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 Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The third tale, “Southern Comfort,” examines the consolation obtained by transforming another into a comforting icon as well as the restrictive effects of that process upon both the transformed and the transformer. Set in an acute, rapid turnover, hospital therapy group, the story describes the radical modifications required to adapt a group to the demands of contemporary managed care treatment. Leaders of such groups must change their values, must settle for less, must strive to offer something in brief, more impersonal contacts. This is not an easy transition for therapists accustomed to more ambitious goals and more intimate caring relationships; many fall prey, as I did in this tale, to the professional hazard of grandiose rescue fantasies. (For more information about leading such acute inpatient groups see my text: Inpatient Group Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1983).) “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” my longest and most complex tale, is an undistorted account of treatment (aside from omission of prosaic details and for disguised identity) containing a myriad of psychotherapy themes. The therapist as student and, conversely, the patient as teacher, a theme introduced in “Travels with Paula,” is more fully developed in this story. Twenty-five years ago during a sabbatical year at a clinic in London, I studied with an eminent group therapist who told the saddest psychotherapy story I’ve ever heard. He described a group meeting to me in which the members (most of them in the group for ten years!) reviewed the progress of their group and concluded that every single group member had undergone considerable change—save the therapist who, ten years later, was exactly the same. The therapist then turned to me, eyes sparkling, and said, tapping his forefinger on the desk for emphasis, “That, my boy, is good technique!” I’ve always viewed this tale of the immutable therapist as a sad story because it portrays such a fundamental misunderstanding—namely that therapists are mechanics tinkering with the apparatus of the mind but remaining outside of the field or, alternatively, are inert chemical catalysts, enabling the process of change while untouched personally by the reaction. These highly misleading metaphors ignore the vast numbers of inquiries into the process of therapeutic change that support the axiom—and axiom is not too strong a term—that it is the relationship that heals. Therapeutic change ensues from a genuine, authentic engagement, and that, by definition, implies mutuality. Therapists facilitate change in the patient and, in the process, are themselves changed. Good therapists are perpetual students on a never-ending voyage of self-discovery and, as they feel more secure in their own skins and are able to relinquish the garb of authority, they will welcome as a blessing a deeply intelligent, sensitive, and challenging patient like Irene.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  But I didn’t just wait, she said. I expected, no, I wanted to work for it. I spilled time into the piano as I’d have put cash in a bank. I saw full concert halls in the future, solo recitals. Front-page plaudits. I practiced Liszt while imagined spotlights gilded the living room. Recollection is half invention, but it feels as though I spent my entire childhood training to prove I was the significant pianist I believed I’d be. So, I piled up trophies. It wasn’t enough. The teacher flicked my hands with a rod each time I didn’t hit the right note, but I didn’t mind. My ambition outstripped his. Let my hands swell. I could use the extra span. Bright-knuckled, I tried again. The months ticked past, then years. I kept lists of rivals; I indexed others’ exploits by age. Kiehl, at five, had given his first recital to the Danish king. Ohri, eleven, debuted at Carnegie Hall; Liu, fifteen. One night, my teacher called Libich’s Étude no. 5 the most challenging piece a soloist might attempt. It’s eluded the finest pianists, he said. I rushed to find the étude’s score. I learned it alone, in secret. I memorized Libich’s high trills. I flailed through wild ostinatos. – Once, at the table, my mother asked what I was smiling about. Haejin, she said. I blinked, Libich vibrating in my head. I, I don’t— She laughed. It’s all right, she said. I ate while she peeled a white peach. The skin dropped in a single coil. She picked it up, holding it to the light. Such a rich hue, she said. It flushed pink, backlit; I nodded, then she put it down. I could tell she wished to talk, but I was lost in trills. I pushed a last peach slice in my mouth, and I went back to the piano. – Until then, nothing I played had evoked the orphic singing I knew to be possible. It was an ideal I lacked the skill to bring to life. Each first-place prize marked a point when I’d let the music down. With Libich, I failed less. His étude asked so much of me that, at times, I’d forget I had an I. I should have learned, from this, that playing had to be birthed in a place without ego, in which I didn’t exist except as the living conduit, Libich’s medium. But then, when I showed the teacher what I could do, he was astonished. I’d achieved more than he’d hoped, he said. He switched the piece in for the next competition, a city-level open. I was driven to the recital hall. The sun fell on my hands as I practiced Libich again, fingers dancing across my legs. Spotlit, I listened to the traffic sing my name. The lax blue of L.A., heat-rippled, veiled the horizon. Like curtains, I thought, poised to rise.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The photographs in our hallway that depicted a polymorphously perverse range of S/M techniques and practitioners were very controversial. I was always suspect in the group because I was a sort of spokesperson for lesbian S/M, the face most identified with our cause, and frankly, because I was a leader and did so much work on its behalf. This notoriety sprang mostly from the publication of Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality , a sex manual I’d written and published that caused a shit storm of angry reaction because it had chapters on transsexuality, butch/femme sexuality, and S/M. The bulk of pages that dealt with vanilla sex were largely ignored. By the way, that subtitle was the publisher’s idea, not mine. I never thought one book could tell the whole story of lesbian sexuality. While lesbian magazines and newspapers like Off Our Backs tore the book apart, as if it could single-handedly destroy feminism, it sold and sold and sold. Gay women were coming out of the closet in record numbers, and they wanted to know more about how to please themselves and their lovers. That didn’t make it any less traumatic for me to read the caustic reviews. I had poured so much of my own heart and soul into that book, largely because coming out had been a miserable business for me, and there had been no resources at all to help me with problems like difficulty having an orgasm or the daunting question of what to do with a woman who expected me to pleasure her. I wanted to break the silence about cunnilingus, sex toys, tribadism, masturbation, penetration, kinky sex, sexual health and prevention of STDs, group sex—anything I could think of that some woman somewhere might want to do, I wrote about. I was sick of the homophobic shame that colored our lives and made it difficult to take any joy in love or erotic abandon. Above all, I was sick of the “truism” that one woman would somehow automatically know how to get another woman off. Why should we have to fumble around in the dark when a little education could provide the lubrication to get past any unpleasant friction? Samois would never have come together without the community-wide publicity and controversy generated by Sapphistry . Before that, many people believed and stated in print that S/M was a “perversion” that only gay men practiced, not lesbians. I’m not sure where all of the straight kinky people went while such bold statements were being made. The East Village, perhaps? Orange County? But I digress.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The Calyx wouldn’t open until much later that night, and the crowd would be light. But it was a very fine day. The morning fog had burned off and the evening fog had not yet rolled in. When her chauffeur (who was wearing the dress-gray uniform of a West Point cadet) opened her door and handed her out, Tyre spared an admiring glance for her enemy, the sun. Then she covered her sensitive pink eyes with big Italian sunglasses and hurried to the door. Under her conservatively cut Blackglama, she was wearing a hot-pink spandex jumpsuit with more zippers in it than in a full set of luggage. Slung around her hips was a wide, studded belt that came down to a V above her crotch. Her silver pumps had six-inch heels. When you are just over six feet tall and have perfectly white hair that falls to your knees, there is no point in pretending to be inconspicuous. “Please take Sara home. I won’t need the car until the usual time tonight, Michael,” she said. The driver saluted, her white glove touching the black patent bill of the military cover at precisely the correct angle. The two women, lady and retainer, two different kinds of aristocrats, exchanged a discreet smile of complicity. Michael’s blond mustache twitched. Sara (fast asleep for the moment) was a juicy piece Tyre had picked up just before closing time the night before. Once they were in the back seat of the limousine, Tyre had put one hand over her mouth and used the other to make love to her while Michael drove them up to Twin Peaks, through Golden Gate Park, across the bridge, and back to her home via Seal Rock and Ocean Beach, with discreet pauses along the way. Whenever Tyre had directed Michael to park the limo, the chauffeur’s gray eyes had not left the rearview mirror. Even when they were in motion, Michael wasn’t able to resist keeping track of Sara, writhing in pleasure she was not allowed to express, as often as the traffic would allow. Tyre knew that her trick was going to get quite a ride on her way home. She approved. She pressed the buzzer and waited for the security guard to check the video monitor and let her in. Her high heels clicked on the parquet floors. A crew was cleaning up the large waiting area. The place looked strange—skeletal, unreal—with all the house lights up, no music, no milling hordes of women. The cashier’s booth was unoccupied.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  As hero of the day, he conducts, in the synagogue and in front of all the faithful, that morning’s service, whereas the profane part of the holiday lasts all night and the parents, whether rich or poor, have only one thought, to dazzle their crowded guests. As boys, we used to dream, for years, in anticipation of this triumphant day which set a limit within our lives for all wonderful promises: “After my bar mitzvah, I’ll do this and that...” In a synthesis of all the wonderful feasts of which I had ever heard, I had imagined that an ox would be sacrificed on our threshold, its blood dripping down the whole staircase, all the poor fed at our expense, lighting so brilliant as to pale the stars, the music of a triumphant procession, an orgy lasting until dawn, all the women and my mother uttering shrill cries of excitement, and the men drunk, happy and grateful... At the mere repetition of all this, dispensed to whoever would listen to me, my chest seemed to swell with pride and joy as if I were already wearing a silken shirt and standing there to dazzle the assembled crowd. My mother was expected to give birth to the child in April. If luck would have it that she was delivered of a boy, we would kill two birds, even three, with one stone: we would celebrate our housewarming, my bar mitzvah, and the circumcision of the newborn son. To my taste, they all spoke far too much about my potential partner in all this glory. I was jealous of this possible brother who prevented me from being the uncontested hero of a ceremony that would occur only once in my lifetime. I realized that even the date of my bar mitzvah had been left undecided, to be determined according to the date of his birth. And so I waited for him. My parents had repeated to me often enough, in spite of all, that I was their first great joy, the only boy and the future head of the family. Now, I learned that I had only just escaped not being what I was. Before me, my parents had had another boy, born with all his fingers joined together, webbed like a duck’s foot: “That was a bad omen, but I looked after him well in spite of it all,” my mother used to say, “though I knew all the time that something would happen to him.” And it did happen, for he died in infancy. On the eve of his death, one of the women next door had heard an owl hoot quite close to our house. As Monsieur Touitou, our teacher, had told us that this superstition was meaningless, I explained firmly to my mother that owls do not kill infants but that the latter die for lack of proper care.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Still, it meant no advantages for me, as the lowest age for admission as a candidate was twelve. Everything was indeed very well worked out. If one of us managed to overcome all these handicaps, it proved that he was really much better than all the sons of middle-class parents. When our instructor, Monsieur Marzouk, drew up the list of official candidates, he was sorry to have to warn me that I had to wait until the next year. For a brief moment, the whole class concentrated its attention on me and I was more proud of it all than disappointed. Nor did I even dream that there was such a thing as an entrance examination for admission to the lowest high-school grade, which one could take at any age and that made the school certificate unnecessary. Who could have informed me? My father, who had attended only a year or two of school, or my mother, who has never learned to read or write any language? Our tribe, too busy with the daily preoccupations of its difficult life, had no knowledge of the passionate discussions of middle-class families concerning the future of their children. My immediate future, in school, was always far too uncertain to allow any long-term planning. So I quietly made the most of this honor of having to mark time for a full year and completed a second year of the same grade, winning all the prizes. These easy prizes indeed had more influence on my future, perhaps, than any precocious success at the school certificate might have had. Toward the end of my second year, Graziani, our Italian school porter, came into the classroom one day and said to Monsieur Marzouk that the school principal wanted to speak to me. To speak to me? Me, of all people? The principal? The school principal was in our eyes a very important person, so majestic and distant that he was almost a legend. His orders were abstract commands, impersonal, communicated to us by signs like the orders of a divinity. But why to me? I could see no connection. On one or two occasions a pupil had had some contact with the principal, but always as the result of a catastrophe or some grave misdeed. The principal had, for instance, broken the news to Nataf Pipo, in the fifth year, of his mother’s death, which had occurred suddenly at ten in the morning. And Brami Pinhas, in the third year, had also been summoned to the principal’s office, because he had thrown an inkwell against the wall; he had then been expelled and subsequently became insane. My heart beat so violently I could feel it thump beneath my ribs.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It would be a tough struggle, though I felt that no struggle could really be too tough for me. I exaggerated the difficulties that lay ahead of me, but this was only to enhance my own heroic attitude. I organized my life accordingly, working out several basic plans, then developing the individual details, as do all great builders. In this manner, my first efforts were soon crowned with success. I filed an application for a job as supervisor of studies in a high-school dormitory for resident students. Our principal remembered his promise and, within a week, I received my appointment. I then wrote a letter to the Head of the Philosophy Department in Algiers, which was the nearest university, asking him in all simplicity for some assistance. Though a professor on a university faculty was, in my eyes, a very important person indeed, he wrote me a reply that was full of encouragement; he even promised to look over my essays. My life as a poor student was divided between my work as a supervisor, monotonous and bothersome, and my own studies that were difficult enough, for lack of any advice other than this irregular checking of my philosophical compositions. My time was broken up, even my thoughts interrupted, by my constantly having to watch what was going on in passages and staircases, by my having to be present whenever the students moved from one class to the next, and by my having to attend to endless administrative details. Every hour on the hour, as soon as the bell rang, I had to put on my jacket and rush out of my room. Once the rhythm of my studies had thus been interrupted, it was difficult for me to return to the concentration and the flow of thought that are necessary for any productive work. I made up for all this, however, by making increasingly heavy demands on myself and by becoming even more austere. I no longer allowed myself any outings, stopped going to the movies, and added several more hours to my schedule of studies so as to make up in quantity what I had lost in quality of concentration. The study plan that I worked out for myself was calculated on the basis of periods of fifteen minutes, not only from day to day but for several months ahead, and I then forced my body and my mind to comply with this schedule that fitted me like a tight corset. I got up at dawn, my eyes still smarting from sleeplessness, and I went to bed again in the evening only when I began to fall asleep over a difficult textbook. But all this made me somehow aware of my own superiority.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  What innocence, what fervor, but also what self-sufficiency I must have had to believe I would be welcomed by the others merely because I had gone to them, full of faith and goodwill! In spite of the difficulties, I thought I was succeeding. The men, covered with lice, no longer fought disease. I discovered a barber among the workers. He had brought his tools with him, but he was called upon only on the eve of a day of leave. Together, we organized a little plot which would also be profitable for him. The following Sunday, rather ostentatiously, in the middle of the camp, I had my whole head shaved. After a few ironic comments, a few men followed my example when I explained that this would help protect me from lice. After that, the barber held his sessions every Sunday. I even became almost popular when I succeeded in obtaining an extra day of rest through a new system of rotation in our duties. A Jewish doctor had been specially appointed to the camps and came around once a week. We also had a permanent nurse, a former pharmacist who had no medical training. Only the more clever had managed so far to be reported sick. I persuaded the doctor, who pretended he was happy to speak at last to an intellectual, that it was necessary to grant a rest to those men who threatened to break down. Many had given up all hope and withdrawn into a mute stupor, and the unexpected rest certainly helped to save some of them. I remember with emotion the extraordinary scene when poor Basmouth, who had become a sort of hairy animal clothed in rags, spent his day off feverishly washing himself, as though he were afraid the day would end before he had managed to get clean. I triumphed the day two men came and asked me timidly if I could organize a Sabbath service. In other circumstances, I would have refused vehemently. For years I had not even been inside a synagogue. But they were asking for what seemed most important to them, so I joyfully accepted. I soon saw what use I could make of such meetings. Through the group chiefs I requested permission of the military authorities to hold a strictly religious service. My excuse was that the men’s morale must be improved, which was true, and that, in consequence, they would work better, which was doubtful. My reasoning seemed valid, and permission was granted.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The appreciations expressed by my teachers filled my heart with happiness and made me laugh when I was alone. Sometimes, when I thought of these compliments as I walked along the street, I had to clench my teeth until they hurt in order not to smile like an idiot. Would I have dared to tell you about all this foolishness if I had not ultimately realized that intelligence and work cannot themselves guarantee the happiness or the value of a man? At that time, however, I believed firmly that they could; I had to believe it. For it was only through my struggles in school that I could triumph, assert myself, and vindicate myself. The quarterly report cards were my bulletins of victory. The pleasure and pride I took in them gave me the greatest satisfactions of my adolescence. They made my family’s sighs and my father’s asthma attacks bearable to me . My homework was done in a room where six children played, shrieked, and argued; sometimes they were joined by little friends and cousins, and by the shrieking, vulgar, and piercing voices of my aunts. I scarcely dared to silence them because they always suspected me of impertinence. Occasionally, I was so exasperated by a difficult assignment in Latin or mathematics that I jumped from my chair and shouted at the children. The hypocritical women then scolded the children gently and pretended to sympathize with me, but calmly went on with the shindy on their own account. The children would remain quiet for a while, but, soon carried away by their games, became as noisy as before; and the noise would go on. Finally, I reached the point where I could read a difficult book on a seat in the street in the midst of clanging streetcars or traffic or the screaming Mediterranean crowds, surely the noisiest in the world. Could I have continued without my fierce will and my ability to ignore my surroundings? Yet, at what nervous cost did I achieve it! With these same efforts, the same passion, I might have become a successful man. You can, of course, succeed in spite of all difficulties, but you must relinquish a piece of fur or of flesh at each contest and, more often than not, you die somewhere along the road. Sometimes you end up elsewhere; then you realize that the goal you had set yourself wasn’t really so worthwhile after all. I studied at a little dressing table which I covered with thick layers of newspaper to smooth its broken marble top and to avoid touching the cold stone surface which I detested.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But I had no desire to kiss her. Sexually, I seemed to have been completely neutralized and only conventional thoughts rattled through my body that had lost all power of motion. Still, these thoughts knew what was expected of them and followed certain directives: the moment had been reached when a kiss was due. All the boasting reports made by my schoolmates had convinced me of this, so I remained with my right hand tightly grasping hers that held the pencil and my left hand around her neck. But our chairs were too far apart, though I would never have had the courage to draw them closer. In this rigid position, and from such an absurd distance, I thrust my head forward toward her mouth. I had almost reached her lips when she moved suddenly and withdrew her head, so that my lips met her cheek. This left me free; she had put an end to all of it, setting distinct limits to what she was ready to permit for this one day. Of course, I would never have taken such liberties had I not thought... I would never force her... Meanwhile, I had recovered some mastery over my own body and could control my thoughts again. I withdrew my right hand, then my left arm too. I rose from my chair and walked across the room. As if the electric current that fed it had been cut, I suddenly recovered from the tremor that had overpowered me ever since she had entered the room, though I had noticed it only now. I was back in the ordered world of everyday events, with my classmate Ginou. I had almost forgotten that Ginou had to be coached in composition. Walking up and down the room, I now began to explain things to her as one might to an audience of strangers in a lecture hall. Meanwhile, she took notes very actively and her pencil no longer scraped against the paper. I made a few wisecracks about that dumb cluck Hippolytus and his horrified surprise when his stepmother propositioned him, but otherwise we studied seriously and with great concentration. When we had finished the job, she asked me not to accompany her downstairs and I heard her footfalls grow fainter and fainter as she went down the stairs and left me alone. I was calm, but as if I had just recovered from a moment of drunkenness, of happy drunkenness that left me no hangover and no headache. “It’s the first time I have ever touched a girl,” I repeated to myself, “the first time, a girl...” I felt proud of myself, as if this had all been some kind of promotion or of admission into a world of initiates, and I came to a clear conclusion, that Ginou’s answer could only be interpreted as an admission of her love.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I might even have forgotten philosophy and remembered it only as a boyhood love, nostalgic and yet ridiculous. As a physician, however, I would have preserved the somewhat simple complacency and intellectual security and pride of one of those petty-bourgeois representatives of culture. On that day, however, when Monsieur Bismuth informed me that he was withdrawing his financial support, I saw it as but one more obstacle to surmount. I no longer had anybody on whom I could rely. This was one more rope that had once guaranteed my security and that had now broken and failed me. I was not afraid, I only felt that it would mean all the more glory if I made a success of my life, battling my way ahead by the sheer strength of my own wrists. I contemplated myself with some emotion and self-complacency: Alexandre Benillouche, professor of philosophy! To me, it seemed prodigious, so full of promise. For this wonderful goal remained, after all, only one of many stages on my way. As a physician, I had no chance of fame; nor could I have remained content with a profession that clearly imposed on me such intolerable limitations. As a philosopher and writer, I would be able to taste every experience and seize at every kind of glory. At that time, I never stopped to count the cost, in blood and sweat, of these experiences, nor had it yet occurred to me that, without assistance, without advice, above all spending my gifts profusely, I might collapse out of sheer exhaustion. I reached the Parents’ Association Hall in a sweat, and the crowd was already streaming out of it as I ran up the four steps to the entrance. In the middle of the hall, the long table, still littered with glasses and bottles, had been abandoned. The celebration was over and only a few small groups, probably parents of those who had won prizes, were still gossiping, with all sorts of polite intonations in their voices and gestures of their hands, of their whole plump little bodies that seemed to be brimful of foolish happiness and pride. Nobody has ever come along with me, I said to myself, but I’ve always managed to come out ahead of their children. Now, I hesitated in the doorway, not knowing a soul in the hall. By failing to appear on time, I had missed celebrity and now stood there in an undeserved and insuperable incognito, with nobody to recognize me. Still, I couldn’t call out to them: “Hi, there! I’m the honors prize-winner, the boy whose name you heard called out, with all his credits, a little while ago!”

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

  Liberating the Exiled ChildPeter ran an oncology service at a prestigious academic medical center that was consistently rated as one of the best in the country. As he sat in my office, in perfect physical shape because of his regular squash practice, his confidence had crossed the line into arrogance. This man certainly did not seem to suffer from PTSD. He told me he just wanted to know how he could help his wife to be less “touchy.” She had threatened to leave him unless he did something about what she termed his callous behavior. Peter assured me that her perception was warped, because he obviously had no problem being empathic with sick people. He loved talking about his work, proud of the fact that residents and fellows competed fiercely to be on his service and also of scuttlebutt he’d heard about his staff being terrified of him. He described himself as brutally honest, a real scientist, someone who just looked at the facts and—with a meaningful glance in my direction—did not suffer fools gladly. He had high standards, but no higher than he had for himself, and he assured me that he didn’t need anybody’s love, just their respect. Peter also told me that his psychiatry rotation in med school had convinced him that psychiatrists still practiced witchcraft, and his one stint in couples’ therapy had further confirmed that opinion. He expressed contempt for people who blamed their parents or society for their problems. Even though he had had his own share of misery as a child, he was determined never to think of himself as a victim. While Peter’s toughness and his love for precision appealed to me, I could not help but wonder if we would discover something I’d seen all too often: that internal managers who are obsessed with power are usually created as a bulwark against feeling helpless. When I asked him about his family, Peter told me that his father ran a manufacturing business. He was a Holocaust survivor who could be brutal and exacting, but he also had a tender and sentimental side that had kept Peter connected with him and that had inspired Peter to become a physician. As he told me about his mother, he realized for the first time that she had substituted rigorous housekeeping for genuine care, but Peter denied that this bothered him. He went to school and got straight As. He had vowed to build a life free of rejection and humiliation, but, ironically, he lived with death and rejection every day—death on the oncology ward and the constant struggle to get his research funded and published.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Our alley was at the frontier of the Jewish quarter of Tunis, but this was enough to satisfy my father’s pride. In the cool twilight of summer days the heat often drove us out of our rooms, and we made ourselves comfortable in chairs leaned against the wall and cushioned with pillows. The men wore their long white underpants, the women their housecoats of printed cotton, and the blind alley took on the air of a common living- room. My father was a better talker than Barouch, so that everybody listened to him. He liked to contrast the dreamy silence of our alley, cool from having recently been watered, with the offensive stink of the ghetto alleys. He would describe the foul fluids of the gutters as they filled the air with the fetid stink of the butcher-shops, the greasy and sickly odor of dishwater from the houses, and the acrid vapors of chlorinated water from the laundries. He spoke of the mountains of garbage where the sunlight hatched swarms of green and black flies, and of the roaches that emerged from them, so well fed that they could scarcely crawl along on their thin legs. In a tone of condescension he deplored the common lavatory that several families must share. We might well have but one room, but we were only two families to share our kitchen and our toilet. Besides, we had the privilege of running water and were not obliged to fetch it, at the risk of freezing our fingers till they were blue, from the fountain in the street. Meanwhile, I was being spared the extreme poverty of the ghetto. Often, on Saturday evenings, I went to see my aunt Abbou, who lived in one of the sixteen rooms of the poorhouse called Oukala of the Birds. In the morning my cousins and I used to race each other to the toilet. The walls of the tiny closet were as sticky as a slug’s hole, the ceiling so low that one couldn’t stand upright. I shall never forget the heat, experienced nowhere else, of that hive, with its stairs of rotting wood. How can wood be so warm, so brotherly? I loved those rooms that seemed to trespass on each other, all built to a man’s size, with no preconceived plan but the eye’s desires and the limits of an arm’s reach. One of the rooms was halfway up the stairs. To economize on kerosene, all doors were closed as soon as it was dark, and we all woke up together, with the same lisping voices. The Oukala of the Birds lived according to the rhythm of the world.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [1 Tim 5:14 ; Titus 2:5 ] 28 Her children rise up and call her blessed (happy, prosperous, to be admired); Her husband also, and he praises her, saying, 29 “Many daughters have done nobly, and well [with the strength of character that is steadfast in goodness], f But you excel them all.” 30 Charm and grace are deceptive, and [superficial] beauty is vain, But a woman who fears the LORD [reverently worshiping, obeying, serving, and trusting Him with awe-filled respect], she shall be praised. 31 Give her of the product of her hands, And let her own works praise her in the gates [of the city]. [Phil 4:8 ] Proverbs 1 a 1:7 In Proverbs various kinds of fools are discussed including those who are closed-minded, over-confident, and reject instruction and correction—the unteachable; those who lack spiritual insight—the spiritually blind; and those who are flippant, hardened, and who deliberately choose to reject God and wisdom—the arrogant. b 1:20 Wisdom is personified as a woman in vv 20–33 and speaks, in the first person, of godly wisdom. Read the word “wisdom” as “the wisdom of God” and see the wonderful power of this book. c 1:32 Lit simple ones . Proverbs 3 a 3:1 Or law . b 3:6 One of the ancient rabbis said that all the essence of the Torah (Law) depends on this verse. c 3:27 Using this verse as a proof text, the ancient rabbis offered the example of an employer who tells his foreman to hire workers at four zuz (small silver coins) each to do a job, and the foreman hires them at three instead. Even though they accepted the terms, the rabbis rule that they have the right to complain. Compare this with the parable of the landowner who hires workers for a denarius each. The difference there is that the first group receives a fair wage, while the last is overpaid as a matter of generosity (Matt 20:15 ). Proverbs 4 a 4:2 Lit forsake . b 4:6 Lit forsake . Proverbs 5 a 5:15 All of the Ten Commandments are reflected in the book of Proverbs; here it is the seventh, “You shall not commit adultery.” b 5:15 Vv 15–18 describe the purity of a man’s relationship in marriage. The cistern and well represent his wife. c 5:16 I.e. children of one’s promiscuity who are fatherless. d 5:19 Lit stagger (with passion). Proverbs 6 a 6:3 Under the ancient laws governing debt, a man obligated for another’s debt could lose his money, land, bed, and clothing; and if these were not sufficient, he and his wife and children could be sold as slaves, not to be released until the next Year of Jubilee—fifty years after the previous one. b 6:20 Lit forsake . Proverbs 7 a 7:11 Lit Her feet do not . b 7:27 Hades, the nether world, the place of the dead.

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

  “People who are terrified need to get a sense of where their bodies are in space and of their boundaries. Firm and reassuring touch lets them know where those boundaries are: what’s outside them, where their bodies end. They discover that they don’t constantly have to wonder who and where they are. They discover that their body is solid and that they don’t have to be constantly on guard. Touch lets them know that they are safe.” 6. Taking ActionThe body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones. These are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease. However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster—rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals—utilize their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized. (Nonetheless, everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.) Helplessness and immobilization keep people from utilizing their stress hormones to defend themselves. When that happens, their hormones still are being pumped out, but the actions they’re supposed to fuel are thwarted. Eventually, the activation patterns that were meant to promote coping are turned back against the organism and now keep fueling inappropriate fight/flight and freeze responses. In order to return to proper functioning, this persistent emergency response must come to an end. The body needs to be restored to a baseline state of safety and relaxation from which it can mobilize to take action in response to real danger. My friends and teachers Pat Ogden and Peter Levine have each developed powerful body-based therapies, sensorimotor psychotherapy[29] and somatic experiencing[30] to deal with this issue. In these treatment approaches the story of what has happened takes a backseat to exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body. Before plunging into a full-fledged exploration of the trauma itself, patients are helped to build up internal resources that foster safe access sensations and emotions that overwhelmed them at the time of the trauma. Peter Levine calls this process pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations and traumatic memories. In this way patients are helped to gradually expand their window of tolerance.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I even became almost popular when I succeeded in obtaining an extra day of rest through a new system of rotation in our duties. A Jewish doctor had been specially appointed to the camps and came around once a week. We also had a permanent nurse, a former pharmacist who had no medical training. Only the more clever had managed so far to be reported sick. I persuaded the doctor, who pretended he was happy to speak at last to an intellectual, that it was necessary to grant a rest to those men who threatened to break down. Many had given up all hope and withdrawn into a mute stupor, and the unexpected rest certainly helped to save some of them. I remember with emotion the extraordinary scene when poor Basmouth, who had become a sort of hairy animal clothed in rags, spent his day off feverishly washing himself, as though he were afraid the day would end before he had managed to get clean. I triumphed the day two men came and asked me timidly if I could organize a Sabbath service. In other circumstances, I would have refused vehemently. For years I had not even been inside a synagogue. But they were asking for what seemed most important to them, so I joyfully accepted. I soon saw what use I could make of such meetings. Through the group chiefs I requested permission of the military authorities to hold a strictly religious service. My excuse was that the men’s morale must be improved, which was true, and that, in consequence, they would work better, which was doubtful. My reasoning seemed valid, and permission was granted. As I could not undertake the religious part, rather because of my ignorance than of any scruple, I found an assistant capable of saying the prayers — they were all capable of this — and kept for myself the sermon, which mattered more to me. It worried me to have to trick my own people like the enemy. But if religion could help me save these men and give them a collective consciousness which would keep them sane, I would use their religion. They did not, however, all have confidence in me, and the more suspicious were among the most faithful. Some welcomed the idea of keeping up religious education, others demanded a rabbi. On Wednesdays and Thursdays the coming ceremony was the center of discussion, and often silence fell as I approached. To add to the solemnity of the occasion, I induced the kitchens, which were supplied by the community, to make a special effort. I prepared my program with great care. The rest was a question of propaganda, and in this I was greatly helped by the scouts and a few men who had understood my ultimate aim.

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

  Nick spent most of seventh and eighth grade in bed, bloated by allergies and medications that left him too exhausted to go to school. His mother and I saw him becoming entrenched in his identity as a self-hating and isolated kid, and we were desperate to help him. When his mother realized that he picked up a little energy round 5:00 p.m., we signed him up for an evening class in improvisational theater where he would at least have a chance to interact with other boys and girls his age. He took to the group and to the acting exercises and soon landed his first role, as Action in West Side Story, a tough kid who’s always ready to fight and has the lead in singing “Gee, Officer Krupke.” One day at home I caught him walking with a swagger, practicing what it was like to be somebody with clout. Was he developing a physical sense of pleasure, imagining himself as a strong guy who commands respect? Then he was cast as the Fonz in Happy Days. Being adored by girls and keeping an audience spellbound became the real tipping point in his recovery. Unlike his experience with the numerous therapists who had talked with him about how bad he felt, theater gave him a chance to deeply and physically experience what it was like to be someone other than the learning-disabled, oversensitive boy that he had gradually become. Being a valued contributor to a group gave him a visceral experience of power and competence. I believe that this new embodied version of himself set him on the road to becoming the creative, loving adult he is today. Our sense of agency, how much we feel in control, is defined by our relationship with our bodies and its rhythms: Our waking and sleeping and how we eat, sit, and walk define the contours of our days. In order to find our voice, we have to be in our bodies—able to breathe fully and able to access our inner sensations. This is the opposite of dissociation, of being “out of body” and making yourself disappear. It’s also the opposite of depression, lying slumped in front of a screen that provides passive entertainment. Acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life. The Theater of WarNick’s transformation was not the first time I’d witnessed the benefits of theater. In 1988 I was still treating three veterans with PTSD whom I’d met at the VA, and when they showed a sudden improvement in their vitality, optimism, and family relationships, I attributed it to my growing therapeutic skills. Then I discovered that all three were involved in a theatrical production.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But I believed in some social distinction between its inhabitants and ourselves, since we lived a good five hundred meters from the nearest Jewish home. Besides, my father owned a store and was an employer. Once the crops have been harvested, the Bedouin has a little cash on hand and comes down to the city to buy a new halter for his horse, and this makes him feel important. Crossing the threshold of the narrow store where two men, as poorly dressed as he, are both busy at their tasks, he proudly proclaims: “I want to speak to the boss.” Without interrupting his work, my father would then raise his head and invite the customer to be seated on a stool. I would put aside my toy whips, made of threads of leather and matches, to concentrate on the serious business that was at hand. I was proud of my father’s nod of assurance, of being the son of the boss. Ours was a dignity of an entirely different sort, superior indeed to that of the street hucksters who are always being told by the cops to move on, or of the workers in a tailor’s shop, shaken by spasms from dawn to nightfall. One evening, as it was getting dark, Kalla and I were busy, without being unduly hurried, putting the four chairs with which we had been playing at trains back where they belonged. We were tired of traveling around the world, with my sister as the only tourist while I alone drove the engine. Besides, the tiled floor of the yard was cold and our legs were frozen. So we then played at being bakers: we were kneading our painless legs, laughing at their being so strangely numb and threatening to put them in the oven to bake. My mother came out of the dark room and, as the light outside still allowed her to see a bit, set about checking the wick of her lamp. The twilight comes late in our country, but night then falls suddenly, and Mother, as always, was in a hurry. Two discreet knocks were heard, barely touching the wood of the street door. So as to avoid giving me any excuse to go out, I was forbidden ever to open the door. Kalla was more obedient than I and was therefore allowed to open it, which humiliated me, but gave her no particular pleasure. Her large dark eyes and her shoulders apologized to me as she went to open the door. It was Fraji, the son of Choulam: puny, with his scared, wide-open eyes like those of a bat, his sickly hair that grew in greasy tufts on a scalp like a barren moor. “Is your mother at home,” he asked Kalla. Dancing shadows suddenly appeared on the walls that seemed to stare as Fraji’s dark double arose at his feet, crawled from the ground up to the door, and then spread huge across the ceiling.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was proud and moved that I had had the courage to do what my school principal himself would have done, and I left his office feeling quits with the persecutors of Vichy. I had hit back, blow for blow. Of course, I had lost my job. But my reputation, both as a serious pupil and as a student, assured me many requests for private lessons. When they had encroached on my rigid schedule, I had refused them; now I would accept them. Even when the universities were closed to Jews I was not alarmed. Having no money, I could not attend them anyway. But we did have the right to continue to the end of the school year. The war was not real enough for me to imagine how long it might last. On the contrary, my own near future seemed so promising that in my own mind I just ignored this obstacle. Immediately, with the arrival of the Germans, came disaster. No longer did I have the leisure to meditate; we were hurled into such a whirlwind that we only started breathing again after they left. Disaster certainly makes one less lucid. The first morning after that sinister evening when the German authorities settled in the dark city, the Kommandantur took its first anti-Jewish steps. Armed with well-prepared lists and accompanied, as was fitting, by their French colleagues, the German police went out to collect several hundred hostages. It was announced that, at the slightest opposition, they would all be shot. Then came requisitions and exactions and murders. Now that we have news from the rest of the world, I know that we did not reach the bottom of the abyss. We had no gas chambers or crematoria. Those of us who were deported to Germany probably went through all that, but we did not know about it at the time. We were saved from despair by our ignorance and our lack of understanding concerning all that was upsetting our daily routine. I found out all about it later, and I know now what risks we ran and might still have run. That is why I want to deal quickly with this part of my story. We certainly had our share of misery, however meager compared to that of others. We also had our victims, executed for fun or as punishment or by mistake, our women raped and our homes plundered. The Germans fired into windows to enforce the curfew, they said, but they did it preferably when they saw somebody there, and only in Jewish homes. The next day, we were told the name of the victim. German lorries would draw up in front of a building occupied by Jews; soldiers would get out and, blocking the exits, summon all the inhabitants to leave immediately.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The fact that the victory had already been won didn’t mean that Paul and Silas wouldn’t be beaten (illegally, as it happens) by the authorities in Philippi, but it did mean that when they then sang hymns at midnight, the prison doors were shaken open by an earthquake and they found themselves converting the jailer and demanding—and receiving—a public apology from the magistrates. Or go to Acts 27–28. The victory achieved by Jesus didn’t stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching. At each point we have the sense that these things are not coincidental. Those who follow Jesus are precisely not to suppose that there will be no suffering along the way or that, if there is, it means they must have sinned or rebelled to have deserved such a thing. (They may, of course, but that isn’t the point, as Paul emphasizes in 2 Corinthians.) On the contrary. The suffering of Jesus’s followers—of the whole Body of Christ, now in one member, now in another—brings the victory of the cross into fresh reality, so that fresh outflowings of that victory may emerge. That seems to be what Paul has in mind when he says in Colossians 1:24 that he is celebrating his sufferings, which are for the benefit of the young church. He is completing in his own flesh, he says, “what is presently lacking in the king’s afflictions on behalf of his body, which is the church.” This is a striking claim. It seems to mean that part of Paul’s apostolic vocation is to go ahead of the young churches scattered around the Mediterranean world, like a brave commander on the battlefield drawing the enemy fire away from those more vulnerable, to take upon himself the suffering that might otherwise come their way. There is no sense here of Paul trying to add to the once-for-all achievement of Jesus. He elsewhere emphasizes that, for instance in Romans 6:10. But his claim here goes closely with what he says in more discursive mode in Romans 5:3–5 and then at length in 8:17–25. It is worth looking briefly at both.