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 Henry and June (1986)

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

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

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

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

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

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “ For Mom and Dad ,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “ Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q .” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working . So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood. How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen? Did I not read the poem she brought home that year from the school on the steep hill? The school to which she wore the plaid uniform jumper and carried the blue lunchbox? The school to which John watched her walk every morning and thought it was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen? “The World,” this poem is called, and I recognize her careful printing, quixotically executed on a narrow strip of construction paper fourteen inches long but only two inches wide.

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

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

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I feel like a second chance, for true! I’m making myself a new office upstairs in Jonathan’s old room. It’s going to be a good year. October 10, 1984 New York City I’ve been thinking about my time in Germany again, unencumbered by artificial shades of terror and self-concern. I don’t want my involvement with health matters to obscure the revelation of differences I encountered. The Afro-European women. What I learned about the differences when one teaches about feeling and poetry in a language that is not the original language of the people learning, even when they speak that language fluently. (Of course, all poets learn about feeling as children in our native tongue, and the psychosocial strictures and emotional biases of that language pass over into how we think about feeling for the rest of our lives.) I will never forget the emotional impact of Raja’s poetry, and how what she is doing with the German language is so close to what Black poets here are doing with English. It was another example of how our Africanness impacts upon the world’s consciousness in intersecting ways. As an African-American woman, I feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in america, of having no land to be our primary teacher. And this distorts us in so many ways. Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black americans. And whatever our differences are that make for difficulty in communication between us and other oppressed peoples, as Afro-Americans we must recognize the promise we represent for some new social synthesis that the world has not yet experienced. I think of the Afro-Dutch, Afro-German, Afro-French women I met this spring in europe, and how they are beginning to recognize each other and come together openly in terms of their identities, and I see that they are also beginning to cut a distinct shape across the cultural face of every country where they are at home. I am thinking about issues of color as color, Black as a chromatic fact, gradations and all. There is the reality of defining Black as a geographical fact of culture and heritage emanating from the continent of Africa—Black meaning Africans and other members of a diaspora, with or without color. Then there is a quite different reality of defining Black as a political position, acknowledging that color is the bottom line the world over, no matter how many other issues exist alongside it. Within this definition, Black becomes a codeword, a rallying identity for all oppressed people of Color. And this position reflects the empowerment and the worldwide militant legacy of our Black Revolution of the 1960s, the effects of which are sometimes more obvious in other countries than in our own. I see certain pitfalls in defining Black as a political position.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I suspect I shall have to concentrate upon how painful it is to think about death all the time. [In the spring of 1984, I spent three months in Berlin conducting a course in Black american women poets and a poetry workshop in English for German students. One of my aims for this trip was to meet Black German women. I’d been told there were quite a few in Berlin, but I had been unable to obtain much information about them in New York.] May 23, 1984 Berlin, West Germany Who are they, the German women of the diaspora? Where do our paths intersect as women of Color—beyond the details of our particular oppressions, although certainly not outside the reference of those details? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both, Afro-German and Afro-American? Afro-German. The women say they’ve never heard that term used before. I asked one of my Black students how she’d thought about herself growing up. “The nicest thing they ever called us was ‘warbaby,’” she said. But the existence of most Black Germans has nothing to do with the Second World War, and, in fact, predates it by many decades. I have Black German women in my class who trace their Afro-German heritage back to the 1890s. For me, Afro-German means the shining faces of Katharina and May in animated conversation about their fathers’ homelands, the comparisons, joys, disappointments. It means my pleasure at seeing another Black woman walk into my classroom, her reticence slowly giving way as she explores a new self-awareness, gains a new way of thinking about herself in relation to other Black women. “I’ve never thought of Afro-German as a positive concept before,” she said, speaking out of the pain of having to live a difference that has no name, speaking out of the growing power self-scrutiny has forged from that difference. I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longing.” I can see these women as a growing force for international change, in concert with other Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, Afro-Americans. We are the hyphenated people of the diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origin, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard. June 1, 1984 Berlin My classes are exciting and exhausting. Black women are hearing about them and their number is increasing. I can’t eat cooked food and I am getting sicker. My liver is so swollen I can feel it under my ribs. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

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

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

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

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  – And with this question the night fell before his eyes again. He saw, he didn't know or understand anything anymore and let himself sink deeper into the pillows, completely blinded and exhausted by the bit of truth he had just been allowed to see. And he lay still and waited fervently, tempted to pray that it might come once more and enlighten him. And it came. With folded hands, not daring to move, he lay and was allowed to look... what was death The answer did not appear to him in poor and self-important words: he felt it, he possessed it inwardly. Death was a happiness so deep that it could only be fully appreciated in blessed moments like this one. It was the return of an unspeakably embarrassing mistake, the correction of one serious mistake, the liberation from the most adverse ties and barriers - a deplorable misfortune he made good again. end and resolution? Thrice merciful to anyone who felt these vain concepts to terrify! What would end and what would dissolve? This body of his... This personality and individuality of his, this clumsy, stubborn, flawed and hateful obstacle to being something different and better ! Wasn't every human being a blunder and misstep? Did he not end up in a painful prison as soon as he was born? Prison! Prison! Barriers and ties everywhere! Through the lattice windows of his individuality man stares hopelessly at the curtain walls of external circumstances until death comes and calls him home and freedom... Individuality!... Ah, what one is, can and has seems poor, grey, inadequate and boring; but what one is not, cannot and does not have, that is precisely what one looks at with that longing envy that becomes love because it is afraid of becoming hate. I carry within me the seed, the seed, the potential for all the skills and activities in the world... Where could I be if I weren't here! Who, what, how could I be if I were not me, if this my personal appearance did not shut me off and separate my consciousness from that of all those who are not me! Organism! Blind, thoughtless, regrettable eruption of the urgent will! Better, truly, this will weaves freely in the spaceless and timeless night than languishes in a dungeon poorly lit by the quivering and swaying little flame of the intellect! In my son did I hope to live on? In an even more anxious, weaker, more vacillating personality? Childish, deluded folly! What's a son to me? I don't need a son!... Where will I be when I'm dead? But it's so brilliantly clear, so overwhelmingly simple! I will be in all those who have said, say and say I over and over again become: but especially in those who say it fuller, stronger, happier ...

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The day after the consul's severe agony, the senator, at the table and, as it seemed, studiously in the presence of his son, condemned his wife with a few harsh words for the behavior of uncle Christian, who, when the patient was at its worst, slipped away and went to bed. "It's the nerves, Thomas," Gerda had answered; but with a look at Hanno, which the child had by no means escaped, he replied in an almost stern tone that no word of apology was appropriate here. The blessed mother suffered so much that one should have been ashamed cowardly to withdraw the little suffering that the sight of their struggles would have caused in one. From this Hanno had concluded that he dare not object to the visit to the open coffin. As at Christmas, the large room was alien to him when he entered it from the columned hall on the day before the funeral between father and mother. Straight ahead, glowing white against the dark green of large potted plants forming a semicircle, alternating with tall silver candelabra, on a black pedestal stood the copy of Thorwaldsen's Blessing Christ, which had been placed outside in the corridor. Everywhere on the walls a black pile moved in the breeze and hid the sky-blue of the wallpaper as well as the smiles of the white statues of gods who had looked on when people happily dined in this hall. And surrounded by his relatives dressed all in black, the broad crape around the sleeve of his sailor suit, his mind befogged by the scents, This wasn't grandma. It was her society cap with the white silk ribbons and her reddish-brown parting underneath. But that pointed nose, those drawn-in lips, that protruding chin, those yellow, transparent, clasped hands that looked cold and stiff, didn't belong to her. This was a strange wax doll, and there was something horrible about building and celebrating in this way. And he looked across at the landscape room as if the real grandmother was about to appear there in a moment... But she didn't come. She was dead. Death had exchanged her forever for this waxy figure, which kept its lids and lips shut so relentlessly, so unapproachably tight... He stood, resting on his left leg, his right knee bent so that his foot balanced lightly on the point, and one hand grasped the sailor's knot on his chest while the other hung limp. His head, with his light brown hair falling in curls at his temples, was tilted to one side, and his golden-brown eyes, surrounded by bluish shadows, squinted from under knitted brows, with a repelled and brooding expression into the face of the corpse. He breathed slowly and hesitantly, for with each breath he expected the scent, that strange and yet so strangely familiar scent that the clouds of floral scents could not always drown out.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  His face, with the light eyebrows, one of which was raised a little, seemed serious and attentive in these occupations; but his thoughts went far away in the dark, their own toilsome paths. Sometimes he would sit down on the small terrace in the pavilion, which was completely covered with vine leaves, and look without seeing anything across the garden to the red back wall of his house. The air was warm and sweet, and it was as if the peaceful sounds around him were soothing and trying to lull him. Tired of staring into emptiness, of loneliness and silence, he now and then closed his eyes, only to get up again and hastily shoo the peace away from him. I have to think, he said almost aloud... I have to put everything in order before it's too late... But here it was, in this pavilion, in the little yellow cane rocking chair, where one day he read for four full hours with increasing emotion a book that he had half looked for, half accidentally got hold of... After the second breakfast, with the cigarette in his mouth, he had found it in the smoking room, in a deep corner of the bookcase, hidden behind stately volumes, and remembered that a year ago he had bought it carelessly at a book dealer at a bargain price: a fairly large one, up A work poorly printed and stitched on thin yellowish paper, the second part of only a famous metaphysical system... He had taken it with him into the garden and now, in deep absorption, turned page after page... An unknown, great and grateful satisfaction filled him. He felt the incomparable satisfaction of seeing how a vastly superior brain took hold of life, this life so strong, cruel and scornful, in order to subdue and condemn it... the satisfaction of the sufferer, of the cold and harshness of life constantly kept his suffering hidden with shame and a bad conscience and suddenly received from the hands of a great and wise man the fundamental and solemn right to suffer in the world - this best of all imaginable worlds, which was proved with playful scorn to be the worst of all conceivable. He didn't understand everything; Principles and assumptions remained unclear to him, and his mind, untrained in such reading, was able not to follow certain trains of thought. But it was precisely the alternation of light and darkness, of dull incomprehension, vague foreboding and sudden clairvoyance, that kept him in suspense, and the hours passed without him looking up from his book or even changing his position in his chair. At first he had left many a page unread and, progressing rapidly, unconsciously and hastily, longing for the main thing, for what was really important, he only made this or that passage his own that fascinated him.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  [image "9780785263708_0195_002" file=Image00074.jpg] The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. [image "9780785263708_0195_004" file=Image00075.jpg] God brought me to Graceland to rid me of this deception, to scrub it out of the gray matter of my mind. It was a frustrating and painful experience. I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction. [image "9780785263708_0195_007" file=Image00076.jpg] In the spring of my year at Graceland, when the ground was beginning to dry at Laurelhurst Park, a friend and I traveled to Salem to hear Brennan Manning speak. Manning is a former Catholic priest and a wonderful writer who has struggled with alcoholism and speaks frankly about matters of Christian spirituality. We sat so close I could see the blue in Brennan’s eyes and that quality of sincerity you find in people who have turned trial into service. Brennan grew up in New York and speaks with a slight East Coast bite that has been sanded down by years of smoking. An ear has to work a bit to keep his pace. He opened his talk with the story of Zacchaeus. Brennan talked about how an entire town, with their ridicule and hatred, could not keep the little man from oppressing them through the extravagant financial gains he made as a tax collector. Christ walked through town, Brennan said, and spotted the man. Christ told Zacchaeus that He would like to have a meal with him. In the single conversation Christ had with Zacchaeus, Brennan reminded us, Jesus spoke affirmation and love, and the tax collector sold his possessions and made amends to those he had robbed. It was the affection of Christ, not the brutality of a town, that healed Zacchaeus. Manning went on to speak of the great danger of a harsh word, the power of unlove to deteriorate a person’s heart and spirit, and how, as representatives of the grace and love of God, our communication should be seasoned with love and compassion. While Manning was speaking, I was being shown myself, and I felt like God was asking me to change. I was being asked to walk away from the lies I believed about the world being about me. I had been communicating unlove to my housemates because I thought they were not cooperating with the meaning of life, that meaning being my desire and will and choice and comfort. There was nothing fun about going home that night. I went with new eyes, seeing my housemates as people.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn’t receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn’t feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn’t make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right. It wasn’t manly or healthy, and I cut it out. That was about a year ago, and since then I have been relatively happy. I am not kidding. I don’t sit around and talk bad about myself anymore. The girl and I got back together, and she could sense the difference in me, and she liked it, and I felt that I was operating a completely new machine. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was to receive love, to have the authority to love myself, to feel that it was right to love myself. When my girlfriend told me how she felt, I was able to receive it, and we had this normal relationship that in the end didn’t work because we realized we weren’t for each other. When we finally closed it out, it didn’t hurt because I trusted that God had something else for me, and if He didn’t, it didn’t mean He didn’t love me. From that point on, the point in the bathroom, I had confidence. Odd but true. [image "9780785263708_0245_002" file=Image00091.jpg] And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it. 20 Jesus The Lines on His Face A GUY I KNOW NAMED ALAN WENT AROUND THE country asking ministry leaders questions.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The heart responds to conflict within story, I began to think, because there is some great conflict in the universe with which we are interacting, even if it is only in the subconscious. If we were not experiencing some sort of conflict in our lives, our hearts would have no response to conflict in books or film. The idea of conflict, of having tension, suspense, or an enemy, would make no sense to us. But these things do make sense. We understand these elements because we experience them. As much as I did not want to admit it, Christian spirituality explained why. And then the element of story known as climax. Every good story has a climax. Climax is where a point of decision determines the end of the story. Now this was starting to scare me a little bit. If the human heart uses the tools of reality to create elements of story, and the human heart responds to climax in the structure of story, this means that climax, or point of decision, could very well be something that exists in the universe. What I mean is that there is a decision the human heart needs to make. The elements of story began to parallel my understanding of Christian spirituality. Christianity offered a decision, a climax. It also offered a good and a bad resolution. In part, our decisions were instrumental to the way our story turned out. Now this was spooky because for thousands of years big-haired preachers have talked about the idea that we need to make a decision, to follow or reject Christ. They would offer these ideas as a sort of magical solution to the dilemma of life. I had always hated hearing about it because it seemed so entirely unfashionable a thing to believe, but it did explain things. Maybe these unfashionable ideas were pointing at something mystical and true. And, perhaps, I was judging the idea, not by its merit, but by the fashionable or unfashionable delivery of the message. [image "9780785263708_0046_003" file=Image00010.jpg] A long time ago I went to a concert with my friend Rebecca. Rebecca can sing better than anybody I’ve ever heard sing. I heard this folksinger was coming to town, and I thought she might like to see him because she was a singer too. The tickets were twenty bucks, which is a lot to pay if you’re not on a date. Between songs, though, he told a story that helped me resolve some things about God. The story was about his friend who is a Navy SEAL. He told it like it was true, so I guess it was true, although it could have been a lie. The folksinger said his friend was performing a covert operation, freeing hostages from a building in some dark part of the world. His friend’s team flew in by helicopter, made their way to the compound and stormed into the room where the hostages had been imprisoned for months.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  For a split second, she recalled the brief conversation when Olivia asked her if her belief system played a part in the troubles she and James experienced. Olivia was clear that James’s behavior was James’s responsibility, but she also said we all have a powerful need to prove our belief system is true—even if it is destructive to love and life. At that moment, while speaking to these students, Kaycie had her own epiphany. She could feel it and it was real; deep down she believed trusting a man was emotional suicide. Momentarily stunned by this revelation, she knew she had to make things right with James. So much progress had been made between the two of them, but there was more work to be done if they were ever going to be truly naked and unashamed with each other. Wrapping up her talk, Kaycie asked the students if any of them experienced anything along the same lines as she did. She asked the student leaders and the Real Life team to come up to the front to be available to any of the students who needed support or prayer. It began slowly, but soon a throng of students flooded the front of the auditorium. Prayers, whispered truths, secrets were shared in this sacred space. Kaycie shook her head, always surprised by how many could relate to her story. It caused her to notice the heaviness in her heart, but just as quickly, the promise available for every student if they simply took hold of it. Jesus significantly healed her heart and was still doing so. And Jesus could heal their hearts too. It was quiet in the car on the drive home. Both were processing the time with the students and hearing some of their stories of sexual trauma and regrets. Both felt contented to have the opportunity to do as Scripture recommends—just put your ear to the lips of the victim and healing will begin. James interpreted her thoughts with, “You okay?” “Yes, I’m just processing what all happened tonight and a realization I had about myself. I know you are tired, but can we have some talk time when we get home, maybe after we have a shower and unwind?” “Sure, of course,” James responded. “Hey, let’s pray together before we get home so we can focus on each other.”

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

  Dismiss the thought and out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of 'ideas' that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old triangles. Each bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis. [251] In his work, La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters VI and VII. [252] Page 198. [253] Page 146. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we often hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not understand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly 'realize' what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea. The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intellectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M. Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, when it is grasped—we hear the echo of the words as we catch their meaning. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there. [254] A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds that the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sentences are finished. [255] The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrine set forth here is in O. Liebmann's Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, pp. 427-438. [256] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's Microcosmus, Eug. tr. vol.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “This term signifies an intimate, experiential, personal, face to face, eye to eye, I to I, type of a relationship. It isn’t casual and it isn’t quick. This type of relationship takes the willingness to study and observe and watch and listen and attune to and notice. Honestly, it takes work, but it is the kind of work that is more like an investment. The more you invest, the greater the reward. “How would lovemaking be different if you approached it with this term in mind? If this is what you were made for?” The room was still for a few moments while Olivia patiently waited. James motioned with his raised hand he wanted to say something. “Well, it gives sex a totally different meaning. If I initiate sex with Kaycie from a position of wanting to know her—I want to understand her. I want to experience her—I imagine I would be thinking less about having an orgasm with her and more about really being with her, being present with her. I would have to bring myself fully to bed. I couldn’t be hidden, or preoccupied. I would have her as my focus and my heart in the right place. “If I want to know her, I would be focused on discovering what pleases her sexually and how I could engage her whole person. I would see her not just as a body, but a person with a soul, spirit, and personality. I would care about her needs, her desires, her likes and dislikes. I would listen for what arouses her. I would notice when she goes quiet or when it feels like she has left the room mentally. I would ask her where she went. I would ask her what she feels and likes and wants. I would be way more sensitive to her.” With that, he sat back down with tears filling his eyes. Olivia asked him, “James, what might you be feeling?” James closed his eyes for a minute before he said, “I haven’t ever really made love to my wife. It just hit me; I haven’t known how to make love to her. I thought it was all about getting it on with her because I wanted her, but now I know it’s deeper than that. I want to know her.” He turned and looked at Kaycie, “Would you forgive me for not getting it? Would you forgive me for being selfish?” “I forgive you, James; I haven’t known how to make love to you any more than you have known how to make love to me. I totally forgive you. Will you forgive me for withholding and withdrawing from you?” Kaycie asked. “Of course, I will. Man, I don’t deserve you.” James smiled. They leaned into each other for a tender kiss. Olivia asked, “How is that for you two?”

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The slot-machine God provided a relief for the pinging guilt and a sense of hope that my life would get organized toward a purpose. I was too dumb to test the merit of the slot machine idea. I simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate. What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality. But it worked. If something nice happened to me, I thought it was God, and if something nice didn’t, I went back to the slot machine, knelt down in prayer, and pulled the lever a few more times. I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. But the fun never lasts. My slot-machine God disintegrated on Christmas Eve when I was thirteen. I still think of that night as “the lifting of the haze,” and it remains one of the few times I can categorically claim an interaction with God. Though I am half certain these interactions are routine, they simply don’t feel as metaphysical as the happenings of that night. It was very simple, but it was one of those profound revelations that only God can induce. What happened was that I realized I was not alone in my own surroundings. I’m not talking about ghosts or angels or anything; I’m talking about other people. As silly as it sounds, I realized, late that night, that other people had feelings and fears and that my interactions with them actually meant something, that I could make them happy or sad in the way that I associated with them. Not only could I make them happy or sad, but I was responsible for the way I interacted with them. I suddenly felt responsible. I was supposed to make them happy. I was not supposed to make them sad. Like I said, it sounds simple, but when you really get it for the first time, it hits hard. I was shell-shocked. This is how the bomb fell: For my mother that year I had purchased a shabby Christmas gift—a book, the contents of which she would never be interested in. I had had a sum of money with which to buy presents, and the majority of it I used to buy fishing equipment, as Roy and I had started fishing in the creek behind Wal-Mart. My extended family opens gifts on Christmas Eve, leaving the immediate family to open gifts the next morning, and so in my room that night were wonderful presents—toys, games, candy, and clothes—and as I lay in bed I counted and categorized them in the moonlight, the battery-operated toys of greatest importance, the underwear of no consequence at all.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It’s not a question of Luke fending him off. You are witnessing the arrogance of the blessed, and Bader is merely the person on the other end of the exchange today. For all the talk of the crucial difference a weight class can make, that difference is often neutralized by the truly great wrestler. Dan is no less a load at 145 pounds than he would have been at 140. He will win again. It is the pool of candidates to finish second that has changed. If you were going to draw up a blueprint for the construction of a wrestling body, Dan’s shape would be one of the first you would reach for. He is squat; with the same low center of gravity his father has, Dan is virtually impossible to knock off stride. His muscles are in all the right places, with tremendous strength through his legs and hips and a chiseled upper body. He is big enough to hold off other 140-pound wrestlers who occasionally appear at first glance to outsize him. His forearms are taut, thick ropes of strength. And his neck, while not a thing of artistic beauty, is of itself a brilliant wrestling tool. Dan sometimes pummels opponents into submission almost strictly by using that neck strength to drive his chin into their backs or threaten to puncture that vulnerable soft spot between the shoulder and the clavicle. (Try it sometime. You’d be surprised how quickly you can make somebody cry uncle.) And yet he is not invincible. As a freshman, Dan suffered his one defeat to a fellow Iowa high school wrestler; he was beaten fair by a very good opponent named Cory Kalina, a kid from Belle Plain. Dan can tell you about that match today, in detail, at the slightest prompting. He was just starting out in his high school career, and Cory was a senior; and it hurt like hell to lose. Dan remembers vividly the feeling of losing and the rare sense of being outmaneuvered on the mat, the flushing of his cheeks at the defeat, all of it. And yet that match, the loss to Kalina, was the match at which it first really occurred to Dan that he could compete at the high school level—“compete,” naturally, meaning “win.” He was a punk ninth-grader losing to a senior—he barely knew what he was doing, in hindsight—and yet he was mixing it up with the older boy, staying close. “Once you go to the next level, from junior high to high school—I was good in junior high, but what am I in high school? I didn’t really know until I wrestled that match,” Dan says. “It’ll probably be the same way in college. I really won’t know where I’m at until I wrestle in competition somewhere.” Dan’s first title, at 119 pounds, came later that freshman year only after he had defeated a brutally tough wrestler in the championship match at the State Finals—Cory Kalina.