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 Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Hannah's notion of the unremarkable nature of sex with a "nothing-worth-talking-about" essence might also account for her not talking about sex or instructing Sula through a practical, meaningful discourse on sexuality. This choice, then, is not merely negligence of her maternal role. Rather, it also reflects the extent to which silence surrounding black women's sexuality is deeply ensconced in the community. In an environment or culture wherein the script circumscribes women's behavior, with its particular dictates governing sexuality, even Hannah, who engages in sexual intercourse frequently, does not entirely overstep its boundaries. She engages sexuality in its physicality, never exceeding the domain of corporeality that would, otherwise, manifest in the discursive, vocalized, or the spoken. Thus, in silent disposition regarding sexuality, she, in essence, does not "articulate any conception of [...I sexuality," to evoke black feminist scholar Evelynn Hammonds, or "the possible varieties of expression of sexual desire."19 Instead, sex is performed and enacted but, "quiet as it's kept," it is never vocalized, spoken about, or taught through a discursive pedagogy of instruction or intergenerational transmission of experiential knowledge. Hannah, in addition to this "lesson" on sex-which Sula learns incidentally after witnessing her mother having sex in the pantry-also imparts a second lesson to Sula: "there was no other that you could count on" (118-19). Sula learns this upon overhearing her mother admit that, while she loves Sula, she "just don't like her" (57). Hannah's differentiation between loving and (not) liking her daughter-which alludes interestingly to Hannah's inquiry to Eva of "did you ever love us?"-exists, much like her ideologies regarding sexuality, in direct opposition to the script, which demands women's idealization and exaltation of motherhood. Hannah demystifies the gradations, obligatory dimensions (or lack thereof), and contingencies of "love" in a demarcation between duty/obligation (love) and agency/choice (like).20 Hannah not only destabilizes fallacious or generalized assumptions regarding the "quality of love," particularly where mothers are concerned, but also illustrates that "love" and "like" are not coterminous notions-nor do these entities fall along the same emotional-committal continuum. For, fundamental to Hannah's notion of love is what feminist sexuality studies scholar Jennifer Nash recognizes as a "black feminist love-politics" in which love engenders a "resistant ethic of self-care"; or, put another way, "love is a politics of claiming, embracing, and restoring the [...] black female self."21 Thus, none of the inadvertent "lessons" Hannah instills in her daughter, namely about sex, love, and nondependency, offers Sula any substantial or pragmatic instructions on girlhood/womanhood or, more specifically, codes of conduct for female behavior. Hannah's not instructing Sula in these areas, however, provides Sula space in which to create a self unaligned with conventionality"a resistant ethic of self-care." And, too, it functions, in part, as an impetus and foundation for Sula's later transgressive behavior and interrelated prioritization of her "self."

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  9 When they came to Hilkiah the high priest, they delivered the money that had been brought into the house of God, which the Levites, who guarded the doors, had collected from Manasseh and Ephraim, and from all the remnant of Israel, and from all Judah and Benjamin, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 10 Then they gave it to the workmen who were appointed over the house of the LORD , and the workmen who were working in the house of the LORD gave it [to others] to repair and restore the house (temple). 11 They in turn gave it to the carpenters and builders to buy quarried stone and timber for couplings (trusses, braces) and to make beams for the houses which the kings of Judah had let go to ruin. 12 The men did the work faithfully with foremen over them to supervise and inspect [their work]: Jahath and Obadiah, the Levites of the sons of Merari, and Zechariah and Meshullam of the sons of the Kohathites, and the Levites, all who were skillful with musical instruments. 13 They were also in charge of the burden bearers [who carried heavy loads], and supervised all the workmen in any kind of service; and some of the Levites were scribes and officials and gatekeepers. Hilkiah Discovers Lost Book of the Law 14 When they were bringing out the money which had been brought into the house of the LORD , Hilkiah the priest found the Book of the Law of the LORD given by Moses. 15 Hilkiah told Shaphan the scribe, “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the LORD .” And he gave the book to Shaphan. 16 Shaphan brought the book to the king, but [first] reported further to him, “Your servants are doing everything that was entrusted to them. 17 “They have emptied out the money that was found in the house of the LORD , and have delivered it into the hands of the overseers and the workmen.” 18 Then Shaphan the scribe told the king, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.” And Shaphan read from it in the presence of the king. 19 When the king heard the words of the Law, he tore his clothes.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  141 23. Texts That Didn’t Make It into the Bible Faced with this diverse set of texts, scholars separated the Dead Sea Scrolls into two main blocks: canonical texts—those known from the Bible—and noncanonical texts, or everything else. However, no one has any idea whether the Dead Sea Scrolls community distinguished between canonical and noncanonical texts. Perhaps the most earth-shattering realization from this discovery is that at the time they were written, roughly between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE, there was no biblical canon—there was no Bible. The Apocrypha Many books that didn’t make it into the Bible as many people know it are already in the Catholic Bible. These books are known as the Apocrypha. For Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities, they’re called deuterocanonical, as in a secondary canon. They include short novels, such as Judith and Tobit; collections of proverbial sayings, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira; 1 and 2 Maccabees, which are historical works about the revolt of the Maccabees, that is, the Hanukkah story; and additions to the book of Daniel, including Bel and the Dragon. These works are all from roughly the last couple of centuries BCE, and they’re all Jewish. That is, they’re all basically from the same time and community as the biblical book of Daniel. They’re also all found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. For the community that translated the Hebrew into Greek, these works were considered to be biblical. However, despite being in the Septuagint, they aren’t in the traditional Hebrew text— they didn’t make it into Judaism. Thus, the Septuagint is sort of like the Dead Sea Scrolls: It’s the product of a Jewish community that had a canon rather different from that of the rabbis who gave birth to Judaism as it is today. The conf lict between the Septuagint’s canon and the Jewish one caused Jerome—the great translator of the Bible into Latin—to translate these books but to note in his prefaces that they were somehow other, as they aren’t part of the Jewish tradition. But not everyone read the prefaces, so these books were read as part of the biblical canon for the next 1000 years or so. In the 16th century, early Protestant reformers looked back at the questionable status

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Her intentional invocation of her own corporeality through the use of embodied discourse reminds us that intellectual work is not a disembodied project. That fact alone makes it untenable for scholars to continue to read Black women’s literature solely or primarily through the corporeal frames offered to us by the culture of dissemblance or the politics of respectability. Respectability and dissemblance belong to a broader constellation of social formulations that race women theorized and enacted to protect themselves and make themselves known on their own terms. But if we fail to move beyond respectability, we will continue to miss critical parts of the story. Cooper, like other Black women thinkers of her time, recognized that muting her body, or dissembling, offered little safety and limited prospects for achieving respectability. For instance, in what is most assuredly an allusion to Ida B. Wells’s violent encounter on a train in the late 1880s, Cooper wrote, “I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women traveling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured.”19 This forthright presentation of a Black female body injured in the process of doing race work is just one of many examples of how embodied discourse shows up in Cooper’s work and that of other Black women—pushing us to deal with the embodied dimensions of public Black women’s lives. Cooper’s use of embodied discourse as a disruptive textual practice ultimately locates Black female bodies within the project of racial knowledge production and the reorganization of place or public space. For Cooper, and for this project, Black bodies—and in particular, Black women’s bodies—mark possibilities and generative tensions that are sites of inspiration and theory production. Whether the orienting Black body included a pregnant woman, a young man, an embryonic, gender neutral body, or even her own body experiencing various modes of segregation, Cooper’s work can be read through tracking the varying invocations of Black bodies as a mechanism for theory production itself.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  27 ‘Therefore, O king, let my advice to you be [considered and found] acceptable; break away now from your sins and exhibit your repentance by doing what is right, and from your wickedness by showing mercy to the poor, so that [if you repent] there may possibly be a continuance of your prosperity and tranquility and a healing of your error.’ The Vision Fulfilled 28 “All this happened to Nebuchadnezzar the king. 29 “Twelve months later he was walking on the upper level of the royal palace of Babylon. 30 “The king said thoughtfully, ‘Is not this the great Babylon which I myself have built as the royal residence and seat of government by the might of my power and for the honor and glory of my majesty?’ 31 “While the words were still in the king’s mouth, a voice came [as if falling] from heaven, saying, ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: “The kingdom has been removed from you, 32 and you will be driven away from mankind, and your dwelling place will be with the animals of the field. You will be given grass to eat like the cattle, and seven periods of time will pass over you until you know [without any doubt] that the Most High God rules over the kingdom of mankind and He bestows it on whomever He desires.” ’ 33 “Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was b driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails were like birds’ claws . 34 “But at the end of the days [that is, at the seven periods of time], I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my understanding and reason returned to me; and I blessed the Most High [God] and I praised and honored and glorified Him who lives forever, For His dominion is an everlasting dominion; And His kingdom endures from generation to generation. 35 “All the inhabitants of the earth are regarded as nothing. But He does according to His will in the host of heaven And among the inhabitants of the earth; And no one can hold back His hand Or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’ 36 “Now at the same time my reason returned to me; and for the glory of my kingdom, my majesty and splendor were returned to me, and my counselors and my nobles began seeking me out; so I was re-established in my kingdom, and still more greatness [than before] was added to me.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Standing on line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which is a very abnormal condition.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I realize how easily desire is transformed into reality. I have to be careful even of what I dream, since for me between dream and reality there is only the thinnest veil. The One Book I Always Wanted to Write—The World of SexIn reading my books which are purely autobiographical one should bear in mind that I am writing of things which happened a considerable time ago. The Tropic of Capricorn , for example, which will run to several volumes, deals chiefly with a period of about seven years’ duration, my life with a woman called Mona in Tropic of Cancer . In telling this story I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstitution of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are for me only the starting points on the way towards the discovery of truth. I am trying to get at the inner pattern of events, trying to follow the potential being who was deflected from his course here and there, who circled around himself, so to speak, who was becalmed for long stretches or who sank to the bottom of the sea or suddenly flew to the loftiest peaks. I am trying to seize the quintessential moments in which things happened, things which altered me profoundly. The man who tells the story is not the one who experienced the events recorded. There is distortion and deformation, but only for the purpose of capturing the true inner reality. Thus, for no apparent reason, I may often lapse back into a period anterior to the one I am talking about. The reader may find himself puzzled: he may wonder about the relevancy of such lapses. But they are dictated by necessity. A sudden switch, a long parenthetical detour, a monologue, a remembrance which suddenly crops up, all these, without conscious effort on my part, serve to bind the loose threads together and augment the whole emotional trend. A man does not go forward through life along a straight, horizontal path; often he does not stop at the stations indicated on the time table; sometimes he goes off the track completely; sometimes he dives below and is lost for a time, or he takes to the air and is flung against the side of a steep cliff. Tremendous voyages sometimes occur without the person moving from the spot. In five minutes some men have lived out the span of an ordinary man’s life. Some men use up numbers of lives in the course of their stay on earth. Some develop like mushrooms, while others slip back, retrogress. What goes on at every moment in the life of each and every man is something forever unfathomable and inexhaustible to relate.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Once he has made use of his extraordinary powers, and I am thinking of the use of obscenity in just such magical terms, he is inevitably caught up in the stream of forces beyond him. He may have begun by assuming that he could awaken his readers, but in the end he himself passes into another dimension of reality wherein he no longer feels the need of forcing an awakening. His rebellion over the prevalent inertia about him becomes transmuted, as his vision increases, into an acceptance and understanding of an order and harmony which is beyond man’s conception and approachable only through faith. His vision expands with the growth of his own powers, because creation has its roots in vision and admits of only one realm, the realm of imagination. Ultimately, then, he stands among his own obscene objurgations like the conqueror midst the ruins of a devastated city. He realizes that the real nature of the obscene resides in the lust to convert. He knocked to awaken, but it was himself he awakened. And once awake, he is no longer concerned with the world of sleep; he walks in the light and, like a mirror, reflects his illumination in every act. Once this vantage point is reached, how trifling and remote seem the accusations of moralists! How senseless the debate as to whether the work in question was of high literary merit or not! How absurd the wrangling over the moral or immoral nature of his creation! Concerning every bold act one may raise the reproach of vulgarity. Everything dramatic is in the nature of an appeal, a frantic appeal for communion. Violence, whether in deed or speech, is an inverted sort of prayer. Initiation itself is a violent process of purification and union. Whatever demands radical treatment demands God, and always through some form of death or annihilation. Whenever the obscene crops out one can smell the imminent death of a form. Those who possess the highest clue are not impatient, even in the presence of death: the artist in words, however, is not of this order, he is only at the vestibule, as it were, of the palace of wisdom. Dealing with the spirit, he nevertheless has recourse to forms. When he fully understands his role as creator he substitutes his own being for the medium of words. But in that process there comes the “dark night of the soul” when, exalted by his vision of things to come and not yet fully conscious of his powers, he resorts to violence. He becomes desperate over his inability to transmit his vision. He resorts to any and every means in his power; this agony, in which creation itself is parodied, prepares him for the solution of his dilemma, but a solution wholly unforeseen and mysterious as creation itself. All violent manifestations of radiant power have an obscene glow when visualized through the refractive lens of the ego. All conversions occur in the speed of a split second.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The act of writing puts a stop to one kind of activity in order to release another. When a monk, prayerfully meditating, walks slowly and silently down the hall of a temple, and thus walking sets in motion one prayerwheel after another, he gives a living illustration of the act of sitting down to write. The mind of the writer, no longer preoccupied with observing and knowing, wanders meditatively amidst a world of forms which are set spinning by a mere brush of his wings. No tyrant, this, wreaking his will upon the subjugated minions of his ill-gotten kingdom. An explorer, rather, calling to life the slumbering entities of his dream. The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new ambiance. The chairs and tables collaborate; an effluvia is given off, a game is begun. To ask the purpose of this game, how it is related to life, is idle. As well ask the Creator why volcanos? why hurricanes? since obviously they contribute nothing but disaster. But, since disasters are disastrous only for those who are engulfed in them, whereas they can be illuminating for those who survive and study them, so it is in the creative world. The dreamer who returns from his voyage, if he is not shipwrecked en route, may and usually does convert the collapse of his tenuous fabric into other stuff. For a child the pricking of a bubble may offer nothing but astonishment and delight. The student of illusions and mirages may react differently. A scientist may bring to a bubble the emotional wealth of a world of thought. The same phenomenon which causes the child to scream with delight may give birth, in the mind of an earnest experimenter, to a dazzling vision of truth. In the artist these contrasting reactions seem to combine or merge, producing that ultimate one, the great catalyzer called realization . Seeing, knowing, discovering, enjoying—these faculties or powers are pale and lifeless without realization. The artist’s game is to move over into reality. It is to see beyond the mere “disaster” which the picture of a lost battlefield renders to the naked eye. For, since the beginning of time the picture which the world has presented to the naked human eye can hardly seem anything but a hideous battle ground of lost causes. It has been so and will be so until man ceases to regard himself as the mere seat of conflict. Until he takes up the task of becoming the “I of his I.” Reading the Face of the World—PlexusThere exists a curious book by an American anarchist, Benjamin R. Tucker, entitled INSTEAD OF A BOOK BY A MAN TOO BUSY TO WRITE ONE.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  All during this Paris period prior to tackling Capricorn I had been enjoying, if I might put it that way, the effect of other men’s writing. I was open to any and all influences. Especially from the French. I was writing in my head constantly … as they might write, I mean. I was a literary man. I might have written books and not the story of my life. What happened? I suppose you might say that I suffered a kind of dementia. The more I wrote the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some), for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system, no doubt. Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had given them some kind of immunity. What was this poison? Not a hatred that I had to work off, for by the time of writing I had no hate for any of my “characters.” Indeed, I fell in love with many of them, the ones who lent themselves to ridicule and caricature particularly. All the while puffed up, no doubt, by that vanity which writers are plagued with—the belief that they can enter into the heart and soul of their inventions. And while the writer in me reveled at his prowess the human being had to admit more and more to the annihilating truth that no matter how sincerely, how tenderly, how reverently, he approached the character he was writing about, he could never, never capture him, never enter him, never render back what had been created by God alone. In other words, the truth teller, as I always styled myself, came face to face with the fabricator, or the writer. Is it any wonder that between whiles, between opera, or between sections of any one book, I gave myself up to the wildest dreams? Oscillating always between the desire to be solely an inventor and the hope to become completely a man of truth? And what was I forging all the while in preparation for that mortal combat? The weapons with which to destroy the warrior who would use them. In short, myself. No wonder I am full of anomalies, both as writer and as human being. Criticism bounces off me, not because I am vain and self-centered, not because I think I am a great writer … oh no! Because, my dear fellow, art has been my life-long preoccupation. The word means nothing to me, nor what it is supposed to stand for. Like God. But I am never fooled by men who pretend they cannot get it past their lips. I don’t look for art in art, any more than I look for God in religion. But if you have prayed earnestly for certain powers you recognize them when you witness them, even though you yourself may never have been granted these powers.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Or, and from a Zen view not such a weakness either, the desire to imitate life. Not record or present life, but imitate it, in short, make books live. All this leading to that point I began to make in my writings, and which bothers writers no end, that the highest art is the art of living, that writing is but a prelude or form of initiation for this purpose. From this standpoint most every writer is consequently a rank failure. The fear which writers or artists in general have when confronted with such an issue is that art would disappear. Dear Art! As if anything could destroy it. How do you destroy the cornerstone of life? Why worry? True, we may eliminate the hot-house geniuses—but on the other hand we might, once again, endow everything we see, do, touch or think about with art. We may all become, or re-become, artists! There is the kind of immolation (of the artist) I believe in. But even from a limited, academic, hidebound point of view, the traditional art view, how silly it is for critics to be disturbed about slag, excrescences, drift and scoriae. How little they understand the role or the value of the so-called non-essential, the commonplace, the ugly, the inartistic. Their desire for perfection is so similar to that false religious attitude which desires only the good. You may think I am trying to justify my weakness. No, I am trying to tell you that I learned as much, or more, from the bad, the wrong, the slipshod, the evil, the misfit, and so on, than the other way round. When we speak of a person getting to grips with himself, accepting himself for what he is, we do not simply mean that he admits and recognizes his weaknesses but that he also discovers how important they were in his evolution. Asked how long a man’s legs should be, Lincoln replied: “Just long enough to reach from his waist to the ground.” And then there’s another thing about the drift and slag … have you ever noticed how, in life, there come these dull, dull moments when everything drags, everything seems futile, and you grow into a sort of vegetable … and just when you have reached the nadir, so to speak, of your being, there comes an awakening from deep down, like a flower opening its petals, and little by little, as if there were chinks in your armor, the light seeps in, stirs you gently back to life and awareness. But that vegetable pause or break was necessary; without it there would be no wonderful return. I say “wonderful” return to distinguish it from the usual returns which occur more frequently—because admit it or not, we are continually on the verge of falling asleep (mentally, morally, spiritually).

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That summer, Maria flew home to Iowa and my mother went to Europe for two months. She left me twenty-five dollars a week to live on and the key to her apartment. She’d estimated that the allowance was large enough to feed me and small enough to force me into getting a summer job. I did work for a while loading trucks all night. To get the job I had to tell the boss I’d be staying on in the autumn. I’d dropped out of school, I said, and wasn’t seeking just summer employment. But once I started working, the other men drew me aside, one by one, to tell me that I must go back to school. “Don’t get stuck here,” they said. “It’s shit. It’s a dead end.” In the sweaty Chicago night we’d squat bare-chested inside the holds of semis, stacking cartons. Our sweating hands and arms would leave phantom brown prints on the tan cardboard boxes. My partner, a beer-bellied man whose five-o’clock shadow had deepened to midnight by dawn, never spoke to me; I could imagine marrying him, living in a trailer with him, and cooking him meatloaf. On the third night we worked together he finally opened up. He told me that when he was a teenager his father, a young doctor, had died suddenly of a heart attack. No insurance. My partner had been the oldest boy and had gone to work to support his mother and to send the three younger kids through college. “But I got stuck. Now they’re all in professions with nice homes in the suburbs and they’re ashamed of me, don’t like me coming around. So I’m stuck in this shit job.” We talked about books. He liked Stefan Zweig and Nelson Algren. And he liked Beethoven, especially the symphonies. When he talked about books and music, his flat Midwestern voice (he pronounced milk as “melk” and wash as “warsh”) warmed up, almost as though through the smoked window of his face I could see a young man approach, smile, then go away. Two nights later he stopped talking, and when he had to say something he mumbled. Once again every noun was double-decked by “fuckin’ ” or “mother-fuckin’.” I’d return to my mother’s skyscraper apartment, my face fierce in its warpaint of dirt, my T-shirt clinging to my wet body. The city at last was cool and the streets had run dry of traffic. I’d bow my head under the shower for twenty minutes, scarcely moving, then stand nude in the window and watch the city below slowly constructing itself like coral under incoming tides of light. My father had told me his father had become a professor so he wouldn’t have to work the fields of his parents’ Texas farm. Now I understood my grandfather perfectly. I felt pride in my strength and shame over my position just as the other men did.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But my study of world religion during the last twenty years has compelled me to revise my earlier opinions. Not only has it opened my mind to aspects of religion as practiced in other traditions that qualified the parochial and dogmatic faith of my childhood, but a careful assessment of the evidence has made me see Christianity differently. One of the things I have learned is that quarreling about religion is counterproductive and not conducive to enlightenment. It not only makes authentic religious experience impossible but also violates the Socratic rationalist tradition. In the first part of this book, I have tried to show how people thought about God in the premodern world in a way that, I hope, throws light on some of the issues that people now find problematic—scripture, inspiration, creation, miracles, revelation, faith, belief, and mystery —as well as showing how religion goes wrong. In the second part, I trace the rise of the “modern God,” which overturned so many traditional religious presuppositions. This cannot, of course, be an exhaustive account. I have focused on Christianity, because it was the tradition most immediately affected by the rise of scientific modernity and has also borne the brunt of the new atheistic assault. Further, within the Christian tradition I have concentrated on themes and traditions that speak directly to our present religious difficulties. Religion is complex; in every age, there are numerous strands of piety. No single tendency ever prevails in its entirety. People practice their faith in myriad contrasting and contradictory ways. But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West. People believed that God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could be known only by dedicated practice. We have lost sight of this important insight, and this, I believe, is one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today. Hence I have given special attention to this neglected discipline in the hope that it may throw light on our contemporary predicament. But I do not, of course, claim that this was a universal attitude; simply that it was a major element in the practice not only of Christianity but of other monotheistic and nontheistic faiths and that it needs to be drawn to our attention. Even though so many people are antagonistic to faith, the world is currently experiencing a religious revival. Contrary to the confident secularist predictions of the mid-twentieth century, religion is not going to disappear. But if it succumbs to the violent and intolerant strain that has always been inherent not only in the mono-theisms but also in the modern scientific ethos, the new religiosity will be “unskillful.”

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  One day he didn’t come to school, and the next day the teacher announced that he had gotten sick and died. That was all. I recall no particular reaction—my own or anyone else’s in the class. But there is one extraordinary thing about it: L.E.’s face remains so clearly in my mind. I can still visualize him—with an astonished look on his face and his very light blond hair standing straight up in a short crew cut. D R. Y ALOM: And that’s extraordinary because?… I RVIN: It is extraordinary that his image is so clear. It’s weird because I didn’t know him very well. I think he was in my class only that one year. What’s more, he had some kind of sickness and his mother drove him to and from school, and so we never walked home together or played. There were many other kids in that class whom I knew far, far better, and yet I can’t remember any other faces. D R. Y ALOM: And that means that?… I RVIN: It must mean that death obviously caught my attention, but that I chose not to think about it directly. D R. Y ALOM: Were there times you did think directly about it? I RVIN: It’s hazy in my mind, but I recall I was walking around in my neighborhood, after having played on the pinball machine at a five-and-dime store, and the idea just thundered down on me that I was going to die like everyone else, everyone who lives, or will ever live. That’s all I remember, except I know that it was my first realization of my own death, and also that I couldn’t hold it in my mind for very long, and, of course, I never spoke of it to anyone. Until now. D R. Y ALOM: Why “of course”? I RVIN: My life is very solitary. There’s no one I can share those thoughts with. D R. Y ALOM: Does solitary mean lonely? I RVIN: Oh, yes. D R. Y ALOM: What comes to mind when you think of “lonely”? I RVIN: I think of riding my bike in the old “Soldiers Home,” a large park about ten blocks from my father’s store… D R. Y ALOM: You always say “my father’s store” rather than “my home.” I RVIN: Yes, good catch, Dr. Yalom. I just noticed that too. My shame about my home runs deep. What comes to mind—and I’m still free-associating, right? D R. Y ALOM: Right. Continue. I RVIN: What comes to mind is a Saturday night birthday party I attended when I was about eleven or twelve held at a very ritzy house, a house the likes of which I had never seen except in Hollywood films. It was the home of a girl named Judy Steinberg whom I had met and romanced at a summer camp—I think we even kissed.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I had just witnessed a simple but extraordinarily important phenomenon: all the group members being exposed to a single stimulus (in this instance, a leader asking that all comments remain in the here-and-now), and the members responding in very different ways. A single shared stimulus and eleven different responses! Why? There was only one possible solution to this puzzle: There are eleven different inner worlds! And these eleven different responses may be the royal road into these different worlds. Without the leader’s assistance, we each then introduced ourselves and said something about what we did professionally and why we were there. I noted that I was the only psychiatrist—there was one psychologist, and the rest were educators or social scientists. I turned and addressed the leader directly. “I’m curious about your silence. Could you say a bit about your role here?” This time she answered (briefly): “My role is to be the leader and to hold all the feelings and fantasies that members have about leaders.” We continued meeting for the next seven days and began examining our relationships with one another. The psychologist member of the group was a particularly angry individual and often laced into me for being pompous and overbearing. A few days in, he related a dream he had had about being chased by a giant—which seemed to be me. And ultimately, he and I did a good bit of work—I on my discomfort with his anger and he on the competitive feelings I aroused in him—and we worked through some of the distrust between our respective professions. Since I was the only physician at this conference, I was called upon to care for and eventually hospitalize a member in another group who developed a psychotic reaction to the stress generated in his group. This outcome made me even more aware of the power of the small group—power not only to heal but also to harm. I grew to know Dorothy Garwood well, and years later she and her husband and Marilyn and I had a lovely vacation on Maui. She was by no means a withholding person, but had been trained in a tradition from the Tavistock Clinic—a large psychotherapy training and treatment center in London—in which the leader remained outside the group and confined all her observations to mass group phenomena. Three years later, on a sabbatical at the Tavistock Clinic, I understood more clearly the rationale for her leadership posture. W hen our family of five had first arrived in Palo Alto after my discharge from the army nearly three years before, in 1962, Marilyn and I had set about finding a place to live. We could have purchased a home in the faculty housing area of Stanford, but, as in Hawaii, we chose a more diverse neighborhood. We bought a thirty-year-old house (almost ancient by California standards) fifteen minutes from the campus.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  I realize that I’ve mixed together, contrary to any method, many disparate things: Plato and the Bible, the gods of Egypt and the kings of Assyria. This is because it was only a matter of showing that in speaking of the gods, kings, prophets, or even of the magistrates as shepherds at the head of their flock, one doesn’t just celebrate their power or goodness through the use of a familiar metaphor, one also designates a certain way to exercise power. Or at least one designates an ensemble, without systematicity but not without coherence, particular functions that go with a certain type of authority. Even detached from the political religious contexts in which it took on its profound value, the image of the shepherd had its logic. — A considerable double event for the ancient world: Christianity is the first religion to organize itself as a Church. And that Church defines the power that it exercises over the faithful—over each and all of them—as a pastoral power. Far from being in Christianity a way of representing some specific aspect of power, the figure of the shepherd covers, on the contrary, all the forms of ecclesiastical government: all of them justify themselves by the fact that, through the example of Christ the Shepherd and under his direction, they have to lead the human flock (including the least of the sheep) to the eternal pastureland. This is not just a metaphor; it implies the setting in place of institutions and procedures designed to regulate the “conduct” of men throughout society. The term should be understood in the sense of the word: a way of directing, a way for them to behave. Christianity and the Church established a general power capable of “conducting the conduct” of men: a power very different from those which the ancient world knew, be it that of the prince over the empire, of the magistrate over the city, the father over the “family,” the owner over his clientele, the master with his servants or slaves, the schoolmaster with his disciples. And if Christianity was able, rather quickly, to insert itself into the organization of the romanitas, this was perhaps in part because it brought with it such procedures of power: new enough and specific enough not to be immediately incompatible with those that already existed, effective enough to respond to a whole ensemble of recently emerged needs. Pastoral power became an institution that was at the same time global (that concerns in principle all the members of the community), specialized (since it has particular objectives and methods), and relatively autonomous (even if it is linked to other institutions with which it interferes or from which it draws support).

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  83 later came to be known as orthodoxy was just one of the numerous forms of Christianity in the early centuries, the one that ended up acquiring the majority of converts over time, then rewrote the history of the con À ict to make it appear that this view had always been the majority one. Writings in support of other views were systematically eliminated from the historical record. But traces of the earlier con À ict managed to survive. Bauer’s book proceeds by going region by region, examining these surviving traces and showing that virtually everywhere we look—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor—the earliest attested forms of Christianity are in fact non-orthodox, for example, Gnostic or Marcionite. There were, of course, pockets of believers who held the views that later became dominant, but these were not the majority everywhere. They were, though, the majority in the city of Rome. That ended up being signi ¿ cant because, as this group happened to be located in the capital of the empire, it was able to use its vast resources and administrative skill to exert in À uence on churches in surrounding areas and, then, throughout the world. Thus, by the beginning of the fourth century, it was the Roman form of Christianity that was dominant, with the Roman church, or the Roman Catholic Church, that determined the course of future Christianity. Today, nearly seventy years after Bauer’s breakthrough, no one subscribes to his views wholesale, but his basic understanding of early Christianity is enormously in À uential. We have since made additional discoveries— most signi ¿ cantly, the Nag Hammadi library—that appear to support his perspective. Early Christianity appears now to be widely diverse, not basically monolithic, as Eusebius would have had us believe. This can be seen in our very earliest sources. The apostle Paul, for example, appears to be ¿ ghting Christian opponents in virtually every one of his letters—and these are addressed to churches that he himself founded! What of the churches he did not found? We have also become increasingly aware of other forms of Christianity not even dealt with much by Bauer (such as the Ebionites). Moreover—and this is perhaps the most signi ¿ cant point in this discussion for the purposes of this course—each of these groups appears to have had its own literature, books allegedly written by apostles of Jesus (as we have seen throughout this course) authorizing the theological views of the group.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  See further ARN 39 (ET, p. 162). Tannaitic Literature [I pay a good reward to the righteous!' 122 In any case, this is a relatively small development within the general idea that the suffering of the righteous is to be explained as God's just punishment for their few sins. 123 Having been punished here, they need not be punished hereafter. Thus Israel is compared to a vessel of common earthenware which, having been broken, cannot be 'punished' further. 'Thus when punishment ceases from Israel, it will not return upon them in the future.' 124 This discussion shows again how incorrect the weighing idea is as an accurate reflection of the views of the Tannaim. It follows logically from their conception of the justice of God, and is sometimes stated. But they also thought that God had provided means of atonement which were both thoroughly efficacious and also in accord with his justice. If salvation be viewed as God's activity, then sufferings may be said to satisfy God's just require- ment; one is not both punished and damned for transgression. 125 But internally, sufferings are seen by the religious man as moving him to examination and repentance. The Rabbis did not see suffering as God's just punishment for transgression and suffering as God's means of urging man to repentance as in any way in conflict. Both statements spring from deeply held religious convictions (God is just and man is liable to sin and in need of repentance) and both can be expressed by saying that suffering brings atonement. 126 It is only a small step to saying that death atones. In addition to the state- ment of R. Ishmael, we have already seen Yoma 8.8, which probably reflects the view of R. Akiba. In Sifre Numbers, this view is explicitly credited to R. Akiba. Commenting on Numbers 5.8, he says that the specified guilt- offering is to be brought for a person who needs atonement, but this excludes one who is dead, since his soul (or life) has atoned for him. 12 7 The logic behind the view that death atones is the same as that behind the 122 Mek. Vayassa' 3 (165; II, 110 [ch. 4]; to 16.13). 123 See further on this topic Biichler, Types, pp. 111-14 (who thinks that the general view that one suffers here in order to enter the world to come purified can be traced to the first century); Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind, p. 218. We should note that later in the second century there was at least a partial return to the early idea (see the beginning of section 6) that the righteous prosper in this world also. Thus the sayings by R. Simeon b. Judah in the name of R. Simeon b. Yohai and by R. Simeon b. Menasya in Aboth 6.8 (cf. T.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Because, like others, I was afraid of it. And deeper than that was the fact that, far from situating myself in a beyond, I was caught in the very heart of the web. I had survived my own destructive school of Dadaism: I had progressed, if that is the word, from scholar to critic to pole-axer. My literary experiments lay in ruins, like the cities of old which were sacked by the vandals. I wanted to build, but the materials were unreliable and the plans had not even become blueprints. If the substance of art is the human soul, then I must confess that with dead souls I could visualize nothing germinating under my hand. To be caught in a glut of dramatic episodes, to be ceaselessly participating, means among other things that one is unaware of the outlines of that bigger drama of which human activity is but a small part. The act of writing puts a stop to one kind of activity in order to release another. When a monk, prayerfully meditating, walks slowly and silently down the hall of a temple, and thus walking sets in motion one prayerwheel after another, he gives a living illustration of the act of sitting down to write. The mind of the writer, no longer preoccupied with observing and knowing, wanders meditatively amidst a world of forms which are set spinning by a mere brush of his wings. No tyrant, this, wreaking his will upon the subjugated minions of his ill-gotten kingdom. An explorer, rather, calling to life the slumbering entities of his dream. The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new ambiance. The chairs and tables collaborate; an effluvia is given off, a game is begun. To ask the purpose of this game, how it is related to life, is idle. As well ask the Creator why volcanos? why hurricanes? since obviously they contribute nothing but disaster. But, since disasters are disastrous only for those who are engulfed in them, whereas they can be illuminating for those who survive and study them, so it is in the creative world. The dreamer who returns from his voyage, if he is not shipwrecked en route, may and usually does convert the collapse of his tenuous fabric into other stuff. For a child the pricking of a bubble may offer nothing but astonishment and delight. The student of illusions and mirages may react differently. A scientist may bring to a bubble the emotional wealth of a world of thought. The same phenomenon which causes the child to scream with delight may give birth, in the mind of an earnest experimenter, to a dazzling vision of truth. In the artist these contrasting reactions seem to combine or merge, producing that ultimate one, the great catalyzer called realization . Seeing, knowing, discovering, enjoying—these faculties or powers are pale and lifeless without realization.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Came a day when winter must give place to spring, when the daffodils marched across the whole country from Castle Morton Common to Ross and beyond, pitching camps by the side of the river. When the hornbeam made patches of green in the hedges, and the hawthorn broke out into small, budding bundles; when the old cedar tree on the lawn at Morton grew reddish pink tips to its elegant fingers; when the wild cherry trees on the sides of the hills were industriously putting forth both leaves and blos: soms; when Martin looked into his heart and saw Stephen — saw her suddenly there as a woman. Friendship! He marvelled now at his folly, at his blindness, his coldness of body and spirit. He had offered this girl the cold husks of his friendship, insulting her youth, her womanhood, her beauty — for he saw her now with the eyes of a lover. To a man THE WELL OF LONELINESS 107 such as he was, sensitive, restrained, love came as a blinding revelation. He knew little about women, and the little he did know was restricted to episodes that he thought best forgotten. On the whole he had led a fairly chaste life — less from scruple than because he was fastidious by nature. But now he was very deeply in love, and those years of restraint took their toll of poor Martin, so that he trembled before his own passion, amazed at its strength, not a little disconcerted. And being by habit a quiet, reserved creature, he must quite lose his head and become the reverse. So impatient was he that he rushed off to Morton very early one morning to look for Stephen, tracking her down in the end at the stables, where he found her talking to Williams and Raftery. He said: * Never mind about Raftery, Stephen — let’s go into the garden, I’ve got something to tell you.’ And she thought that he must have had bad news from home, because of his voice and his curious pallor. She went with him and they walked on in silence for a while, then Martin stood still, and began to talk quickly; he was saying amazing, incredible things: ‘ Stephen, my dear — I do utterly love you.’ He was holding out his arms, while she shrank back be- wildered: ‘I love you, I’m deeply in love with you, Stephen — look at me, don’t you understand me, belovéd? I want you to marry me — you do love me, don’t you?’ And then, as though she had suddenly struck him, he flinched: ‘Good God! What’s the matter, Stephen? ’