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 Cultish (2021)

  This fundamental human itch for connection is touching, but when steered in the wrong direction, it can also cause an otherwise judicious person to do utterly irrational things. Consider this classic study: In 1951, Swarthmore College psychologist Solomon Asch gathered together half a dozen students to conduct a simple “vision test.” Asch showed four vertical lines to the participants, all but one of whom were in on the experiment, and asked them to point to the two that were the same length. There was one obviously correct answer, which you needed zero skills other than eyesight to figure out, but Asch found that if the first five students pointed to a blatantly wrong answer, 75 percent of test subjects ignored their better judgment and agreed with the majority. This ingrained fear of alienation, this compulsion to conform, is part of what makes being part of a group feel so right. It’s also what charismatic leaders, from 3HO’s Yogi Bhajan to CrossFit’s Greg Glassman, have learned to channel and exploit. It was once true that when in need of community and answers, people defaulted to organized religion. But increasingly this is no longer the case. Every day, more and more Americans are dropping their affiliations with mainstream churches and scattering. The “spiritual but not religious” label is something most of my twentysomething friends have claimed. Pew Research data from 2019 found that four in ten millennials don’t identify with any religious affiliation; this was up nearly 20 percentage points from seven years prior. A 2015 Harvard Divinity School study found that young people are still seeking “both a deep spiritual experience and a community experience” to imbue their lives with meaning—but fewer than ever are satisfying these desires with conventional faith. To classify this skyrocketing demographic of religious disaffiliates, scholars have come up with labels like the “Nones” and the “Remixed.” The latter term was coined by Tara Isabella Burton, a theologian, reporter, and author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. “Remixed” describes the tendency of contemporary seekers to mix and match beliefs and rituals from different circles (religious and secular) to come up with a bespoke spiritual routine. Say, a meditation class in the morning, horoscopes in the afternoon, and then ultra- Reform Friday night Shabbat with friends. Spiritual meaning often doesn’t involve God at all anymore.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Rose is right: I really should find a new job. But it’s November, and the holidays are arriving, and nobody will be hiring at this time of year. I figure I can ride things out for a few more months. I’ll go into the office a couple of days a week, just enough to keep up appearances. Over the winter I’ll do a lot of skiing. I’ll take a trip to Utah and visit some friends. By the time ski season ends it will be April, and I’ll have hit my one-year anniversary and can slip out quietly from HubSpot. I remind myself that I have a lot to be thankful for—realizing, even as I do, that the only people who say this are people who are desperate and miserable. Nonetheless, my health is good. I’m employed. The family is happy. My son has been playing soccer, and this season I have seen all of his games. My daughter has a piano recital and will dance in the local Nutcracker, and this year I can attend both of them. Last year I was in San Francisco. Sasha’s migraines are under control. She’s happier and less stressed out. So what if my job sucks? I’m working. I’m getting paid. Things could be worse. HubSpot has a policy that says anyone can work from home whenever they want. I now take full advantage of this. When I have to work in the office— usually because there’s a meeting that I have to attend—I go in late and leave early. In meetings I say as little as possible. I stare at my laptop and pretend to take notes, when really I’m browsing the web and catching up on Facebook. Between meetings I return to my desk in the cacophonous spider monkey room, put in my earplugs and headphones, listen to Mozart, and gaze around at the doomed souls. It’s a lonely, isolated existence. Around noon I walk across First Street to the Galleria mall, eat sushi in the food court, then return to my desk and my headphones, burying myself in my cocoon. Sometimes I go for a walk around the offices. I visit different floors, just looking around. I’ll find a kitchen and make a cup of coffee and sit by myself on a couch in a lounge area, reading news on my phone. By around four o’clock it’s dark outside, so I put my laptop into my backpack and head home. Entire days go by when I do not speak a word to anyone. The whole thing feels surreal. Gradually I slide into depression, swinging between a restless, herky-jerky anxiety and a mind-numbing lethargy. Some nights I lie awake, unable to sleep, my mind racing, until finally I take an Ambien to knock myself out.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  “How long have you been crying?” I asked her. “I haven’t been crying,” she responded. “No, I mean how long have you been crying inside?” “Eight months.” I simply held her like a child until the sobbing gradually subsided. Little by little she was able to tell what was troubling her. She felt that she could be of help to others but that no one could love her, and therefore no one could help her. I suggested that she turn around and look at the group and she would see a great deal of caring on the faces of those around her. Then one of the members, a nun, told how she had lived through the same kind of period in her own life —doubt, despair, and feeling unloved. Other members of the group also helped. Then Ann revealed that her parents had separated. She had greatly missed her father, and to have a man show a caring interest in her meant a great deal. Evidently by intuition I had acted wisely, but I have no idea of how this came about. Here, however, was a girl whom almost everyone would consider a charming and lovable person, yet within, she had, seen herself as completely unlovable. My own caring and that of the members of the group did a great deal to change this perception. (pp. 111–113) Following this weekend group, I had several letters from Ann telling how much the experience had meant to her. She said she still had many doubts and questions, but the hopelessness and the feelings of being alone and unloved had disappeared. About six months later, I was in the parking lot of the Immaculate Heart campus. A car with several girls in it stopped. Ann jumped out of the car and came over, and we embraced warmly. It was clear that she felt secure and cared for in her relationship with me. Now, nine years later, comes this letter: Dear Carl, Years ago in high school (Immaculate Heart) I was fortunate enough to have been a part of your sensitivity training for a weekend in Montecito. Just this summer I was attending San Jose State Grad Program for my teaching credentials, and lo and behold, in my sociology class we were to read Freedom to Learn by you. My thoughts turned to you time and again, over and over, and I just had to send you this message of how powerful an experience my being with you years ago has been. It was as clear nine years ago as it is to me today how real, how honest, genuine, valid, and true your human approach is. Little did I

• From Cultish (2021)

  Starting in the 2010s, America’s fastest-growing companies in general became the ones that offered not only desirable products and services, but also personal transformation, belonging, and answers to big life questions like: Who am I in this increasingly isolated world? How do I connect with people around me? How do I find my most authentic self and take the steps to become that person? In so many pockets of American culture, folks turn to workout studios for these answers. “Meaning-making is a growth industry,” said ter Kuile. Like church, fitness brands became both a social identity and a code by which to lead your life. The fitness “movement” encompasses customs and rituals, social expectations, and consequences for failing to show up. People meet their closest friends and spouses in the studio; true diehards quit their jobs to become instructors themselves. “I don’t want to ride. I don’t ever want to ride. A good-hair day is a good-enough excuse for me not to ride. Now I’m riding five or six times a week because we have built such a supportive community,” effused one devout Peloton user in a 2019 New York magazine interview. “It goes so beyond the bike.” Workout studios wound up feeling, to some degree, holy. After all, they became some of the only physical spaces where the young and religiously ambivalent could put down their devices and find in-the-flesh community and connection. “We’re living in dark times,” remarked Sam Rypinski, owner of a “radically inclusive” Los Angeles gym called Everybody. “We’re very segregated and separated. . . . We’re cut off by technology. We don’t connect with our bodies . . . [or] each other. So if there’s a space that encourages that on any level, people are so happy to be there.” On top of cerebral notions of “meaning-making” and existential loneliness add the rise of social media fitness influ encers (and the so-called aspirational body standards they promote), plus innovations in workout technology (high-performance athleticwear, fitness trackers, streaming classes), and it’s no wonder the business of exercise boomed in a godlike way. At some point during the mid-2010s, the phrase “cult workout” entered our vocabularies—a succinct label to describe the fitness industry’s intensified societal role. Participants in Casper ter Kuile’s Harvard Divinity School study sincerely told him things like “SoulCycle is like my cult,” and they meant it in a good way. The cult comparisons were something brands didn’t know how to handle at first. In 2015, I interviewed SoulCycle’s senior vice president of “Brand Strategy and PR” about the company’s status as a cult workout. Cautiously, she told me, “We don’t use that word. We say ‘community.’” It was very clear that she didn’t want to leave people any room to conflate her employer with the likes of Scientology. But over the years, fitness studios have really leaned into the churchly role they play in members’ lives. SoulCycle’s website explicitly reads: “SoulCycle is more than just a workout.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  She was suddenly fluent in the language of the Mexican grandmother she now claimed — a woman she’d never met, a country she’d never visited, until summoned to her deathbed, or so goes her most famous ballad. I dried myself out, bought a Spanish translation dictionary, hired a tutor, worked diligently, but words don’t roll easy on my tongue. Some I can manage. Photo: foto. Film: membrana. Naked: en carne. Same as meat: carne, my line of business. Sin tu, without you, a sin. But I stumble over words. Speech is not my method of communicating. I lip read better than I talk. I smell a false trail more easily than I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Like the molé of her adopted country, she took a hundred separate ingredients and used her secret, inherited recipe, boiling them down into one dish — her new identity. I backed it all up. I documented her made-up truths, turned her lies into reality. The fame that had eluded her until then exploded like a supernova. Year by year, she’s grown darker — though her skin is still smooth and unlined — easily explained by sun worship, though modern actresses have given up this pagan ritual in our cancer-riddled times. But I know that she draws her curtains to e/ sol and casts her devotion to the moon. Her skin can only be the pigment of her grandmother calling from the distant past. 94 ¥. D. Munro I want to be part of the fabric. Not apart. Not what I am, a bedbug on the linen, despised irritant. Not what I am, always witness, never in the frame. Not what I am, one of the mongrel pack who chase her, like the hundreds of stray dogs that crowd the pitted streets of Moth Bay. All descended from just a few lost pets long ago, the hotel proprietress, a transplanted gringo, told me. Like the townspeople themselves, all descended from just two ancestors: a Huichol priestess and the first Catholic priest to land on this shore, a man of the cloth who disrobed to lie with her. I see hints of Kiara when I look at the villagers. They won’t talk to me, even when I stutter out an hola at the mercado. Secretive, as tight knit as the jungle trees. They say it was the women who saved the town from slaughter when the conquerors invaded. The white men simply disappeared, one by one.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The Tinkling of Tiny Silver Bells 215 see her for months. Once a year passed before I walked in to see her dancing, naked, in my living room, the air thick with Mexican greenbud. But now that she had passed on, time seemed different to her. I would expect to feel or feel this spirit of Morrison, of Cream, of Sergeant Pepper at least once a day. Dancing in the living room, reading the Sunday paper in the kitchen, masturbating on the toilet, spooning with me in bed. Bad? No, not at all. I felt special that of all the people she lived with, had fucked, had fought with, this one grungy hack writer living in a cheap-ass bungalow in Long Beach was the one she wanted to spend eternity with. But there started to be other times, too. I would walk from the kitchen into the living room, coffee cup in hand, straight for my Mac with visions of Truck Stop Bimbos running through my head like a pneumatic chorus line, and I would see her, standing by the window looking at something only the ghostly Jasmine could see. What bothered me more than anything was that Jasmine, alive, never really had an interest in the traffic on Oleander Street. Jasmine wasn’t just an echo drilled into me and my cheap-ass stucco walls. Something of the real Jasmine was here witlt the spectral one. Something that was missing something. It became pretty obvious when she started to get . . distracted by things. Right in the middle of one hot and nasty morning blowjob, her ghost would stop right in the middle (cottus spectoralus) and I would get the definite impression that she was looking out that window again like she was trying to remember something that she had forgotten. . Rosie, my only expert on dead relations coming back to cop a feel, got real quiet as she poured my Darjeeling tea, then said: “When Bolo left this world —” Rosie’s ex who tried to jump her Harley from the Queen Mary to Catalina “— she came back to visit me a couple of times. It was like she just wanted to say good-bye in a way she couldn’t when she was living. When she had done that, she just faded away.” “Yeah, but I don’t get the vibe that Jas is here for a reason. It’s like she just sort of moved back in.” Rosie stirred her tea with a chiming that reminded me way too much of Jasmine’s tiny silver bells. “I got the impression from Bolo that she knew where she was going and that she was just stopping by. Remember, we are dealing with Jasmine, here. She could have gotten lost.” Zan M. Christian Great, a girl who could get lost in a Safeway had taken the wrong turn between death and the afterlife and was now trapped in my house.

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

  Next day the Sixth did nothing except cut out my name from the list of the First Eleven: I was told that Jones was going to thrash me but I startled my informant by saying: “I’ll put a knife into him if he lays a hand on me: you can tell him so.” In fact, however, I was half sent to Coventry and what hurt me most was that it was the boys of the Lower School who were coldest to me, the very boys for whom I had been fighting. That gave me a bitter foretaste of what was to happen to me again and again all through my life. The partial boycotting of me didn’t affect me much; I went for long walks in the beautiful park of Sir W. W— near the school. I have said many harsh things here of English school life; but for me it had two great redeeming features: the one was the library which was open to every boy, and the other the physical training of the playing fields, the various athletic exercises and the gymnasium. The library to me for some months meant Walter Scott. How right George Eliot was to speak of him as “making the joy of many a young life.” Certain scenes of his made ineffaceable impressions on me though unfortunately not always his best work. The wrestling match between the Puritan, Balfour of Burleigh and the soldier was one of my beloved passages. Another favorite page was approved, too, by my maturer judgment, the brave suicide of the little atheist apothecary in the “Fair Maid of Perth.” But Scott’s finest work, such as the character painting of old Scotch servants, left me cold. Dickens I never could stomach, either as a boy or in later life. His “Tale of Two Cities” and “Nicholas Nickleby” seemed to me then about the best and I’ve never had any desire since to revise my judgment after reading “David Copperfield” in my student days and finding men painted by a name or phrase or gesture, women by their modesty and souls by some silly catchword; “the mere talent of the caricaturist”, I said to myself, “at his best another Hogarth.” Naturally the romances and tales of adventure were all swallowed whole; but few affected me vitally: “The Chase of the White Horse” by Mayne Reid, lives with me still because of the love-scenes with the Spanish heroine, and Marryat’s “Peter Simple” which I read a hundred times and could read again tomorrow; for there is better character painting in Chucks, the boatswain, than in all Dickens, in my poor opinion. I remember being astounded ten years later when Carlyle spoke of Marryat with contempt. I knew he was unfair, just as I am probably unfair to Dickens: after all, even Hogarth has one or two good pictures to his credit, and no one survives even three generations without some merit.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  life of every one of us, but that in her case was exaggerated. As infants, we live in our experience; we trust it. When the baby is hungry, he neither doubts his hunger nor questions whether he should make every effort to get food. Without being in any way conscious of it, he is a self-trusting organism. But at some point, parents or others say to him, in effect, “If you feel that way, I won’t love you.” And so he feels what he should feel, not what he does feel. To this degree, he builds up a self that feels what it should feel, only occasionally seeing frightening glimpses of what his organism, of which the self is a part, is actually experiencing. In Ellen’s case, this process operated in an extreme fashion. In some of the most significant moments of life, she was made to feel that her own experiencing was invalid, erroneous, wrong, and unsound, and that what she should be feeling was something quite different. Unfortunately for her, her love for her parents, especially her father, wa.s so strong that she surrendered her own capacity for trusting her experience and substituted theirs, or his. She gave up being her self. This observation, made by one of her doctors during her last year, is no surprise: “Though as a child she was wholly independent of the opinion of others, she is now completely dependent on what others think.” She no longer has any way of knowing what she feels or what her opinion is. This is the loneliest state of all—an almost complete separation from one’s autonomous organism. What went wrong with her treatment? Here is an intelligent, sensitive young woman, seeking help. The prognosis, by modern standards, would seem very favorable. Why such complete failure? I am sure opinions differ, but I should like to state mine. The greatest weakness in her treatment was that no one involved seems to have related to her as a person—a person worthy of respect, a person capable of autonomous choice, a person whose inner experiencing is a precious resource to be drawn upon and trusted. Rather, she seems to have been dealt with as an object. Her first analyst helps her to see her feelings but not to experience them. This only makes her more of an object to herself and still further estranges her from living in and drawing upon her experience. Wisely, she says that the “analyst can give me discernment, but not healing.” The analyst points out to her that she is an individual with such and such dynamics. She agrees with him, though surely not on the basis of experiencing these dynamic feelings. She is simply following the pattern which has already isolated her—distrusting her own experiencing and trying to believe and feel what she should feel, what the expert tells her she feels. Then comes the comic-tragic argument over her diagnosis, of which she was evidently quite aware. The doctors disagree as to what type of object she is: She

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  This last statement indeed leads into the next learning that I want to share with you: I am terribly frustrated and shut into myself when I try to express something which is deeply me, which is a part of my own private, inner world, and the other person does not understand. When I take the gamble, the risk, of trying to share something that is very personal with another individual and it is not received and not understood, this is a very deflating and a very lonely experience. I have come to believe that such an experience makes some individuals psychotic. It causes them to give up hoping that anyone can understand them. Once they have lost that hope, then their own inner world, which becomes more and more bizarre, is the only place where they can live. They can no longer live in any shared human experience. I can sympathize with them because I know that when I try to share some feeling aspect of myself which is private, precious, and tentative, and when this communication is met by evaluation, by reassurance, by distortion of my meaning, my very strong reaction is, “Oh, what’s the use!” At such a time, one knows what it is to be alone. So, as you can readily see from what I have said thus far, a creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic, nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship. It is important for me to provide it; it has been extremely important, especially at certain times in my life, to receive it. I feel that I have grown within myself when I have provided it; I am very sure that I have grown and been released and enhanced when I have received this kind of listening.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Yow’re not ready.” When she looked at his face, she saw that he was grinning — the lines deepening around his eyes. He liked her. She could tell. She’d guessed that when he’d pierced her ear, his breath on her skin so she could feel the heat. The flash of pain had been over in a second — far too quickly — the whole experience taking less than ten minutes from the time she handed him her neatly folded cash to when she walked out the door on to the glittery grit of Melrose Avenue. Afterwards, she’d spent hours sitting on the fire escape of her apartment, touching the silver hoop in the middle of her right ear, twirling the metal, holding it. She had the usual ear piercings from when she was a teenager, but this one, high up on her ear, felt different. Somehow the new hoop there had made her life the tiniest bit less lonely. Weeks had passed before she’d had the nerve to go back. She was a good girl, after all, with a respectable job and a decent salary. She wore sensible clothes, low-heeled pumps, suitable for work in an accounting office on the Miracle Mile. Piercing/tattoo studios weren't places her friends visited, or discussed, or fantasized about. Nor were the boys who worked there. Tattooed boys who made her heart race. She requested nipple piercings next, standing in front of the counter wearing a white T-shirt and a white bra, chinos from Pierced 267 ‘Talbots, glossy brown penny loafers. He gave her a hard look this time, as if he didn’t believe what she’d said. Not someone as normal — or in her mind, boring — as she was. Embarrassingly normal. The freckles on her pale skin. The sleek dark hair that would not hold a curl. Slim-hipped body. Hardly any curves. “You're sure?” he’d asked once he’d taken her into the private room, and she had tried to look brave as she removed her shirt and sat down, flinching when the sticky plastic coating on the chair met her skin. Her breasts were extremely sensitive. Wearing the right — or wrong — bra would create such pleasurable friction she could almost climax. So when he rolled her dark pink nipples between his gloved fingers, she’d had to stifle a moan. Her eyes were closed the whole time. If she stared at him, she might say something. Something she’d regret? Perhaps. Something she wished she’d said now? When he’d told her to prepare herself, she’d licked her bottom lip, sucking it into her mouth, something she did when she was scared. of “Youre sure?” he’d asked again, right before sliding the needle through, and she’d simply said, “Yes. Please.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She thought: ‘I shall never be one with great peace any more, I shall always stand outside this stillness—wherever there is absolute stillness and peace in this world, I shall always stand just outside it.’ And as though these thoughts were in some way prophetic, she inwardly shivered a little . Then what must the swan do but start to hiss loudly, just to show her that he was really a father: ‘Peter,’ she reproached him, ‘I won’t hurt your babies—can’t you trust me? I fed you the whole of last winter!’ But apparently Peter could not trust her at all, for he squawked to his mate who came out through the bushes, and she hissed in her turn, flapping strong angry wings, which meant in mere language: ‘Get out of this, Stephen, you clumsy, inadequate, ludicrous creature; you destroyer of nests, you disturber of young, you great wingless blot on a beautiful morning!’ Then they both hissed together: ‘Get out of this, Stephen!’ So Stephen left them to the care of their cygnets. Remembering Raftery, she walked to the stables, where all was confusion and purposeful bustle. Old Williams was ruthlessly out on the warpath; he was scolding: ‘Drat the boy, what be ’e a-doin’? Come on, do! ’Urry up, get them two horses bridled, and don’t go forgettin’ their knee-caps this mornin’—and that bucket there don’t belong where it’s standin’, nor that broom! Did Jim take the roan to the blacksmith’s? Gawd almighty, why not? ’Er shoes is like paper! ’Ere, you Jim, don’t you go on ignorin’ my orders, if you do—Come on, boy, got them two horses ready? Right, well then, up you go! You don’t want no saddle, like as not you’d give ’im a gall if you ’ad one! The sleek, good-looking hunters were led out in clothing—for the early spring mornings were still rather nippy—and among them came Raftery, slender and skittish; he was wearing his hood, and his eyes peered out bright as a falcon’s from the two neatly braided eye-holes. From a couple more holes in the top of his head-dress, shot his small, pointed ears, which now worked with excitement. ‘ ’Old on!’ bellowed Williams, ‘What the ’ell be you doin’? Quick, shorten ’is bridle, yer not in a circus!’ And then seeing Stephen: ‘Beg pardon, Miss Stephen, but it be a fair crime not to lead that horse close, and ’im all corned up until ’e’s fair dancin’!’ They stood watching Raftery skip through the gates, then old Williams said softly: ‘ ’E do be a wonder—more nor fifty odd years ’ave I worked in the stables, and never no beast ’ave I loved like Raftery. But ’e’s no common horse, ’e be some sort of Christian, and a better one too than a good few I knows on—’ And Stephen answered: ‘Perhaps he’s a poet like his namesake; I think if he could write he’d write verses.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  great for much communication. I knew my parents loved me, but it would never have occurred to me to share with them any of my personal or private thoughts or feelings, because I knew these would have been judged and found wanting. My thoughts, my fantasies, and the few feelings I was aware of I kept to myself. I could sum up these boyhood years by saying that anything I would today regard as a close and communicative interpersonal relationship with another was completely lacking during that period. My attitude toward others outside my home was characterized by the distance and the aloofness that I had taken over from my parents. I attended the same elementary school for seven years. From this point on, until I finished graduate work, I never attended any school for longer than two years, a fact that undoubtedly had its effect on me. Beginning with high school, I believe my hunger for companionship came a little more into my awareness. But any satisfaction of that hunger was blocked first by the already mentioned attitudes of my parents, and second by circumstances. I attended three different high schools, none for more than two years, commuting long distances by train to each one, so that I never was able to put down any social roots and was never able to participate in any after-school or evening activities with other students. I respected and liked some of my fellow students, and some of them respected and probably liked me—perhaps partly because of my good grades—but there was never time enough to develop a friendship, and certainly I never had any close personal interaction with any of them. I had one date during high school—to attend a senior class dinner. So, during the important years of adolescence I had no close friend and only superficial personal contact. I did express some feelings in my English themes during the two terms when I had reasonably understanding teachers. At home I felt increasingly close to my next younger brother, but an age difference of five years cut down on any deep sharing. I was now more consciously a complete outsider, an onlooker in anything involving personal relationships. I believe my intense scientific interest in collecting and rearing the great night-flying moths was without doubt a partial compensation for the lack of intimate sharing. I realized by now that I was peculiar, a loner, with very little place or opportunity for a place in the world of persons. I was socially incompetent in any but superficial contacts. My fantasies during this period were definitely bizarre, and probably would be classed as schizoid by a diagnostician, but fortunately I never came in contact with a psychologist. College represented the first break in this solitary experience. I entered the college of agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, and almost immediately joined a group of fellows who met in a YMCA class. Starting with this narrow

• 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 Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  nobody to tell them to. Nobody to listen. You’ve been so lonely.” Like he had been there, with her, in her nearly empty apartment. Sat at her side on the fire escape. Looked out into a city of millions of people and been all by herself. And then he bent down and licked her in a circle, a circle within a circle, and she came. Vibrant. Colors behind her shut lids. Like every orgasm she’d had thinking of him, thrusting his gloved fingers up inside her, fucking her ass with two fingers overlapped while he sucked hard on her clit. She came in - shudders, in waves, and then fell back, limp in the chair. But even as she came, understanding flooded through her. Somewhere inside, she’d pierced him. The Tinkling of Tiny Silver Bells M. Christian Jasmine died two years ago. She showed up three weeks ago. Should have expected it, knowing Jasmine as well as I did. I didn’t know she was back, not really, for almost a week. Stomping around my little Long Beach bungalow, the one she had called my shell, I caught glimpses of faint reds, gold, of the hazy glow of sunlight through baggy tie-dyes, and of God’s Eyes turning in the windows. They were just there enough so I knew I saw something, but was always a part, always a fragment of that something. Same with smells: incense, patchouli oil, pot, cheap wine, and that simple lemon perfume. Same with sounds, walking from the little kitchenette into the living room I would catch the slap of leather sandals on the hardwood floors, the opening clap of Stairway, and that tiny sound, that special sound that would always mean bells on toes. Jasmine. She had outlasted the ghost of the sixties by a few years, Jasmine had. Even though she’d been born in ’71, she was a spirit of the Merry Pranksters, of Airplane, of the Summer of Love, acid, pot, Fat Freddy’s Cat, the Stones, and tie-dyes. It wasn’t easy being a flower child in the age of the World Wide Web, ecstasy, coke, NIN, Courtney Love and body piercings, but Jasmine pulled it off. She drifted with a smile on her face, and those fucking bells on her toes, through life — hitching rides with only good people, taking only the best drugs, being friends with only good people. She was a ghost of the sixties, a spirit of the Haight and the Diggers. Now she was just a spirit. I never could figure out how she could exist. She was fascinating in the same way a Mary Keene painting (admit it, you’ve seen them — big eyed children) can be: innocence distilled to the point of being surreal. Jasmine could hitchhike with Jeffrey Dahmer and get out alive, and with some money to help her on her way. Deep down, The Tinkling of Tiny Silver Bells PAN

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  His eyes are intense as my own, defiant. Had the crowd attacked me, I would have picked this face as the leader, with his lidded intense eyes. His eyes are filled with his sense of violation, and an immense loneliness. His loneliness is the price of loving me in my natural solitude, the lamb loving the tiger. I had thought once to meet his family, but realized I could not. There was room in my world safe only for him and no more. Beyond that my heart could not stretch. But that was before I was saved. “You found me,” he says. Before I can answer: “What just happened in there?” “Did you see everything?” -“Yeah. Were you just fooling everybody? Was it real?” “My love, it was real. I went a little crazy, but I accepted the Jesus Christ now. ’m not evil anymore.” “You went totally bat shit in there. I thought you were going to start attacking people. I thought you might go after me next. You knew I was there.” “T came here to bring you home.” “T was about to flag you down,‘get you to go after me and maybe spare the other people, but then you fell on the floor and went into a fit. What the hell happened to you in there?” “Tt’s all right now, listen to me. Daniel. I’m your ordinary girl now. The evil thing inside, it’s gone. I feel different. The preacher man, he healed me. Jesus has healed me.” He looks at me suspiciously. He wants to search my face, but does he see in the dark the way I can see him? Does he see my face so clearly? “Why did you come to this place?” I say. “Tt’s nothing complicated.” he says. “I’m staying with Aunt Tilly. She’s born again and wanted me to come here with her. That’s all it is. I didn’t want to stay at her place alone.” He is keeping his distance from me. “Are you sure youre all right?” I move in close to him, touching him again — and oh the joy to feel him against me, the heat of him - still holding my bag, but stepping close enough for my breasts to aggressively brush up against him. I’m trying to get him to put his arms around me, but he steps back and I feel his fear. “Why?” I say. “TI got to know if you’re all right.” “No — why did you not want to be there, alone? You were afraid.” He looks down, ashamed. And afraid. 514 C. Sanchez-Garcia “Why, my love? Why were you afraid?” “I thought you might be looking for me.” “Of course I was looking for you,” I say soft and slow, feeling the bag in my hand grow heavy. “Why would I not look for you? Why would you not want me to find you alone? I’m still your woman. Don’t you want to be alone with me?”

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I’d be flossing my teeth before bed and feel a heavy sensation below my sternum, like something inside me was falling. I was lonely. I wanted to find him in our bed, curl around him like a vine. To miss him felt good and right, because I’d lost something real, our particular way of love. But when he would come home, I was never excited to hear the key turn in the lock. So did I miss him, or not? When he was awake, he stared at the computer or his phone, his head still at the restaurant. He was tired. I fumed, and I also thought, Look—he’s working so hard. Shouldn’t you be grateful? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I traveled often for work and occasionally for pleasure. It seemed normal to me, healthy even, that a person should do things by herself, married or not. When I was a kid, it wasn’t unusual for my mother to travel without my father and me. She went to conferences or on trips with her sisters. When my mother was gone, I missed her, but I never read her absence as evidence of a lack of love. I knew she was thoughtful, reasonable, and would come back to us. “By taking her mind totally off me,” wrote the artist Anne Truitt of her mother, “she gave me my own autonomy. . . . I realized that she would have watched me had she not been sure that I was all right. And, if she were sure, I could be sure.”3 I was proud of my independence, but I did worry sometimes about how little I looked back. I worried at this absence of feeling, the way a child tongues the space where a lost tooth used to be. But I didn’t want to be the opposite, did I—someone who never does anything without her spouse? Brandon and I knew couples like that, and we agreed that it didn’t suit us. If that kind of dependence would be unhealthy, surely our independence was laudable, a good sign. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Our fights never lasted long. I remember only one night, maybe two, of sleeping on the sofa. But we were not skilled at fighting. We rarely emerged from an argument with a better understanding than we’d had when we started. At some point in any fight, we lost the ability to hear each other, a sort of psychological bursting of the eardrums. Our therapist suggested that when this happens, one of us should rush to the fridge, open the crisper drawer, take out a vegetable, and wave it around. She called this “the eggplant trick” and suggested that the stupidity of it would snap us back to reality. We never tried it.

• 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 Austerlitz (2001)

  time. The square in front of the station was empty except for a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her. There was no taxi in sight, so I set off on foot from Lovosice in the direction of Terezin. As one leaves the town, the appearance of which I can no longer remember, said Austerlitz, a wide panorama opens up to the north: a field, poison-green in color, in the foreground, behind it a petrochemicals plant half eaten away by rust, with clouds of smoke rising from its cooling towers and chimneys, as they must have done without cease for many long years. Further away I saw the conical Bohemian mountains surrounding the BohuSevice basin in a semicircle, their highest summits disappearing into the low sky this cold, gray morning. I walked on down the straight road, always looking ahead to see if the silhouette of the fortifications, which could not be more than an hour and a half’s walk away, was in sight yet. The idea I had formed in my mind was of a mighty complex rising high above the level country, but in fact Terezin lies so far down in the damp lowlands around the confluence of the Eger and the Elbe that, as I read later, there is nothing to be seen of the town, even from the hills around Leitmeritz or indeed from its immediate vicinity, except the chimney of the brewery and the church tower. The brick walls built in the eighteenth century to a star-shaped ground plan, undoubtedly by serf labor, rise from a broad moat and stand not much higher than the outlying fields. In the course of time, moreover, all kinds of shrubs and bushes have covered the former glacis and the grass-grown ramparts, giving the impression that Terezin is not so much a fortified town as one half- hidden and sunk into the marshy ground of the floodplain. At any rate, as I made my way that morning to Terezin along the main road from Lovosice, I did not know until the last minute how close I already was to my journey’s end. Several sycamores and chestnuts, their bark blackened by rain, still obstructed my view when I found myself standing among the facades of the old garrison buildings, and a few more steps brought me out on the central square, which was surrounded by a double avenue of trees. From the first, I felt that the most striking aspect of the place was its emptiness,

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  It seems those who had advised him saw the husband as more useful in Sea Org as a full-time staffer than just continuing to take courses and receive auditing and training. In the months that followed, I received several phone calls from the husband, his sister, and his wife. Sometimes there were concerns regarding the difficulties he was experiencing in his social transition away from Scientology. He was sometimes lonely and missed his Scientology friends. It appears that he wasn’t officially declared, but his Scientology friends began to drop him, and he needed to move on with his life. This meant finding new friends and interests. The husband received some professional counseling, but largely found solace from the input, support and advice of family. CHAPTER 16 LARGE GROUP AWARENESS TRAINING (LGAT) Before detailing an intervention regarding large group awareness training (LGAT), discussing the historical concerns surrounding some controversial LGATs is helpful. Today there are many for-profit, privately owned companies and organizations around the world that sell this type of training through extended weekends or longer retreats and seminars. An LGAT organization or company is typically based on selling the philosophy of its founder. The purpose of the training, other than making money as a product of the business, is to essentially persuade participants to accept and embrace that philosophy. This is done over a period of days in the context of an intensely emotional and frequently confrontational group encounter format. The philosophy LGAT proponents propose and promote is typically seen as the means for addressing virtually any human problem and often as an all-encompassing framework for curing the ills of humanity. A primary leader usually facilitates the LGAT, and that facilitator is most often carefully scripted. The underlying assumption is that adoption of the LGAT belief system will lead to a better and more productive life. LGAT participants are expected to undergo days of confrontation and scrutiny through a facilitated group encounter designed to promote a catharsis of change, culminating in an expected epiphany or sudden illumination. Despite discomfort, many new initiates do not leave due to peer pressure and the constraints of group influence. In their new state of engineered enlightenment, they have effectively embraced the LGAT’s philosophy. This is the requisite realization and planned outcome of a LGAT experience. In this sense LGATs demand a rather rigid conformity and adherence to a group mind-set. That is why some past participants and others have alleged that LGATs are engaged in a kind of “brainwashing.” Whatever trait an individual possesses that fails to conform to the LGAT paradigm is likely to be seen as negative and therefore should be purged from the participant or be destroyed.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  To see Stephen Gordon’s expression of horror if one so much as threw out a hint on the subject, was to feel that the thing must in some way be shameful, a kind of disgrace, a humiliation! And then she was odd about other things too; there were so many things that she didn’t like mentioned. In the end, they completely lost patience with her, and they left her alone with her fads and her fancies, disliking the check that her presence imposed, disliking to feel that they dare not allude to even the necessary functions of nature without being made to feel immodest. But at times Stephen hated her own isolation, and then she would make little awkward advances, while her eyes would grow rather apologetic, like the eyes of a dog who has been out of favour. She would try to appear quite at ease with her companions, as she joined in their light-hearted conversation. Strolling up to a group of young girls at a party, she would grin as though their small jokes amused her, or else listen gravely while they talked about clothes or some popular actor who had visited Malvern. As long as they refrained from too intimate details, she would fondly imagine that her interest passed muster. There she would stand with her strong arms folded, and her face somewhat strained in an effort of attention. While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them—yes, indeed, at such moments she longed to be like them. It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves as they gossiped together. There was something so secure in their feminine conclaves, a secure sense of oneness, of mutual understanding; each in turn understood the other’s ambitions. They might have their jealousies, their quarrels even, but always she discerned, underneath, that sense of oneness . Poor Stephen! She could never impose upon them; they always saw through her as though she were a window. They knew well enough that she cared not so much as a jot about clothes and popular actors. Conversation would falter, then die down completely, her presence would dry up their springs of inspiration. She spoilt things while trying to make herself agreeable; they really liked her better when she was grumpy. Could Stephen have met men on equal terms, she would always have chosen them as her companions; she preferred them because of their blunt, open outlook, and with men she had much in common—sport for instance. But men found her too clever if she ventured to expand, and too dull if she suddenly subsided into shyness. In addition to this there was something about her that antagonized slightly, an unconscious presumption.