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 Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Method 1: Build CamaraderieRyan Westwood, CEO of Simplus, told us that he was affected when conducting a one-on-one with a remote employee via teleconference during the pandemic. “She said to me, in tears, ‘I haven’t had a hug in three months.’ Her grown boys live in different states. My heart was breaking. We have to be conscious of our coworkers and their situations, more than ever when people are working remotely.” As such, his company has created geographic regions for its six hundred employees. In areas with at least ten people, employees are given a budget to do “service projects, go bowling, do whatever you want to do.” Westwood added, “We don’t have a leader looming over the gatherings. It’s about people genuinely connecting in the way they want. We have found that our employee happiness and employee net promoter scores have gone way up from this small budget.” In another of our clients, a new team was formed during a reorganization. The group consisted of people who had not worked together before, who had various backgrounds and experiences. They were to provide support services to several divisions of the company, meaning they would be gone from the office most of their days. The leader knew this environment could be ripe for feelings of exclusion and anxiety, so she initiated a few simple activities that built esprit de corps and fostered inclusion. She brought the team together in the office first thing every Thursday morning without fail to see how the work was going, analyze loads and balance tasks, and brainstorm ways to help each other (these moved to teleconferences during the pandemic). She kept the meetings to an hour, and made sure no one voice dominated, yet no one was allowed to stay quiet either. To be respectful to those who may be anxious about speaking in public, and so no one would feel pushed onto a stage, she spent a few minutes the day before putting together an agenda, letting each team member know the specific updates she would ask them to share with the group. Not only did this make her more introverted workers feel more at ease with their part in the discussion—as they had time to prepare—the whole meeting ran more smoothly. During the sessions, she followed a round-robin format, in which everyone got a chance to share their thoughts in turn. Her meetings may not have had the chaotic excitement of some brainstorming sessions, but her anxious people felt included and safe to speak up in this calm setting, leading to a tremendous amount of creative ideas flowing from the group. The team also started handing around a traveling trophy in those meetings, in this case a bowling loving cup the manager had bought at a Goodwill store.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  They can take a psychological toll on the mental health of recipients and can lower work productivity and problem-solving abilities.Methods to help those who are marginalized feel valued and included in any team include: 1) listen up, 2) sponsor, 3) stand up, and 4) advocate. 8Transform Exclusion into ConnectionHelp Team Members Build Social BondsThe greatest kindness is acceptance. —Christina Baker Kline, novelist In some fascinating work done at Cornell University, researchers found that fire stations perform better—including saving more lives—when firefighters eat meals as a team. “Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills over into work,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Kniffin. In fact, the researchers noted that firefighters in stations where everyone dined alone often expressed embarrassment when asked why. “It was basically a signal that something deeper was wrong with the way the group worked,” Kniffin said. Eating together for firefighters is a big sign that everyone is accepted. We are not suggesting every team needs to run out to Chili’s at noon every day, but after twenty years of working with organizations around the world, we can attest that finding ways to include everyone can create boons to team performance. In contrast, exclusion can lead to job dissatisfaction and higher employee turnover. We’ve probably all been left out at some point in our lives; it evokes unpleasant memories from school playground days. While much has been written on bullying at work as a serious concern for employees’ mental health and team cohesion, research shows exclusion can be just as toxic to anxiety levels and hasn’t received anywhere near the attention. FOMO and being excluded at work can cast a dark shadow on one’s life, suggests Professor Sandra Robinson of the University of British Columbia. This is because we as humans have such a strong need to belong. Robinson’s research indicates that 71 percent of professionals say they have experienced some degree of exclusion from their team—even before the coronavirus pandemic isolated so many. And ostracism in the workplace can have long-term psychological implications, she adds. Exclusion can impact anyone and be a huge contributor to anxiety. As leaders, a step forward in inclusion awareness is to understand that when team members shun or snub other employees, it can make those people feel like they’re not fully accepted or respected by their colleagues. These actions are often insidious and subtle: phone calls that are not returned, meetings where some are not invited, lunch offers that never come. Ostracism like this not only affects morale; it can affect an individual’s productivity and a team’s ability to hit its goals. What’s Not Happening . . . and What IsIn some cases, exclusion is not intentional; and inadvertent actions can be tricky to spot. They are sins of omission: the result of help not offered, conversations not engaged in, camaraderie not shared. How are managers supposed to see what’s not happening?

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In an organization, part of what we, as leaders, need to create is an environment where our differences are celebrated. That’s what makes work interesting, exciting—the different approaches, ideas, and backgrounds.” As we spoke with individuals in marginalized communities, a few things they wanted managers to understand about addressing bias included: 1) Don’t try to convince a person from a marginalized group of all the things that have gone wrong in your life to better relate to their issues (you were poor, your parents died, you have a learning disorder, etc.); this is not a competition. 2) Don’t ante up by saying that your daughter is gay or that you have lots of Black friends. 3) Be compassionate but don’t be “shocked” by racism or other forms of bias; if you are, you have been actively ignoring what’s been happening because it did not affect you directly. 4) Don’t preach about your “wokeness” to the issue; show it (we’ll get to how in a minute). Says Katie Burke, chief people officer for HubSpot, “Allyship is a verb, and it starts with a combination of self-awareness and empathy. You have to adopt a mindset where you’re constantly learning, growing, and improving how you stand up and show up for others. It’s a lifelong commitment to building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals or groups.” It’s our responsibility as leaders to ensure those who are in need of support aren’t left feeling like they’re alone, added Terry Jackson, PhD, an executive coach and CEO of the Jackson Consulting Group. “Every day, your employees deal with social issues. Those issues will impact productivity and the level of engagement within your organization. If you’re an emotionally intelligent leader, you understand what is going on in the community that’s impacting your vulnerable employees. If you are not embracing those issues, discussing them and trying to solve them, you’re going to end up on the wrong side of history because we are at the tipping point where everybody is willing to engage around what is right for humanity.” Fundamentally, to do what Jackson suggests, leaders must start by believing people when they say they are hurt by racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for instance, didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They exposed a nerve that has long been ignored in America, that we are a nation still divided by inequality. As leaders who care about our people—their lives and emotional experiences—we need to be there for each other. After all, being the “only” in any group can be lonely and isolating, especially when no one speaks up for you, when no one believes the challenges you face every day. “As more and more companies attempt to build more diverse and inclusive workforces, one of the dynamics that fundamentally needs to shift is who speaks up on matters of belonging,” said Burke of HubSpot. Who is that? The leader.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  There’s actually quite a lot that team leaders can do to encourage inclusion; for instance, looking carefully for anyone on the team who may seem to be left out (all the more important when some or all of a team works remotely), which person is regularly cut off during group discussions, who is regularly chatting with whom, and who doesn’t seem to be interacting with anyone. By watching, a manager can gain awareness and insight. But regular one-on-ones are probably the best way to understand what’s really going on: asking about people’s interactions with others on the team and if they are having challenges with any specific personalities. At FYidoctors, doctors and team leaders follow what they call a Ten-Ten Commitment in their optometry clinics, labs, and home office departments. “For the first ten minutes of each day, leaders walk around and ask their team members how they are doing with a friendly hello and no other agenda but a welcome to the day,” said president Darcy Verhun. “It’s incumbent on the leaders to do this to demonstrate visible leadership and caring. It’s ten minutes at the start of the day, and another ten minutes at the end of the day to see how everyone’s day has gone. I’m amazed at the power of a simple check-in.” Verhun added, “These check-ins are not so that the team can hear the leader’s story, but so the leaders can hear their team members’ stories and connect. We have received such positive feedback from the team on this leadership commitment and have found it reduces anxiety.” But even if managers pick up on exclusion, they still need specific approaches to help their people move from feeling isolated to connected and accepted. We are not necessarily suggesting dragging everyone out for karaoke or starting a potluck Friday, but a few ideas that can help immediately include: Ensure that all team members can contribute in meetings and have their voices heard in a calm, organized manner.Buddy new hires up with more seasoned employees who they might form a connection with (friendly seasoned employees, that is).Spend time in every meeting recognizing the contributions of individuals as well as those of the group as a whole.Go out of the way to make remote workers feel fully accepted—e.g., even though some people may be working in the office, now and then ask everyone to join meetings via electronic means. Also bring remote people into the workplace on a regular basis. What follows are a few more methods used by leaders we’ve interviewed and worked with to enhance inclusion and strengthen bonds in their teams to great effect.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  His despair was even intensified by the consciousness that he was utterly alone in his sorrow. In all Petersburg there was not a human being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as a suffering man; indeed he had not such a one in the whole world. Alexey Alexandrovitch grew up an orphan. There were two brothers. They did not remember their father, and their mother died when Alexey Alexandrovitch was ten years old. The property was a small one. Their uncle, Karenin, a government official of high standing, at one time a favourite of the late Tsar, had brought them up. On completing high school and university courses with medals, Alexey Alexandrovitch had, with his uncle's aid, immediately started in a prominent position in the service, and from that time forward he had devoted himself exclusively to political ambition. In the high school and the university, and afterwards in the service, Alexey Alexandrovitch had never formed a close friendship with anyone. His brother had been the person nearest to his heart, but he had a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was always abroad, where he had died shortly after Alexey Alexandrovitch's marriage. While he was governor of a province, Anna's aunt, a wealthy provincial lady, had thrown him—middle-aged as he was, though young for a governor—with her niece, and had succeeded in putting him in such a position that he had either to declare himself or to leave the town. Alexey Alexandrovitch was not long in hesitation. There were at the time as many reasons for the step as against it, and there was no overbalancing consideration to outweigh his invariable rule of abstaining when in doubt. But Anna's aunt had through a common acquaintance insinuated that he had already compromised the girl, and that he was in honour bound to make her an offer. He made the offer, and concentrated on his betrothed and wife all the feeling of which he was capable. The attachment he felt to Anna precluded in his heart every need of intimate relations with others. And now among all his acquaintances he had not one friend. He had plenty of so-called connections, but no friendships. Alexey Alexandrovitch had plenty of people whom he could invite to dinner, to whose sympathy he could appeal in any public affair he was concerned about, whose interest he could reckon upon for anyone he wished to help, with whom he could candidly discuss other people's business and affairs of state. But his relations with these people were confined to one clearly defined channel, and had a certain routine from which it was impossible to depart.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  There was one man, a comrade of his at the university, with whom he had made friends later, and with whom he could have spoken of a personal sorrow; but this friend had a post in the Department of Education in a remote part of Russia. Of the people in Petersburg the most intimate and most possible were his chief secretary and his doctor. Mihail Vassilievitch Sludin, the chief secretary, was a straightforward, intelligent, good-hearted, and conscientious man, and Alexey Alexandrovitch was aware of his personal goodwill. But their five years of official work together seemed to have put a barrier between them that cut off warmer relations. After signing the papers brought him, Alexey Alexandrovitch had sat for a long while in silence, glancing at Mihail Vassilievitch, and several times he attempted to speak, but could not. He had already prepared the phrase: 'You have heard of my trouble?' But he ended by saying, as usual: 'So you'll get this ready for me?' and with that dismissed him. The other person was the doctor, who had also a kindly feeling for him; but there had long existed a taciturn understanding between them that both were weighed down by work, and always in a hurry. Of his women-friends, foremost among them Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Alexey Alexandrovitch never thought. All women, simply as women, were terrible and distasteful to him. XXII A LEXEY A LEXANDROVITCH had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten him. At the bitterest moment of his lonely despair she came to him, and without waiting to be announced, walked straight into his study. She found him as he was sitting with his head in both hands. 'J'ai forcé la consigne,' she said, walking in with rapid steps and breathing hard with excitement and rapid exercise. 'I have heard all! Alexey Alexandrovitch! Dear friend!' she went on, warmly squeezing his hand in both of hers and gazing with her fine pensive eyes into his. Alexey Alexandrovitch, frowning, got up, and disengaging his hand, moved her a chair. 'Won't you sit down, countess? I'm seeing no one because I'm unwell, countess,' he said, and his lips twitched. 'Dear friend!' repeated Countess Lidia Ivanovna, never taking her eyes off his, and suddenly her eyebrows rose at the inner corners, describing a triangle on her forehead, her ugly yellow face became still uglier, but Alexey Alexandrovitch felt that she was sorry for him and was preparing to cry. And he too was softened; he snatched her plump hand and proceeded to kiss it. 'Dear friend!' she said in a voice breaking with emotion. 'You ought not to give way to grief.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch sat down, feeling that his words had not had the effect he anticipated, and that it would be unavoidable for him to explain his position, and that, whatever explanations he might make, his relations with his brother-in-law would remain unchanged. 'Yes, I am brought to the painful necessity of seeking a divorce,' he said. 'I will say one thing, Alexey Alexandrovitch. I know you for an excellent, upright man; I know Anna—excuse me, I can't change my opinion of her—for a good, an excellent woman; and so, excuse me, I cannot believe it. There is some misunderstanding,' said he. 'Oh, if it were merely a misunderstanding! . . .' 'Pardon, I understand,' interposed Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'But of course . . . One thing: you must not act in haste. You must not, you must not act in haste!' 'I am not acting in haste,' Alexey Alexandrovitch said coldly, 'but one cannot ask advice of anyone in such a matter. I have quite made up my mind.' 'This is awful!' said Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'I would do one thing, Alexey Alexandrovitch. I beseech you, do it!' he said. 'No action has yet been taken, if I understand rightly. Before you take advice, see my wife, talk to her. She loves Anna like a sister, she loves you, and she's a wonderful woman. For God's sake, talk to her! Do me that favour, I beseech you!' Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch looked at him sympathetically, without interrupting his silence. 'You will go to see her?' 'I don't know. That was just why I have not been to see you. I imagine our relations must change.' 'Why so? I don't see that. Allow me to believe that apart from our connection you have for me, at least in part, the same friendly feeling I have always had for you . . . and sincere esteem,' said Stepan Arkady evitch, pressing his hand. 'Even if your worst suppositions were correct, I don't—and never would—take on myself to judge either side, and I see no reason why our relations should be affected. But now, do this, come and see my wife.' 'Well, we look at the matter differently,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch coldly. 'However, we won't discuss it.' 'No; why shouldn't you come today to dine, anyway? My wife's expecting you. Please, do come. And, above all, talk it over with her. She's a wonderful woman. For God's sake, on my knees, I implore you!' 'If you so much wish it, I will come,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, sighing. And, anxious to change the conversation, he inquired about what interested them both—the new head of Stepan Arkadyevitch's department, a man not yet old, who had suddenly been promoted to so high a position.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'But what's to be done?' 'Don't steal rolls.' Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed outright. 'O moralist! But you must understand, there are two women: one insists only on her rights, and those rights are your love, which you can't give her; and the other sacrifices everything for you and asks for nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act? There's a fearful tragedy in it.' 'If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I'll tell you that I don't believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why. To my mind, love . . . both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato defines in his Banquet, serve as the test of men. Some men only understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy. "I'm much obliged for the gratification, my humble respects"—that's all the tragedy. And in platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all is clear and pure, because . . . ' At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner conflict he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly— 'But perhaps you are right. Very likely. . . . I don't know, I don't know.' 'It's this, don't you see,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, 'you're very much all of a piece. That's your strong point and your failing. You have a character that's all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of a piece too—but that's not how it is. You despise public official work because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all the while with the aim—and that's not how it is. You want a man's work, too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided—and that's not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.' Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own affairs, and did not hear Oblonsky. And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than once experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy, coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases. 'Bill!' he called, and he went into the next room, where he promptly came across an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance and dropped into a conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And at once in the conversation with the aide-de-camp Oblonsky had a sense of relaxation and relief after the conversation with Levin, which always put him to too great a mental and spiritual strain.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  We've a great deal to talk about. And I've had a talk with . . .' Dolly did not know what to call him. She felt it awkward to call him either the count or Alexey Kirillovitch. 'With Alexey,' said Anna, 'I know what you talked about. But I wanted to ask you directly what you think of me, of my life?' 'How am I to say like that straight off? I really don't know.' 'No, tell me all the same…. You see my life. But you mustn't forget that you're seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us and we are not alone. . . . But we came here early in the spring, lived quite alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better. But imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be . . . I see by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be half the time away from home,' she said, getting up and sitting down close by Dolly. 'Of course,' she interrupted Dolly, who would have answered, 'of course I won't try to keep him by force. I don't keep him indeed. The races are just coming, his horses are running, he will go. I'm very glad. But think of me, fancy my position. . . . But what's the use of talking about it?' she smiled. 'Well, what did he talk about with you?' 'He spoke of what I want to speak about of myself, and it's easy for me to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility . . . whether you could not . . .' (Darya Alexandrovna hestitated) 'correct, improve your position. . . . You know how I look at it. . . . But all the same, if possible, you should get married….' 'Divorce, you mean?' said Anna. 'Do you know, the only woman who came to see me in Petersburg was Betsy Tverskoy? You know her, of course? Au fond, c'est la femme la plus depravée qui existe. She had an intrigue with Tushkevitch, deceiving her husband in the basest way. And she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my position was irregular. Don't imagine I would compare . . . I know you, darling. But I could not help remembering . . . Well, so what did he say to you?' she repeated. 'He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps you will say that it's egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism. He wants first of all to legitimise his daughter, and to be your husband, to have a legal right to you.' 'What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?' she put in gloomily. 'The chief thing he desires… he desires that you should not suffer.'

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

  The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomena compared. And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed. The past and present selves compared are the same just so far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling of 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feeling of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same in kind . But this generic unity coexists with generic differences just as real as the unity. And if from the one point of view they are one self, from others they are as truly not one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute of continuity; it gives its own kind of unity to the self—that of mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal thing—but it gives not a jot or tittle more. And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the unbrokenness in an exhibition of 'dissolving views,' in no wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount of plurality in other respects. And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal identity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency. That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living child to-day. Why? Partly because great time-gaps break up all these early years—we cannot ascend to them by continuous memories; and partly because no representation of how the child felt comes up with the stories. We know what he said and did; but no sentiment of his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic strivings as they felt to him, comes up to contribute an element of warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and the main bond of union with our present self thus disappears.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. It was not such a good lake for swimming. After high school, he'd caught an ear infection that had almost kept him out of the war. And the lake had drowned his friend Max Arnold, keeping him out of the war entirely. Max had been one who liked to talk about the existence of God. "No, I'm not saying that," he'd argue against the drone of the engine. "I'm saying it's possible as an idea, even necessary as an idea, a final cause in the whole structure of causation." Now he knew, perhaps. Before the war, they'd driven around the lake as friends, but now Max was just an idea, and most of Norman Bowker's other friends were living in Des Moines or Sioux City, or going to school somewhere, or holding down jobs. The high school girls were mostly gone or married. Sally Kramer, whose pictures he had once carried in his wallet, was one who had married. Her name was now Sally Gustafson and she lived in a pleasant blue house on the less expensive side of the lake road. On his third day home he'd seen her out mowing the lawn, still pretty in a lacy red blouse and white shorts. For a moment he'd almost pulled over, just to talk, but instead he'd pushed down hard on the gas pedal. She looked happy. She had her house and her new husband, and there was really nothing he could say to her. The town seemed remote somehow. Sally was married and Max was drowned and his father was at home watching baseball on national TV. Norman Bowker shrugged. "No problem," he murmured. Clockwise, as if in orbit, he took the Chevy on another seven-mile turn around the lake. Even in late afternoon the day was hot. He turned on the air conditioner, then the radio, and he leaned back and let the cold air and music blow over him. Along the road, kicking stones in front of them, two young boys were hiking with knapsacks and toy rifles and canteens. He honked going by, but neither boy looked up. Already he had passed them six times, forty-two miles, nearly three hours without stop. He watched the boys recede in his rearview mirror. They turned a soft brownish color, like sand, before finally disappearing. He tapped down lightly on the accelerator. Out on the lake a man's motorboat had stalled, the man was bent over the engine with a wrench and a frown. Beyond the stalled boat there were other boats, and a few water-skiers, and the smooth July waters, and an immense flatness everywhere. Two mud hens floated stiffly beside a white dock.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous, with neat houses and all the sanitary conveniences. Norman Bowker lit a cigarette and cranked open his window. Seven thirty-five, he decided. The lake had divided into two halves. One half still glistened, the other was caught in shadow. Along the causeway, the two little boys marched on. The man in the stalled motorboat yanked frantically on the cord to his engine, and the two mud hens sought supper at the bottom of the lake, tails bobbing. He passed Sunset Park once again, and more houses, and the junior college and the tennis courts, and the picnickers, who now sat waiting for the evening fireworks. The high school band was gone. The woman in pedal pushers patiently toyed with her line. Although it was not yet dusk, the A&W was already awash in neon lights. He maneuvered his father's Chevy into one of the parking slots, let the engine idle, and sat back. The place was doing a good holiday business. Mostly kids, it seemed, and a few farmers in for the day. He did not recognize any of the faces. A slim, hipless young carhop passed by, but when he hit the horn, she did not seem to notice. Her eyes slid sideways. She hooked a tray to the window of a Firebird, laughing lightly, leaning forward to chat with the three boys inside. He felt invisible in the soft twilight. Straight ahead, over the take-out counter, swarms of mosquitoes electrocuted themselves against an aluminum Pest-Rid machine. It was a calm, quiet summer evening. He honked again, this time leaning on the horn. The young carhop turned slowly, as if puzzled, then said something to the boys in the Firebird and moved reluctantly toward him. Pinned to her shirt was a badge that said EAT MAMA BURGERS. When she reached his window, she stood straight up so that all he could see was the badge. "Mama Burger," he said. "Maybe some fries, too." The girl sighed, leaned down, and shook her head. Her eyes were as fluffy and airy-light as cotton candy. "You blind?" she said. She put out her hand and tapped an intercom attached to a steel post. "Punch the button and place your order. All I do is carry the dumb trays." She stared at him for a moment. Briefly, he thought, a question lingered in her fuzzy eyes, but then she turned and punched the button for him and returned to her friends in the Firebird. The intercom squeaked and said, "Order." "Mama Burger and fries," Norman Bowker said. "Affirmative, copy clear. No rootie-tootie?" "Rootie-tootie?" "You know, man—voot beer." "A small one."

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I shoot back that the table’s still mine, but he will own its brokenness for perpetuity. (Years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle and resume the correspondence that held the better angels of our natures.) Disaster, my teacher Bob explained to me once, can translate as something wrong with the stars . Our stars—David’s and mine—badly misalign, yet we can’t escape each other’s orbits. He climbs on my balcony and bangs on the bedroom window. I slip heartfelt notes under his windshield wiper. Coming across each other at a meeting, we wind up making out in the parking lot. By Thanksgiving, we’ve both changed our phone numbers to escape each other’s stalkeresque calls, and we’re burnt out enough to let go, though we’ll reconnect for a few sloppy goodbyes before he moves away that spring. By December when telephone poles sparkle with red lights and green bells, I’m sunk in the grief for my marriage that I’d been running from all along. This time I vow to embrace my loneliness till some spiritual presence takes up residence in my rib cage. But I face the holiday like my own private gallows. Dev and I shape clay elf ornaments to bake in the oven, but at night, while I’m grading papers, they take on a ghoulish, leering quality I didn’t figure on. Walking to school under the gray sky, I envision my solo Christmas hunched over a hot plate boiling packaged noodles. (Forget that I don’t own a hot plate.) Patti invites me over on Christmas Day, contingent on my volunteering at the local soup kitchen—a duty I resent like hell. She says, Whatever you want emotionally, you have to start giving away. Want to find company? Open up to other people . That’s how I land behind the steam table of a homeless shelter on Christmas, hair wadded into a black net. One hand wields a long-handled spoon, the other an ice cream scoop for potatoes. Patti predicted I’d bond cheerily with my fellow volunteers. But to me, they’re that most grisly of Christmas specters: a happy family. Uniformed in matching Buffalo Bills football jerseys, they nonstop grin like beauty contestants who’ve vaselined their teeth. The father says, Our lives are so abundant, this is just our way of giving back . Maybe they don’t smile at my newly divorced ass like I’ve got cooties, but that’s what I feel, since part of my illness is a proclivity for lopping myself off from others while simultaneously blaming them for how lonely I feel. Pretty soon I find myself staring at the blackened teeth of a crack-head, thinking, This is the bottom. But as I hand over the tray in baby-blue plastic with its boxy compartments, a flash goes off inside. It hits me that had I kept drinking awhile, I could’ve ended up gumming my turkey like this woman does. And for an instant, I actually look at her.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Occasionally, he’ll tug a red curl over the crease in his forehead. Eventually, I wind down and ask, what should I do? And I wait for the word salad of his scrambled cortex to spew forth. Instead, his eyes meet mine evenly, and he says—as it seems everybody says—You should pray about it. But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy , the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary . I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there? If God hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Moses. The night sky edges across our windows, and I’m carried inside this tank of a car. James wanting to get drunk makes sense to me, and I like how nobody rebuked him after. But there were also no-bullshit acts like not letting him speak—crazily he’d wanted to testify about his sobriety. But Gerry took his car keys, and made him sit through the meeting. It’s my life outside these oddballs that scares me. David? I say, leaning forward. Yes, ma’am. He turns down the radio. Any chance you cadged that frosting? Gross, Gerry says. You’re not gonna eat that. David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge on my T-shirt. You know, sanitize it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Walt helped me figure out that if I dropped the murderous physics, my grades might score scholarship money, maybe soon as second term. He’d hire me to clean rat and pigeon cages, which would free me from the food service’s vile hairnet. (As he had for who knows how many others, Walt had decided to lift me up. The therapy—when I showed up—involved sitting in a cozy office, trying to look sane enough not to be kicked out. But every now and then I’d blubber about being lonesome for home or scared to fail, and I mostly left breathing deeper.) Buoyed up after talking to Walt, I set out for my dorm. The cold had polished and clarified the sky into onyx. The stars seemed close enough to scoop up. Crossing the quad, I felt some wormhole into my skull finally get bored. There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer’s broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it): The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language. He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards. I moved through the lung-scalding air, no longer a misplaced cracker but a by-God symbolic animal who’d puzzled out—over a week’s time—the meaning of a hard sentence. But checking my P.O. in the student union the next day, brushed past by the sons and daughters of the professional class—my down-jacketed (alleged) peers—I sensed a dashed line around me where invisible scissors would soon clip me away. Fair-minded, straight-toothed, impossibly clear-skinned, these kids were nothing if not democratically inclined vis-à-vis the likes of me. They blew pot smoke from their joints into my pursed lips and paid my way to Dylan and the Grateful Dead. They gave me rides in paid-for cars. Their parents steered me under restaurant awnings and through doors where the maître d’s looked at my soaking tennis shoes long and hard. They passed menus featuring appetizers that cost more than the whole chicken-fried steak dinners Daddy bought us on paycheck night. They invited me home for Thanksgiving and Easter. They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Eventually, I hang up to drink my own self into a stupor. And the next morning, when I ring Mother’s house to ensure she’s still got a pulse, I get no answer and no answer. Calling Lecia next, I hear her ask am I sitting down. The question takes the bottom out of my stomach like a speed bump, and for the umpteenth time in my life, I feel the cold impact of Mother’s death. It’s so easy to picture her and Harold reeling down the road from Get Down Brown’s like they were in bumper cars. She’s not dead, Lecia says. Dead would be simpler. Lecia tells me that Harold allegedly propositioned some cowboy in the men’s room, and the guy had beaten the shit out of him. Which prompted Mother to draw—from her beaded bag—the pearl-handled revolver so small it could pass for a cigarette lighter. She held the cowboys at bay through the parking lot while she wrangled the pulp-faced Harold into her car. Once home, Mother poured herself a glass of milk and opened a tranquilizing package of ho-hos. Then she proceeded to tear Harold a new asshole— verbally speaking. He was bloody-nosed already, and stout as a prize pig, blubbering Mother was his soul mate till he corked off on the kitchen floor. Mother had sat on the counter stool, sipping at the milk and ratcheting up her pissed-off with every whisper sweep of the clock till it came to her Harold needed a piece of her mind. She’d pelted him with a pastry, then kicked him not very hard, she’d told Lecia, and mostly in his big fat ass. Then she got her pistol out again and fired it over Harold’s head, and he’d screamed himself awake. Somewhere in there, he’d pissed his pants. She couldn’t shift him off the kitchen floor, so she called to Tex, who hauled Harold to detox. She shot at him? I say. That’s exactly what I said. You shot at him? Lecia says. So embarrassing. Lecia’s our only family member plagued by a sense of propriety. She belongs to civic groups and the country club. She’d that morning taken from Mother’s house every gun she could rustle up. Do I know of any little pistols laying around? I don’t. It’s like the old days, I say. Remember her shooting at Hector? (Lecia and I had draped ourselves over our stepfather’s semi-supine form while Mother brandished a firearm.) Daddy, too. When did she shoot at Daddy? You were too little to remember. I know I told you about it. One Christmas. You never saw the bullet hole in the kitchen tile by the stove? I thought Daddy was cleaning a pistol. Why’d she shoot at him? The better question is, Lecia adds, why’d she shoot at anybody? There was a pause, and we said in unison, To get their attention. Which had been her standard explanation over the years. I know a lot of people, Lecia says.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “You think anyone here likes you? Who here likes Celena? No one! We hate you! Hate you!” Throughout my years in the commune I had nightmares about being attacked by a bear or wolf. I was trapped in a circle of children, all of them mouthless and holding hands. Only I was confronted by a wild animal. The other children either would not or could not help nor let me get free of the beast that crept ever closer with its sharp fangs. When I first came to the school my popularity among my peers burned brightly, bolstered by my second buddy Anna, who had taken Sophie’s place. Socially, Anna was at the top and anyone she deemed worthy of her company basked likewise in the warming rays of her alpha status. When Anna left a few months into my stay, my popularity dropped like a rapidly declining currency. Girls who’d previously included me began to turn their backs, teasing me mercilessly, imitating the way I walked on my toes. The shape of my head was mocked, the long narrow proportions of the back of my skull like the profile of Nefertiti. This inspired the nickname “Football Head.” I didn’t know how to handle such cruelty. One day I would react with tears, another with rage. There were times when I played nicely with a particular child for several days or weeks only to have him or her suddenly turn on me or join a small mob of children who would taunt me to the point of verbal savagery. I knew the game forbade physical contact, but outside of the game I frequently had physical fights with the other children. One of these fights led me to take up a new activity. Every week I looked forward to the show Little House on the Prairie . During that hour I soaked up the love that Ma and Pa had for their children, virtually living the frontier life. I’d go to the shared living room in my pajamas, ready for another riveting hour of Laura Ingalls’s life, her chores at home with Ma, lessons in the little school house, experience with the great outdoors and always at the heart of it, a moral lesson to learn that Pa would usually drive home in his calm and kind way. I was therefore severely disappointed when one evening a cop show with a car chase and people shooting at one another was on the TV instead of Little House . Most of the kids hadn’t come to the living room to settle in yet. Just three boys sat in front of the TV. I asked, “What happened to Little House ?” One of the boys, Ben, glanced up blandly at me. “We’re not watching that tonight. Everyone wants to watch Kojak .” “We always watch Little House .” I felt my frustration rising.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. It was not such a good lake for swimming. After high school, he'd caught an ear infection that had almost kept him out of the war. And the lake had drowned his friend Max Arnold, keeping him out of the war entirely. Max had been one who liked to talk about the existence of God. "No, I'm not saying that," he'd argue against the drone of the engine. "I'm saying it's possible as an idea, even necessary as an idea, a final cause in the whole structure of causation." Now he knew, perhaps. Before the war, they'd driven around the lake as friends, but now Max was just an idea, and most of Norman Bowker's other friends were living in Des Moines or Sioux City, or going to school somewhere, or holding down jobs. The high school girls were mostly gone or married. Sally Kramer, whose pictures he had once carried in his wallet, was one who had married. Her name was now Sally Gustafson and she lived in a pleasant blue house on the less expensive side of the lake road. On his third day home he'd seen her out mowing the lawn, still pretty in a lacy red blouse and white shorts. For a moment he'd almost pulled over, just to talk, but instead he'd pushed down hard on the gas pedal. She looked happy. She had her house and her new husband, and there was really nothing he could say to her. The town seemed remote somehow. Sally was married and Max was drowned and his father was at home watching baseball on national TV. Norman Bowker shrugged. "No problem," he murmured. Clockwise, as if in orbit, he took the Chevy on another seven-mile turn around the lake. Even in late afternoon the day was hot. He turned on the air conditioner, then the radio, and he leaned back and let the cold air and music blow over him. Along the road, kicking stones in front of them, two young boys were hiking with knapsacks and toy rifles and canteens. He honked going by, but neither boy looked up. Already he had passed them six times, forty-two miles, nearly three hours without stop. He watched the boys recede in his rearview mirror. They turned a soft brownish color, like sand, before finally disappearing. He tapped down lightly on the accelerator. Out on the lake a man's motorboat had stalled, the man was bent over the engine with a wrench and a frown. Beyond the stalled boat there were other boats, and a few water-skiers, and the smooth July waters, and an immense flatness everywhere. Two mud hens floated stiffly beside a white dock.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  One afternoon I followed the narrow, paved road that wound through the property and saw a rare sight: a moving car. I found a yard full of every imaginable kind of tile—some stacked neatly, others tossed in messy, mountainous heaps on wooden pallets as far as I could see. I explored the tile yard for an hour or so, winding my way through the maze of multi-colored ceramic and porcelain materials and never saw another person. Nor did I ever see anyone there in subsequent visits. I found other places like the tile yard, buildings two or three stories high, barn-like structures with tin roofs. Layers of dust and dirt covered every surface inside them. Cobwebs hung in dusty tatters or curtained the corners, shimmering expansively at times. These buildings were bursting with various items: clothes, shoes, blankets, record players, records, cabinets, dining tables and chairs, all stacked haphazardly or packed in boxes. I spent hours sorting through things, playing records and trying on musty-smelling clothes before some of the hazy mirrors. Light poured through the windows, making visible the dust particles that swirled through the air, giving the spaces a ghostly feel. On another walk, I discovered an old speedboat in the middle of a meadow and, not far from the boat, a decaying cow and calf. The calf was just bones with bits of skin and fur, but the cow was mostly intact. Its stomach had expelled a pool of white, foul-smelling goop teeming with maggots. I went back to look at the bovine corpses every weekend until the cow was nothing but scattered bones. Some of the other girls introduced me to the children’s zoo, which consisted mostly of rabbits kept in individual hutches that sat high above the ground on stilted wooden legs. I had to stand on a two-step ladder to open the hatch door. I was allowed to pet the velvety fur of the skittish creatures, but warned to never touch the tiny pink newborns because the mother might kill them if she smelled an unfamiliar scent on their smooth, bubblegum flesh. Weekends were about autonomy. I might wander alone, set off on an adventure with another child or join a group of kids in a game of tag or Monopoly. Mostly I played on my own. Other than a brief friendship with a girl named Anna, who replaced my “buddy” Sophie, I did not yet have connections with any of the other children. Anna, an older girl who was well liked by the demonstrators and other kids, treated me like a favored pet. During free times, I went everywhere with her. As her favorite, I found myself regularly fussed over, my cheeks pinched by other, older girls, who exclaimed, “Ahh, she’s so cute!” When Anna left the commune, I once again became solitary.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  By this time one of us is perennially on the way out the door, pausing to hand our boy off like a football. More and more often, he’s our sole point of contact. Otherwise, we exist as a pair of profiles gliding past each other. If a laser had sliced each of us cartoonlike down the middle—half of each falling away—we may not have noticed the missing half for days. While I tell myself this is the normal way of careworn parents with handfuls of jobs between them, the distance feels like powerful magnets, once kissing, now turned to their opposing poles. It’s not just that we don’t eat out, don’t take vacations at all—together or apart, expense being cited—we barely speak beyond necessity. Only in bed do we sometimes fall on each other like starved beasts. Quitting drinking will reunite us. On New Year’s, we down our last champagne, and two days later, a wicked flu fells me like a chain-sawed oak. The sole cure for which ailment—it strikes me—is whiskey toddies with lemon and honey. Purely medicinal, of course. Don’t you want a drink? I say to Warren as I itchily shift around in bed. I can’t concentrate on grading. Not really, he says. The literary magazine he’d cofounded before keeps him editing manuscripts even nights he’s home. My limbs ache like I’ve run ten miles, and I’m clammy. In the past, quitting drinking was a breeze. I’d done it a thousand times—binge as a reward, say, or down it all one weekend then swear off on Monday. I whine to him that sleep’ll elude me. He yawns, hefting his folder to the floor with a thunk, saying (as a joke), I wish I couldn’t sleep. I sullenly kick back the covers on my side of the bed, pissed at how he’ll twist off the light, and block out my insomniac pouting. Downstairs, I stand before the brass thermostat swathed in layers of sweatclothes and woolens, for this is how I bundle to sleep at the igloo temperature Warren insists on—again, expense being cited. I scrub my chafed red hands together like a fly then I twist the wheel right. Before it reaches eighty, I hear—from the bowels of the house—the furnace go whomp. I even rise early to dial it back low before Warren—soaked in sweat—comes down in the morning, wondering why the thermometer’s red line holds at eighty, as I look mystified. Since there’s no liquor in the house, I concoct for myself a backache, filching a few of the blue valiums Warren rarely takes for his—truly bad—back. They’re for sleep, I tell myself. (My creative skill reaches its zenith at prescription interpretation, i.e., the codeine cough syrup bottle seems to read: Take one or two swigs when you feel like it. I take three.)