without having been able to find the cure-all for his ailments. In 1869, James finally graduated, receiving a degree from Harvard's medical school. Oddly enough, he decided not to go into medical practice, feeling an unnerving hunger for some other kind of knowledge and an anxiety about what he would do for a career. The same year he graduated, his illness symptoms steadily became worse. For the next year, his level of depression increased and he contemplated suicide once again. Yet after reading a written piece on the topic of freedom by a man named Charles Renouvier, James began to recover from his depression. Though his mental condition improved, he would still experience physical signs of distress throughout his life. In 1872, he was asked by Harvard's then-president, a former chemistry teacher of his, to teach physiology. He took the offer, setting off the beginning of the rest of his career teaching at Harvard. The following year, he started teaching physiology and anatomy, moving on to psychology classes by the middle of the decade. By 1876, he had become an assistant professor in psychology. He soon met a woman and schoolteacher by the name of Alice Howe. The two were married by 1878 and would go on to have five children.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In Berlin and Paris, the two capitals of exile, Russians formed compact colonies, with a coefficient of culture that greatly surpassed the cultural mean of the necessarily more diluted foreign communities among which they were placed. Within those colonies they kept to themselves. I have in view, of course, Russian intellectuals, mostly belonging to democratic groups, and not the flashier kind of person who “was, you know, adviser to the Tsar or something” that American clubwomen immediately think of whenever “White Russians” are mentioned. Life in those settlements was so full and intense that these Russian “intelligentï” (a word that had more socially idealistic and less highbrow connotations than “intellectuals” as used in America) had neither time nor reason to seek ties beyond their own circle. Today, in a new and beloved world, where I have learned to feel at home as easily as I have ceased barring my sevens, extroverts and cosmopolitans to whom I happen to mention these past matters think I am jesting, or accuse me of snobbery in reverse, when I maintain that in the course of almost one-fifth of a century spent in Western Europe I have not had, among the sprinkling of Germans and Frenchmen I knew (mostly landladies and literary people), more than two good friends all told.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One more incident belongs in this thirteenth year, and is worthy perhaps of record. Freed of the bullying and senseless cruelty of the older boys who for the most part, still siding with Jones, left me severely alone, the restraints of school life began to irk me. “If I were free”, I said to myself, “I’d go after E… or some other girl and have a great time; as it is, I can do nothing, hope for nothing.” Life was stale, flat and unprofitable to me. Besides, I had read nearly all the books I thought worth reading in the school library, and time hung heavy on my hands: I began to long for liberty as a caged bird. What was the quickest way out? I knew that my father as a Captain in the Navy could give me or get me a nomination so that I might become a Midshipman. Of course I’d have to be examined before I was fourteen; but I knew I could win a high place in any test. The summer vacation after I was thirteen on the 14th of February I spent at home in Ireland as I have told, and from time to time, bothered my father to get me the nomination. He promised he would, and I took his promise seriously. All the autumn I studied carefully the subjects I was to be examined in and from time to time wrote to my father reminding him of his promise. But he seemed unwilling to touch on the matter in his letters which were mostly filled with Biblical exhortations, that sickened me with contempt for his brainless credulity. My unbelief made me feel immeasurably superior to him. Christmas came and I wrote him a serious letter, insisting that he should keep his promise. For the first time in my life I flattered him, saying that I knew his word was sacred: but the time-limit was at hand and I was getting nervous lest some official delay might make me pass the prescribed limit of age. I got no reply: I wrote to Vernon who said he would do his best with the Governor. The days went on, the 14th of February came and went: I was fourteen. That way of escape into the wide world was closed to me by my father. I raged in hatred of him.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalie’s eccentric art. This at least was the explanation I dug up for not being oversuccessful on the playing fields of Cambridge. Oh, to be sure, I had my bright, bracing days—the good smell of turf, that famous inter-Varsity forward, dribbling closer and closer to me with the new tawny ball at his twinkling toe, then the stinging shot, the lucky save, its protracted tingle.… But there were other, more memorable, more esoteric days, under dismal skies, with the goal area a mass of black mud, the ball as greasy as a plum pudding, and my head racked with neuralgia after a sleepless night of verse-making. I would fumble badly—and retrieve the ball from the net. Mercifully the game would swing to the opposite end of the sodden field. A weak, weary drizzle would start, hesitate, and go on again. With an almost cooing tenderness in their subdued croaking, dilapidated rooks would be flapping about a leafless elm. Mists would gather. Now the game would be a vague bobbing of heads near the remote goal of St. John’s or Christ, or whatever college we were playing. The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates. Not once in my three years of Cambridge—repeat: not once—did I visit the University Library, or even bother to locate it (I know its new place now), or find out if there existed a college library where books might be borrowed for reading in one’s digs. I skipped lectures. I sneaked to London and elsewhere. I conducted several love affairs simultaneously. I had dreadful interviews with Mr. Harrison. I translated into Russian a score of poems by Rupert Brooke, Alice in Wonderland, and Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon. Scholastically, I might as well have gone up to the Inst. M. M. of Tirana.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As soon as I began to take note of things, I remarked that Lizzie no longer came near my room. One day I asked my sister what had become of her. To my astonishment my sister broke out in passionate dislike of her: “while you were lying unconscious”, she cried, “and the doctor was taking your pulse every few minutes, evidently frightened: he asked me could he get a prescription made up at once: he wanted to inject morphia, he said, to stop or check the racing of your heart. He wrote the prescription and I sent Lizzie with it and told her to be as quick as she could for your life might depend on it. When she didn’t come back in ten minutes, I got the Doctor to write it out again and sent Father with it. He brought it back in double-quick time. Hours passed and Lizzie didn’t return: she had gone out before ten and didn’t get back till it was almost one. I asked her where she had been? Why she hadn’t got back sooner? She replied coolly that she had been listening to the Band. I was so shocked and angry I wouldn’t keep her another moment. I sent her away at once. Think of it! I have no patience with such heartless brutes!” Lizzie’s callousness seemed to me even stranger than it seemed to my sister. I have often noticed that girls are less considerate of others than even boys, unless their affections are engaged, but I certainly thought I had half won Lizzie at least! However, the fact is so peculiar that I insert it here for what it may be worth. During my convalescence which lasted three months, Molly went for a visit to some friends: at the time I regretted it; now looking back I have no doubt she went away to free herself from an engagement she thought ill-advised. Missing her I went about with her younger, prettier sister Kathleen who was more sensuous and more affectionate than Molly. A little later, Molly went to Dresden to stay with an elder married sister: thence she wrote to me to set her free and I consented as a matter of course very willingly. Indeed I had already more real affection for Kathleen than Molly had ever called to life in me. As I got strong again I came to know a young Oxford man who professed to be astonished at my knowledge of literature and one day he came to me with the news that Grant Allen, the writer, had thrown up his job as Professor of Literature at Brighton College: “why should you not apply for it: it’s about two hundred pounds a year and they can do no worse than refuse you.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells. She lives elsewhere. She lives in a room where a tree gently taps against the glass as someone touches a needle to a phonograph record. Here in this kitchen white dishes are stacked pristinely, like holy implements, behind glassed cupboard doors. A row of old terra-cotta pots, glazed in various shades of crackled yellow, stand on the granite countertop. Clarissa recognizes these things but stands apart from them. She feels the presence of her own ghost; the part of her at once most indestructibly alive and least distinct; the part that owns nothing; that observes with wonder and detachment, like a tourist in a museum, a row of glazed yellow pots and a countertop with a single crumb on it, a chrome spigot from which a single droplet trembles, gathers weight, and falls. She and Sally bought all these things, she can remember every transaction, but she feels now that they are arbitrary, the spigot and the counter and the pots, the white dishes. They are only choices, one thing and then another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this life— these empty and arbitrary comforts. She could simply leave it and return to her other home, where neither Sally nor Richard exists; where there is only the essence of Clarissa, a girl grown into a woman, still full of hope, still capable of anything. It is revealed to her that all her sorrow and loneliness, the whole creaking scaffold of it, stems simply from pretending to live in this apartment among these objects, with kind, nervous Sally, and that if she leaves she’ll be happy, or better than happy. She’ll be herself. She feels briefly, wonderfully alone, with everything ahead of her. Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight. Clarissa pulls the flowers from their paper, puts them in the sink. She is disappointed and more than a little relieved. This is, in fact, her apartment, her collection of clay pots, her mate, her life. She wants no other. Feeling regular, neither elated nor depressed, simply present as Clarissa Vaughan, a fortunate woman, professionally well regarded, giving a party for a celebrated and mortally ill artist, she goes back to the living room to check the messages on the answering machine. The party will go well or badly. Either way, she and Sally will have dinner afterward.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Virginia gathers the collar of her cloak around her neck, though it isn’t cold. It is merely darkening, with a wind. She believes she will walk into town, yes, but what will she do there? The shops, even now, are being swept and readied for closing. She passes a couple, a man and woman younger than herself, walking together, leisurely, bent toward each other in the soft lemon-colored glow of a streetlamp, talking (she hears the man say, “told me something something something in this establishment, something something, harrumph, indeed”); both man and woman wearing stylish hats, the fringed end of a mustard scarf (whose?) rippling behind like a flag; both of them bent slightly forward as well as toward each other, mounting the hill, holding their hats against the wind, avid but unhurried, coming home (most likely) from a day in London, he saying now, “And so I must ask you,” after which he lowers his voice—Virginia can’t make out the words at all—and the woman emits a gleeful little shriek, showing a quick white flash of tooth, and the man laughs, striding forward, setting down with perfect confidence the toe of one and then another perfectly polished brown shoe. I am alone, Virginia thinks, as the man and woman continue up the hill and she continues down. She is, of course, not alone, not in a way anyone else would recognize, and yet at this moment, walking through wind toward the lights of the Quadrant, she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again. The devil is a headache; the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil is a fin breaking through dark waves. The devil is the brief, twittering nothing that was a thrush’s life. The devil sucks all the beauty from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished is a realm of the living dead—joyless, suffocating. Virginia feels, right now, a certain tragic grandeur, for the devil is many things but he is not petty, not sentimental; he seethes with a lethal, intolerable truth. Right now, walking, free of her headache, free of the voices, she can face the devil, but she must keep walking, she must not turn back. When she reaches the Quadrant (the butcher and greengrocer have already rolled up their awnings) she turns toward the rail station. She will go, she thinks, to London; she will simply go to London, like Nelly on her errand, although Virginia’s errand will be the trip itself, the half hour on the train, the disembarking at Paddington, the possibility of walking down a street into another street, and another after that. What a lark! What a plunge!

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

  Then, when the group meeting ended, the observers (medical, psychology, or counseling students, residents, and nurses who had observed the meeting through a one-way mirror) entered the room and discussed the meeting while the patients observed from an outer circle. 4. Finally, for the last ten minutes, the group members responded to the observers’ post-group discussion. The first step, the formulation of an agenda, was the most difficult task for the patients and therapists. As I defined it, the agenda was not about why patients entered the hospital—not, for example, about the frightening voices they might hear, or the side effects of antipsychotic medications, or some traumatic event in their life. Instead, the agenda was to be about some problem in their relationships with others—for example, “I’m lonely. I need friends but no one wants to be with me,” or, “Whenever I open up, people will ridicule me,” or, “I sense that people consider me repulsive and a nuisance and I need to find out if that’s true.” The therapist’s next step would be to transform that into a here-and-now agenda. When a members says, “I’m lonely…” the therapist might say, “Can you talk about the ways in which you feel lonely here in this group?” or, “Who might you want to be close to in this group?” or, “Let’s explore, as we proceed, what role you play in being lonely in this group today.” The therapist must be very active, but when it works well, the members of the group help each other improve their interpersonal behavior, and the results are significantly better than when focusing on why the patient has been hospitalized. I strove to give the observers—nurses, psychiatry residents, and medical students—an active role in the group, and that resulted in the observers making a significant contribution to the therapy group session. On a survey, the patients rated the last twenty minutes of the meeting (the discussion with the observers) as the most worthwhile part of the meeting! In fact, some patients habitually peeked into the observation room before the group started, and if there were no observers that day, they were less inclined to attend. These reactions were similar to the reactions of my outpatient groups. If members can lay eyes on the observers and get feedback from them, the therapy work is facilitated. For the daily group of lower-functioning patients, I formulated a model that included a series of safe, structured exercises of self-disclosure, empathy, social skills training, and identification of desired personal changes. And, finally, to address the diminished staff morale, I set up a weekly process group—that is, a group in which the staff (including the medical director and the head nurse) discussed their relationships with one another. Such a group is hard to lead but ultimately becomes invaluable in ameliorating staff tensions.

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

  The consul looked at them with pleasure when he came to Travemünde with Tom and Christian on Sundays. Then you ate at the table d'hote, drank coffee under the tent roof of the pastry shop while listening to spa music and watched the roulette inside the hall, with jolly people like Justus Kröger and Peter Döhlmann crowding around: the Consul never played. – Tony sunbathed, she bathed, ate bratwurst with peppernut sauce and went for long walks with Morten: the Chausseeweg to the neighboring village, along the beach to the high "sea temple" that commanded a wide view over sea and land, or up into the little forest that lay behind the Kurhaus and at the height of which the large table d'hote bell hung... Or she rowed across the Trave to the »Priwal« where amber could be found... Morten was an entertaining companion, although his opinions were a little heated and dismissive. He carried with him a strict and just judgment about all things, which he pronounced with determination, although he blushed at it. Tony was grieved, and she scolded him when, with a somewhat clumsy but angry gesture, he declared all the nobles to be idiots and wretches; but she was very proud of the fact that he expressed his views to her openly and trustingly, which he didn't tell his parents ... Once he said: "I have to tell you this: I have a perfect skeleton in my booth in Göttingen ... you know, such a bone skeleton, provisionally held together with some wire. Well, I dressed this skeleton in an old policeman's uniform... ha! Don't you think that's excellent? But for God's sake don't tell my father!' It was inevitable that Tony often socialized with her town acquaintance on the beach or in the spa gardens, that she would be invited to this or that reunion and sailing party. Then Morten sat 'on the stones'. These stones had become the idiom between the two since the first day. "Sitting on the stones" meant: "Being lonely and bored." There came a rainy day that veiled the sea far and wide in a gray veil so that it completely merged with the deep sky that soaked the beach and swamped the paths, and Tony said, 'Today we both have to sit on the stones . . . that is in the porch or in the living room. There is nothing to do but play me your student songs, Morten, although I am terribly bored.” "Yes," said Morten, "let's sit down... But you know, when you're with us, there won't be any more stones!"... By the way, he didn't say things like that when his father was around; his mother was allowed to hear it. "What now?" asked the pilot commander when, after lunch, Tony and Morten got up at the same time and prepared to leave...

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. I am a terrible day-dreamer. I have been since I was a boy. My mind goes walking and playing and skipping. I invent characters, write stories, pretend I am a rock star, pretend I am a legendary poet, pretend I am an astronaut, and there is no control to my mind. When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn’t normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body. A few years back some friends and I hiked to Jefferson Park, high on the Pacific Crest Trail at the base of Mount Jefferson. One evening we were sitting around a campfire telling stories when we spotted a ranger slowly walking toward our camp. He was a small man, thin, but he moved slowly as though he was tired. He ascended the small slope toward our fire by pushing his hands against his knees. When he met us he did not introduce himself, he only gazed into the fire for a while. We addressed him, and he nodded. He kindly asked to see our permits. We went to our tents and to our backpacks and brought the permits to him unfolded. He studied each of them slowly, staring at the documents as if he had slipped into a daydream. They were simple documents, really, just green slips of paper with a signature. But he eyed them like moving pictures, like cartoons. Eventually he handed our permits back to us, smiling, nodding, looking awfully queer. And then he stood there. He leaned against a tree only two feet from our campfire and watched us. We asked him a few questions, asked him if he needed anything else, but he kindly said no. Finally, I figured it out. He was lonely. He was alone and going nuts. He had forgotten how to engage people. I asked him how long he had been at Jeff Park. Two months, he said. Two months, I asked, all by yourself ? Yeah, he said and smiled. That’s a long time to be alone, I told him. Well, he said to me, this conversation has worn me out. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled again. He looked out into the distance and stretched his neck to look at the stars. “Do believe I will head back to camp,” he said. He didn’t say good-bye. He walked down the little hill and into the darkness.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  For a second I could not move. I wrote in my journal that evening: “I saw Emily Dickinson step out of a screen door and look at me with dark eyes, those endless dark eyes like the mouth of a cave, like pitch night set so lovely twice beneath her furrowed brow, her pale white skin gathering at the red of her lips, her long thin neck coming perfectly from her white dress flowing so gently and clean around her waist, down around her knees then slipping a tickle across her ankles. And then she went back into the house and it scared me to walk around the place.” Penny says it is when they are in their twenties that people lose their minds. She says this is what happened to her mother. And when we talk about it, I think of myself in Amherst, so confident at the thing I saw, and at once confident there was nothing there because Emily is dead. I stopped imagining her immediately. I never told anybody about this because nothing like this happened anymore, so there was no need, and what’s more I couldn’t bear to find out that I was going crazy, that I was indeed seeing things. I blamed it on loneliness of the biochemical sort. When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn’t good for a person to be alone. [image "9780785263708_0172_001" file=Image00059.jpg] There once was a man named Don Astronaut. [image "9780785263708_0173_001" file=Image00060.jpg] Don Astronaut lived on a space station out in space. [image "9780785263708_0174_001" file=Image00061.jpg] Don Astronaut had a special space suit that kept him alive without food or water or oxygen. [image "9780785263708_0175_001" file=Image00062.jpg] One day there was an accident. [image "9780785263708_0176_001" file=Image00063.jpg] And Don Astronaut was cast out into space. [image "9780785263708_0177_001" file=Image00064.jpg] Don Astronaut orbited the earth and was very scared. [image "9780785263708_0178_001" file=Image00065.jpg] Until he remembered his special suit that kept him alive. [image "9780785263708_0179_001" file=Image00066.jpg] But nobody’s government came to rescue Don Astronaut because it would cost too much money. (There was a conspiracy, and they said he had died, but he hadn’t.) [image "9780785263708_0180_001" file=Image00067.jpg] So Don Astronaut orbited the earth again and again, fourteen times each day. [image "9780785263708_0181_001" file=Image00068.jpg] And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for months. [image "9780785263708_0182_001" file=Image00069.jpg] And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for decades. [image "9780785263708_0183_001" file=Image00070.jpg] And Don Astronaut orbited the earth for fifty-three years before he died a very lonely and crazy man—just a shell of a thing with hardly a spark for a soul.One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I don’t look all that tired in the picture, but I remember being tired. I remember feeling tired for almost a year. I was tired because I wasn’t used to being around people all the time. The picture was taken on the porch. We were all smoking pipes. I was wearing a black stocking cap, like a beat poet or a bank robber. Andrew the Protester, the tall good-looking one with dark hair and the beard, the one who looks like a young Fidel Castro, was the activist in our bachelor family. He is the guy I told you about with whom I go to protests. He works with the homeless downtown and is studying at Portland State to become a social worker. He is always talking about how outrageous the Republicans are or how wrong it is to eat beef. I honestly don’t know how Andrew got so tall without eating beef. Jeremy, the guy in the Wranglers with the marine haircut, is the cowboy in the family. He always carries a gun. You’d think Andrew and Jeremy would hate each other because Andrew opposes the right to bear arms, but they get along okay, good-natured guys and all. It is a shame because that would be a great fight. Jeremy wants to be a cop, and he went to college on a wrestling scholarship, and Andrew is a communist. I would try to get them to fight, but they liked each other. Mike Tucker, whom we all refer to as Tuck, was the older brother in the clan, the responsible one. He is the one with the spiked red hair, like Richie Cunningham fused with a rock star. Mike was a trucker for years but always dreamed of a career in advertising. He moved to Portland and started his own advertising agency with just a cell phone and a Web site. He posed nude on his brochure, which got him gigs with Doc Martens and a local fashion agency. He freelances every other day and drives trucks the rest of the time. Mike is one of my best friends in the world. Mike is one of the greatest guys I know. Simon, the short good-looking guy with the black hair and sly grin, was the leprechaun of our tribe. He’s a deeply spiritual Irishman here for the year from Dublin. Simon is a womanizer, always heading down to Kell’s for a pint with the lads or to the church to pray and ask God’s forgiveness for his detestable sins and temper. Simon came to America on a J-1 visa. He came to Portland, specifically, to study our church. He wants to go back to the homeland and start a Christian revival, returning the country to its faith in Jesus, the living God.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  I did a great Elvis. I would read the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud and pretend to have conversations with her. I asked her what she meant by “zero at the bone,” and I asked her if she was a lesbian. For the record, she told me she wasn’t a lesbian. She was sort of offended by the question, to be honest. Emily Dickinson was the most interesting person I’d ever met. She was lovely, really, sort of quiet like a scared dog, but she engaged fine when she warmed up to me. She was terribly brilliant. I had been living in that apartment for two years when I decided to cross the country to visit Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily lived and died. Back then I imagined her as the perfect woman, so quietly brilliant all those years, wrapping her poems neatly in bundles of paper and rope. I confess I day-dreamed about living in her Amherst, in her century, befriending her during her days at Holyoke Seminary, walking with her through those summer hills she spoke so wonderfully of, the hills that, in the morning, untied their bonnets. My friend Laura at Reed tells me that half the guys she knows have had crushes on Emily Dickinson. She says it is because Emily was brilliant and yet not threatening, having lived under the thumb of her father so long. She thinks the reason guys get crushes on Emily Dickinson is because Emily is an intellectual submissive, and intellectual men fear the domination of women. I don’t care why we get crushes on Emily Dickinson. It is a rite of passage for any thinking man. Any thinking American man. I only tell you all of this to show you how bad it gets when you aren’t around real people for a long time. I tell you of Emily Dickinson because she reminds me of the first time I thought, perhaps, I had lost my mind in isolation. I know now it was an apparition of loneliness, but I cannot tell you how very real it seemed that evening in Amherst. The other times I had seen her it was all invention; I was creating her out of boredom. But this was different. I had driven from New York City to Boston the night before and had slept in my car. I stopped in Boston because I was too tired to drive the night. I was so cold under a towel I turned and rubbed against a seat belt that knotted itself in my back and against the handle of the door that crowded my head. I lay there in the backseat and stared at the roof of the car, thinking about Emily Dickinson. I hardly got any sleep. In the morning I doped up on coffee and started on the last leg of my journey, the leg that led to Amherst.

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

  You with your life… But we're pretty bored, I guess?” 'Yes, Tom, I'm very bored. Sometimes I cry from boredom. I've enjoyed working with this house, and you don't know how happy I am to have you back... But I don't like being at home, you know; God punish me if this is a sin. I'm in my thirties now, but that's not yet the age to be with the last of the heavenly citizens or the ladies Gerhardt or one of mother's dark men who house the widowswolf down, To make bosom friendships... I don't believe in them, Tom, they're wolves in sheep's clothing... Otters bred... We're all weak men with sinful hearts, and when they want to look down on me poor worldling with pity, I laugh at them. I have always been of the opinion that all people are equal and that there is no need for mediation between us and God. You also know my political principles. I want the citizen to go to the state..." "So you're feeling a little lonely, aren't you?" Thomas asked to get her going again. "But listen, you have Erika?" 'Yes, Tom, and I love the child with all my heart, although a certain personality said I was not fond of children... But, you see... I'm frank with you, I'm an honest woman, I speak what is on my heart and don't believe in making words..." "Which is very nice of you, Tony." "In short, the sad thing is that the child reminds me too much of Grünlich ... the Buddenbrooks on Breite Strasse also say that it is so much like him ... And then, when I have it in front of me, I can't stop thinking: You are one old woman with a big daughter and life is behind you. You once stood in it for a few years, but now you can live to be seventy or eighty years old and you'll stay here and Lea Hear Gerhardt read to you. The thought makes me so sad, Tom, it's sitting here in my throat and pressing. Because I still feel so youthful, you know, and I long to get out into life again ... And finally: not only in the house, but also in the whole city I don't feel quite well, because you don't have to believe that I'm with you I'm blind for the circumstances, I'm no longer a goose and I have my eyes in my head. I'm a divorced woman and I get to feel it, that's very clear. Believe me, Tom, it always weighs heavily on my heart to have sullied our name through no fault of my own. You can do whatever you want, you can make money and be the first man in town, people will still say: 'Yes ... his sister is a divorced woman, by the way.' Julchen Möllendorpf, née Hagenström, doesn't greet me ... well, she's a goose! But that's how it goes with all families...

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  The first time he found his stepdad’s stack of porn was when his mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. With his parents preoccupied with surgery, chemo, and radiation, he found the beautiful women posed on the glossy pages to be a strange sort of comfort. He felt warm and somehow accepted by the eyes penetrating his aloneness. The weaker his mom became, the more he detached from her and attached himself to the glamorized, nude women. These women wouldn’t leave him, he justified in his eight-year-old brain. Little did he know he was gradually shifting his need for human attachment onto a false image. The confusion of guilt feelings mixed with sexual arousal and the fear of losing his real mother puddled into the deep recesses of his brain, wiring this innocent little boy for a lifetime of sexual addiction struggles. He was glad to leave Los Angeles behind—only bad memories lived there. He still blushed with disgust over his last date with Kate. Apparently, the years of masturbation and porn were dulling his ability to perform sexually. Seriously, he thought to himself, How could someone like me have performance issues? His shoulder ready to rid itself of his overstuffed backpack, Kevin heaved it onto the ratty sofa in the frat common area. From the stairway, he spotted the largest human he had ever laid eyes on. Jason was from the Midwest and the first to greet Kevin. He looked like a brick house. He was huge, all six feet six inches, three hundred pounds of him. He looked like a linebacker for some professional football team. Kevin soon learned that was exactly what Jason hoped he would become. He was highly pursued by the best universities in the country, but he made the final decision to come to Texas A&M on a full football scholarship. Kevin’s first impression of Jason left no doubt in his mind that every goal Jason had he would achieve. Kevin began to relax as Jason showed him around the house and made him feel at home. There was something down-to-earth about Jason that spawned a sensation in Kevin’s gut. Was it trust? Kevin shook it off and flopped down on the edge of the bed Jason said was his. Jason asked if he wanted to go check out the campus and find food. Always hungry, Kevin quickly agreed. While they wolfed down lunch, Kevin learned more about Jason. He was raised on a dairy farm in Nebraska, his mom and dad were still married, and he had five other siblings. He worked hard on the farm with his family, and though they didn’t have much money, there was plenty of love to be shared. They gave him values, guidance, warmth, and security.