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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the first time I thought that maybe my father was sad. That maybe he had lost something too. I know it sounds strange, but honestly, I never thought about how he felt when I didn’t want to see him anymore. I never imagined how he felt when he walked into his office that Monday morning. It didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother did this to hurt him and not only to heal herself. Even when I say it now, it feels wrong. I don’t think she had bad intentions.” I hear how through Art’s eyes, Alice’s view of her father became more nuanced. She could start seeing him and her mother as complex humans who struggled to survive. “After about a month of nightly conversations with Art, when we talked about absolutely everything, I agreed to meet him outside of the office. And that was it.” Alice pauses. “We spent that night together and knew that we would spend every night of the rest of our lives together. A month later we tried to get pregnant.” “And you felt like you were betraying your mother,” I say. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I obviously told my mother right away and she was happy for me, but I knew that I had crossed some secret line. I was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t legally divorced yet. I was afraid she would see that as a move toward my father and would worry that I might forgive him and leave her. So I told her gradually. “At first she just listened, as she always did. She was always a good listener. And then she asked, ‘Is he a good man, Alice?’ And that made me so uncomfortable because I knew what she really wanted to ask. I knew she was thinking about my father. But she didn’t want to ruin it for me. She just kept asking if he was a good man. “‘Why do you keep asking that, Mom? Of course he is,’ I answered, and she noticed that I was irritated. “‘I love you more than anything,’ she said. ‘I want you to be with a good man. I want you to be happy. One day you will have a daughter and you will understand that.’” Alice looks at me. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “it did ruin it for me. It made me worried. I felt her doubt and I thought that maybe she could see something about Art that I couldn’t. When I was with him, I felt completely safe, but when I was with her, I felt her suspicion of him, and it made me doubt my own judgment.” I wonder out loud if it was her fear of losing Alice that made her mother so worried.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  BCDFGKL al. pier. Eus. Thdrt. Dam. omit it. Sheer accident would be as likely to operate on one side as on the other. At first sight intrinsic probability seems to make for the genuineness of the article, since the N. T. writers, and Paul in particular, rarely use 0e6<; as subject without the article. Yet the use of 0e6<; without the article, because employed with qualitative force with emphasis upon the divine attributes, especially in contrast with man, is an established usage of which there are numerous examples in Paul (see i Thes. i 9 24 i Cor. 2s 3»- 18) and a few in the nominative (i Thes. 25 Gal. 67 2 Cor. 510). In- asmuch, therefore, as there is in this passage just such a contrast, it would be in accordance with Pauline usage to omit the article, and the balance of intrinsic probability is apparently on this side. Tran- scriptional probability is also in its favour, since the scribe would be more likely to convert the unusual 0e6<; into 6 8e6q than the reverse. e/jiol ycip ol Sofcovvres ovSev irpocravdffGvro, "for to me the men of eminence taught nothing new/' In these words the apostle evidently says what he began to say in ATTO 8£ r&v SO/COVVTMV, giving it now the specific form that the Jerusalem apostles imposed on him no burden (of doctrine or practice), or imparted nothing to him in addition to what he already knew. See discussion of irpoa-avedevro below, yap may be justificatory, introducing a statement which justifies the seem- ingly harsh language of the two preceding statements, or ex- plicative, the thought overleaping the parenthetical statements just preceding, and the new clause introduced by yap putting in a different form the thought already partly expressed in awo &% r&v SoKoforaat. The latter is simpler and for that reason more probable* The uses of the verb nrp0aava<cC8i[jiat (Mid.) clearly attested outside of the present passage are three; (i) "To offer or* dedicate beside*': Boeckh. C. /, G. 2782. (2) "To confer with": Gal. i" ($.*.); Diod. Sic. 17, u64; Luc. Jup« Trog. i. (3) "To lay upon one's self in addition, to undertake besides": Xen. Mem, a.t8. Beside these there have been proposed for the present passage; (4) uTo lay upon in addition," L e, (3) taken actively instead of with a middle sense. Cf. Pollux, I gm, (5) (equiv. to vpoOTfthftAt) 4'To add," "to bestow something not possessed before ": Chrys., el al.; (6) (adding to the sense of dvaT£0«|xai in 2s and Acts 35", that of icp&<; In composition, "besides," "in addition ")» "To set forth in addition/1 L e., in this connection, " to teach in addition to what I had already leamed,*1 The word "impart1* in EV» might per- 90 GALATIANS

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  prove that it was to this peninsula that Paul went. If it is necessary to suppose that he went to a city, Petra in the south and Bostra in the north are among the possibilities. There is nothing to necessitate the supposition that he went far from Damascus, nor anything to exclude a far-distant journey except that if he had gone far to the south a return to Damascus would perhaps have been improbable. ical ird\LV vTnl&rpetya ek &a/jt,a<r/cdv, "and again I returned to Damascus." An indirect assertion that the experience de- scribed above (aTrofcdkv^ai TOP vlov avrov iv IfMol) occurred at Damascus (cf. Acts g1'22 and parallels); from which, however, it neither follows that the aTrofcdXmfrw here spoken of must, he- cause of Acts 93' 4 be interpreted as an external appearance of Jesus, nor that the narrative in Acts is to be interpreted as referring to an experience wholly subjective. The identity of place, Damascus, and the evident fact that both passages refer to the experience by which Paul was led to abandon his opposi- tion to Jesus and accept him as the Christ, require us to refer both statements to the same general occasion; hut not (nor are we permitted), to govern the interpretation of one expression by the other. As shown above our present passage deals only with the subjective element of the experience. For the apos- tle's own interpretation of the character of the event viewed objectively, cf. i Cor. 91 is1*1, (c) Evidence of his independent apostkmhtp drawn from a visit to Jerusalem three years after his convention (tw'*°), The apostle now takes up the circumstances erf his first visit to Jerusalem after his Damascus experience, finding in it evi- dence that he was conscious of a source of truth independent of men* l$Tkm I up ie ID Cephm, and I Mm m of I/if did 1 sm the of I/M m re* the I to you, ftnl, / iii» not 18 * *Bwmi rpik ITIJ ik K,i$8»9 "Then 1 up to to visit Cephas/* The "after Is I, 18 59

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  We achieve a kind of gravity-free coordination, complete transcendence of the “fight”—the fight that is life—total trust allowing his deep, hard, long, and fast plunges entirely without self-protective gripping. Undulating . . . and great inner peace as I am rocked like a mermaid in the ocean. THE DOUBLE-SPHINCTER THEORY More mechanics: the inner anal sphincter is not within conscious control. It is regulated by the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system, and is reflexive, opening on demand. The external sphincter, the internal’s sister sphincter, is, however, connected to the conscious brain, regulated by conscious control—witness the ability to grip and hold when necessary, when angry, when scared, when stressed. Unconscious internal sphincter, conscious external sphincter, only centimeters apart. Where else is one’s unconscious and conscious mind so intimately connected, so readily regulated, so easily probed? It is a psychological playground of the most intriguing potential. Put an ass on the couch and much is revealed. But the external sphincter did not begin with consciousness. For the first year or so of life it was unconscious, reacting in conjunction with the internal and letting go on demand—hence diapers. The brain and spinal cord at birth are not yet developed enough for conscious control. And then comes toilet training. When the brain is sophisticated enough and the parents encourage (or scream) enough, the little eighteen-month-old becomes conscious of that external anal sphincter and learns to grip it, control it, and not to let the shit fly at every urge. Shame is born. All this is to say that when I get fucked in the ass, I have learned to play with, and even reverse, that long-ago, probably traumatic coming to consciousness about gripping my ass, holding on to it, showing it to no one. After all, Freud hypothesized that one’s shit is the first gift one offers one’s parents—one’s first creative production. Only now—ninety-seven ass fucks later—is the enormity of the power that lies in this area dawning on me. It is emotional and physical therapy on the deepest level: revisiting and literally learning to trust enough to open the forbidden exit and enter the forbidden zone. As a baby, the first big resounding NO from the world as we know it is the NO perpetrated upon a loose and unconscious external anal sphincter. Getting ass-fucked is the most extreme form of rebellion against one’s parents in which one could possibly indulge—returning not to adolescent transgressions, but rather to the original injury.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  " ’For inveighing more freely against the Roman Pontiff, who was reverenced as the Vicegerent of Christ, the Successor of Peter, and the Head of the Church, they excused themselves thus: Such titles as those are empty bugbears, by which the eyes of the pious ought not to be so blinded as not to venture to look at them and sift the reality. It was when the world was plunged in ignorance and sloth, as in a deep sleep, that the pope had risen to such an eminence; certainly neither appointed head of the Church by the Word of God, nor ordained by a legitimate act of the Church, but of his own accord, self-elected. Moreover, the tyranny which he let loose against the people of God was not to be endured, if we wished to have the kingdom of Christ amongst us in safety. " ’And they wanted not most powerful arguments to confirm all their positions. First, they clearly disposed of everything that was then commonly adduced to establish the primacy of the pope. When they had taken away all these props, they also, by the Word of God, tumbled him from his lofty height. On the whole, they make it clear and palpable, to learned and unlearned, that the true order of the Church had then perished,—that the keys under which the discipline of the Church is comprehended had been altered very much for the worse; that Christian liberty had fallen,—in short, that the kingdom of Christ was prostrated when this primacy was reared up. They told me, moreover, as a means of pricking my conscience, that I could not safely connive at these things as if they concerned me not; that so far art Thou from patronizing any voluntary error, that even he who is led astray by mere ignorance does not err with impunity. This they proved by the testimony of Thy Son (Matt. 15:14): "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." " ’My mind being now prepared for serious attention, I at length perceived, as if light had broken in upon me, in what a stye of error I had wallowed, and how much pollution and impurity I had thereby contracted. Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in the view of eternal death, I, as in duty bound, made it my first business to betake myself to Thy way, condemning my past life, not without groans and tears. " ’And now, O Lord, what remains to a wretch like me, but, instead of defence, earnestly to supplicate Thee not to judge according to its deserts that fearful abandonment of Thy Word, from which, in Thy wondrous goodness, Thou hast at last delivered me.’

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  There’s still more ground to clear. I need to ask you to disengage from some of your most cherished beliefs about love as well: the notions that love is exclusive, lasting, and unconditional. These deeply held beliefs are often more wish than reality in people’s lives. They capture people’s daydreams about the love-of-their-life whom they’ve yet to meet. Love, as your body defines it, is not exclusive, not something to be reserved for your soul mate, your inner circle, your kin, or your so-called loved ones. Love’s reach turns out to be far wider than we’re typically coaxed to imagine. Even so, love’s timescale is far shorter than we typically think. Love, as you’ll see, is not lasting. It’s actually far more fleeting than most of us would care to acknowledge. On the upside, though, love is forever renewable. And perhaps most challenging of all, love is not unconditional. It doesn’t emerge no matter what, regardless of conditions. To the contrary, you’ll see that the love your body craves is exquisitely sensitive to contextual cues. It obeys preconditions. Yet once you understand those preconditions, you can find love countless times each day. It’s difficult to speak of love in scientific terms, I’ve found, because listeners have so many preexisting and strong beliefs about it. Many of these beliefs reflect our shared cultural heritage, like all those proliferating songs and movies that equate love with infatuation or sexual desire, or with stories that end happily ever after, or even the realistic marriage ceremonies that celebrate love as an exclusive bond and commitment. Other beliefs about love are deeply personal. They reflect your own unique life history, with its interpersonal triumphs and scars, lessons about intimacy learned and not yet learned. Left unaddressed, these preconceptions can derail any serious intellectual discussion of love. They may even keep you from soaking up the full implications of the new findings on it. This Approach Is Different The approach I offer weaves together several new strands of science while keeping an eye toward the spiritual and the practical. With roots extending back millennia to your hunter-gatherer ancestors, this approach also casts forward to your future. It envisions your untapped potential for loving and growth, and your ability to create contexts that nurture love and growth in others, and in the generations to come who will inherit whatever world you help to shape. The bedrock for my approach to love is the science of emotions. For more than two decades, I’ve investigated that subset of emotions that feel good to you, those pleasing states—of joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and the like—that simultaneously infuse your mind and body. Odds are you shift into and out of states like these dozens of times each day, sometimes when you’re alone, sometimes when you’re with others.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Anyway , let’s make him someone who works in an office, someone who’s been pampered—what could he say that lets us see this? Let’s dress him carefully because we may have to humiliate him in a minute. For instance, we can see by the precision of the knot in his tie that his wife tied it this morning. His clothes and ring and shoes are all going to talk, and they are going to help us find out who he is, but more importantly he is going to say things to his secretary and to his callers and to the people with whom he works, and these people are going to say things back to him, and we want to hear both sides of these conversations. What if his boss says something to him that seems innocuous but that cuts him to the quick? And what if this time he responds in a completely different way than heading out for barbecue? What if he starts saying things that have nothing to do with what you had in mind, and it all mysteriously rings true? What if he says something so insulting to his boss that it puts his job in jeopardy, and then, instead of a little assault eating, he responds by spending his entire lunch hour at an adult bookstore? Well, maybe you had him wrong to begin with. Maybe he goes from being an Ivy League lawyer to a semisuccessful rug salesman in two lines of dialogue. This may not be convenient for you, but at least now you can see with whom you are really working. Now I want to hear how he describes his day to his wife, what he leaves in and how he says it, and what he neglects to mention. So you make an attempt at capturing this by trying to find him in your psyche, this person who has been talked down to, whose skin is a little thin, whose feelings are easily hurt. You write a shitty first draft of it and you sound it out, and you leave in those lines that ring true and take out the rest. I wish there were an easier, softer way, a shortcut, but this is the nature of most good writing: that you find out things as you go along. Then you go back and rewrite. Remember: no one is reading your first drafts. I need to digress again for a minute: you create these characters and figure out little by little what they say and do, but this all happens in a part of you to which you have no access—the unconscious. This is where the creating is done. We start out with stock characters, and our unconscious provides us with real, flesh-and-blood, believable people.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had learned that London life was even stranger and more various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret element, and claimed by it as a member. I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side. There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five hundred men there. How many of them were like the gentleman whose parts I had just fingered? Even as I wondered it I saw one fellow gaze my way, deliberately - and then another. Perhaps there had been many such looks since I had returned to the world as a boy; but I had never noticed them or grasped their import. Now, however, I grasped it very well - and I trembled again, as I did so, with satisfaction and spite. I had first donned trousers to avoid men’s eyes; to feel myself the object of these men’s gazes, however, these men who thought I was like them, like that — well, that was not to be pestered; it was to be, in some queer way, revenged. For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and to learn the ways and gestures of the world into which I had stumbled. Walking and watching, indeed, are that world’s keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there is a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, a purposeful stepping to an alley or a rooming-house ... At first, as I have said, I took no part in these exchanges, but only studied others at them, and received a thousand questing glances on my own account — some of which I held, rather teasingly, but most of which I turned aside, after a second, with a show of carelessness. But then, one afternoon, I was approached once again by a gentleman who, it seemed to me, bore some slight resemblance to Walter. He wanted my hand upon him, merely, and to have a string of lewd endearments whispered in his ears as I dubbed him off - it didn’t seem like much. If I hesitated, I don’t believe he saw. I named my terms - a sovereign, again - and led him to the nook where I had served his predecessor.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘On the very next morning the man went down to the cattle-stall and called for his companion. The carter came up to him and told him that his fellow had already left town. He had gone at dawn. Of course the young pilgrim was suspicious, having in mind the dream of the night before. So he went at once to the west gate of the town and there, just as he had been informed in his dream, he found the cart-load of dung ready to manure the land. Then he cried out “Harrow!” and “Vengeance!” He told the townsmen that the body of his friend and companion lay buried here, having been foully murdered. He called out for justice. He demanded that the authorities of the town take action. “There has been a murder! The corpse of my friend lies here!” What do I need to say? The people tipped the cart on to its side and there, among the shit, was the body of the dead man.’ Chanticleer ruffled his feathers, with a little shiver of disgust, before going on. ‘Oh God in heaven, You are just and true. See how You have revealed the truth. “Murder will out.” That is the saying. Murder is so abominable a crime that God will not allow it to be concealed. It may take a year, or two, or three, but eventually it will be revealed and seen for what it is. The authorities took

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  a Jewish Pharisee who persecuted the Christians for what he considered to be their blasphemous claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Something happened to convert him, though, from being a persecutor of the Christian faith to being its greatest apostle. Paul indicates that he had a visionary experience of Jesus after his death, which convinced him that Jesus had been raised from the dead. That changed everything. If Jesus was really raised from the dead, he was obviously not the one cursed by God, but the chosen one of God. And that must mean that his death was according to the plan of God, which in turn must have meant that Christ did not die for his own sins (because he was the one most favored by God), but for the sins of others. 1. It is important to realize that before Christianity, there were no Jews who expected the Messiah to die for the sins of others. The Jewish Messiah was to be a great and powerful figure who overthrew the enemies of God and established God’s rule on Earth. He was not to be a weak and defenseless person executed for crimes against the state. 2. Christians like Paul, however, transformed the idea of the Messiah. Because Jesus was the Messiah and because he had suffered, it must be that the Messiah was supposed to suffer. 3. Such Christian converts found support for their views in passages in the Jewish Scriptures—not the ones that talk explicitly about the Messiah (where there is no talk of suffering and death), but ones that talk about someone else, a righteous man, who suffers for others. These passages were taken, then, to refer to the Messiah, even though they had never been read that way before (for example, Isaiah 53; Psalm 22). D. Once Paul came to think that Jesus’s death and Resurrection were the keys to salvation, he had to rethink his understanding of his own Jewish religion: If Christ is the way of salvation, what about the salvation God had already provided his people through the Law? 1. Paul came to think that the Jewish Law was misunderstood if it was taken to be a way to maintain a right relationship with God. 2. The Jewish Law can tell a person how to live, but it does not provide anyone with the power to do what it demands. It is itself good, then, but it is not able to bring salvation, only condemnation. 3. Everyone is under the cosmic power of sin in this evil world, and as such, no one is able to fulfill the righteous demands of the Law. 4. Christ, though, broke the cosmic powers of sin and death (evidence: he overcame death!). Those who believe in his death and Resurrection can be made right with God (= justified)—not by keeping the Jewish Law, but by having faith in the one who triumphed over evil.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  29 Mark was written in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the late 90s. The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Like Paul, the evangelists searched the scriptures to find any mention of a christos— be it a king, prophet, or priest—who had been “anointed” in the past by God for a special mission and was now seen to be a coded prediction of Jesus. They believed that Jesus’s life and death had been foretold in the four servant songs, and some even thought that he was the Word and Wisdom of God, who had descended to earth in human form. This was not simply a clever exercise in public relations. Jews had long realized that all religious discourse was basically interpretive. They had always looked for new meaning in the ancient texts during a crisis, and the basic methodology of Christian pesher (“deciphering”) exegesis, which had also been practiced by the Qumran sectarians, was not unlike Greek “bricolage” or rabbinical midrash. Above all, it was a spiritual exercise. Luke has shown the way it may have worked in his story of a numinous encounter on the road to Emmaus. 30 Three days after Jesus’s crucifixion, two of his disciples had been walking sadly from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus and had fallen in with a stranger who asked them why they were so despondent. They explained what had happened to Jesus, the man they thought had been the messiah. The stranger gently rebuked them: Did they not realize that the scriptures had foretold that the christos would suffer before attaining his glory? Starting with Moses, he began to expound “the full message” of the prophets, and later the disciples recalled how their hearts had “burned” within them when he had “opened” the scriptures to them in this way. When they arrived at their destination, they begged the stranger to dine with them, and it was only when he blessed the bread that they realized it was Jesus himself, but that their “eyes had been held” from recognizing him. Like the rabbis, the Christians gathered “in twos and threes” to decipher the old texts. As they conversed together, the scriptures would “open” and bring them fresh insight. This illumination might last only a moment—just as Jesus had vanished as soon as the disciples had recognized him—but the act of bringing hitherto unconnected texts together to form an unexpected harmony gave them intimations of the coincidentia oppositorum that had characterized the temple experience. Apparent contradictions locked together in the luminous “wholeness” of shalom . The stranger had a crucial role. In Luke’s congregation Jews and gentiles were discovering that, like Abraham at Mamre, when they reached out to the “other,” they experienced the divine.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The evolutionary hypothesis shattered so many fundamental preconceptions that initially few could absorb it in its entirety. Even Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had made a significant contribution to Darwin’s work, could not accept the lack of a controlling Intelligence. 40 The American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), a convinced evolutionist as well as a dedicated Christian, used the evolutionary hypothesis in his study of plant life but could not accept the absence of an overall divine plan. 41 Darwinian theory not only undermined the design-based theology that had become the mainstay of Western Christian belief, but repudiated central principles of the Enlightenment. Darwin, however, had no desire to destroy religion. His faith ebbed and flowed over the years, especially after the tragic death of his daughter Annie, but his chief problem with Christianity was not natural selection; rather, it was the doctrine of eternal damnation— a reaction, doubtless, to hellfire sermons. He told Asa Gray that it was absurd to doubt that “a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist,” adding, “I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, that agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” 42 But as a result of his researches, God was no longer the only scientific explanation of the universe. Not only was there no scientific proof for God; natural selection had shown that such proof was impossible. If Christians wanted to believe that the evolutionary process was somehow supervised by God—and many did—this would henceforth be a matter of personal choice. Darwin’s discoveries accelerated the already growing tendency to exclude theology from scientific discussion. By the end of the 1860s, most scientists were still Christians, but qua scientists they had stopped talking about God. As the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878) said, scientific truth demanded stringent, physical evidence; it must enable us to “explain, to predict, and in some cases to control the phenomena of nature.” 43 Wholly dependent on concrete, measurable fact, science now rejected any hypothesis that was not based on the human experience of the natural world and could not, therefore, be tested . One of the first people to understand how this would impact natural theology was Charles Hodge, Princeton professor of theology, who wrote the first sustained religious attack on Darwinism in 1874.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  The mode of execution itself was a problem for Paul. According to the book of Deuteronomy, “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” In other words, Jesus, however great a preacher he was, or however many good deeds he did, was under God’s curse, because he was hanged on a tree, had been crucified. That may have been what caused Paul to persecute the Christians. They were claiming something that would have been blasphemous, namely that the person whom God cursed was the one that God held in special favor. Although we aren’t sure whether that’s exactly why Paul persecuted the Christians, it may have been why. And as a good Pharisaic Jew, he obviously persecuted Christians trying to make them recant of their faith. However, something happened to convert Paul, to change him from being the persecutor of the Christian faith to being its greatest apostle. Again, he doesn’t give us as much information as we would like, but he does indicate on a couple of different occasions that he had some kind of visionary experience of Jesus after his death, which convinced him that Jesus had been raised from the dead. He had been persecuting Christians. According to the book of Acts, the way it worked was that he was on the road to Damascus, and Jesus appeared to him in a vision. That may be actually what Paul himself would have said. He doesn’t actually talk about going on the road to Damascus and having this vision of Jesus, but he does talk in two passages about having a visionary experience of Jesus that converted him. Since he saw that Jesus was alive after he knew that Jesus had died, that convinced him that God had raised Jesus from the dead. You find this spelled out especially in Galatians chapter 1, and in | Corinthians chapter 15, where Paul talks about this visionary experience. Once Paul became convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead, that changed everything for him. He had thought that Jesus was God’s cursed, but it turns out that Jesus was the one God had raised from the dead. Paul, as a Pharisee, would already have been an apocalyptic Jew, thinking that he was living at the end of the age, before the resurrection of the dead that would bring in the good kingdom. If he thought that he was living at the end aa of the age, and then he came to think that somebody had been raised from the dead, what would his immediate conclusion be? We must be at the very end. Thus, Paul thought he was living at the end of time. The resurrection had started, and Jesus, as Paul puts it was the “first fruits” of the resurrection, meaning that the rest of the resurrection was going to happen very soon, and that the end of the age was imminent.

• From Educated (2018)

  I hesitated for a moment over the keyboard—struck by a premonition that this was information I might regret knowing—then typed “Ruby Ridge” into the browser. According to Wikipedia, Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly standoff between Randy Weaver and a number of Federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. The name Randy Weaver was familiar, and even as I read it I heard it falling from my father’s lips. Then the story as it had lived in my imagination for thirteen years began replaying in my mind: the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done. I scrolled past the backstory to the first shooting. Federal agents had surrounded the Weaver cabin. The mission was surveillance only, and the Weavers were unaware of the agents until a dog began to bark. Believing the dog had sensed a wild animal, Randy’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, charged into the woods. The agents shot the dog, and Sammy, who was carrying a gun, opened fire. The resulting conflict left two dead: a federal agent and Sammy, who was retreating, running up the hill toward the cabin, when he was shot in the back. I read on. The next day, Randy Weaver was shot, also in the back, while trying to visit his son’s body. The corpse was in the shed, and Randy was lifting the latch on the door, when a sniper took aim at his spine and missed. His wife, Vicki, moved toward the door to help her husband and again the sniper opened fire. The bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly as she held their ten-month-old daughter. For nine days the family huddled in the cabin with their mother’s body, until finally negotiators ended the standoff and Randy Weaver was arrested. I read this last line several times before I understood it. Randy Weaver was alive? Did Dad know? I kept reading. The nation had been outraged. Articles had appeared in nearly every major newspaper blasting the government’s callous disregard for life. The Department of Justice had opened an investigation, and the Senate had held hearings. Both had recommended reforms to the rules of engagement, particularly concerning the use of deadly force. The Weavers had filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million but settled out of court when the government offered Vicki’s three daughters $1 million each. Randy Weaver was awarded $100,000 and all charges, except two related to court appearances, were dropped. Randy Weaver had been interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows. If it was a cover-up, it was a very bad one. There had been media coverage, official inquiries, oversight. Wasn’t that the measure of a democracy?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Did you think, if you wore a silken cock, it meant you never had a cunt at the seam of your drawers?’ Her face was very close to my own; she would not let me turn my eyes from hers. She said: ‘You’re like me: you have shown it, you are showing it now! It is your own sex for which you really hunger! You thought, perhaps, to stifle your own appetites: but you have only made them swell the more! And that is why you won’t raise a row - why you still stay, and be my tart, as I desire.’ She gave my hair a cruel twist. ‘Admit that it is as I say!’ ‘It is!’ For it was, it was! What she said was the truth: she had found out all my secrets; she had shown me to myself. Not just with the fierce words of that moment, but with all - the kisses, the caresses, the fuck on the chair - that had made her say them; and I was glad! I had loved Kitty - I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. Now, this lady had torn it from me - had laid me bare, as surely as if she had ripped the shrieking flesh from my white bones. She pressed against me still; and even as her breath came warm against my cheek, I felt my lusts rise up to meet her own, and knew myself in thrall. After all, there are moments in our lives that change us, that discontent us with our pasts and offer us new futures. That night at the Canterbury Palace, when Kitty had cast her rose at me, and sent my admiration for her tumbling over into love - that had been one such moment. This was another; perhaps, indeed, it had already passed - perhaps it was the second when I was guided into the dark heart of that waiting carriage that was the real start of my new life. Either way, I knew I could not go back to the old one, now. The djinn was out of the bottle at last; and I had settled on pleasure. I never thought to ask what happened to the beggar in the tale, once the five hundred days came to an end. Chapter 13 D iana’s wider circle of friends, I believe, thought our union a fantastic one. I would sometimes see them look between us, then overhear their murmurs - ‘Diana’s caprice,’ they called me, as if I were an enthusiasm for a wonderful food, that a sensitive palate would tire of. Diana herself, however, once having found me, seemed only increasingly disinclined to let me go.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  The reflections between the two of you are that penetrating and widespread. It turns out that you weren’t the only one listening to your new friend’s prom story. Hasson’s team invited ten other people to have their brains scanned while listening to the very same audio-recording of her story that you heard. Whereas you listened attentively to everything she said, others didn’t so much. Those differences showed up clearly when you were each asked to recount her story afterward. By tallying up the matches between her original, impromptu prom story and each listener’s retelling of it, Hasson’s team rank-ordered the whole set of listeners by how well they understood the story. Those differences in comprehension reflect the success or failure of communication—how thoroughly information from her brain was transferred to your brain, and to the brains of the other listeners. Strikingly, Hasson’s team discovered that the degree of success in communication predicted the degree of brain coupling between speaker and listener, and did so in surprising ways. Most of the time, across most brain areas, listeners’ brains mirrored the speaker’s brain after a short time lag, around one to three seconds later. It only makes sense, after all, that the speaker leads this dance, since the story is hers and she chooses her words before you and the others hear them. In other cases, though, this neural pas de deux between speaker and listener showed hardly any lag at all—the respective changes in brain activity were virtually synchronized. Your particular case was different, however. Recall that you were the one who grasped your new friend’s story better than anybody. You hung on every word and picked up every detail of it, even the seemingly inconsequential ones. Your more complete grasp of her story went hand in hand with something truly remarkable: Your brain activity actually anticipated her brain activity by a few seconds in several cortical areas. Excellent communication, it thus seems, doesn’t simply involve following along very closely. It also involves forecasting. Once you were in sync and on the same page with your new friend, enjoying her and her story, you could even anticipate what she’d say next, or how she’d say it. Your brain could anticipate her brain’s next move. Brain coupling, Hasson argues, is the means by which we understand each other. He goes even further to claim that communication—a true meeting of the minds—is a single act, performed by two brains. Considering the positivity resonance of love, what I find most fascinating about these findings is that a key brain area that showed coupling in Hasson’s speaker-listener study was the insula, an area linked with conscious feeling states. Evidence for synchrony in two people’s insulae suggests that in good communication, two individuals come to feel a single, shared emotion as well, one that is distributed across their two brains. Indeed, in other work, Hasson and colleagues have shown that people’s brains come particularly into sync during emotional moments.

• From Educated (2018)

  Women stood, naked or half naked, and chained, while men circled them. The projector clacked. The next image was a photograph, black and white and blurred with age. Faded and overexposed, the image is iconic. In it a man sits, stripped above the waist, exposing for the camera a map of raised, crisscrossing scars. The flesh hardly looks like flesh, from what has been done to it. I saw many more images in the coming weeks. I’d heard of the Great Depression years before when I’d played Annie, but the slides of men in hats and long coats lined up in front of soup kitchens were new to me. When Dr. Kimball lectured on World War II, the screen showed rows of fighter planes interspersed with the skeletal remains of bombed cities. There were faces mixed in—FDR, Hitler, Stalin. Then World War II faded with the lights of the projector. The next time I entered the auditorium there were new faces on the screen and they were black. There hadn’t been a black face on that screen—at least none that I remembered—since the lectures on slavery. I’d forgotten about them, these other Americans who were foreign to me. I had not tried to imagine the end of slavery: surely the call of justice had been heard by all, and the issue had been resolved. This was my state of mind when Dr. Kimball began to lecture on something called the civil rights movement. A date appeared on the screen: 1963. I figured there’d been a mistake. I recalled that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued in 1863. I couldn’t account for that hundred years, so I assumed it was a typo. I copied the date into my notes with a question mark, but as more photographs flashed across the screen, it became clear which century the professor meant. The photos were black and white but their subjects were modern—vibrant, well defined. They were not dry stills from another era; they captured movement. Marches. Police. Firefighters turning hoses on young men. Dr. Kimball recited names I’d never heard. He began with Rosa Parks. An image appeared of a policeman pressing a woman’s finger into an ink sponge. Dr. Kimball said she’d taken a seat on a bus. I understood him as saying she had stolen the seat, although it seemed an odd thing to steal. Her image was replaced by another, of a black boy in a white shirt, tie and round-brimmed hat. I didn’t hear his story. I was still wondering at Rosa Parks, and how someone could steal a bus seat. Then the image was of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, “They pulled his body from the river.” There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew.

• From Educated (2018)

  I listened to it over and over while staring out at the north cloister. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds I scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays I was writing. I wondered about them when I should have been reading. From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one. I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our minds . Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse. “Which ones?” she asked. “All of them.” I said. —I ATTENDED A SEMINAR on Wednesday afternoons, where I noticed two women, Katrina and Sophie, who nearly always sat together. I never spoke to them until one afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, when they asked if I’d like to get a coffee. I’d never “gotten a coffee” before—I’d never even tasted coffee, because it is forbidden by the church—but I followed them across the street and into a café. The cashier was impatient so I chose at random. She passed me a doll-sized cup with a tablespoon of mud-colored liquid in it, and I looked longingly at the foamy mugs Katrina and Sophie carried to our table. They debated concepts from the lecture; I debated whether to drink my coffee. They used complex phrases with ease. Some of them, like “the second wave,” I’d heard before even if I didn’t know what they meant; others, like “the hegemonic masculinity,” I couldn’t get my tongue around let alone my mind. I’d taken several sips of the grainy, acrid fluid before I understood that they were talking about feminism. I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument. It also signaled that I had lost. I left the café and went to the library.

• From Educated (2018)

  So I put it in writing. Then this other story appeared. There was no waiting, it insists. The chopper was called right away. I’d be lying if I said these details are unimportant, that the “big picture” is the same no matter which version you believe. These details matter. Either my father sent Luke down the mountain alone, or he did not; either he left Shawn in the sun with a serious head injury, or he did not. A different father, a different man, is born from those details. I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe, and I was there. I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass. I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father, not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he is there, laying him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock. What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families. When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, our father was not the man we thought he would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both. Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments—thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To believe that should we fall, he would not intervene. We would die first. We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain. Further ReadingSome readers of this book may also find themselves struggling to think through difficult family or personal situations. If that is you, below is a list of books, poems, and lectures that helped me. Perhaps they will help you, too.

• From Educated (2018)

  I had retreated, fled across an ocean and allowed my father to tell my story for me, to define me to everyone I had ever known. I had conceded too much ground—not just the mountain, but the entire province of our shared history. It was time to go home. [image "Chapter 39 Watching the Buffalo" file=Image00041.jpg] It was spring when I arrived in the valley. I drove along the highway to the edge of town, then pulled over at the drop-off overlooking the Bear River. From there I could look out over the basin, a patchwork of expectant fields stretching to Buck’s Peak. The mountain was crisp with evergreens, which were luminous set against the browns and grays of shale and limestone. The Princess was as bright as I’d ever seen her. She stood facing me, the valley between us, radiating permanence. The Princess had been haunting me. From across the ocean I’d heard her beckoning, as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd. Her voice had been gentle at first, coaxing, but when I didn’t answer, when I stayed away, it had turned to fury. I had betrayed her. I imagined her face contorted with rage, her stance heavy and threatening. She had been living in my mind like this for years, a stone deity of contempt. But seeing her now, standing watch over her fields and pastures, I realized that I had misunderstood her. She was not angry with me for leaving, because leaving was a part of her cycle. Her role was not to corral the buffalo, not to gather and confine them by force. It was to celebrate their return. —I BACKTRACKED A QUARTER mile into town and parked beside Grandma-over-in-town’s white picket fence. In my mind it was still her fence, even though she didn’t live here anymore: she had been moved to a hospice facility near Main Street. I had not seen my grandparents in three years, not since my parents had begun telling the extended family that I was possessed. My grandparents loved their daughter. I was sure they had believed her account of me. So I had surrendered them. It was too late to reclaim Grandma—she was suffering from Alzheimer’s and would not have known me—so I had come to see my grandfather, to find out whether there would be a place for me in his life. We sat in the living room; the carpet was the same crisp white from my childhood. The visit was short and polite. He talked about Grandma, whom he had cared for long after she ceased to recognize him. I talked about England. Grandpa mentioned my mother, and when he spoke of her it was with the same look of awe that I had seen in the faces of her followers. I didn’t blame him. From what I’d heard, my parents were powerful people in the valley.