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 Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When she left home for the first time, he drove her to college and, in typical fashion, ruined the trip by grousing the entire time about the ugly, garbage-littered stream by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw a beautiful rustic, unspoiled creek. Years later, after he died, she chanced to make the trip again and noted that there were two streams, one on each side of the road. “But this time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through the driver’s window was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” All the components of this lesson—my impasse with Irene, her insistence that I read Frost’s poem, my recollection of my patient’s story of the automobile ride—had been deeply instructive. With astonishing clarity, I understood now that it was time for me to listen, to set aside my personal worldview, to stop imposing my style and my views upon my patient. It was time to look out Irene’s window. Lesson 7: Letting Go Our final session was unremarkable except for two events. First, Irene had to phone to inquire about its time. Though our meeting time had often changed because of her surgical schedule, she had not once, in five years, forgotten it. Second, I developed a splitting headache just before the session. Since I rarely get headaches, I suspect that this one was in some way related to Jack’s brain tumor, which had first made its presence known via a severe headache. “I’ve been wondering about something all week,” Irene began. “Do you plan to write about any aspect of our work together?” I had not thought of writing about her, and at that time was immersed in planning a novel. I told her so, adding, “And anyway, I’ve never written about therapy as current as ours. In Love’s Executioner, I had usually waited years, sometimes a decade or more, after a particular patient’s therapy ended before writing about it. And let me reassure you, if I ever did consider writing about you, I’d seek your permission before beginning—” “No, no, Irv,” she broke in, “I’m not worried about your writing. I’m worried about your not writing. I want my story to be told. There’s too much that therapists don’t know about treating the bereaved. I want you to tell other therapists not only what I’ve learned but what you’ve learned.” In the weeks following termination, I not only missed Irene but, again and again, found myself musing about writing her story.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  No, I didn’t believe in God’s plan. Still, I liked listening to him talk. It had so little to do with the life I’d known. I kept thinking I’d go to one last meeting, then quit. I went again. He noticed I fidgeted, and he advised I exercise, as they did. It’ll be good for you, he said. He sounded playful, but when I laughed, he didn’t. Unechoed, I heard an idiot, laughing at nothing. I stopped. He asked which kind of exercise I liked best. I told him I used to swim; he drew up a schedule. Before the piano, I’d loved being in the pool. I used to frolic with half-nereid L.A. friends: I showed off high flip dives, and I played Marco Polo until I lost my voice, but this wasn’t fun. He set goals. I kept a log. One dull lap blurred into the next, tired leg muscles singing. Push through, he urged. Each night, I thrashed across the school’s Olympic-sized pool. I watched myself, the blurred Phoebe ghost, glide along striped tiles. In time, I noticed more habits changing. I was drinking less, I realized. If I craved gin, I sipped tonic. I hadn’t known it, but I longed for discipline. It was part of the life I’d lost with the piano: a schedule, rigid expectations. With the six-plus hours I practiced each night, I’d had rules to bind me in place. They’d held me up. – I started playing the piano again, in Jejah, at John Leal’s request. I’d thought I couldn’t, but in a short while, as with the ongoing swims, I didn’t mind. Plinked single-octave hymns, simple chords that resolved, like finished stories, with each line: this wasn’t the music I’d failed. If I played well, or didn’t, I felt no pleasure. I didn’t have to be afraid. – So, I’d changed. It was possible. I often thought about what John Leal liked saying, that if we could believe all people existed in their minds as much as we did in our own, the rest followed. To love, he said, is but to imagine well. I pulled out this thought; I held it up, in private, turning it in the light as though I’d find in its prism gleam the Phoebe I could still become. –

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  These two polemical targets—purgatory and the Mass—thus ensured that when the Reformers were developing their own ways of explaining what the death of Jesus achieved, they were understandably eager to ward off what they saw as ecclesial abuse. I am not a specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it does seem to me that in general terms the Reformers and their successors were thus trying to give biblical answers to medieval questions . They were wrestling with the question of how the angry God of the late medieval period might be pacified, both here (through the Mass?) and hereafter (in purgatory?). To both questions, they replied: no, God’s wrath was already pacified through the death of Jesus. Not only does this not need to be done again; if we were to try to do it again, we would be implying that the death of Jesus was somehow after all inadequate. (Echoes of this controversy can still be seen when exegetes tiptoe around Col. 1:24, in which Paul seems to be saying that his own sufferings are somehow completing something that was “lacking” in the Messiah’s own sufferings.) They did not challenge the underlying idea that the gospel was all about pacifying divine wrath. It was simply assumed that this was the problem Paul was addressing in Romans 1:18–32 or indeed 1 Thessalonians 1:10 or 5:9. If, of course, you are faced with the medieval questions, it is better to give them biblical answers than nonbiblical ones. But the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking, which are actually screened out by concentrating on the wrong ones. As I have sometimes remarked in reading the gospels, it is possible to check all the correct boxes, but still end up with the wrong result, like a child doing a connect-the-dots puzzle who doesn’t realize the significance of the numbers and ends up with an elephant instead of a donkey; or perhaps, writing from Scotland, I should say a Saltire instead of a Union Jack. I should also add that these last two or three paragraphs, taken by themselves, could give a very lopsided view of the Reformers. Luther and his colleagues were energetic biblical expositors, excited about the New Testament message of the grace and love of God, which they had not heard taught in the days of their youth. In particular, they went back again and again to grace, love, faith, hope, freedom, and joy as the ultimate reasons for everything, and certainly the ultimate reasons for their own excitement and energy. That, for them, was what it was all about. However, in their insistence on certain particular ways of understanding the biblical teaching on Jesus’s death, the two factors I have highlighted—purgatory and the Mass—remained extremely influential.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The existential frame of reference described throughout this volume posits that many patients fall into despair because of an encounter with some of the ultimate concerns of existence. The particular concerns most salient to clinical work are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness—themes which form the spine of my text, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Since these sources of angst are universal—inherent in the human condition—psychotherapists cannot pretend that it is only “they,” the patients, who face these threats; instead it is “we,” all of us, who share a common destiny. Accordingly the metaphor of “fellow travelers” more aptly describes the therapist-patient relationship I strive for in my therapy work. I first met with Irene shortly after completing three years of research in which I and my colleagues studied the dynamics and clinical course of eighty bereaved spouses.* My research experience proved less relevant to the treatment course than I had expected; in fact there were many counter-productive instances—times when Irene felt, quite justifiably, that my reliance on the experience of other bereaved individuals impeded my appreciation of her unique experience. The effective therapist must be able to empty his/her mind of the expectations and stereotypes which obstruct vision in order to facilitate the patient’s unique narrative to unfold freshly in the relationship. And so, too, for therapy technique. Not only in “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” but in the other tales as well I urge the therapist to create a new therapy for each patient. Hyperbolic though that may sound, I sincerely mean that the therapeutic venture must be organic: the therapist and patient must together shape the form of therapy—indeed, the joint process of shaping the work is an integral part of the work. The contemporary managed care trend toward brief, ready-made, protocol-driven therapy is a wrong turn and is deeply threatening to the whole therapeutic enterprise; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the process of personal growth, namely that therapy consists of imparting information or advice. Ernest Lash, the therapist in the last two stories “Double Exposure” and “The Hungarian Cat Curse” had an earlier life as the protagonist of my novel, Lying on the Couch. His encore appearance is meant to signify that these two last tales are heavily fictionalized.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Paul has built into this narrative of Adam and the Messiah the darker theme of the Jewish law: “The law came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent” (5:20). What does that mean? Older theologies, including the “works contract” as often understood, saw the Jewish law as the equivalent of the original commands given to Adam and Eve. It was, so people thought, the moral standard Israel was expected to keep in order to be God’s people. It was the high moral bar that people in general, and Israel in particular, had to clear in order to be ruled “all right” in God’s sight. Then, in this same works-contract analysis, it became clear that Israel could not keep the law. The “law” was then seen as a negative, dangerous, perhaps even demonic power. According to some, God gave the law in order to terrify people with the prospect of judgment, so that they would run to the gospel for relief. That appears to make some sense, provided you approach the whole thing from the works-contract point of view. But this is not, however, the sense Paul has in mind. What Paul has in mind is a longer and more complex story, which he will unfold in chapter 7. This story is about the strange, unexpected divine purpose in giving the law, and this is what he has woven, as a foretaste, into the Adam-and-Messiah story of chapter 5. “The law,” he says, “came in alongside, so that the trespass might be filled out to its full extent.” The phrase “so that,” italicized here, is vital. Paul is hinting that the often dark and sad history of Israel, the long descent into the “curse” of Deuteronomy, was not itself outside the divine purpose. That descent under the law was to be the means by which redemption would come. Even the exile itself, the long sojourn under the law’s curse, was part of the eventual saving purpose. The “so that” indicates that this was God’s intention. It was not an accident. Nor was it a demonic intrusion into the divine purpose. We note in particular at the end of Romans 5 that Paul in his distinctive way has done exactly what we saw in the four gospels. He has told the story of “how God became king” in such a way as to demonstrate that the death of Jesus was the clue to that result. At this point we seem to be very close to a central and more or less universal early Christian perception of what the gospel was all about and how its power was unleashed. If that is so, we should be less than surprised that Paul, like the gospels in describing Jesus’s last days, discerns the meaning of those days as the new Passover, the new Exodus. Romans 6–8: The New Exodus

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I believe this remoteness, and your discomfort about my challenging it, is the major factor motivating your wish to terminate. “Let me share a second observation: I’m struck by your lack of curiosity about yourself. I feel that I have to supply the curiosity for both of us—that I alone must carry the entire burden of our work.” “I’m not deliberately concealing anything from you, Doctor. Why would I do that intentionally? That is just the way I am,” Halston repeated in his wooden way . “Let’s try one last time, Halston. Humor me. I want you to review again the events of the day preceding the evening of the nightmare. Let’s go over it with a fine-tooth comb.” “As I told you, a normal day at the bank, and that night a horrible nightmare, which I’ve forgotten—the drive to the emergency room—” “No, no, we’ve done that. Let’s try another approach. Get your date book out. Let’s see,” Ernest checked his calendar, “our first meeting was May 9. Go over your appointments the day before. Start with the morning of May 8.” Halston took out his week-at-a-glance date book, turned to May 8, and squinted. “Mill Valley,” he said, “now why on earth was I in Mill Valley? Oh, right—my sister. I remember now. I wasn’t in the bank that morning after all. I was investigating Mill Valley.” “What do you mean, ‘investigating’?” “My sister lives in Miami, and her firm is transferring her to the Bay area. She’s considering a house in Mill Valley, and I offered to reconnoiter the town for her—you know, morning traffic patterns, parking, shopping, the best residential areas.” “Good. Excellent start. Now take me through the rest of the day.” “Everything is strangely hazy—it’s almost eerie. I can’t recall anything.” “You live in San Francisco—do you remember driving to Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge? What time?” “Early, I think. Before the traffic. Maybe seven.” “Then what? Had you eaten breakfast at home? Or in Mill Valley? Try to picture it. Let your mind wander freely back to that morning. Close your eyes, if it helps.” Halston closed his eyes. After three or four minutes of silence, Ernest wondered whether he had fallen asleep and in a soft voice prodded, “Halston? Halston? Don’t move, stay where you are, but try to think aloud. What are you seeing in your mind?” “Doctor”—Halston slowly opened his eyes—“did I ever tell you about Artemis? ” “Artemis? The Greek goddess? No, not a word.” “Doctor,” said Halston, blinking his eyes and shaking his head as if to clear it, “I’m a little shaken. I’ve just now had the oddest experience. As though a rent suddenly appeared in my mind, letting all the uncanny events of that day pour through. I don’t want you to think I’ve been deliberately withholding this from you.” “Rest assured, Halston. I’m with you.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  They knew Isaiah 59:2 (“Your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear”) as well as we do, but the early Christians did not explain the message of the gospel in those terms. They did not propose that God had set up, through Jesus, a kind of spiritual mechanism whereby anyone at any time could repent, be assured of God’s forgiveness, and experience the loving presence of God in a new way. Once again, I do not think any early Christians would have denied that this was true, but it is interesting that they didn’t put it like that. These are all meanings that belong in the much later world of modern Western piety. They are important, but they do not give us the original, and larger, biblical picture. No. If we are to be faithful to the biblical overtones of “forgiveness of sins,” we must insist that all such meanings are included within something much larger , something far more revolutionary. It is this larger reality that really matters. The smaller reality—that I, as a sinner, need to know the forgiving love of God in my own life—is vital for each person, one by one. But, as history shows, that reality can all too easily be understood within the Platonized version of the gospel in which the whole emphasis falls on a detached spirituality in the present and a detached future salvation in which the created order is abandoned altogether. Once again, that is how to domesticate the revolution. The larger reality is that something has happened within the actual world of space, time, and matter, as a result of which everything is different . By six o’clock on the Friday evening Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic “new temple”: “God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah” (2 Cor. 5:19). This was totally unexpected. No Jews prior to Jesus were walking around with this kind of messianic narrative in their heads. But when the resurrection compelled the disciples to rethink their original and natural reaction to the death of Jesus—a reaction we see graphically portrayed in Luke’s picture of the two on the road to Emmaus—we find them grappling with the fresh belief that these events were seen as the dramatic, unexpected, but nevertheless appropriate fulfillment of the ancient prophecies and therefore as the events through which the long-awaited new age was being ushered in at last . This was not about inventing a new kind of religion. It had nothing to do with getting rid of the earthbound hopes of the ancient Jews and embracing a “spiritual” reality instead.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  145 This counterintuitive (bottom-up) view challenged the Cartesian/cognitive (top-down) paradigm where the conscious mind first recognizes the source of threat and then commands the body to respond: to flee, to fight or to fold. James’s bottom-up perception—that we feel fear because we are running away from the threat—while only partially correct, does make a crucial point about the illusory nature of perception. We commonly believe, for example, that when we touch a hot object, we draw our hand away because of the pain. However, the reality is that if we were to wait until we experienced pain in order to withdraw our hand, we might damage it beyond repair. Every student of elementary physiology learns that there is first a reflex withdrawal of the hand, which is only then followed by the sensation of pain. The pain might well serve the function of reminding us not to pick up a potentially hot stone from the fire pit a second time, but it has little to do with our hand withdrawing when it is first burned. Similarly, every student of basic chemistry learns, hopefully after the first encounter, that hot test tubes look just like cold ones. However, what we falsely perceive , and believe as fact, is that the pain causes us to withdraw our hand. James was able to perceive that fear was not a primarily cognitive affair, that there was a muscular and visceral reaction in his body first , and that it was the perception of this body reaction that then generated the emotion of fear. What James observed was that, yes, when the brain calculates that there is danger, it makes this assessment so quickly that there isn’t enough time for the person to become consciously aware of it. What happens instead, according to James, is that the brain canvases the body to see how it is reacting in the moment. In what was a revelatory revision, James relocated the consciousness of feeling from mind to body. In doing this he demonstrated a rare prescience about what neuroscience was only to begin to discover a hundred years later. Ben Libet, 146 neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist at the University of California–San Francisco’s Medical School, conducted a revealing, but little known, series of studies over thirty years ago. He essentially confirmed James’s observational chain. Here’s a little experiment that you can do right now. Hold one of your arms out in front of you with your hand facing upward. Then, whenever you feel like it (of your own “free will”), flex your wrist. Do this several times and watch what happens in your mind. You probably felt as though you first consciously decided to move and then, following your intention, you moved it.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  As soon as I know this (his desire, pointing at me, is like a sword between us), I free myself, and I leave, without hurting him in any way. I think, well, I just wanted the pleasure without feeling. But something holds me back. There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly. I think of this in the Métro, and I get lost. A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid. Then I read Drake’s novel, and I discover an unsuspected Drake—foreign, uprooted, fantastic, erratic. A realist, exasperated by reality. Immediately his desire ceases to repulse me. A little link has been formed between two strangenesses. I respond to his imagination with mine. His novel conceals a few of his own feelings. How do I know? They are not consistent with the story, not quite. They are there because they are natural to him. The name Lawrence Drake is put on, too. There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. I wondered at this last night as I closed Drake’s book. I knew it would take me years to forget John [Erskine], because it was he who first stirred the secret source of my life. There is nothing of Drake himself in the book, I am convinced. He hates the parts I like. It was all written objectively, consciously, and even the fantasy was carefully planned. We settle this at the beginning of my next visit. Very good. I am beginning to see things more clearly. I know now why I did not trust him the first day. His actions are devoid of either feeling or imagination. They are motivated by sheer habits of living and grabbing and analyzing. He’s a grasshopper. He has now hopped into my life. My feeling of dislike becomes intensified. When he tries to kiss me, I evade him. At the same time I concede to myself that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I’ve met. His gestures never miss their aim, no kiss ever goes astray. His hands are deft. My curiosity for sensuality is stirred. I have always been tempted by unknown pleasures. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. Finally I lie still on the couch, but when his desire grows, I try to escape. Too late. Then I tell him the truth: woman’s trouble. That does not seem to deter him. “You don’t think I want that mechanical way—there are other ways.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  He felt no vibration of social hope in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the shouts of the crowd when Jesus entered Jerusalem. He caught no revolutionary note in the Book of Revelation. The social movement had not yet reached him. Jesus knew human nature when he reiterated: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” We see in the Bible what we have been taught to see there. We drop out great sets of facts from our field of vision. We read other things into the Bible which are not there. During the Middle Ages men thought they saw their abstruse scholastic philosophy and theology amid the simplicity of the gospels. They found in the epistles the priests and bishops whom they knew, with robe and tonsure, living a celibate life and obeying the pope. When the Revival of Learning taught men to read all books with literary appreciation and historic insight, many things disappeared from the Bible for their eyes, and new things appeared. A new language was abroad and the Bible began to speak that language. If the Bible was not a living power before the Reformation, it was not because the Bible was chained up and forbidden, as we are told, but because their minds were chained by preconceived ideas, and when they read, they failed to read. We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. Where we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court harlots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of history. The Bible shares in that new social reinterpretation. The stories of the patriarchs have a new lifelikeness when they are read in the setting of primitive social life. There are texts and allusions in the New Testament which had been passed by as of slight significance; now they are like windows through which we see miles of landscape. But it is a slow process. The men who write commentaries are usually of ripe age and their lines of interest were fixed before the social movement awoke men. They follow the traditions of their craft and deal with the same questions that engaged their predecessors. Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a hurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  When life gets upended, some corner of our psyche becomes more aware that we will one day leave this planet. No one really wants to think about that (including me). But perhaps the heightened awareness of our limited time helps us see more keenly which parts of our lives could be pruned to make space for our next chapter. I think back to David Kessler and what he said about how, when our loved ones are nearing the end of their lives, we have to “ride the damn horse in the direction it’s going.” Just as that’s a sobering metaphor for the dying, it also applies to the parts of ourselves that have died (or are dying) in the process of loss and crisis. When we resist the undercurrent of deep inner transformation, we’re also resisting the natural growth process. In retrospect, the dominoes that fell once Dad got sick now seem inevitable, like they had been a long time coming. My mind always goes back to the conference I spoke at in 2016, before the return flight was delayed, before Mom greeted me at the door at midnight, before the words “Dad has a mass on his pancreas” changed our lives forever. Readying myself to go onstage that night to hopefully inspire people to live fully, I remember thinking, Once this is over , then I’ll live. Once this task—obligation, deadline, to-do—was complete, then I’d [take better care of myself, visit my best friend . . . fill in the blank]. But every time I finished a task or project, I failed to pause and keep the promises I had made to myself. Instead, I’d automatically turn to another item on my list. I knew I needed to recalibrate for quite some time. I just didn’t know how. Then illness happened, loss happened, crisis happened, and once again, I was reminded that life is always speaking to us. At first, it taps us gently and whispers in our ears. Our intuition sharpens and our gut tingles. Our dreams become more vivid as we unconsciously work out the messages being offered in our sleep. Life continues trying to get our attention in the hopes that we’ll recalibrate on our own. But when we refuse to pick up what life is laying down, those whispers can turn into wrecking balls. It’s kinda like the Glenn Close character in the movie Fatal Attraction . Life basically says, “I will not be ignored, Dan.” And if you shrug her off long enough, she’ll boil your bunny. Horrific, I know. Maybe your life isn’t as deranged (and dramatic) as mine, but my point still remains: Don’t blow off the messages. Listen to the whispers before they become roars. Even though it’s human nature to kick the can down the road because fear comes up, excuses multiply, and there’s a sale at Target, life (like Glenn Close) is very persistent. So what then?

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Why do we think murder is wrong, Mounce asks: we can easily think of reasons, but it turns out on further reflection that none of the reasons we might cite is any more certain and fundamental than our original conviction that murder is wrong. We might say that murder is wrong because it has bad social effects—but then, when there are no such consequences, we should have to find a different reason. It might be held, on the other hand, that murdering certain persons would have good social effects: that might lead into further debate about the rights and wrongs of assassinating tyrants, and so on. As the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler is enough to show, even assassination in such circumstances confronted the conspirators with a terrible moral dilemma. Partly, no doubt, as officers, they had a problem about breaking their oath of allegiance to the head of state. Also, however, they shrank from an act of homicide which, if successful, was likely to have good political results. This is not surprising. We think there is something wrong with murder, independently of whatever results it might have. The reasoning that might come into the question begins after, not before, some act is regarded as murder. Our reaction to murder is an example of what Thomas means by saying that we have moral principles which are not founded on reasoning but are given us by nature. For Thomas, moral reasoning is cogent only to the extent that it is framed and informed by principles that are given to us by our nature. We know the difference between right and wrong not because we have discovered it by reasoning but because it is given us as a natural disposition, “a natural way of reacting to good and evil when they appear,” as Mounce says. If this seems too mysterious we need to consider what the alternative might be. If our belief that some action is right or wrong rests on reasoning, we certainly move far from what Thomas and (before him) Aristotle held. For Thomas it is part of our being created to the image and likeness of God that we have these natural dispositions which provide the principles upon which our moral reasoning can begin to work. Given that by nature we are drawn to the good and inclined to resist evil, we have a ‘natural law’ which then requires us to reason, in particular cases. Of course we have to reason; our natural reactions will not do it all. For Thomas, as for common sense, there is something given to us and something that we have to do ourselves. Moreover, again as Mounce notes, it is mistaken to think that for Thomas natural law enables us to have solutions to every moral problem—he thought, on the contrary, that no such clear-cut solutions were available in most cases.

• 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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I remember only snippets from the rest of that weekend. Sailing on his boat. A walk in the woods. Finding a clamshell on the beach (that sits in my bathroom with a candle in it to this day). Telling him I wanted to be an actress. Him telling me I should be a writer instead. Noticing how we crossed our legs the same way and had a similar sense of humor. Moments that made me understand that I am a product of both BD and Ken, of nature and nurture. BD and I had another thing in common: he first met his father when he was a teenager, too. Being born into absence was our shared DNA, and so was the trauma that came with it. BD wasn’t a villain, after all. He was a victim of rejection, just like me. And as such, he did what he was taught to do. There’s a growing body of scientific literature to support that grief and trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. In epigenetics, researchers study how gene expression is modified based on behavior and environment. In terms of trauma, that means that people who’ve experienced war, famine, or other forms of extreme stress can pass down genetic modifications to their offspring. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and director of Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, has been at the forefront of this research. She and her team conducted a study of 32 Jewish men and women who had endured or observed torture, been interned at concentration camps, or went into hiding during the war. They also examined the genes of their adult children, finding that both parents and offspring had lowered cortisol levels compared to Jewish families who resided outside of Europe during the war. This is significant, as cortisol is the stress hormone that helps to counter adrenaline and calm the system. Yehuda concludes, “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents.” Research like Yehuda’s suggests that our ancestors’ life experiences have the power to leave lasting imprints for generations. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some very old branches of my paternal family tree there were ancestors who had also experienced abandonment and neglect. Living in these conditions creates a whole bunch of behavioral issues: codependency; fear of being left; insecurity and low selfworth; difficulty saying no and trouble self-regulating, especially big feelings like—you guessed it—anger. As a result, it can be hard to form healthy relationships, because it’s difficult to trust others and even yourself.

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

  Automatically I took down the volume and it opened of itself at the last page of Emerson’s advice to the scholars of Dartmouth College. Every word is still printed on my memory: I can see the left-hand page and read again that divine message: I make no excuse for quoting it almost word for word: “Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, because I thought that standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is this beauty!’ men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season’;—then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science.... Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.” The truth of it shocked me: “then perish the buds of art and poetry and science in you as they have perished already in a thousand, thousand men!” That explained why it was that there was no Shakespeare, no Bacon, no Swinburne in America where, according to population and wealth there should be dozens. There flashed on me the realization of the truth, that just because wealth was easy to get here, it exercised an incomparable attraction and in its pursuit “perished a thousand, thousand” gifted spirits who might have steered humanity to new and nobler accomplishment.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Facing death shows us the other parts of our lives that are dying, too. Our outworn patterns, partnerships, and parts come into sharp focus. This trickle-down effect makes perfect sense. All systems of life are interconnected, and what isn’t working in one area often illuminates the struggle in other areas, too. When life gets upended, some corner of our psyche becomes more aware that we will one day leave this planet. No one really wants to think about that (including me). But perhaps the heightened awareness of our limited time helps us see more keenly which parts of our lives could be pruned to make space for our next chapter. I think back to David Kessler and what he said about how, when our loved ones are nearing the end of their lives, we have to “ride the damn horse in the direction it’s going.” Just as that’s a sobering metaphor for the dying, it also applies to the parts of ourselves that have died (or are dying) in the process of loss and crisis. When we resist the undercurrent of deep inner transformation, we’re also resisting the natural growth process. In retrospect, the dominoes that fell once Dad got sick now seem inevitable, like they had been a long time coming. My mind always goes back to the conference I spoke at in 2016, before the return flight was delayed, before Mom greeted me at the door at midnight, before the words “Dad has a mass on his pancreas” changed our lives forever. Readying myself to go onstage that night to hopefully inspire people to live fully, I remember thinking, Once this is over, then I’ll live. Once this task—obligation, deadline, to-do—was complete, then I’d [take better care of myself, visit my best friend . . . fill in the blank]. But every time I finished a task or project, I failed to pause and keep the promises I had made to myself. Instead, I’d automatically turn to another item on my list. I knew I needed to recalibrate for quite some time. I just didn’t know how. Then illness happened, loss happened, crisis happened, and once again, I was reminded that life is always speaking to us. At first, it taps us gently and whispers in our ears. Our intuition sharpens and our gut tingles. Our dreams become more vivid as we unconsciously work out the messages being offered in our sleep. Life continues trying to get our attention in the hopes that we’ll recalibrate on our own. But when we refuse to pick up what life is laying down, those whispers can turn into wrecking balls. It’s kinda like the Glenn Close character in the movie Fatal Attraction. Life basically says, “I will not be ignored, Dan.” And if you shrug her off long enough, she’ll boil your bunny. Horrific, I know.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Is 42:5 ] 26 “And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands and territories. 27 “This was so that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grasp for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. 28 “For in Him we live and move and exist [that is, in Him we actually have our being], as even some of f your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ 29 “So then, being God’s children, we should not think that the Divine Nature (deity) is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination or skill of man. 30 “Therefore God overlooked and disregarded the former ages of ignorance; but now He commands all people everywhere to repent [that is, to change their old way of thinking, to regret their past sins, and to seek God’s purpose for their lives], 31 because He has set a day when He will judge the inhabited world in righteousness by a Man whom He has appointed and destined for that task, and He has provided credible proof to everyone by raising Him from the dead.” [Ps 9:8 ; 96:13 ; 98:9 ] 32 Now when they heard [the term] resurrection from the dead, g some mocked and sneered; but others said, “We will hear from you again about this matter.” 33 So Paul left them. 34 But some men joined him and believed; among them were Dionysius, [a judge] of the Council of Areopagus, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. Acts 18 Paul at Corinth 1 A FTER THIS Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife, Priscilla, because [the Roman Emperor] Claudius had issued an edict that all the a Jews were to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them; and they worked together for they were tent-makers. 4 And he reasoned and debated in the synagogue every Sabbath, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks; 5 but when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia (northern Greece), Paul began devoting himself completely to [preaching] the word, and solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed). 6 But since the Jews kept resisting and opposing him, and blaspheming [God], he b shook out his robe and said to them, “Your blood (damnation) be on your own heads! I am innocent of it. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” [Acts 13:46 ] 7 Then he moved on from there and went to the house of a man named c Titius Justus, who worshiped God and whose house was next door to the synagogue.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Poetry Is Not a Luxury T he quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/” * and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

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

  For example, I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting. At first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, 'surely I have seen that before,' but when or how does not become clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra of familiarity,—when suddenly I exclaim: "I have it, it is a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Florentine Academy—I recollect it there!" But the motive to the recall does not lie in the fact that the brain-tract now excited by the painting was once before excited in a similar way; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with that brain-tract other tracts also are excited: those which sustain my friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the one hand; those which sustain the mental image of the Florence Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my visit there; and finally those which make me (more dimly) think of the years I have lived through between these two times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is a thought with a peculiar object, namely, that I who now stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original. M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image develops into an object of memory, in his usual vivid fashion. He says: "I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new details. 'When I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio; he is so-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was it? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before the spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm Sunday!' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the past; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with the present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and confronted with all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceedings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, beyond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the ill-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Dark images of the New World accompanied more seductive ones. When early English promoters portrayed North America as a rich and fertile landscape, they grossly and perhaps knowingly exaggerated. Most were describing a land they never had seen, of course. Wary investors and state officials had to be convinced to take the plunge into a risky overseas venture. But most important, it was a place into which they could export their own marginalized people. The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. Historic memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division. And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride. Class is the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked, element in presuppositions about early settlement. Even now, the notion of a broad and supple middle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower. It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again. An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012). For Murray, an authority in the minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by the shared experiences of the nuclear family. When they watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, average Americans believed they were seeing their lives on the small screen. 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in its innocent youth, television caricatured people by class types.