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 Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  I’m vehemently aware that many do not have the time or resources to go after their deepest dreams and are just trying to survive paycheck to paycheck. Time is one of the most lucrative currencies and without it, many of us struggle to get ahead. That’s why when people say celebrities have the same twenty-four hours in the day, it’s a total bogus claim. Sure, we all logically have the same twenty-four hours in a day, but most of us don’t have cooks to make us healthy meals, assistants to take care of extra tasks, and trainers to help us exercise in our personal gyms. Many of us do not have this privilege of time, and how much we get can vary throughout our lives. I know that I have been fortunate to be gifted with time, even though my anxious brain has tried to trample it. I want to make that awareness abundantly clear as I share my experience. It’s not just that I’ve earned things in life because I’m a hard worker—I’ve been granted the time to work hard on the things I’m passionate about in the first place. With this at the forefront, I’ve learned that I no longer need to fall for the belief that I’m not smart and that I need to work hard to earn love. I don’t have to buy into these myths that I’m lazy if I rest and I’m worthless if I’m not accomplished. Neither is true. These are lessons I’m reminding myself of every day. I’m teaching myself that I am intelligent and that my value is not based in my looks or what I do. I’m also learning that I don’t have to constantly perform to feel loved. Maybe you can resonate with this—feeling like you’re only as good as your recent Instagram post. What I’m finding, though, is that a life of obscurity is just as meaningful and beautiful as a life that is more forward- facing. Neither is necessary to find contentment in life. We are more than the number of followers, likes, and reshares that we get. An algorithm does not need to determine how we feel about ourselves. IT’S ALL ABOUT WINNING THE SURFING COMPETITION I doubt I’m alone in struggling with this. I could see Jordan feeling in his own way the weight of expectations himself, although his looked different from mine. I see so many of my clients grappling with this same externalized sense of self- worth. We feel like we need to get into the best schools, date the best potential partners, and get the best job if people are going to give us the time of day—let alone if we are going to give ourselves permission to be happy. With parents who cheered for us proudly when we were winning, we learned at a young age to equate joy and love with advancement.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  After a brief prayer the man opened his Bible and began to read. “O LORD , you have searched me and known me!” he said, his thick accent rolling over the r ’s. “You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar…”2 As these words emerged from his lips, realization sank heavy in me. He’s reading from Psalm 139—are you kidding me? He’s reading from Psalm 139. “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me…”3 I felt myself brace as he spoke. I knew what was coming next. “Where shall I go from your Spirit?” he said. “Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there…” Tears sprang to my eyes. The room grew stiflingly hot. “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me…” I knew that to excuse myself just then would have been inappropriate, even though I really did want to bolt. I felt my throat hitch and my eyes burn as dammed-up tears broke free. Here, halfway around the world, in a microscopic village we’d traveled a full day by prop plane and rickety bus to get to, I heard these familiar words from the mouth of a man whose native language is not English. We loved the same God. How could this God not be real? This man could have read one of the other tens of thousands of passages, but here we were reading the very words—the only words—that were holding up my fragile faith. When Ann said those simple words—“Jennie, this isn’t who you are” —she was right. In my soul I knew it. This wasn’t who I was. I loved God. I was a believer. I trusted Jesus and prized my faith. And God was not going to let go of me. The fears. The doubts. The restlessness. The pain. None of it was who I was. God is real, and I am valuable. My life matters. He is real. I had an enemy, and I’d let him beat me up for too long. I was over it. This was war. Clear Vision Restored After Ann and Esther and I returned home from Uganda, Ann laid out our plan of attack. Part of me felt like a bother to my good friends, but the rest of me was desperate for help. Ann decided that for twenty-four hours the three of us, to stand in solidarity against whomever or whatever had pulled me so deep into the pit of unbelief and doubt, would together pray and fast from all food and drink. No morning smoothie. No Torchy’s Tacos for lunch. No late-afternoon Starbucks—the flat white or the madeleines.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...Florence came home distracted that night, and hardly seemed to notice whether I had hair upon my head or not - though Ralph said, in a hopeful way, ‘Now, there’s a handsome hair-cut!’ She didn’t see me in my moleskins, either: for I had promised myself that, for the sake of the neighbours, I would only wear them to do the housework in; and by the time she came home from Stratford each night, I had changed back into my frock and put an apron on. But then, one day, she came home early. She came home the back way, through the yard behind the kitchen; and I was at the window, cleaning the glass. It was a large window, divided into panes: I had covered the panes with polish, and was wiping them clear, one by one. I was dressed in the moleskin bags and the shirt - I had left the collar off - my sleeves were rolled above my elbows, and my arms were dusty and my fingernails black. My throat was damp at the hollow, and my top lip wet - I paused to wipe it. My hair I had combed flat, but it had shaken itself loose: there was a long front lock which kept tumbling into my eyes, so that I had to push out my lip to blow it back, or swipe at it with my wrist.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Things eased up once we hit the highway, and the taxi dropped us off in front of the embassy, where a pair of smartly dressed Marines nodded in greeting. Inside the courtyard, the clamor of the street was replaced by the steady rhythm of gardening clippers. My mother’s boss was a portly black man with closely cropped hair sprinkled gray at the temples. An American flag draped down in rich folds from the pole beside his desk. He reached out and offered a firm handshake: “How are you, young man?” He smelled of after-shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck. I stood at attention as I answered his questions about the progress of my studies. The air in the office was cool and dry, like the air of mountain peaks: the pure and heady breeze of privilege. Our audience over, my mother sat me down in the library while she went off to do some work. I finished my comic books and the homework my mother had made me bring before climbing out of my chair to browse through the stacks. Most of the books held little interest for a nine-year-old boy—World Bank reports, geological surveys, five-year development plans. But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. I thumbed through the glossy advertisements—Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV (“Why not the best?”) and Campbell’s Soup (“Mm-mm good!”), men in white turtlenecks pouring Seagram’s over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly—and felt vaguely reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading the caption. The photograph of French children dashing over cobblestoned streets: that was a happy scene, a game of hide-and-go-seek after a day of schoolbooks and chores; their laughter spoke of freedom. The photograph of a Japanese woman cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub: that was sad; the girl was sick, her legs twisted, her head fallen back against the mother’s breast, the mother’s face tight with grief, perhaps she blamed herself …. Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Perhaps even as you read my example, it brought a smile to your face. This is just another example of how we can collectively connect and heal when we share our happiness with others. TO THE CHILD WITHIN Even with the ideas of post-traumatic growth and gratitude, this chapter may be heavy for you. And while we may not care to admit it because we minimize our pain or it feels too hard to face, the trauma we experience, especially at a young age (as was the case for Colleen), can shape us. What’s so hard about this particular pain is that it can feel invisible—even to ourselves. We often have no conscious memories of these wounds and yet they mark our bodies and brains nonetheless. I knew this to be true in my own life when I had to acknowledge how the trauma I went through as a child impacted me still as an adult. You’re familiar by now with how I’ve grappled with emetophobia throughout my life. It’s tortured me in a variety of ways as I’ve grown up and yet, all throughout my childhood and even into early adulthood, I never knew why. It wasn’t until I was in my psychodynamic class in graduate school that it dawned on me. It was about my mom. I know, I know. A common therapy trope. But in this case, it was true. When I was about two years old, my mom was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. It turned out she had a lump in her breast before she got pregnant with me, but, even as a nurse, she was repeatedly told she was “crazy” for believing that at thirty-five years old, she could have breast cancer. Finally, after years of her seeing the lump grow, someone believed her. What happened next were years of surgeries, including a mastectomy, hair loss, chemotherapy, and, sure enough, vomiting. As I was a toddler then, I remember none of it. While my conscious memory fails, I’m told that my mom was very sick. I know she tried to shield me from her pain. In fact, I was frequently physically removed from my house to keep me from seeing her so sick. As time marched on, I never pieced together how my mom’s cancer shaped how I showed up in the world. The trauma was so deep that I couldn’t see it—I could only feel it. When you feel something almost all the time, you don’t realize that it may not be “normal.” Panic attacks, anxiety around peers, and seeking an excess amount of control was just part of my daily experience. I was unknowingly living a life of frequent aftershocks when I couldn’t remember what the actual earthquake felt like. And then that one day in class it hit me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At first she answered as I thought an actress should - comfortably, rather teasingly, laughing when I blushed or said a foolish thing. Gradually, however - as if she was stripping the paint from her voice, as well as from her face - her tone grew milder, less pert and pressing. At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl’s: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl’s voice, like my own. Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you. Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,’ she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door. ‘Thank you, Miss Astley,’ she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.’ She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips. I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler’s nose! I felt ready to die of shame. I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret. ‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -’ ‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it. ‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...’ And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Like a lot of humans who get socialized in a religious context, I grew up believing in procreation as the primary purpose of sex. And I grew up thinking that the penis was the center of sex, the necessary component. Even when I began sleeping with people who didn’t have (or want to have) a penis, we would bring the penis in. We might buy one at a store and strap it to our bodies. We might just use the language—“suck my dick, lick the shaft, kiss the tip, come inside me.” Of course, I don’t mind this with transmasculine lovers, but I began to wonder why, when I was with lovers who didn’t identify with a penis in any way, we still felt the need for … a penis. I started intentionally leaving the penis out, seeing how far we could go without it. It was so far! It was further, in many cases, than I’d ever gotten with a real or fake penis. I gained a new respect for the brilliant design of my hands, how I have enough fingers for simultaneous double penetration and clitoral stimulation—and a whole other hand for nipple tweaking or hair pulling and face grabbing or ass gripping. I was also amazed at how erotic and satisfying all the variations on grinding could be, especially the holy grail of tribbing. I talked with gay cis male friends and they shared a similar experience of this phenomenon: an initial approach to the ass as if it were some alternative to a pussy, and then a recognition of the way the male body is actually structured to feel outstanding pleasure through anal stimulation. Of course, anal sex feels good to a lot of women too, even without the precious prostate. And, of course, neither fingering nor tribbing nor anal sex (nor any other kind of sex) are actually gay sex anyway.That whole limited way of thinking is evidence of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the moralistic effort to control what happens in our bedrooms. All of this finally led to a breakthrough—“gay” sex isn’t missing anything, and it isn’t alternative, it’s just been politically attacked. For a long time. Not forever, though—there is so much evidence of gay sex in all cultures from the beginning of time. We are in an era of rejecting the rigidity and lies of authoritarian systems that aim to separate us from listening to the wisdom of our bodies in order to control us. As with so many aspects of pleasure activism, we are remembering our nature and regenerating our relationships to each other in the most natural ways. Are you there, goD? It’s me, DayHoliday Simmons Holiday Simmons is a transmasculine, two-spirit, Black and Indigenous organizer and educator based in Atlanta. Holiday is someone I've watched grow and transition, someone I've known to be open in teaching others as he learns how longing, trauma and gender have shaped him. October 2012

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I was that girl, in the camo miniskirt with the tight pink Jem and the Holograms T-shirt and no bra, short hair in a Spanish anarchist mullet and big boots. Something like Cameron Howe in season one of Halt and Catch Fire, I was that trans hacker activist girl in early transition, and when I realized it was a big deal if I took my clothes off, I did. As I was finishing my MFA in visual art, focusing on networked mixed-reality performance, around 2009, I was committed to becoming an internationally known performance artist. I was fascinated by art movements like cyberfeminism, post-porn, and netporn. With my partner, I created erotic performances online and onscreen, hacking our own electronic devices and coding our avatars to imagine new possibilities for pleasure, sexuality, and gender. I recall reading Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” for the first time, years ago, and rejecting her claim that “to refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” I refused to see the pornographic as negative. I was deep in denial. Now I feel the depth and truth of her claims in my own life. Lorde describes the power of erotic not only in the connection between any two people but also in so many more experiences, saying “the erotic connection … is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response.”78 Her description of the erotic as a source of power, which can be distorted or misused, resonates with my experience. In my 2010 essay “Trans Desire,” published with Barbara Fornssler’s essay “Affective Cyborgs” in the book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, I made an argument that I no longer agree with.79 I argued that do-it-yourself (DIY) queer porn could be a form of liberatory, biopolitical world-building. I argued that desire could be a central guide for political struggle, particularly for trans politics, in which there is no logical way to decide to transition one’s gender, given the danger of doing so and the unknowability of the outcomes. After going through medical, emotional, and spiritual transition, I feel differently now. My gender transition took almost ten years, and I understand my art practice as an important process of experimentation that led me to where I am today. Still, now I see how much of the erotic art that I did in the beginning of my career was a way to unconsciously re-create traumatic experiences I had as a young child and primarily about seeking approval and validation. The behavior was reinforced by being rewarded with attention as a performance artist.

• 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 Art of Memoir

  Many of the truths a memoirist starts out believing morph into something wholly other. Again: anybody maladroit at apology or changing her mind just isn’t bent for the fluid psychological state that makes truth discoverable. You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate- type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. Geoffrey Wolff claimed he, over the years, inadvertently shaped his old man into a more dashing, gangsteresque figure than he’d been: It had always been convenient to see my father in melodramatic terms, as extraordinarily seedy or criminal. But the things I’d dined out on weren’t emotionally accurate. Before writing his Vietnam memoir, Tobias Wolff discovered that the letters he’d sent his mother—which he’d remembered as soft- focus, composed to shield her from fret—actually ramped up the danger he’d faced. When Gary Shteyngart worked on his mesmerizing Little Failure, he came to realize what a dutiful son he’d in fact always been. Family lore held he was an ingrate and a bounder who cost his parents no end of misery. Of course, revelations come to anybody who prods around in the past, memoirist or not. Ten years before my first book, I confronted my mother about why Daddy, who’d stoically tolerated her tantrums and wagging firearms at him, had stayed with her. She’d said, “He felt sorry for me.” The instant she said it, I knew it for truth, and yet it overturned a lifetime of believing she’d held all the power in their marriage. His silence hadn’t been helplessness—it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity. Mostly we get in trouble when we start trying to unpack those sound bites I mentioned. Ideas that hold decades of interpretation can lie to us worst of all: I was tough, I was beleaguered, I was

• From My People (2022)

  What effect the change on Malcolm X’s status, like all of the other sweeping policy changes being made, will have on the ranks of Muslims is impossible to assess at this time. Minister Farrakhan said that with the naming of the temple for him Malcolm’s “place in the history of Islam is assumed.” He added: “It forces the community to deal with it and think about it and assess this man unemotionally. It stimulates growth and development.” Columbia’s Overdue Apology to Langston HughesThe New Yorker DECEMBER 22, 1967 On a miserably wet evening seven months after the death of Langston Hughes, we sat, almost comfortably (except for our damp feet), in the cavernous Wollman Auditorium, at Columbia University, and listened to the low, bemused voice of Hughes on tape as, against a taped musical background, it sent his “Weary Blues” floating over a group of people who had assembled to pay tribute to him. The program, “A Langston Hughes Memorial Evening,” was sponsored by the Forum, which is, in the words of its nineteen-year-old president, Bruce Kanze, “a student organization that brings to the university interesting people whom the university itself would never consider bringing, to discuss issues and topics that are important.” A few minutes after eight, when nearly every seat was filled, three men walked onto the stage: Leon Bibb, the actor and singer; Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age ; and Professor James P. Shenton, of Columbia. (“He teaches a course on Reconstruction—the closest thing to a course on Negro history at Columbia,” Mr. Kanze told us later.) They were soon joined by Miss Viveca Lindfors, the actress, who was wearing a pale-gray fur coat but removed it as she was sitting down, and gracefully placed it over her mini-exposed knees. Professor Shenton, who had to leave early, was introduced, and hurried to the microphone. “I am here partly as a way of saying for Columbia that we owe some apologies,” he said solemnly. “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, and Columbia never took the time to find out what he was about.” The professor paused for a few seconds, and then continued, “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, who even attended Columbia for a while, and yet he never received an honorary degree from here. When we buried him, then we gave him a memorial. But, after all, that’s the experience of the black man down the street from Columbia.” Professor Shenton left the platform, and Mr. Kozol, a slim young man wearing rimless glasses, came to the microphone. In 1965, he was discharged from a ghetto school in Boston, in part because he read Langston Hughes’ poem “Ballad of the Landlord” to his class: Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week? Landlord, landlord, These steps is broken down.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  It is not until the spring of 1993, and having suffered a nervous breakdown in the meantime, that Austerlitz has another visionary experience, this time in a Bloomsbury bookshop. The bookseller is listening to the radio, which features two women discussing the summer of 1939, when, as children, they had come on the ferry Prague to England, as part of the Kindertransport: “only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well,” Austerlitz tells the narrator. The mere mention of the name “Prague” impels Austerlitz to the Czech capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny, Vera RySanova, and uncovers the stories of his parents’ abbreviated lives. His father, Maximilian Aychenwald, escaped the Nazis in Prague by leaving for Paris; but, we learn at the end of the book, he was eventually captured and interned in late 1942, in the French camp of Gurs, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His mother, Agata Austerlitz, stayed on in Prague, insouciantly confident of her prospects, but was rounded up and sent to the Terezin ghetto (better known by its German name of Theresienstadt) in December 1942. Of the final destination of Maximilian and Agata we are not told, but can easily infer the worst: Vera tells us only that Agata was “sent east” from Terezin, in September 1944. This short recital, poignant though its content is, represents a kind of vandalism to Sebald’s beautiful novel, and I offer it only in the spirit of orientation. It leaves out, most importantly, all the ways in which Sebald contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a broken, recessed enigma, whose meaning the reader must impossibly rescue. Though Austerlitz, and hence the reader too, is involved in a journey of detection, the book really represents the deliberate frustration of detection, the perpetuation of an enigma. By the end of the novel, we certainly know a great deal about Jacques Austerlitz—about the tragic turns of his life, his family background, about his obsessions and anxieties and breakdowns—but it can’t be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to quit the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it. Sebald deliberately layers and recesses his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to. He tells his story to the narrator, who then tells his story to us, thus producing the book’s distinctive repetitive tagging, a kind of parody of the source-attribution we encounter in a newspaper: almost every page has a “said Austerlitz” on it, and sometimes the layers of narration are thicker still, as

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Re-Imagining Reality: Seeing Things in a New WayHannah Arendt is one of many philosophers to note that thinking has often been thought of in terms of seeing. Recent studies have suggested that the human ability to see things in a new way is important to our evolutionary development, allowing us to solve problems through imagining alternative ways of thinking or acting.12 The western scientific, religious, philosophical and literary tradition draws extensively on our experience of sight and vision for its metaphors of truth and meaning.13 As we saw earlier, the modern term ‘theory’ derives from the Greek theōria, which means ‘beholding’. The writer Henry Miller, reflecting on the development of his own thought as he wandered through exotic landscapes, once remarked that he found his destination was ‘never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’14 Miller’s comment points to the fact that we inherit or acquire, often without realising it, certain ways of ‘seeing’ the world which we treat as fixed or self-evidently true. Philosophers of science speak of ‘theory-laden observation’, meaning that what we think is a ‘natural’ understanding of the world is often informed and to some extent predetermined by an assumed or presupposed theory.15 Scientific advance often proceeds by demolishing these assumptions, and replacing them with something more reliable. The first step in theoretical development is to identify our inherited or assumed theories, and subject them to critical examination. Ideological enforcement, however, proceeds by imposing a ‘sound’ or ‘rational’ map that invalidates others, and allows us to see only what the ideologues want us to see, normalising what would once have been seen as strange and perplexing. Theories can too easily prevent us from seeing things fully, by declaring that only the deluded and irrational ‘see’ certain things, which wiser and more theoretically informed individuals know cannot exist, and thus discount any suggestion that they should be taken seriously. This crass intellectual condescension is perhaps an inevitable outcome of modernity’s highly restrictive account of human rationality. We are only allowed to see what our theoretical precommitments permit – what our theoretical maps tell us. The economist E. F. Schumacher highlighted this in his final work, reflecting on how his education constricted his grasp and appreciation of reality. ‘All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance for the conduct of my life.’ His moment of liberation arrived when he realised the solution to this impoverishment. ‘I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’16

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  After it, the earth was a planet, like Mars and Jupiter; the sun was a star; and the moon was a new sort of body, a satellite.’ 20 Kuhn’s point is that the phenomena were unchanged; they were, however, seen in a new way. What was physically seen did not change; the change took place within the mind of the observer, who interpreted what was seen in the light of this theory. A pre-Copernican observer might ‘see’ the sun rise and set; a post-Copernican would, however, ‘see’ the earth turning on its axis, leading to the apparent motion of the sun across the heavens. Religion: The Role of Conversion Many consider religious conversions to be one the most striking examples of how a new set of beliefs changes the way people see themselves and their world, often reflecting a growing disillusionment or dissatisfaction with an existing way of thinking that is found to be inadequate and unsatisfying. Consider the case of Paul Kalanithi (1977–2015), a promising Stanford neurosurgeon who died of metastatic lung cancer at the age of thirty-seven, before he was able to practice as a fully qualified surgeon. His bestseller When Breath Becomes Air , written during his advanced illness and published posthumously, tells how he became a neurosurgeon because he wanted to learn about ‘what really matters in life’ – only to discover that science failed to engage, and could not engage, the deep and urgent existential questions that mattered to him, and which became increasingly important as his illness progressed. Science, Kalanithi concluded, might ‘provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so must be set against its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life.’ 21 This is no criticism of science; it is rather a penetrating diagnosis of what humans need, which lay behind Kalanithi’s reappraisal of the importance of literature (especially Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot) in reflecting on meaning, and Christianity in providing it. His rediscovery of Christianity reflected his realisation of its capacity to engage these ‘ultimate questions’ in a time of crisis and need. Kalanithi’s moving narrative of reflection on how we cope with trauma and uncertainty also illuminates an issue that is of recurring importance to thinking about belief. How can we live on the basis of beliefs, when we crave certainties? Kalanithi found himself drawn to seven words of Samuel Beckett: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ 22 We are caught in the insoluble enigma of the human situation. We can’t reason our way to infallible truths that are existentially meaningful – but we can’t live fully and authentically without such beliefs. Intellectually, we feel we can’t go on; existentially, we know we have to go on. Kalanithi found that his reaffirmation of a once-rejected Christianity gave him a new lens through which he could see his own situation.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I wept and wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. And the tribe of cartoonists. And the tribe of chronic masturbators. And the tribe of teenage boys. And the tribe of small-town kids. And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners. And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers. And the tribe of poverty. And the tribe of funeral-goers. And the tribe of beloved sons. And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends. It was a huge realization. And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay. But it also reminded me of the people who were not going to be okay. It made me think of Rowdy. I missed him so much. I wanted to find him and hug him and beg him to forgive me for leaving. [image "An illustration of two boys holding hands while jumping into a body of water. Text reads, ‘Boys can hold hands until they turn nine. Rowdy and me in third grade, jumping into Turtle Lake.’" file=image_rsrc4TE.jpg] Talking About Turtles [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] The reservation is beautiful. I mean it. Take a look. There are pine trees everywhere. Thousands of ponderosa pine trees. Millions. I guess maybe you can take pine trees for granted. They’re just pine trees. But they’re tall and thin and green and brown and big. Some of the pines are ninety feet tall and more than three hundred years old. Older than the United States. Some of them were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president. Some of them were alive when George Washington was president. Some of them were alive when Benjamin Franklin was born. I’m talking old. I’ve probably climbed, like, one hundred different trees in my lifetime. There are twelve in my backyard. Another fifty or sixty in the small stand of woods across the field. And another twenty or thirty around our little town. And a few way out in the deep woods. And that tall monster that sits beside the highway to West End, past Turtle Lake. That one is way over one hundred feet tall. It might be one hundred and fifty feet tall. You could build a house using just the wood from that tree. When we were little, like ten years old, Rowdy and I climbed that sucker.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  John the Evangelist indeed takes the trouble to interrupt the majestic cadences of his opening Gospel hymn to let us know with a certain banality that the Baptist was ‘not the light, but came to bear witness to the light’ (John 1.8). [4] The movements may have started out in rivalry before their ostentatious reconciliation through Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan. Jesus did not leave any clear line of development for baptism, and John the Evangelist further claims that the Lord did not himself perform the rite, leaving it to his disciples (John 4.2). This directly contrasts with Jesus’s direct institution of the breaking of bread and distributing of wine in the ‘Eucharist’ (from the Greek for ‘thanksgiving’), around which Christian life has been organized ever since. The institution of the Eucharist is one of the few parts of Jesus’s teaching or practice that Paul thinks fit to record (1 Cor. 11.23–25), in a fashion later echoed by the Synoptic Gospels. By contrast, it is Paul who dwells on and spells out the crucial nature of baptism: ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ’ (Gal. 3.27). More than that, he goes on to say that ‘in Christ’ (that is, among those that are baptized in the name of Christ), ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek…neither slave nor free…neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3.28). There is much to be read out of this profound statement about the relation of Saviour to believer, but, at one level, it is a startlingly simple statement of fact. [5] The basis of identity for the people of God has been overturned. Instead of the Covenant in the Hebrew Scripture witnessed by an outward sign of mutilation to male genitalia, the act of initiation for a Christian is a washing in water, baptism, which can make a full Christian out of a woman just as much as it does a man. Jesus himself said nothing that has survived about circumcision, positive or negative; he may well have taken it for granted in traditional Judaistic fashion. We first hear this fundamental change discussed by Paul, without any word from the Lord. In Acts (Ch. 15), a definitive rejection of circumcision for Gentile (non-Jewish) converts to Christianity is presented as being confirmed in Jerusalem through debate and a general

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The miserable thing was hideous to look upon; Monsieur de Corville orders that she be borne away.... "No," says Madame de Lorsange, getting to her feet with the utmost calm; "no, leave her here before my eyes, Monsieur, I have got to contemplate her in order to be confirmed in the resolves I have just taken. Listen to me, Corville, and above all do not oppose the decision I am adopting; for the present, nothing in the world could swerve my designs. "The unheard of sufferings this luckless creature has experienced although she has always respected her duties, have something about them which is too extraordinary for me not to open my eyes upon my own self; think not I am blinded by that false-gleaming felicity which, in the course of Therese's adventures, we have seen enjoyed by the villains who battened upon her. These caprices of Heaven's hand are enigmas it is not for us to sound, but which ought never seduce us. O thou my friend! The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal to which Providence would expose Virtue, it is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies but for an instant embellish the atmosphere, in order to hurl into death's very deeps the luckless one they have dazzled. And there, before our eyes, is the example of it; that charming girl's incredible calamities, her terrifying reversals and uninterrupted disasters are a warning issued me by the Eternal, Who would that I heed the voice of mine guilt and cast myself into His arms. Ah, what must be the punishment I have got to fear from Him, I, whose libertinage, irreligion, and abandon of every principle have stamped every instant of my life I What must I not expect if 'tis thus He has treated her who in all her days had not a single sin whereof to repent I Let us separate, Corville, the time has come, no chain binds us one to the other, forget me, and approve that I go and by an eternal penance abjure, at the Supreme Being's feet, the infamies wherewith I am soiled absolutely. That appalling stroke was necessary to my conversion in this life, it was needed for the happiness I dare hope for in another.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: In a lot of ways, I think I created the idealized version of me. A lot of wish fulfillment on who I wish I would have been back then, or maybe looking back, decisions I would have made or ways I would have acted. I could have been a better person, slightly better. And also in writing the other characters, I blended people, I took real aspects of certain people and blended them into a fictional stew and created these other characters. It’s realistic and people are racist and classist and sexist and mean and funny and kind. And I think because I wrote with specific people in mind, it was easier to create a real world or a fictional world that felt real. JW: Has the response in that real world been different than to your other books? SA: You know, I never really heard much from Reardan. I mean, there’s a real Gordy—Gordy the white boy genius in the book—there’s a real character he’s based on. He had a different name in the early drafts; I think I called him Henry? JW: Oh, and it just never felt right, I guess. SA: No, and I sent the manuscript to the real Gordy, and he said, “Yeah, this is good, but why are you calling him Henry? Call him Gordy.” So he wanted his real name in the book. To this day I think he’s the only real person I’ve seen at a reading of True Diary. He lives in Arizona and I gave a reading in Arizona, and I knew he was coming, but I didn’t have a cell phone back then so I had no contact with him, and I was reading the book and I decided to read that chapter—even though I hadn’t seen him yet—where Gordy teaches Arnold about books and boners and how to read and the importance of education.…That’s also an interesting thing to write in the book, that positive idea of education. I think that was quietly revolutionary for a Native American character. JW: It really is a quest to have the best education you can get.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics. Ashoka had discovered this even earlier than the Shii Imams when he promoted his compassionate dharma but could not disband his army. At best, people of faith can either bear witness to these values, as Khomeini did when he castigated the injustice of the Pahlavi regime in the 1960s, or provide an alternative that either challenges or seeks to mitigate state violence. But as we have seen throughout this story, even the most humanitarian traditions are unable to implement their ideals if they identify with a state ideology that inevitably depends upon force. Khomeini believed that the revolution had been a rebellion against the rational pragmatism of the modern world. The goal of his theory of velayat-e faqih was to institutionalize Shii values: the supreme jurist (faqih) and the ulema on the Council of Guardians would have the power to veto any legislation that violated the principles of Islamic justice.104 But in practice, Khomeini would often have to reprove the guardians for playing selfish power games, just as he himself had felt compelled to pursue a cynical realpolitik during the hostage crisis. We have seen that revolutions can take a long time, and like the French Revolution, the Iranian Revolution has passed through many stages and is still in progress. As in France, Iranians feared that powerful external enemies would destroy the Islamic regime. In the summer of 1983 the Iraqis attacked Iranian troops with mustard gas and then with nerve gas the following year.105 Khomeini was convinced that America would organize a coup similar to the one that had deposed Musaddiq in 1953. Because Iran had antagonized the West, she had forfeited essential equipment, spare parts, and technical advice; inflation was high, and by 1982 unemployment had risen to 30 percent of the general population and 50 percent in the cities.106 The poor, whose plight Khomeini had championed, were not doing much better under the revolution. Yet Western observers had to acknowledge that, despite the growing opposition of Westernized Iranians, Khomeini never lost the love of the masses, especially the bazaaris, the madrassa students, the less-eminent ulema, and the poor.107 These people, whom the shah’s modernization program had overlooked, still thought and spoke in a traditionally religious, premodern way that many Westerners could not even comprehend.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It’s as if it were there all along and I just needed the right sleep to access the answer. I am on my feet in an instant, running to the trapdoor barefoot and dropping from the ladder before I reach the last rung. I take the stairs two at a time and come to a halt in the doorway of the kitchen. Isaac is sitting at the table, his head in his hands. His hair is spiked up like he’s been running his fingers through it all night. I eye his knee bouncing beneath the table at jackrabbit speed. He’s going through a kidnapped version of the seven stages of grief. By the look of his bloodshot eyes, I’d say he was well into Acceptance. “Isaac.” He looks up. Despite my need to know what he is feeling, I avert my eyes. I lost my privilege to his thoughts long ago. My feet are freezing, I wish I’d put on socks. I walk to the window, and point at the snow. “The windows in this house,” I say, “they all face the same direction.” The fog in his eyes seems to clear a little. He pushes back from the table and comes to stand beside me. “Yeah…” he says. Of course he knew that too. Just because I was in a haze didn’t mean that he was. He has more hair on his face than I have ever seen on him. I direct my eyes away from him, and we look at the snow together. We are so close I could extend a pinkie and touch his hand. “What’s behind the house?” he asks. There is some silence between us before I say, “The generator…” “Do you think…?” “Yeah, I do.” We look at each other. I have goose pimples along my arms. “He can refuel it,” I say. “I think that as long as we stay put, he will refill the generator. If we figure out the code and get out, we will lose power and freeze.” He thinks long and hard about this. It sounds right. To me, at least. “Why?” asks Isaac. “Why would you think that?” “It’s in the Bible,” I say, and then automatically flinch. “You’re going to have to break this one down for me, Senna,” he says, frowning. His voice is terse. He’s losing patience with me, which isn’t really fair since we are both sinking in the same ship. “Have you seen the picture hanging next to the door?” He nods. Of course. How could he miss it? There are seven prints hanging on the walls of this house. When you spend six weeks locked up somewhere, you spend a lot of time examining the art on the walls. “It’s a painting by F. Cayley. It’s supposed to be of Adam and Eve when they find out they have to leave Eden.”