Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  The first man that I knew introduced me to the second. Claude was friendly with a couple of colleagues some ten years older than us. The man was not very tall but he had the muscle tone of a sportsman, she had a magnificent Mongolian face, with short-cropped blond hair; she also had one of those stiff personalities with which intelligent women sometimes modulate their sexual freedom. It could be that Claude had had some sexual encounters with her before introducing me to him, before, that is, arranging for me to fuck him. We carried on a sort of loosely arranged swap which continued even after Claude and I had rented a studio next to their apartment. I would go and meet up with the man at their apartment, while she would join Claude in ours. The partition wall was like a television remote-control: there was a different film on if you switched sides. There was only one occasion when this disjunction was not respected. It was while we were on holiday in a house they owned in Brittany. A cold, mellow afternoon light permeated the sitting room right into the corner where he was resting on a daybed. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, she was coming and going, Claude had gone off somewhere. He gave me that weak, almost submissive, look that some men have even when they are expressing the most imperious of orders, then drew me to him, held my chin and kissed me, and then pushed my head down towards his organ. I liked it better like that. Using me to harden him up while I lay curled in on myself rather than stretching up to his face for a long kiss. And I sucked him off well. Perhaps it was on that day that I realised I had a gift for it. I concentrated on co-ordinating the way I moved my hand and my lips; from the pressure of his hand on my head, I knew when I should speed up or slow down the rhythm. But it was definitely the facial expressions that I remember most clearly. When I occasionally looked beyond the immediate horizon of his zip to take a deep breath, I saw her expression – as gently vacuous as a statue’s, and his – almost disbelieving. I now feel that it was then that I first hazily grasped the fact that, if relationships with friends could spread and grow like a climbing plant, twisting and knotting together in perfect and reciprocal freedom, and that all you had to do was to let yourself go with the flow of its sap, then all the more reason for me to decide on my own behaviour for myself, resolutely and solitarily. I like this paradoxical solitude.

• From Cultish (2021)

  This is a book about the language of fanaticism in its many forms: a language I’m calling Cultish (like English, Spanish, or Swedish). Part 1 of this book will investigate the language we use to talk about cultish groups, busting some widely believed myths about what the word “cult” even means. Then, parts 2 through 5 will unveil the key elements of cultish language, and how they’ve worked to inveigle followers of groups as destructive as Heaven’s Gate and Scientology . . . but also how they pervade our day-to-day vocabularies. In these pages, we’ll discover what motivates people, throughout history and now, to become fanatics, both for good and for evil. Once you understand what the language of “Cultish” sounds like, you won’t be able to unhear it. Language is a leader’s charisma. It’s what empowers them to create a mini universe—a system of values and truths—and then compel their followers to heed its rules. In 1945, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that language is human beings’ element just as “water is the element of fish.” So it’s not as if Tasha’s foreign mantras and Alyssa’s acronyms played some small role in molding their “cult” experiences. Rather, because words are the medium through which belief systems are manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally could not exist without them. “Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion,” John E. Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, wrote to me from Scotland. “These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence.” Without language, there are no “cults.” Certainly, you can hold beliefs without explicitly articulating them, and it’s also true that if Tasha or Alyssa did not want to buy into their leaders’ messages, no collection of words could’ve forced them into it. But with a glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible. The way a person communicates can tell us a lot about who they’ve been associating with, who they’ve been influenced by. How far their allegiance goes. The motives behind culty-sounding language are not always crooked. Sometimes they’re quite healthy, like to boost solidarity or to rally people around a humanitarian mission. One of my best friends works for a cancer nonprofit and brings back amusing stories of the love-bomb-y buzzwords and quasi-religious mantras they repeat on end to keep fund-raisers hyped: “Someday is today”; “This is our Week of Winning”; “Let’s fly above and beyond”; “You are the greatest generation of warriors and heroes in this quest for a cancer cure.” “It reminds me of the way multilevel marketing people talk,” she tells me (referencing culty direct sales companies like Mary Kay and Amway—more on these later). “It’s cultlike, but for a good cause. And hey, it works.”

• From Cultish (2021)

  But in Scientology, “valence” signifies possession by an evil spirit or personality, as in the sentence, “You sure mock up a good SP valence.” To a neuropsychologist, an “engram” is a hypothetical change in the brain related to memory storage, but to a Scientologist, it’s a mental image recorded after a painful unconscious episode from a PC’s past. Engrams are stored in the reactive mind and require auditing if the PC has any hopes of going clear (and if you can understand that sentence, mazel tov, you’re on your way to speaking fluent Scientology). The linguistic world Hubbard created was so legit-sounding—so inspired and comprehensive—that it sparked a host of copycat “cult leaders.” NXIVM founder Keith Raniere lifted all kinds of terms straight from Scientology, like “suppressives,” “tech,” and “courses,” as well as illusory, pseudo-academic acronyms, like EM (exploration of meaning, NXIVM’s version of auditing) and DOS (Dominus Obsequious Sororium, Latin for “Dominant Submissive Sorority,” a secret all-female club within NXIVM composed of so-called “masters” and sex-trafficked “slaves”). Like in Scientology, Raniere knew his followers were motivated by a desire for exclusive, erudite wisdom; his knockoff Hubbardese helped him exploit that. * In the style of Newspeak, Hubbard took dozens of common words that boast a range of colorful English meanings and reduced them to one incontestable Scientology definition. “Clear” means at least thirty different things in everyday English (easy to understand, empty or unobstructed, acquitted of guilt, free of pimples, etc.). But in Scientology, it has but one solitary definition: “a person who has completed the Clearing Course.” Using it any other way would be to demonstrate a lack of understanding of Hubbard’s texts. That would be considered PTS, a threat to the church, which you’d want to avoid at all costs. Scientology knows it has no power without its cultish language, but that the language is also what implicates the group as dangerously cultish. So, to stay as clandestine and protected as possible, the church holds a slew of copyrights on its writings, terminology, names, even symbols. Infamously litigious, Scientology frequently buries outsiders and defectors who comment on or satirize its language too publicly (oops) under groundless lawsuits and metaphysical threats that exposing untrained ears to mere talk of Xenu and other high-level Scientology concepts will bring on “devastating, cataclysmic spiritual harm.” On the phone with Cathy, I told her I hadn’t remembered Mr. Blue Suit talking about evil galactic monarchs or thetans during my experience at Scientology HQ that summer in LA. “Well, of course not,” she replied. “They don’t start you out with that stuff. They’d lose you. If they told me about aliens when I first got there, I would have been out, and it would have saved me a lot of money.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  to feel this way until one night I was sitting and thinking and I realized that this alien was the me that I had been trying to find. I have noticed since that night that people no longer seem so strange to me. Now it is beginning to seem that life is just starting for me. I am alone right now but I am not frightened and I don’t have to be doing something. I like meeting me and making friends with my thoughts and feelings. Because of this I have learned to enjoy other people. One older man in particular—who is very ill— makes me feel very much alive. He accepts everyone. He told me the other day that I have changed very much. According to him, I have begun to open up and love. I think that I have always loved people and I told him so. He said, “Were they aware of it?” I don’t suppose I have expressed my love any more than I did my anger and hurt. Among other things, I am finding out that I never had too much self-respect. And now that I am learning to really like me I am finally finding peace within myself. Thanks for your part in this.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  therapeutic force, even when directed at a narrow sector of life, and with no intent of being helpful. Perhaps another way of putting some of what I have been saying is that a finely tuned understanding by another individual gives the recipient a sense of personhood, of identity. Laing (1965) has said that “the sense of identity requires the existence of another by whom one is known” (p. 139). Buber has also spoken of the need to have our existence confirmed by another. Empathy gives that needed confirmation that one does exist as a separate, valued person with an identity. Let us turn to a more specific result of the empathic interaction, in which individuals feel understood. Persons begin revealing material that they have never communicated before, in the process discovering previously unknown elements in themselves. Such an element may be “I never knew before that I was angry at my father,” or “I never realized that I am afraid of succeeding.” Such discoveries are unsettling but exciting. To perceive a new aspect of oneself is the first step toward changing the concept of oneself. The new element is, in an understanding atmosphere, owned and assimilated into a now altered self- concept. This is the basis, in my estimation, of the behavior changes that can come about as a result of psychotherapy. Once the self-concept changes, behavior changes to match the freshly perceived self. If we think, however, that empathy is effective only in the one-to-one relationship called psychotherapy, we are greatly mistaken. Even in the classroom it makes an important difference. When teachers show evidence that they understand the meaning of classroom experiences for students, learning improves. In studies made by Aspy and colleagues, it was found that children’s reading improved significantly more when teachers exhibited a high degree of understanding than in classrooms where such understanding did not exist. This finding has been replicated in many classrooms (Aspy, 1972, chap. 4; Aspy & Roebuck, 1975). Just as clients in psychotherapy find that empathy provides a climate for learning more of themselves, so students in the classroom find themselves in a climate for learning subject matter when they are in the presence of an understanding teacher. Thus far, I have spoken of the more obvious change-producing effects of empathy. I should like to turn to an aspect having to do with the dynamics of personality. When persons are perceptively understood, they find themselves coming in closer touch with a wider range of their experiencing. This gives them an expanded referent to which they can turn for guidance in understanding themselves and in directing their behavior. If the empathy has been accurate and

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

  In the other ten, it has posted losses. Recently the losses have been prodigious—LinkedIn lost $150 million in the first nine months of 2015. Yet Hoffman’s net worth stands at nearly $5 billion. Amazon, the online retailer, is twenty-one years old and has never made huge profits, yet its founder, Jeff Bezos, is worth $60 billion. Salesforce.com, a software company, reported net losses totaling three-quarters of a billion dollars from 2011 through 2014, yet its founder, Marc Benioff, is worth $4 billion. Someone has to get left holding the bag. In summer 2015 I speak with Pat, a well-known Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who is both the CEO of a privately held company and an angel investor. We’re talking about the soaring valuations being placed on privately held companies. Suddenly the Valley is filled with so-called unicorns, privately held corporations that supposedly are worth billions, even tens of billions, of dollars. Fortune says there are now 145 unicorns, nearly twice as many as existed only seven months before. “You realize who’s going to get hurt, right?” Pat says. “I don’t know. The VCs?” I ask. “No! The investors are protected.” Pat explains: The funds investing in late-stage start-ups and paying ridiculous valuations are demanding, and receiving, a kind of guarantee called a ratchet. That is a promise that if the company goes public at a valuation lower than what the private investors have paid, the company will grant them enough extra shares to make them whole. Some investors are guaranteed to make at least 20 percent on their investment. Unless there’s an apocalyptic meltdown, the investors cannot lose money on these deals. They are taking pretty much no risk. Founders are cashing out too. Groupon raised $1.1 billion in its last private round of venture funding before its IPO, but relatively little of the money actually went to the company. Most of it—$946 million—reportedly went into the pockets of insiders who sold their personal shares to venture capital investors. “So the founders are safe. They’re selling their personal shares in these private rounds at these high valuations,” Pat says. “They’re taking money off the table now, instead of waiting for the IPO. So who does that leave to get hurt?” I say I’m not sure. “Jesus, dumbass. The employees!” Pat explains: The employees are paid in part with stock options. The strike price on the options is calculated based on the valuation of the company at the time the options are granted. If you joined the company late, you probably have a high strike price. If the company goes public at a lower valuation—if it suffers a “cramdown,” as it’s called—then your options might be underwater. This is definitely going to happen to a lot of the unicorns, Pat says. Every time another late-stage investor comes in and makes another investment at an even more insane valuation, a cramdown becomes more likely.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  with complete certainty that this was what she was experiencing. It matched what was going on in her. As is so often true when a person is acceptantly understood, she was able first to experience the feeling fully and clearly in her sobs. Then she was able to follow her experiencing further and to realize that, in addition to the envy, she felt much pain, and that she had never mourned for her father, because for her he had died years before his death. 3. It is a very precise example of a moment of irreversible change, the minute unit of change which, taken with other such units, constitutes the whole basis for alteration of personality and behavior. I have defined these moments of change in this way: when a previously denied feeling is experienced in a full and complete way, in expression and in awareness, and is experienced acceptantly, not as something wrong or bad, a fundamental and irreversible change occurs. Nancy might, under certain circumstances, later deny the validity of this moment, and believe that she was not envious or not in mourning. However, her whole organism has experienced those feelings completely and, at most, she could only temporarily deny them in her awareness. 4. We see here an instance of a change in the way Nancy perceives herself. She has been, in her own eyes, a person with no close relationship to her father, unmoved by his death, a person who did not care. Possibly, she has also believed she was guilty because of those elements. Now, that facet of her concept of self is clearly changed—she can see herself as a person wanting very much a close relationship with her father, and mourning the lack of that as well as his death. The almost inevitable result of this alteration in her self-concept will be a change in some of her behaviors. I can only speculate at this point what those changes will be—possibly, her behavior toward older men will change, or perhaps, she will be able to feel and express more sorrow over other tragedies. We cannot as yet be sure. 5. This is an example of the kind of therapeutic climate in which change can occur. The group is a caring one—one whose members respect her worth enough to listen to her intently even when such listening breaks into the “task” on which they were working. They are trying very hard to convey as much understanding as they can. Ann’s realness in exposing her own feelings is an example of the openness and “transparency” of the group members. All the ingredients for growth and change are there, and Nancy makes use of them. 6. It is exciting evidence that this growth-promoting climate can evolve, even in such a large group. Sixty-nine people can be therapists, perhaps

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Reading this over preparatory to typing it up, I realized that I have launched into a monograph whose tone suggests it is addressed to a friend. First amazed at my temerity, on reflection I can see that it makes perfect sense. What has happened to me over the past three years, and most particularly in the past month, is in many ways attributable to you. No wonder I feel that you are a friend—and that no matter how many times you have heard my story you will know that for me it is unique. I realize too that I haven’t really told you much about myself—my exterior self, perhaps I should say. That can wait. What is important is the event. About a month ago, in the midst of a period of pretty deep hostility toward my therapist (Joe M———, your student at Chicago), I sought out some of your writing. My purpose was to gather ammunition for a broadside at Joe— something like, “Aha! Look here what your Rogers says—how can you explain this in light of my condition, Doctor! You people in your almighty normalcy should try life on this side for awhile.” It was pretty much a last gasp in a losing fight—I felt if I couldn’t trip or sting Joe with you, where it all started for him, I might as well give up—no other form of attack had bothered him. This, then, was my purpose. But, Dr. Rogers, I have never in a generally confused life had anything go so completely contrary to expectations. What I felt then, and continue to feel as I read more and more of your philosophy, must have been close to the experience known loosely as revelation. Instead of ammunition to fire at Joe, I found in the first brief reading I encountered (a reprint of Chapter 3 of On Becoming a Person, “The Characteristics of a Helping Relationship”) the feeling that here were explanations of, and answers to, everything we had been struggling toward during three long, difficult years of therapy. And as I have read more—three books and many articles—I find a philosophy so totally understandable and acceptable to me that as I said above, it has been almost a revelation. Before I get into the things I want to share with you, I’ll say a word about Joe. Because, although the immediate dramatic breakthrough I seem to have accomplished was triggered by your writing, without what Joe has done for me —no, with me—the static I had lived with all my life would have been so

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  distracting I never could have even heard you, much less understood. In spite of the fact that he sprinkles his Rogerianism with an occasional Ellisian * onslaught (strange juxtaposition but apparently successful with me), this man is a concrete representation of every concept you deem necessary for a successful therapeutic relationship. He is congruent; he is empathic; he has given me unconditional positive regard; and some of the most beneficial times in therapy for me have been during five- or ten-minute silences, when—even though I didn’t know it— the almost tangible peace was because we were experiencing together. Finally, he has been consistent—stable and unchanging through what must have been, for him, some miserable, discouraging times. But my appreciation of Joe is really of secondary importance here. The point at hand is that through your words I have been able for the first time to actually see and understand what has happened to me. This, I think, is what made me figuratively catch my breath, and what I feel so pressed to communicate to you: the sudden recognition of what I was really doing, the identification of a goal I only hazily apprehended even as I was almost upon it. I have repeatedly used, in my therapeutic writing and in sessions, the phrase “be a person,” or rather, “be a PERSON.” I had only a very hazy knowledge of your work—I knew Joe was basically a Rogerian—I knew that he listened a lot, and many times has been able to clarify ideas, concepts, feelings that I, in my inarticulate intellectualizing, was groping for. But about becoming a person, I knew only that I wanted to be one. I didn’t know that you had spent your whole life finding the direction for me. The most valuable thing you have led me to, of course, something I know we have been working toward these three hard years, is the ability—or maybe just my own permission (I’ve always had Joe’s)—to have feelings. I have discovered, all at once, that I can feel—happy, depressed, touched, sad, exuberant—there is no need to deny or negate a feeling. If it’s a good one, I won’t scare it away by acknowledging it; if it’s bad, recognizing it won’t make it stay around forever. There really isn’t anything static about life—it is fluid and changing—dynamic, and I can be dynamic and changing with it. This new ability to feel has led to some pretty important insights. For example: as I first read excerpts from interviews in your books, I found myself troubled because people, as they began to experience rather than to intellectualize, could so clearly describe the sensation, feeling, image of what they were inside. But when I looked into myself there was emptiness. No crumbling of walls, no unleashing of floods, no peeling off of layers. There was just a cavern. Then, with this sudden gift of feeling, I stopped trying to intellectualize the cavern—trying to put something there that just didn’t exist.

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

  Dingwall took the next train west, leaving me to put up hoardings in a month, after getting first of all the permission from the lot-owners. To cut a long story short, I got the permission from a hundred lot-owners in a week through my brother Willie, who as an estate agent knew them all. Then I made a contract with a little English carpenter and put the hoardings up and got the bills all posted three days before the date agreed upon. Hatherly’s Minstrels had a great fortnight and everyone was content. From that time on, I drew about fifty dollars a week as my profit from letting the hoardings, in spite of the slump. Suddenly Smith got a bad cold: Lawrence is nearly a thousand feet above sea-level and in winter can be as icy as the Pole. He began to cough, a nasty, little, dry hacking cough: I persuaded him to see a doctor and then to have a consultation, the result being that the specialists all diagnosed tuberculosis and recommended immediate change to the milder east. For some reason or other, I believe because an editorial post on the “Press” in Philadelphia was offered to him, he left Lawrence hastily and took up his residence in the Quaker City. His departure had notable results for me. First of all, the spiritual effect astonished me. As soon as he went, I began going over all he had taught me, especially in economics and metaphysics: bit by bit I came to the conclusion that his Marxian communism was only half the truth and probably the least important half: his Hegelianism, too, which I have hardly mentioned, was pure moonshine in my opinion: extremely beautiful at moments, as the moon is when silvering purple clouds: “history is the development of the Spirit in time: Nature is the projection of the idea in space”, sounds wonderful; but it’s moon-shiney, and not very enlightening. In the first three months of Smith’s absence, my own individuality sprang upright, like a sapling that has long been bent almost to breaking, so to speak, by a superincumbent weight and I began to grow with a sort of renewed youth. Now for the first time, when about nineteen years of age, I came to self-consciousness as Frank Harris and began to deal with life in my own way and under this name, Frank.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  78 Lecture 14: Paul—The Man, the Mission, and the Modus Operandi 3:13)—to be utterly blasphemous. He may have found the Christian claim that salvation came to non-Jews apart from Jewish Law to be completely offensive. He actively persecuted the Christians (Gal. 1:13). He had some kind of visionary experience of Jesus that changed his life (Gal. 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 15:8). Even though Acts describes the event in some detail (Acts 9, 22, 26), Paul is more elusive. It appears, though, that he had some kind of vision of Jesus (Gal. 1:16; 1 Cor. 15:8). This experience completely transformed his understanding of Jesus. Paul’s thought process seems to have worked backward from his conviction that Jesus really was raised from the dead, based on Paul’s own vision of him. Rather than being a dead criminal, Jesus was the living Savior. Because God had showered such favor on Jesus after his death, his death must not have been an accident or a mere miscarriage of justice, but the plan of God. Rather than the one who was cursed by God, Jesus was the one man more than any other who was ultimately blessed by God. Because Jesus, as God’s blessed one, could not have borne the curse of death for anything he had done, he must have borne it for others. That is to say, Jesus’ death was a sacri¿ ce for the sins of others. A person’s sins can, therefore, be removed if he or she will accept that sacri¿ ce by faith, or trust in Christ’s death for salvation. Having a right standing before God must come through Christ’s death and resurrection, and nothing else. For this reason, the Jewish Law cannot be the way to attain a right standing before God; Jesus’ death is the only way. Rather than continuing on as a Pharisee, urging Jews to keep the Law more perfectly and Gentiles to start keeping the Law through being circumcised, Paul came to promote faith in Christ as the way of salvation. There could be no other way: Salvation comes to all people, Jew and Gentile, through the death of Jesus. Thus, Paul became the leading proponent of the view that Gentiles, along with Jews, could belong to the people of God. As a result, he became an inÀ uential missionary, taking the message of Christ principally to the Gentiles. Not only did Paul change his views about Jesus and the way to salvation, he also came to see the signi¿ cance of Jesus’ resurrection for the history of the world. As a Pharisee, Paul already believed in an apocalyptic form

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For example, the expansion of the universe can be explained and justified through contemporary cosmology; yet the real issue lying behind this question requires a different toolbox, in that it concerns the psychological question of how human beings can visualise four-dimensional space-time, when they have been habituated into three-dimensional modes of thinking. Like the biologist Steven Rose, I consider that we live in a world that is an ‘ontological unity’, 42 while recognising that we must adopt ‘an epistemological pluralism’ if we are to investigate it responsibly and coherently. We use different research methods for each of its many aspects. The resulting forms of knowledge will have different characteristics and epistemic values – some capable of being proved (logic and mathematics), some well-evidenced yet open to revision over time through evidential accumulation and theoretical development (the natural sciences), and others taking the form of beliefs that may be trusted yet cannot be proved (ethics, politics and religion). Knowledge of the world thus takes different forms; each of these has a different evidence base and form of reasoning, and consequently permits a different degree of epistemic confidence. But I can’t force every aspect of human knowledge into the same epistemic container. I can’t insist that ethics should be subject to the same methods and norms as physics. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to explore how these different forms of knowledge might be woven together, or at least be held together alongside each other. The human quest for wisdom involves an interdisciplinary correlation of these insights. Yet the mood of our ‘debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom’ (Susan Sontag). 43 Achieving wisdom, for Sontag, demands a full and attentive engagement with the complexity of reality. But how can this be done in practice, when in theory it seems to be impossible, given the issues that we have just noted? 44 In what follows, we will consider how the British public philosopher Mary Midgley approaches this important question. Mary Midgley and the Correlation of Human Knowledge The realisation that our world is too vast and complex to be fully grasped by any single individual can be traced back to Plato. No single method of investigation can provide us with a comprehensive understanding of our world. Mary Midgley was a champion of an intellectually respectful engagement with our universe, arguing that it requires the use of many approaches and perspectives to do justice to its many aspects, and avoid a distorting reductionism.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] It was January, and I was Swiffering the bedroom when I saw it, the book I’d bought in the fall: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire. The capsule description was a firm handshake: “Having tracked one hundred women for more than ten years,” it read, “Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual, but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups and, most importantly, different love relationships.”41 I read it in two days, while June was at Brandon’s. The premise was this: in the course of her career, Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, had read countless studies of sexual orientation. She noticed that the overwhelming majority had recruited only men as their subjects.42 As a pregnant woman and new mother, I had been baffled by how little we know of women’s bodies; apparently, we know little of their sexuality either. The studies Diamond read had built and upheld a born-this-way model of sexual orientation, the longtime prevailing model. But since the studies had looked only at men, Diamond wondered how well the model fit non-heterosexual women. So over the course of a decade, she conducted her own methodical study. What she found surprised even her: among female subjects, the norm was not stability in sexual attraction and identity but change. Most women reported having a certain orientation, as men did, but their attractions were more nuanced, layered, sensitive to circumstance. Diamond called this quality “fluidity.” Her study dialogued with others, too, that were similarly affirming. Diamond cited a 2000 article by psychologist Roy Baumeister suggesting that women’s sexuality is more “plastic” than men’s, in the sense not only of variability in sexual attraction, but also in sex drive, qualities they like in a partner, and what they like in bed.43 (I imagine this will shock absolutely zero women.) “The notion of female sexual fluidity,” writes Diamond, “suggests not that women possess no generalized sexual predispositions but that these predispositions will prove less of a constraint on their desires and behaviors than is the case for men.”44 This made my eyes well, though for most of my life, I probably would have nodded politely at Diamond’s assertion and then privately, internally, scoffed. Riiight. Explain it however you want. Clearly these people were closeted, and now they’re just coming out. That’s what I’d thought when I heard about people who lived for years in the straight world—acquaintances, strangers, celebrities like Cynthia Nixon—coming out as gay or lesbian. I’d had a similar feeling upon hearing of seemingly straight women dating a lesbian for a while and then going back to men. She was just experimenting. I wouldn’t have believed me.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them. As I waited outside the bazaar, Austerlitz resumed after a little while, a light rain had begun to fall, and since neither the proprietor of the shop, whose name was given as Augustyn Némecek, nor anyone else was in evidence, I finally walked on, going up and down a few streets until suddenly, on the northeast corner of the town square, I found myself outside the so-called Ghetto Museum, which I had overlooked before. I climbed the steps and entered the lobby, where a lady of uncertain age in a lilac blouse, her hair waved in an old-fashioned style, sat behind a kind of cash desk. She put down the crochet work she was doing and leaned slightly forward to give me a ticket. When I asked if I was the only visitor today she said that the museum had only recently opened and not many people from outside the town came to see it, particularly at this time of year and in such weather. And the people of Terezin didn’t come anyway, she added, picking up the white handkerchief she was edging with loops like flower petals. So I went round the exhibition by myself, said Austerlitz, through the rooms on the mezzanine floor and the floor above, stood in front of the display panels, sometimes skimming over the captions, sometimes reading them letter by letter, stared at the photographic reproductions, could not believe my eyes, and several times had to turn away and look out of a window into the garden behind the building, having for the first time acquired some idea of the history of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now, in this place, surrounded me on all sides. I studied the maps of the Greater German Reich and its protectorates, which had never before been more than blank spaces in my otherwise well-developed sense of topography, I traced the railway lines running through them, felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the National Socialists, by the evidence of their mania for order and purity, which was put into practice on a vast scale through measures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal. I was confronted with incontrovertible proof of the setting up of a forcedlabor system throughout Central Europe, and learned of the deliberate wastage and discarding of the work slaves themselves, of the origins and places of death of the victims, the routes by which they were taken to what destinations, what names they had borne in life and what they and their guards looked like. I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum from room to room and back again, ignorant as I feared I had been through my own fault, far exceeded my comprehension. I saw pieces of luggage brought to Terezin by the internees from Prague and Pilsen, Witrzburg and Vienna, Kufstein and Karlsbad and countless other places; the items such as

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Poking around online, I find a paper by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, called “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” That puzzling thing, the self, Dennett posits, is analogous to the center of gravity of an object. A center of gravity is an accepted concept in Newtonian physics, but it is not an atom or other physical item in the world. It has no mass or color or physical properties, except for its location in time and space. It is a purely abstract object, Dennett explains, a “theorist’s fiction.” So too is the self. When we read fiction, Dennett says, contradictions don’t feel like a big deal.63 We’re used to this in stories; we’ve gotten good at suspending disbelief. It’s just a fictional character. We find contradictory properties less tolerable, however, when we are trying to interpret real people and things. But contradictory properties are quite normal, something we can all locate in ourselves. Walt Whitman famously exalted in his multitudes. In the fiction of the self, the self is both author and character. We are constantly writing the novel of ourselves, inventing more and more of it on demand, in response to what the world asks of us. In this way, parts of us that are not exactly known or defined at one time become better defined as we go on creating. We can’t undo anything, but we can clarify and interpret. “The past and present wilt,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I have fill’d them, emptied them. / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.” I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self. 35It’s easier to say what I am not than what I am. I’m not straight. I’m in-between. In a certain sense, maybe I’m not so different from Ash. I find desire where gender crimps to reveal the person underneath it, because that’s where I myself want to be found. I’m in-between other identities too: a mother, but only half-time, and a divorced woman who co-parents with her ex. It doesn’t surprise me anymore that Diamond found, among her sample of non-heterosexual women, that “unlabeled” was the sexual identity most frequently used. These women explained that they were increasingly skeptical of the rigid nature of any sexual categorization. Feeling “unlabelable” isn’t new, or unusual. “Fluidity conveys the capacity of women’s sexuality to fill an available space the way a body of water takes the form of its immediate boundaries,” writes Diamond. “Sometimes the available space is created by a particular environment, opportunity, or relationship, but sometimes it is created by the process of self-reflection. Either way, when the attractions develop, they may be experienced as an expansion and a blossoming rather than as a discovery of something that was always there but just repressed.”64

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] It looks like I’m having a midlife crisis, I thought. That’s what this is. But it didn’t feel like I’d imagined a midlife crisis would feel. Yes, I’d asked for an open marriage. I’d had a panic attack on the bathroom floor. But under the panic, I knew why I did what I was doing: because I couldn’t not do it. I had changed. Nora met me like an enzyme, and she catalyzed a reaction. And I couldn’t undo it, because it was not other from me. It was me. 12Hi, Nora, I wrote. I found your email address online, and I hope it’s okay to contact you. I was a juror on the trial last summer, and you mentioned that you were a writer. What are you working on these days? Would you be up for coffee sometime? I sent the email before I could decide not to. I held my breath. The time stamp read 9:28 P.M., April 20, 2016. I imagined her struggling to place my name, to even remember our having met ten months ago. Her reply came at 9:49: Hi, I was recently thinking I wanted to catch up with you! She’d been thinking of me. Exclamation point! I don’t remember the days between sending the email and seeing Nora again. We agreed to meet that Sunday afternoon at a coffee shop across town. I got there first. Nerves chattered my teeth. I ordered a beer, found a table facing the window, and took out my laptop as though I planned to work. Out on the sidewalk I saw her reaching for the door handle. I stared at the laptop screen. She was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a thin sweater in dark green. I’d never seen her out of a suit. From the corner of my eye, I watched her walk to another table, stop to greet and hug someone there, then notice me. I forced my eyes up. She smiled, striding toward my table. Her smile was exactly as I remembered it: quick, wide, white as whole milk. I stood to hug her, as though it were easy. We talked about the trial. It felt natural, or we both worked hard to create the illusion that it was. I asked about her work, her writing. She asked about my work, and I told her about the restaurants, about Brandon and June. I said lots of things to avoid saying anything, or everything. Then she said it: Are you queer? I must have been plain as a sheet of glass. How long had she been thinking of asking this? I thought I’d hidden myself so well. I fumbled. I talked obliquely about a recent crush on a woman, said my husband and I had opened our marriage, were trying it out. Words came from my mouth like they were someone else’s. I’ve dated people in open relationships, she said.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  As a Daoist, Zhuangzi sought to bring his life into harmony with the Way (dao), by which he meant all the myriad patterns, forms, and potential that made nature the way it was. Yet while nature is in constant flux, we always go against the grain and try to freeze our ideas and experiences and make them absolute. It is egotism that makes us identify with one opinion rather than another, become quarrelsome and unkind, say this could not mean that, and think we have a duty to change others to suit ourselves. Zhuangzi regarded the Confucians, who were constantly trying to persuade the rulers of China to adopt more compassionate policies, as interfering busybodies. Yet sometimes he mischievously put his own ideas into the mouth of Confucius and his disciples in stories he made up for the occasion. In one of these, Confucius’s most advanced pupil, Yan Hui, came to see his teacher and announced: “I’m gaining ground!” “What do you mean?” Confucius asked. Yan Hui explained proudly that he had completely forgotten all his master’s teachings about ren and morality. “That’s not it,” said Confucius. A few days later, Yan Hui was delighted to tell the master that he had now forgotten all about the li. “Not bad,” Confucius admitted, “but that’s still not it.” Finally, Yan Hui surprised him: “I’m gaining ground!” he said, beaming. “I sit quietly and forget.” Confucius shifted uneasily. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I let the body fall away and let the intellect fade,” replied Yan Hui. “I throw out form, abandon understanding—and then move freely, blending away into the great transformation. That’s what I mean by sit quietly and forget.” Realizing that his pupil had surpassed him, Confucius went pale. “If you blend away like that, you’re free of likes and dislikes,” he said. “So in the end, the true sage here is you! So you won’t mind if I follow you from now on, will you?” 8 When we cling to our certainties, likes, and dislikes, deeming them essential to our sense of self, we alienate ourselves from the “great transformation” of the Way, because the reality is that we are all in continual flux, moving from one state to another. An unenlightened person, Zhuangzi explained, is like a frog in a well who mistakes the tiny patch of sky he can see for the whole; but once he has seen the sky’s immensity, his perspective is changed forever.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  It is not possible here to give an exhaustive account of the teachings of all the major traditions. I have had to concentrate on a few of the seminal prophets and sages who developed this ethos. But this brief overview can give us some idea of the universality of the compassionate ideal and the circumstances in which it came to birth. We have seen that there are brain mechanisms and hormones that induce such positive emotions as love, compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness but that they are not as powerful as the more primitive instinctual reflexes known as the Four Fs located in our reptilian old brain. But the great sages understood that it was possible to reorient the mind, and by putting some distance between their thinking selves and these potentially destructive instincts they found new peace. They did not come to this insight on lonely mountaintops or in desert fastnesses. They were all living in societies not unlike our own, which witnessed intense political conflict and fundamental social change. In every case, the catalyst for major spiritual change was a principled revulsion from the violence that had reached unprecedented heights as a result of this upheaval.3 These new spiritualities came into being at a time when the old brain was being co-opted by the calculating, rational new brain in ways that were exciting and life-enhancing but that many found profoundly disturbing.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Koestler helps us see that the core of any oppressive system is a belief – a conviction that one group is somehow superior to another. For example, many believe that women are physically weaker than men. What matters, however, is how this belief is applied – such as excluding women from certain social roles, or subordinating them to men. Oppressed groups internalise the ideology of inferiority, seeing themselves through a dominant social or cultural lens, rather than challenging the legitimacy of this lens. Koestler is an important witness to how individual beliefs or a ‘big picture’ can entrap individuals, allowing them to oppress others in the fight against oppression, and to tell lies in the fight for truth – while at the same time anointing these beliefs with an ideological balm that somehow makes them appear true, noble and inevitable. Yet Koestler’s realisation of the illusory promise of Marxism-Leninism ultimately led him to question the reliability of any such ‘big picture’. Where many abandoned one worldview to embrace another, Koestler became suspicious of the overreach of worldviews and metanarratives in general. Where he once regarded the universe as an ‘open book’, he now saw it as a ‘text written in invisible ink’, allowing us at most to ‘decipher a small fragment’ of its complexity.33 Big pictures could only cope with the density and disorder of human history by simplifying and distorting it, offering a ‘specious clarity’. That is why Marxist theory ‘had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism.’34 All the questions had been answered correctly and authoritatively; there was no need for further reflection, merely to learn and repeat the right answers. The outcome of Koestler’s dramatic abandonment of Communism was thus not the adoption of another worldview, but rather a dawning realisation that no such big picture could be trusted. We live in a twilight world of shadows, in which there are no certainties. A throwaway line at the end of Darkness at Noon, as Rubashov waits in his cell for the arrival of his executioners, is significant here. ‘Perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist.’35 There were limits to human reason, which might lead us astray if pressed too far. For Koestler, Marxism was an example of such an overreach of reason; so, perhaps, were all other attempts to rationalise the complexities of nature or social reality. The political writer Rafael Behr makes this point neatly: ‘every aspiration to contain human experience in a unified theory, every urge to order mankind in neat rows, every codified system of belief that despises dissent, involves some inward violence.’36

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Oh, no! He not only existed, but he exists even now and precisely in the post given up by Rimsky, that is, the post of findirector of the Variety. Coming to his senses about twenty-four hours after his visit to Woland, on a train somewhere near Vyatka, Aloisy realized that, having for some reason left Moscow in a darkened state of mind, he had forgotten to put on his trousers, but instead had stolen, with an unknown purpose, the completely useless household register of the builder. Paying a colossal sum of money to the conductor, Aloisy acquired from him an old and greasy pair of pants, and in Vyatka he turned back. But, alas, he did not find the builder’s little house. The decrepit trash had been licked clean away by a fire. But Aloisy was an extremely enterprising man. Two weeks later he was living in a splendid room on Briusovsky Lane, and a few months later he was sitting in Rimsky’s office. And as Rimsky had once suffered because of Styopa, so now Varenukha was tormented because of Aloisy. Ivan Savelyevich’s only dream is that this Aloisy should be removed somewhere out of sight, because, as Varenukha sometimes whispers in intimate company, he has never in his life met ‘such scum as this Aloisy’, and he expects anything you like from this Aloisy. However, the administrator is perhaps prejudiced. Aloisy has not been known for any shady business, or for any business at all, unless of course we count his appointing someone else to replace the barman Sokov. For Andrei Fokich died of liver cancer in the clinic of the First MSU some ten months after Woland’s appearance in Moscow. Yes, several years have passed, and the events truthfully described in this book have healed over and faded from memory. But not for everyone, not for everyone. Each year, with the festal spring full moon, 1 a man of about thirty or thirty-odd appears towards evening under the lindens at the Patriarch’s Ponds. A reddish-haired, green-eyed, modestly dressed man. He is a researcher at the Institute of History and Philosophy, Professor Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev. Coming under the lindens, he always sits down on the same bench on which he sat that evening when Berlioz, long forgotten by all, saw the moon breaking to pieces for the last time in his life. Whole now, white at the start of the evening, then gold with a dark horse-dragon, it floats over the former poet Ivan Nikolaevich and at the same time stays in place at its height. Ivan Nikolaevich is aware of everything, he knows and understands everything. He knows that as a young man he fell victim to criminal hypnotists and was afterwards treated and cured. But he also knows that there are things he cannot manage. He cannot manage this spring full moon.