Pride

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 In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cabin in the Woods I went to Yaddo to write this book in full performance mode. I didn’t realize it until a few weeks in, when I was midlaugh middinner and, for the first time in ages, heard myself. As a teenager I would have given my eyeteeth for this sense of sureness. I performed as a witch, a socialite. I wore mermaid-cut skirts and silk jumpsuits and elegant, floor-length sequined dresses and faux-fur wraps and black frocks and glittering rhinestone earrings. I didn’t hold back on my opinions. I drank wine at dinner and took second helpings and strutted around the grounds. I slept mere feet from where I wrote, in a cabin in the trees. I played Pokémon Go on long walks and vied for control of the property’s single gym (located, abstractly, in a grand and elegant fountain at the base of the slope that dropped down from the mansion) with an avatar called “Hornbuckets.” It was autumn, and every day leaves and pine needles came down; I was forever picking detritus out of my bra. It got cold, and warm, and cold again. It snowed, but the snow melted the next day. I drove to southern Vermont for a reading on Halloween with a bunch of other writers and blew out a tire on a dark country road on the way home, and as we waited for AAA we sat in the car and told stories about our worst jobs. In the mansion on the property, the furniture was gathered to the center of the room and draped in sheets. I saw a painting of the dead children, dressed in black. I thought I heard my name in a half whisper, but when I turned around there was no one. “Sound moves weirdly in here,” one of the residents explained. The rooms were, in turn, monastic, bombastic. I nursed a crush on a playwright and a nonfiction writer both, rolled my eyes at a sculptor, felt great fondness for badass visual artists who were breaking into the fine arts boys’ club before I was born. I talked about supplements with a painter and comforted a composer. Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table. Toward the end, I told the story about the Dream House, the funny version: the version where the irony of my relationship with Val and the universality of shitty exes are at the forefront. I kept my eyes open: for deer, for ghosts.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  WHEN CATHERINE HIT PUBERTY SHE was fifty pounds overweight. Sexually invisible, repeatedly rejected, she was the “ugly sidekick” left guarding the door while her girlfriends made out on the other side of it. Today she is a beautiful woman, married for almost fifteen years. She and her husband play out a fantasy in which she is a high-priced prostitute. Men pay top dollar for the pleasure of her company—they want her so much they’re willing to spend a small fortune and risk their jobs and marriages for a little bit of her time. The more outrageous their transgressions, the greater her value. Catherine’s past humiliations are vindicated by the men who now can’t walk past her without marveling. In her theater of the surreal she triumphantly exacts revenge for the pains and frustrations of her adolescence. Daryl’s wife complains, “He can’t even decide on a restaurant, and he wants to tie me up? What’s that about?” The difficulty Daryl feels about asserting himself in his daily life is spectacularly remediated in his domination fantasies. In the highly ritualized and consensual choreography of bondage and domination, Daryl’s aggression finds safe expression. His wants are honored, his fear of going too far is contained, and his masculine power brings others pleasure rather than pain. Lucas, an unabashedly gay man who grew up in a small town in southern Illinois, spent years passing for straight, terrified that he’d be found out. He played high school football and even had sex with a cheerleader because she approached him in a crowd and he knew that turning her down would raise suspicions about his sexuality. Now in his thirties, he says, “I got the hell out of that town so I could be openly gay without it threatening my life. And now I find myself walking the nude beach at Aquinnah pretending to be straight so some guy can try to turn me. I’ll be straight, but on my terms. Today I only act straight when I think it’ll get me laid. Lucky for me, so many gay men get off on turning a straight guy that I get laid all the time!” Emir is a one-woman man, and has been his whole life. “I’ve always had girlfriends, real girlfriends, women I’ve loved whom I’ve stayed with for years. That’s me. I’ve been with Althea for five years now. We used to have a great sex life, but since we had a baby six months ago she doesn’t want sex nearly as often as she used to. I have to deploy my whole seductive arsenal to convince her, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Most of the time I take care of myself.” Emir’s favorite fantasy is having sex with two women at once. “I like the idea of all that attention.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For Renee, pregnancy ushered in a self-acceptance she had never felt. “Pregnancy was a healing experience for me. I was sexually abused as a child, and had always loathed any signs of womanliness in my body. I’d been at war with my thighs for twenty-five years. I was hospitalized for an eating disorder the year before I got pregnant. In fact, I was so skinny I didn’t even think I could get pregnant. I hadn’t had a regular period in years. But the minute I saw that plus sign in the EPT everything changed. It was the first time in my life that food became decontaminated. I relished watching my body grow ripe. For once in my life my breasts were naturally round and I was so proud. Most of my friends complained of the discomfort and weight gain. But for me, I felt like it was finally OK to look like a woman. I gave birth naturally; it was powerful. I was amazed by what my body could do and what it could endure. I was capable of so much more than I thought. Ever since, when I make love, I pursue that intensity.” For Julie, a mother of three, motherhood has brought a positive new identity. “In my early twenties I dressed like a boy: big sweaters, jeans, size-nine Keds. It was a total denial of femininity and a feminist distrust of its motives. I mistook appreciation for objectification, and didn’t trust that a man might be interested in me beyond my availability as a sexual object. These days the pants are stylish, tight, and fun; the blouses show cleavage. Finally, I’m the kind of woman my Italian father would recognize, and who would make my mother blush—greedy, sexy, entitled. Why? I feel safe now. I have no one’s eye to catch. I’m already caught, thoroughly enmeshed in the needs and desires of others (four males as it turns out). And I am finding freedom in this place, where there is no power game. I don’t have to respond to anyone I haven’t already chosen. As a mother I’m not afraid to be sexual, sensual, to assert my desire.” When Daddy Sings the Baby Blues For every man like Warren, who feels sexually abandoned when his wife becomes a mother, there is a man like Leo, whose libido makes a break for it on the way home from the delivery room. Dwindling desire in mothers is, in some ways, old news. We might not like it, but we can at least make sense of it. But what are we to make of the father who can no longer eroticize the mother of his children? This story, though just as common, is admitted far less frequently.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  … I struggled far more than all of them [apostles] put together’ (15:8, 10). “I reckon myself in no way behind the oh-so-grand apostles” (2 Cor 11:5). No less, Paul speaks pervasively of abrupt change, novelty, and disjunction: “If one is in Christ, it’s a new creation. The old things went away. Look: new things have come to be!” (Gal 6:15). He formerly pursued the ancestral traditions with zeal, but now regards those who read scripture without Christ as veiled and blinded by “the god of this age” (2 Cor 3:17–4:4). If Paul’s Announcement had been more in the vein of “I’m OK, you’re OK,” or “You know, I’ve discovered a new reading of Isaiah,” it would surely not have generated such urgency—or intense controversy. 64 Dunn, “New Perspective,” 102–3. 65 Ibid.,” 109. 66 Ibid., 101 (my emphasis): “Paul was by no means the only Jew who became a Christian and it is difficult to see such an arbitrary jump from one ‘system’ to another commending itself quite as much as it … did to so many of his fel ow Jews.” 38 38 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), founder of a modern philosophy of history, warned against five prejudices that ensnare historians. The third, “the conceit of the scholars,” meant “delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves [the modern scholars], which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance. ”67 That is to say, we imagine that the ancients thought as we do, ignoring their unavoidable weirdness as figures from an alien past. Classicists and biblical exegetes—I say this as a ful y complicit commentator—are especial y prone to this fal acy because of the great distance between us and the world we study and yet the very hominess of “Judaeo-Christian” tradition. We feel that we should understand it intuitively and feel at home in it. Dunn’s call for a reasonable, scholarly Paul seems to me to embody this pul , which we all feel in some way. Conclusion Many, perhaps most historical questions are worth pursuing even if we cannot definitively answer them. When we investigate why an actor in the past did something, or why an event occurred, we are immersing ourselves in their world to rethink their thoughts and situations. Since history is first of all the act of investigating, nothing is lost and much is gained by this effort to live imaginatively in the foreign world of the past, whether we ever figure things out completely or not. Whether Paul was inside or outside “Judaism” is, by contrast, a pointless historical question in my view. This is not because it cannot be answered, but because even trying to answer it, merely framing such a question, takes us away from the ancient world, away from Paul’s world. Discussing the issue requires us to find out from each other what we mean by

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But I was helpless; I couldn’t complain to anyone—Kovacs was a police sergeant. A vulgar, rapacious man. I’ll tell you what kind of man he was. Once I put aside my pride and pleaded with him to keep Merges inside for only an hour a day so Cica could go out in safety. “Nothing wrong with Merges,” he sneered. “My cat and I are alike; we both want the same thing—sweet Hungarian pussy.” Yes, he would agree to keep Merges at home—for a price. And the price was me! Things were bad, but every time Cica entered heat they got even worse. Not only did Kovacs do his usual prowling around my windows and knocking on my door but Merges went berserk: all night long screeching, yowling, scratching at the wall of my house, and flinging himself against my windows. As if Merges and Kovacs were not pestilence enough, Budapest at that time was infested by huge Danube river rats, which swarmed through my neighborhood, pillaged the potato and carrot bins in the cellar, and slaughtered the backyard chickens. One day my landlord helped me set a trap-cage for the rats in the cellar, and that very night I heard ungodly squeals. Descending the stairs by candlelight, I was full of fear. What would I do with the rat or rats I had caught? Then, by the flickering candle, I saw the cage and, peering out from its bars, the largest, most horrible rat I had ever seen or, in my worst dreams, imagined. I flew back up the stairs and decided to call for help later, when my landlord awoke. But an hour later, as dawn broke, I ventured back down and took another look. It was no rat. It was worse—it was Merges! As soon as he saw me he hissed and spat and tried to claw me through the bars of the cage. God, what a monster! I knew just what to do, and it was with great pleasure that I threw an entire pitcher of water on him. He kept on hissing, and I picked up my skirts and pranced with joy three times around the cage. But then what? What should I do with Merges, who now was howling an ungodly song? Something within me made the decision without my knowing it. For the first time in my life, I would take a stand. For me! For women everywhere! I would fight back.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cabin in the Woods I went to Yaddo to write this book in full performance mode. I didn’t realize it until a few weeks in, when I was midlaugh middinner and, for the first time in ages, heard myself. As a teenager I would have given my eyeteeth for this sense of sureness. I performed as a witch, a socialite. I wore mermaid-cut skirts and silk jumpsuits and elegant, floor-length sequined dresses and faux-fur wraps and black frocks and glittering rhinestone earrings. I didn’t hold back on my opinions. I drank wine at dinner and took second helpings and strutted around the grounds. I slept mere feet from where I wrote, in a cabin in the trees. I played Pokémon Go on long walks and vied for control of the property’s single gym (located, abstractly, in a grand and elegant fountain at the base of the slope that dropped down from the mansion) with an avatar called “Hornbuckets.” It was autumn, and every day leaves and pine needles came down; I was forever picking detritus out of my bra. It got cold, and warm, and cold again. It snowed, but the snow melted the next day. I drove to southern Vermont for a reading on Halloween with a bunch of other writers and blew out a tire on a dark country road on the way home, and as we waited for AAA we sat in the car and told stories about our worst jobs. In the mansion on the property, the furniture was gathered to the center of the room and draped in sheets. I saw a painting of the dead children, dressed in black. I thought I heard my name in a half whisper, but when I turned around there was no one. “Sound moves weirdly in here,” one of the residents explained. The rooms were, in turn, monastic, bombastic. I nursed a crush on a playwright and a nonfiction writer both, rolled my eyes at a sculptor, felt great fondness for badass visual artists who were breaking into the fine arts boys’ club before I was born. I talked about supplements with a painter and comforted a composer. Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table. Toward the end, I told the story about the Dream House, the funny version: the version where the irony of my relationship with Val and the universality of shitty exes are at the forefront. I kept my eyes open: for deer, for ghosts.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  and unique, that makes life easier or brings pleasure; or improving conditions for those in need; or solving some seemingly intractable problem. This is the ultimate reality of the group, why it was formed in the first place. This purpose is not vague or implied but clearly stated and publicized. No matter the type of work, you want to emphasize excellence and creating something of the highest possible quality. Making money or being successful should be a natural result of this ideal and not the goal itself. To make this work, the group must practice what you preach. Any signs of hypocrisy or noticeable discrepancy between the ideal and the reality will destroy your efforts. You want to establish a track record of results that reflect the group’s ideal. Groups will tend to lose connection to their original purpose, particularly with any success. You want to keep reminding the group of its mission, adapting it if necessary but never drifting from this core. We often like to reduce the behavior of people to base motives— greed, selfishness, the desire for attention. Certainly we all have a base side. But we also possess a nobler, higher side that often is frustrated and cannot find expression in the ruthless world today. Making people feel an integral part of a group creating something important satisfies a deep yet rarely met human need. Once members experience this, they are motivated to keep the healthy dynamic alive and vital. With its relatively high esprit de corps, the group will police itself. People who are petty and all about ego will stand out and be isolated. With clarity about what the group represents and the role they are to play, members are less likely to form factions. Everything becomes easier and smoother if you instill this collective purpose. Assemble the right team of lieutenants. As the leader of a reality group, you need the ability to focus on the larger picture and the overall goals that matter. You have only so much mental energy, and you must marshal it wisely. The greatest obstacle to this is your fear of delegating authority. If you succumb to micromanaging, your mind will become clouded by all the details you try to keep on top of and the battles among the courtiers. Your own confusion then filters down through the group, ruining the effect of the first strategy. What you need to do from the outset is to cultivate a team of lieutenants, imbued with your spirit and the collective sense of purpose, whom you can trust to manage the execution of ideas. To achieve this, you must have the right standards—you do not base your selection on people’s charm, and never hire friends. You want the most competent person for the job. You also give great consideration to their character. Some people can be brilliant, but in the end their poisonous personalities and egos make them a drain

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  There are six billion people on the planet, and you two ended up together. What was it about him? What was it about her? Many times people forget their own story—the mystery of what brought them together. How much pain in the world can be tied to people losing the power, the mystery, the holiness of their marriage? I Always Watch Their Eyes The creator of the universe has a vested interest in this. God is for marriages. And it must be protected at all costs, especially in the everyday, subtle sorts of ways. I’ve been around lots of couples who cut each other down in public, but it’s all done in the name of humor. “The ball and chain . . .” “My old lady . . .” “He isn’t good for much, but I keep him anyway.” Whenever people talk like this, I always watch their eyes. Is this really all in good fun, or does it carry some truth? Most humor has truth in it. You can tell when the marriage is in trouble. The jokes have an edge to them. The comments linger just a bit too long on the negative. And the eyes. Watch the eyes. A friend of mine is a doctor who specializes in marriage and relational issues. He says he can tell in a couple of seconds whether a marriage will last. Seriously, a couple of seconds. This is a science called thin slicing, and he’s incredibly accurate in his predictions.18 He says it’s all about respect. How he looks at her. How she looks at him. He insists that a few seconds of observing how a couple looks at each other is all he needs to know if the marriage will make it. Maybe that’s another reason why wedding ceremonies are so moving. Watch their eyes. They respect each other. They’re under the chuppah. And then often something happens over time. The ground becomes less holy. And they begin to look at each other differently. Instead of the initial, “Out of all the people in the world, I choose you!” it becomes, “Out of all the people in the world, I chose you?” Recently I was with a couple who is having serious marriage trouble. I know this, of course, because of how they look at each other. But the wife shares with anyone who will listen just how hard it is to live with her husband. One of their friends was telling me just how toxic the two of them have become to those around them. This friend said that it is so hard because she wants to help, but when the wife tells her things, she has this gut reaction that she shouldn’t be hearing them. This couple needs help. There is trouble under the chuppah. But instead of getting counseling for their issues, they’re dragging everything out from under the chuppah and, in the process, making things worse.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  make the racism so visible to the whites watching television that it would strike their consciences, and with a growing sense of outrage, pressure would be placed on the Kennedy administration that it could no longer resist. Most of all, King was counting on the cooperation of Bull Connor in his plans—his overreaction to the intensity of their campaign would be the key to the whole drama they were hoping to enact. In April 1963 King and his team put their plan into action. They attacked on multiple fronts with sit-ins and demonstrations. Although reluctant because of his fear of jails, King got himself arrested. This would garner more publicity and stir the local population to emulate him. But the campaign had a fatal weakness that became apparent only as it evolved: local black support for the movement was tepid. Many blacks in Birmingham resented Shuttlesworth’s autocratic style; others reasonably feared the violence Connor would unleash. King depended on large and boisterous crowds, but what he got was far from that. The national press, not smelling a story, started to leave. Then one of the leaders on his team, James Bevel, had an idea— they would enlist the participation of students in local schools. King had his fears and argued they should not bring in anyone under the age of fourteen, but Bevel reminded him of the high stakes and the need for numbers, and King relented. Many of those inside the organization and sympathizers were shocked that King could be so pragmatic and strategic in using such young people, but the campaign had a higher purpose, and it was no time to be so delicate. The students responded with great enthusiasm. It was just what the movement needed. They filled the streets of Birmingham, more daring and boisterous than their parents. Soon they were filling up the jails. The press returned en masse. Out came the high-pressure fire hoses, the attack dogs, and the night sticks, striking teenagers and even children. Soon television screens around America were broadcasting the tense, dramatic, and bloody scenes that ensued. Enormous crowds now showed up for King’s speeches, drumming up support for the cause. Federal authorities were forced to intervene to lessen the tension. King had learned his lesson from before—he had to keep up the pressure to the very end. Representatives of the white power structure reluctantly opened negotiations with King. At the same time, he sanctioned the demonstrators to continue their downtown marches, coming from all directions and stretching Connor’s police force to the breaking point. Frightened local merchants had had enough and asked the white negotiators to work on a comprehensive settlement with the black leaders, essentially desegregating the downtown stores and agreeing to the hiring of black employees. It was his greatest triumph so far; he had realized his ambitious goal. It did not matter now if the white authorities backtracked, as they inevitably would; Kennedy was caught in the trap, his own

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  I You Own What You’ve Bought and What You’ve Thought: Endowment and Status õuo Bias n 2006, Andrew Wilkinson founded MetaLab, a company that designs and builds mobile apps for tech companies. It was instantly profitable and grew quickly. Its client list includes Apple, Google, Disney, Walmart, and famously successful start-ups like Slack. Over the years, he used some of those profits to start more than twenty companies. In addition, one of those, Tiny, founded in 2014, has invested in and bought dozens of internet businesses. Because of Wilkinson’s reputation for doing fast deals, being a hands-off buyer, and holding for the long term, he’s been called “Warren Buffett for startups.” Wilkinson’s entrepreneurial spirit was apparent from an early age. While attending high school in the early 2000s, he started a tech news website called MacTeens.com, along with some friends. He worked hard at the project, even snagging an interview with Steve Jobs. The site was so successful that, between managing staff, negotiating ad deals, and creating content, it became a full-time job. The project took so much time that he barely graduated. After briefly studying journalism in college, he dropped out and started MetaLab. In 2009, finding that he wanted a way for his team to share to-do lists, he decided to build his own to-do list tool. The idea became a software product called Flow, which he funded and pursued until 2021. The market for SaaS tools, like Google Docs and Slack (which hired MetaLab in 2013 to design its interface), has exploded since then, but at the time he conceived of this idea, the market was nascent. He was early to the space, correctly foreseeing the potential market size for this type of product. MetaLab had become successful enough that he had the resources to bootstrap Flow, to fund the company on his own rather than seek outside investors such as venture capital firms.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  As the woman says in Song of Songs, “My own vineyard is mine to give.”16 In the ancient Near East, a “vineyard” was a euphemism for sexuality. She is saying that she doesn’t give herself to just anyone. She is fully in control of herself, and she is not cheap and she is not easy. Your strength is a beautiful thing. And when you live in it, when you carry yourself with the honor and dignity that are yours, it forces the men around you to relate to you on more than just a flesh level. You are worth dying for.17 If you’re dating someone, what kind of man is he? Does he demonstrate that he’s the kind of man who would die for you? What is his posture toward the world? Does he serve, or is he waiting to be served? Does he believe that he’s owed something, that he’s been shortchanged, that he’s gotten the short end of the stick, that life owes him something? Or is he out to see what he can give? Does he see himself as being here to make the world a better place?18 These are the big questions that you need to ask yourself. Take him to a family reunion. Do some sort of service project with him. See how he interacts with people he doesn’t like. Does he have liquid agape running through his veins? A friend of mine was engaged to a man, and some of her friends were not excited about them getting married. As the wedding day approached, one of her friends decided to say something to her. He said, “When a woman is loved well, she opens up like a flower.” She broke off the engagement soon afterward. In one brilliant sentence, her friend taught her what agape is and what it isn’t. What does he expect of you? Does he expect you to sleep with him when he hasn’t committed to you forever? Does he want all of you without his having to give all of him? Can you tell him anything? Is he safe? Can he be trusted? Can you open up to him, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, knowing that he will protect, not exploit, that vulnerability? Are you opening like a flower? When you live in your true identity, when you find your worth and value in your creator, when you live “in Christ,” in who you really are, you force him to rethink what it means to be a man.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  high degree of confidence in his talents, and the series of promotions he received at ABC confirmed this self-opinion. He could afford to be a little cocky, because he had learned a lot on the job and his skills as a programmer had improved immensely. He was on a fast track toward the top, which he reached at the age of thirty-four by being named head of prime-time programming at ABC. As a person of high ambition, he soon felt that the world of television was somewhat constricting. There were limits to the kinds of entertainment he could program. The film world offered something looser, greater, and more glamorous. It was natural, then, for him to accept the position at Paramount. But at Paramount something occurred that began the subtle process of the unbalancing of his mind. Because the stage was bigger and he was the head of the studio, he began to receive attention from the media and the public. He was featured on the cover of magazines as the hottest film executive in Hollywood. This was qualitatively different from the attention and satisfaction that had come from the promotions at ABC. Now he had millions of people admiring him. How could their opinions be wrong? To them he was a genius, a new kind of hero altering the landscape of the studio system. This was intoxicating. It inevitably elevated his estimation of his skills. But it came with a great danger. The success that Eisner had had at Paramount was not completely of his own doing. When he had arrived at the studio, several films were already in preproduction, including Saturday Night Fever , which would spark the turnaround. Barry Diller was the perfect foil to Eisner. He would argue with him endlessly about his ideas, forcing Eisner to sharpen them. But puffed up by the attention he was receiving, Eisner had to imagine that he deserved the accolades he received strictly for his own efforts, and so naturally he subtracted from his success the elements of good timing and the contributions of others. Now his mind was subtly divorcing itself from reality. Instead of rigorously focusing on the audience and how to entertain people, he started to increasingly focus on himself, believing in the myth of his greatness as promulgated by others. He imagined he had the golden touch. At Disney the pattern repeated and grew more intense. He basked in the glow of his amazing success there, quickly forgetting the incredible good luck he had had in inheriting the Disney library at the time of the explosion of home video and family entertainment. He discounted the critical role that Wells had played in balancing him out. With his sense of grandeur growing, he faced a dilemma. He had become addicted to the attention that came from creating a splash, doing something big. He could not content himself with simple success and rising profits. He had to add to the myth to keep

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  rebel. In other words, we feel the need to continually express and assert our free will. With the second universal (I am intelligent), we may realize we are not on the level of an Einstein, but in our field, in our own way, we are intelligent. A plumber revels in his superior knowledge of the inner workings of a house and in his manual skills, which are a form of intelligence. He also thinks his political opinions come from solid common sense, another sign of intelligence, as he sees it. People are generally never comfortable with the thought that they could be gullible and less than intelligent. If they have to admit they are not smart in the conventional way, they will at least think they are cleverer than others. With the third universal (I am a good person), we like to see ourselves as supporting the right causes. We treat people well. We are a team player. If we happen to be the boss and we like to instill discipline in the troops, we call it “tough love.” We are acting for the good of others. In addition to these universals, we find that people have more personalized self-opinions that serve to regulate their particular insecurities. For instance, “I’m a free spirit, one of a kind” or “I’m very self-reliant and don’t need anybody’s help” or “I am good-looking and I can depend on that” or “I am a rebel and disdain all authority.” Implied in these various self-opinions is a feeling of superiority in this one area: “I am a rebel and you are less so.” Many of these types of self-opinions are related to developmental issues in early childhood. For instance, the rebel type had a father figure who disappointed him; or perhaps he suffered from bullying and cannot bear any feeling of inferiority. He must despise all authority. The self-reliant type may have experienced a very distant mother, be haunted by feelings of abandonment, and have crafted a self-image of rugged independence. Our self-opinion is primary: it determines so much of our thinking and our values. We will not entertain ideas that clash with our self- opinion. Let us say we see ourselves as particularly tough and self- reliant. We will then gravitate toward ideas and philosophies that are realistic, hard-core, and unforgiving of others’ weaknesses. If in this scenario we also happen to be Christian, we will then reinterpret Christian religious doctrines to match our tough self-image, finding elements within Christianity that emphasize self-reliance, tough love, and the need to destroy our enemies. In general, we will choose to belong to groups that validate our feeling of being noble and smart. We might think we have particular ideas or values that stand on their own, but in fact they are dependent on our self-opinion. When you try to convince people of something, one of three things will happen. First, you might inadvertently challenge a particular aspect of their self-opinion. In a discussion that might turn

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  20 Lecture 5: Homer’s Odyssey Homer’s Odyssey Lecture 5 The subject of this lecture is the Odyssey, which is the eternal traveling companion of the Iliad. This [epic] tells the story of the homecoming of the heroes who survived the Trojan War, particularly the homecoming of Odysseus, who makes his way back to the island, the Kingdom of Ithaca. M odern scholarship suggests that the Odyssey was written about a generation after the Iliad but by a different poet who knew the Iliad very well and patterned this poem on the earlier one. Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is written in 24 books, includes larger-than-life characters and events, employs the grand style which uses epic similes, features the same supernatural machinery as the Iliad, and begins in medias res. It also centers on a hero who more than anything else wants to make a name for himself and achieve enduring fame. He shares this primary motivation with the warriors at Troy in the Iliad. In both epics, to achieve enduring fame, characters sometimes must sacri ¿ ce the good of their communities or families.This motif of honor in the Odyssey is illustrated by the episode with the Cyclops.Although Odysseus does not have to confront the Cyclops, he chooses to do so. In so doing, despite the loss of six of his best men, Odysseus adds to his reputation and glory. Once he has escaped, Odysseus makes sure that the Cyclops knows who it was who bested and blinded him, even at the risk of getting himself or more of his crew killed by the one- eyed giant. As in the Iliad, in this poem one has to expose oneself to risk in order to become somebody, a hero with a name that reaches to the ends of the world. The honor motif is further underscored by the kinds of temptations Odysseus resists on his way home, all of which encourage him to lay down his arms and live a long, happy, and anonymous life. The Lotus-Eaters, Circe, the Sirens, and the Phaiakians all make this offer to Odysseus. Most notably, Calypso offers him immortality but at the cost of reputation, fame, and being remembered. Odysseus turns down all of them. Achilles in the Iliad had the same choice: stay home and live a long but undistinguished life, or go to

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Howdy and Noddy have set up housekeeping in the Windy City while Howdy thinks up ways to help Armour out-swift Swift. Seems Chip had ‘business’ in Oak Park the next day with one Miss Sissy Showalter-Price (Madeira, ’55). They plan to tie the knot in June. Ever since the announcement appeared, residents of Greenwich have reported widespread sounds of wailing and gnashing teeth. Hmmm . . . wunda who dat c’d be? Nuff said. Good luck, Sissy! (Hint: When last seen, Chip was handing off to Howdy on the comer of East Wacker and Lakeshore Drive, with Noddy in hot pursuit. . .) “R. S. K. Unsworth St. John, ’46, was recently named Director of Marketing Research for Newcombe Industries. Well done, Un!” There were several pages of these notes, some of them accompanied by pictures of smiling, confident men in business suits, tennis whites, golf outfits. The last page of the bulletin had nothing but pictures of babies—all boys, all sons of alumni, and all of them wearing little white sweaters with a big H on the breast. The classes of 1978 and 1979 were already starting to fill up. The director of admissions had sent me a form to complete, a straightforward information sheet. I did not send this back right away. I carried it around with me for a few days, then filled it out. Where it asked me for my name as I wished it to appear in the school catalogue, I wrote, “Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff III.” MY MOTHER PICKED me up after school one afternoon and took me into Concrete for a Coke. She couldn’t get over the fact that I had been given a scholarship to Hill. She kept looking at me curiously, then laughing. “All right,” she said. “What did you tell them?” “What do you mean, what did I tell them. I didn’t tell them anything. I just applied.” “Come on.” “My test scores were pretty high.” “You must have told them something.” “Thanks, Mom. Thanks for the vote of confidence.” “Are you going to get in trouble?” “Get in trouble . What’s that supposed to mean?” “Are you going to get in trouble?” “No. I’m not going to get in trouble.” “Promise?” “I’m not going to get in trouble, I promise . What do you want, blood?” We passed on to other things. She was happy for me, after all, and willing not to question fortune too closely. She had good news of her own. She’d found a job in Seattle, a secretarial job at Aetna Life Insurance. She was supposed to start there in another week. A woman she knew had offered to put her up until she found a place to live so she wouldn’t be under pressure to rent something she didn’t like. She could afford to relax and take her time, especially since I would be going off to California in June rather than coming to live with her.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  73 of her husbands, she loved the last one (the one hardest to subdue) the most. She is still a lusty woman, who has (we suspect) come on this pilgrimage partly in search of a sixth husband. Her tale itself is a romance set in King Arthur’s court and involves a knight who rapes a peasant woman. She appeals to Arthur, who condemns the knight to death, but the women of the court intervene. They give the knight a year and a day to discover what women really want; if he ¿ nds the right answer, his life will be spared. At the end of the year he encounters a loathly hag who promises to save his life if he will grant her a boon. He agrees. When brought before his tribunal of court women, he tells them that what women really want is “sovereignty in love.” The women judges spare his life. The boon the loathly hag demands for saving the knight’s life is to marry him. He reluctantly agrees. On the wedding night, she gives him a stern lecture on the nature of true virtue and nobility, and she ends by giving him a choice: she can be stunningly beautiful, but he will always have to worry about her faithfulness to him; or she can remain as she is but promise absolute dedication to him. He turns the choice over to her, and when she asks whether he is granting her sovereignty in the marriage and he tells her that he is, she becomes a dazzlingly beautiful woman who says that she will also always be faithful to him. She has educated a knight about women and in the process has also shown that what is good for her is also good for him. They live happily ever after. The Wife of Bath ends her story by asking Christ to cut short the lives of all husbands who will not be ruled by their wives; the ending reminds us of the complex character that is the Wife of Bath. She seems in some ways a proto-feminist, demanding recognition of the female point of view in marriage and the values of experience as a teacher—vis-à-vis the book-learning of men. As always, Chaucer lets us make up our own minds about the Wife of Bath and her story. Harold Bloom points out … Chaucer’s characters are so much like real people … that, in a way, we have to treat them the way we do real people.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  133 the genealogy and birth narrative a claim for the voices of women in the proclamation of God’s word—and not just rich or virgin women, but gentile and prostitute too? The question is compelling to me also personally, because I serve as a priest of the church and have for years (and without any particular angst) sought as a priest to proclaim the gospel. Does my proclamation have roots in Matthew’s women? Second, with respect to the women’s “stories”: the readings that find in Matthew’s genealogy a robust role for women depend on the assumption that Matthew has the biblical stories of the four Old Testament (OT) women in mind. 13 Given the interest in the scriptures of Israel evident throughout the gospel (and manifest in the birth narrative in its fulfilment quotations), this is a fair assumption. Indeed, as Richard Hays has made clear (and as I have argued at length elsewhere, with respect to the birth narrative and to Judas), Matthew’s gospel is often in deliberate and thorough-going conversation with the scriptures of Israel not just as proof-text but as saving story, the history of the people of God. 14 But in the genealogy there are no fulfilment quotations; all we have are the names. Can we say with confidence that Matthew’s gospel intends to summon up biblical history in the names? And if we can, how can we control for what is important to Matthew in each woman’s history? Anne Clements has gone some way toward demonstrating that the biblical history resounds in the women’s names. She has drawn links between key themes in each woman’s scriptural story and themes in Matthew’s gospel—Tamar’s righteousness, for instance, and righteousness in the gospel. 15 The argument may be strengthened, however: first by attention to Matthew’s anomaly, “the wife of Uriah,” and second by attention to the literature of Second Temple Judaism. In several Second Temple Jewish texts, the stories of biblical women are a matter of keen interest, as, indeed, are their voices; their biblical histories underlie and inform the later text. Not only do these texts, from Jubilees to Pseudo-Philo, indicate that women’s stories played an important role in the retelling and interpretation of the scriptural history, but in Pseudo-Philo—a text roughly contemporaneous with Matthew—it is Tamar who is named as model

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  people will tend to direct this energy toward themselves. They will find a way to expand their sense of self, to feel great and superior. Although rarely conscious of this, what they are choosing to idealize and worship is the self. Because of this, we find more and more grandiose individuals among us. Other factors have also contributed to increases in grandiosity. First, we find more people who experienced pampering attention in their childhood than ever in the past. Feeling like they were once the center of the universe becomes a hard thing to shake. They come to believe that anything they do or produce should be seen as precious and worthy of attention. Second, we find increasing numbers of people who have little or no respect for authority or experts of any kind, no matter the experts’ level of training and experience, which they themselves lack. “Why should their opinion be any more valid than my own?” they might tell themselves. “Nobody’s really that great; people with power are just more privileged.” “My writing and music are just as legitimate and worthy as anyone else’s.” Without a sense of anyone rightly being above them and deserving authority, they can position themselves among the highest. Third, technology gives us the impression that everything in life can be as fast and simple as the information we can glean online. It instills the belief that we no longer have to spend years learning a skill; instead, through a few tricks and with a few hours a week of practice we can become proficient at anything. Similarly, people believe that their skills can easily be transferred: “My ability to write means I can also direct a film.” But more than anything it is social media that spreads the grandiosity virus. Through social media we have almost limitless powers to expand our presence, to create the illusion that we have the attention and even adoration of thousands or millions of people. We can possess the fame and ubiquity of the kings and queens in the past, or even of the gods themselves. With all of these elements combined, it is harder than ever for any of us to maintain a realistic attitude and a proportionate sense of self. In looking at the people around you, you must realize that their grandiosity (and yours) can come in many different forms. Most commonly people will try to satisfy the need by gaining social prestige. People may claim they are interested in the work itself or in contributing to humanity, but often deep down what is really motivating them is the desire to have attention, to have their high self-opinion confirmed by others who admire them, to feel powerful and inflated. If they are talented, such types can get the attention they need for several years or longer, but inevitably, as in the story of Eisner, their need for accolades will lure them into overreaching. If people are disappointed in their careers yet still believe they are

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  After nine months of work with two developers from MetaLab, Wilkinson succeeded in producing a beta version of the to-do list tool. He described his immediate pride in the product: “It was actually really cool. From day one, it was a huge hit.” The beta version of Flow quickly got to $20,000 in monthly recurring revenues and was soon growing by 10% a month. The product was hot. All the big venture capital firms reached out to him. Among the community of people who incubate new ventures (and the larger community of people who follow what those people are up to), there has long been a spirited debate about the pros and cons of venture funding versus bootstrapping. Wilkinson was among those very publicly siding with bootstrapping as the better option, both for himself and as a general strategy. This obviously contributed to his refusal of all the offers of venture money coming his way. Flow was a spartan operation but, not surprisingly for a new company in this space, it was still significantly outspending its promising initial sales. Wilkinson willingly wrote the checks to cover the growing expenses. He had capital, a product he was in love with, and a frequently expressed desire to avoid the dilution that comes with taking on outside investors. Although Flow’s initial success confirmed that there was demand for a SaaS tool that helped teams manage and share to-do lists, he recognized that the potential demand meant others would try to enter the space. Shortly after starting Flow, Wilkinson began hearing about another product named Asana. He had reason to be concerned about Asana. It was cofounded and run by Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz was a cofounder of Facebook, a billionaire, and someone who had enormous credibility and name recognition with potential investors, employees, and prospective users. When Asana went live in late 2011, Wilkinson breathed a sigh of relief. “It was ugly! It was designed by engineers. Complicated and hard to use. Not a threat in the slightest.” By comparing Flow with this debut version of Asana, he felt validated. “With a team a quarter of the size, and a fraction of the money, we had built what I felt was a superior product.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  point of view that is your own and use this to gently exert your influence. Your path can involve physical labor and craft—you take pride in the excellence of the work, leaving your particular stamp on the quality. It can be raising a family in the best way possible. No calling is superior to another. What matters is that it be tied to a personal need and inclination, and that your energy move you toward improvement and continual learning from experience. In any event, you will want to go as far as you can in cultivating your uniqueness and the originality that goes with it. In a world full of people who seem largely interchangeable, you cannot be replaced. You are one of a kind. Your combination of skills and experience is not replicable. That represents true freedom and the ultimate power we humans can possess. Strategies for Developing a High Sense of Purpose Once you commit yourself to developing or strengthening your sense of purpose, then the hard work begins. You will face many enemies and obstacles impeding your progress—the distracting voices of others who instill doubts about your calling and your uniqueness; your own boredom and frustrations with the work itself and your slow progress; the lack of trustworthy criticism from people to help you; the levels of anxiety you must manage; and finally, the burnout that often accompanies focused labor over long periods. The following five strategies are designed to help you move past these obstacles. They are in a loose order, the first being the essential starting point. You will want to put them all into practice to ensure continual movement forward. Discover your calling in life. You begin this strategy by looking for signs of primal inclinations in your earliest years, when they were often the clearest. Some people can easily remember such early indications, but for many of us it requires some introspection and some digging. What you are looking for is moments in which you were unusually fascinated by a particular subject, or certain objects, or specific activities and forms of play. The great nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientist Marie Curie could distinctly recall the moment when she was four years old and entered her father’s office, suddenly mesmerized by the sight of all sorts of tubes and measuring devices for various chemistry experiments placed behind a polished glass case. Her whole life she would feel a similar visceral thrill whenever she entered a laboratory. For Anton Chekhov, it was attending his first play in a theater as a boy in his small town. The whole atmosphere of make-believe thrilled him. For Steve Jobs, it was passing an electronics store as a child and seeing the wondrous gadgets in the window, marveling at their design and complexity. For Tiger Woods, it was, at the age of two, watching his father hit golf balls into a net in the garage and being unable to contain his excitement and desire to imitate him. For the