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.

Page 48 of 63 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers— Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud. I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first—Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called. I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right. That my dreams were perversions. That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s voice; more often it was my own. I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. —

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I know that in one sense the weighing of hawks is a falling-off, a brute measure compared to the intuitive understanding that comes from really knowing your hawk. Still, I would not train a hawk without a set of scales. When I used to fly merlins, tiny falcons with needle talons and frames so voracious and delicate they resemble heated Meissen porcelain, I weighed them three times a day. I fussed interminably over the relative calorific value of quail and chicken and mouse; I could tell you how much weight my hawk would lose in an hour, in two hours, in three. Even an eighth of an ounce would make a difference to how my merlins flew . It is a grosser calculation with a goshawk, because Mabel is huge compared to a merlin. But still it is not easy to judge how much food, and of what kind, will bring her into perfect flying condition. Scraps of paper litter the kitchen table, jotted with weights and question marks. I am convinced I have these calculations pat, and I am out to prove it. At four o’clock we set off for my college cricket pitch and her first calling-off lessons. ‘It’ll be fine Mabel. It’s the long vacation. The place will be deserted. No dogs, no cows, no people. No one will bother us there.’ We stand uncertainly under the thatched roof of the pavilion. Behind us is a straggling copse of chestnut and limes and a ditch full of leaves and rainwater . The air about us is mild, still, pointed with tiny flies, the sky dull and flat as unpolished brass. There’s an ill savour to the air. I am not sure I want to be here. On the other side of the pitch is a familiar building, a red-brick Victorian Camelot with crenellated battlements, mullioned windows , and a tiny Gothic tower . My office is up there on the top floor . Books , papers , a desk , a chair , a carpet of dove-coloured wool; air that always smells of sunbaked dust, even in winter when frost burns the glass and makes drop-shadows on the panes. I look at the blank façade and think of the letter I’d sent that morning to a German university telling them I couldn’t accept the job they’d offered me that winter. I told them I was sorry, told them that my father had died and I needed to be here. But I was not sorry, and they were not the reasons for my refusal. I can’t go to Berlin in December , I’d thought, appalled. I have a hawk to fly . Ambitions, life-plans: these were for other people. I could no more imagine the future than a hawk could . I didn’t need a career . I didn’t want one. White doves fly up from the roof. I watch their wings flicker against the sky. Sudden vertigo. Something shifts in my head. Something huge.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said stifflly, formally, the half-burger in my hand suddenly unappetising. One deep breath, then, and the words came. ‘I mean, normally I would, I’d leap at the chance; that’s an amazing offer, Stu. But I really do want this gos.’ He nodded. Manfully, I finished the burger. Ketchup dripped down my arm like a wound. There would be a goshawk. And what happened next was this: my eyes started avoiding a book that lived on the shelf by my desk. At first it was just a visual blind-spot, a tic of a blink; then something like a grain of sleep in the corner of my eye. I’d look past the place where the book was with a little flicker of discomfort I couldn’t quite place. Soon I couldn’t sit at my desk without knowing it was there. Second shelf down. Red cloth cover. Silver-lettered spine. The Goshawk. By T. H. White. I didn’t want the book to be there, and I didn’t want to think about why, and soon it got to the point that the bloody book was all I could see when I sat at my desk, even if it was the one thing in the room I wouldn’t look at. One morning, sitting there, sun on the table, coffee to hand, computer open, unable to concentrate, I snapped: this was ridiculous. I leaned down, drew out the book and put it on the desk in front of me. It was just a book. There was nothing especially malevolent about it. It was old and stained with water, and the ends of the spine were bumped and scuffed as if it had been in many bags and boxes over the years. Hmm, I thought. I was interested in my emotions now. I thought about the book cautiously, ran my feelings over it the way you feel for a hurting tooth with your tongue. The dislike was palpable, but bound up with a strange kind of apprehension that needed pulling into parts, because I wasn’t sure exactly what it was made of. I opened the book and began to read. Chapter One, it said. Tuesday. And then: When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered in sacking. It was a sentence from a long time ago, and it carried with it the apprehension of another self. Not the man who wrote it: me. Me, when I was eight years old.

• From Educated (2018)

  understand why I had ever believed anything else. For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he’d really believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and strange words came to mind, words I’d learned only minutes before: paranoia, mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution. And finally the story made sense—the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who’d been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag. — I BECAME OBSESSED WITH bipolar disorder. We were required to write a research paper for Psychology and I chose it as my subject, then used the paper as an excuse to interrogate every neuroscientist and cognitive specialist at the university. I described Dad’s symptoms, attributing them not to my father but to a fictive uncle. Some of the symptoms fit perfectly; others did not. The professors told me that every case is different. “What you’re describing sounds more like schizophrenia,” one said. “Did your uncle ever get treatment?” “No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government conspiracy.” “That does complicate things,” he said. With all the subtlety of a bulldozer I wrote my paper on the effect bipolar parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal. I wrote that children of bipolar parents are hit with double risk factors: first, because they are genetically predisposed to mood disorders, and second, because of the “stressful environment and poor parenting of parents with such disorders.” In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I had hunted with hawks for years before death meant anything to me at all. Perhaps I was then to all intents a child. I’d never considered what I was doing was cruel. I was a spectator, not a killer. Wild hawks hunted; so did mine. There seemed no useful moral difference. And falconry for me was about revelling in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught things I was pleased – partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence. And the vocabulary I’d learned from the books distanced me from death. Trained hawks didn’t catch animals. They caught quarry. They caught game. What an extraordinary term. Game. I sat quietly watching the line and wondered. I would hunt with this hawk. Of course I would. Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play. But that was not why I needed her. To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too. ‘To him I am still the rarely tolerated enemy, and to me he is always the presence of death,’ White wrote of Gos in his notebook. ‘Death will be my last failure.’ His neglect had made Gos wild again, and the hawk had become death to him because it could not be beaten. For six weeks he had struggled with it and the struggle had been as Jacob’s with the angel. ‘I have lived for this hawk,’ he wrote in despair. ‘I have gone half bird myself, transforming my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares. If the hawk dies almost all my present me dies with it. It has treated me today as if I were a dangerous and brutal enemy never seen before.’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘I had only just escaped from humanity,’ White wrote, ‘and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.’ But he hadn’t escaped, not quite. When you read The Goshawk you’re given to understand that his cottage was miles from anywhere, a remote outpost deep in a wood half a mile from the nearest road. But the cottage was on the Stowe estate; it had been built on one of the old roads laid out as carriage routes to the great house centuries before. They were called the Ridings, and one ran in a shifting river of grass straight past White’s cottage, over the crest of a sheep-cropped hill and down to the doors of the school. The house was rustic, yes: it had an earth-closet and a well, and when White stood with his hawk in the barn he could still see where a Victorian gamekeeper had written of vanished bags of game in pencil on the back of the door. Phesant, it said. Harn. But remote it was not. There was his house, not quite in a wood, sitting on the old and open road to Stowe, like a promise not quite kept, and White in it, like a dog who sits at the very end of his chain, or the sad divorcee who moves out of their partner’s house to live at the bottom of the road. For all his joy in freedom, the schoolmaster had not escaped the bounds of the school, and he’d not escaped schoolmastering either. In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude. The training of a hawk mirrored the education of the public schoolboy. In both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilised; was taught good manners and obedience. But the methods were different, and this gave White much pleasure. ‘I had been a schoolmaster for so long,’ he wrote, ‘in which profession the standard way of meeting a difficult situation was by punishment. It was nice after this to discover a profession of education where punishment was treated as ridiculous.’

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In India, truth was measured not by its objective but by its therapeutic value. The followers of Samkhya were supposed to meditate upon this description of nature’s relationship with the purusha in order to discover what a human being had to do to find his way back to his true self. The ideas of Samkhya were almost certainly born in the circles of renouncers who were not satisfied by the spirituality of the Upanishads. Instead of losing themselves in the impersonal brahman, they wanted to retain their individuality. It was quite clear to them that life was unsatisfactory. Something had gone wrong, but it was pointless to speculate on how this unhappy state of affairs had come to pass. In their meditations they had glimpsed some kind of inner light, which indicated to them that they had another, more absolute self, if only they could separate it from the mess of illusion and desire that impeded their spiritual growth. The word samkhya may have once referred to the “dissociation” of the self from the “natural” realm of mind and matter. The renouncer had already withdrawn from society; now he had to take the next step, and find the true center of his being: the true spirit, his real self, his immortal purusha. Samkhya attempted an analysis of reality that was simply designed to help the renouncer to achieve this liberation. In his forest retreat he could meditate upon it in order to understand the different components of his human nature. Only by becoming acquainted with the complexities of the human predicament could he hope to transcend it. Samkhya taught that nature had three different “strands” (gunas), which could be discerned in the cosmos as a whole and in each individual person. • Satta, “intelligence,” which is closest to the purusha • Rajas, “passion,” physical or mental energy • Tamas, “inertia,” the lowest of the gunas At the beginning of time, before individual creatures had come into existence, the three gunas coexisted harmoniously in primal matter, but the presence of purusha disturbed this equilibrium and set off a process of emanation. The first of the new categories to emerge from the original undifferentiated unity was the intellect (buddhi), known as the “Great One.” This was the highest part of our natural selves, and if we could isolate and develop it, it could bring us to the brink of enlightenment. The intellect was very close to the purusha, and could reflect the self in the same way as a mirror reflects a flower, but in the unenlightened human being it was clouded by the grosser elements of the world.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But gradually the merits of Confucianism became apparent.12 The Han emperors had always appreciated the importance of ceremony and ritual. The first Han emperor had commissioned the local ritualists to draw up a court liturgy and when it was performed for the first time, he had cried: “Now I realize the nobility of being a son of Heaven!”13 Once people had recovered from the trauma of the Qin inquisition, Daoism began to seem impractical. It had always had more than a hint of anarchy and lawlessness, and it was felt that the people needed some kind of moral guidance. Whatever the merits of wu wei, the emperors could not rule entirely by “emptiness.” The popularity of Huang Lo peaked during the reign of the Han emperor Wen (179–157), and after that the regime was ready for change. In 136, the court scholar Dong Zhongshu presented a memorial to Emperor Wu (140–87), arguing that there were too many competing schools and recommending that the six classics, taught by the Confucians, should become the official teaching of the state. The emperor agreed, but instead of abolishing all the schools, as the Qin had done, he permitted the other schools to continue. Confucian philosophy endorsed the meritocratic system of the Han, which now selected its civil servants by means of a public examination. The Confucians had always believed that a man of virtue and learning should take a high position in government, regardless of his birth. They supported the family, the basic unit of society, and above all, they were scholars as well as thinkers, intimately familiar with the cultural history that was essential to the Chinese national identity.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Because she is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all. I put White’s book on the shelves, make myself a cup of tea. I’m in a contemplative mood. I’d brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down at my hands. There are scars on them now. Thin white lines. One is from her talons when she’d been fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I’d pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I’d thought I’d lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she’d helped mend, not make. 30 The moving earth It is 27 February, and I’m feeling distinctly wobbly. Tomorrow I’ll be driving Mabel to my friend Tony’s house. He’s a very old friend of mine, a gifted falconer and a deeply generous man. He lives with his family in a little lemon-coloured house in the flat lands of south Suffolk half an hour from the sea. I’m looking forward to seeing him but am wobbly all the same, because this will not be a flying visit for Mabel. Tony’s giving Mabel a spare aviary for the moulting season. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back here and leaving her behind. I have to do it. It’s time for her to drop all her feathers, one by one, and grow new ones. She needs to be fat and full of food to grow her new plumage, so all week I’ve been giving her as much quail and pheasant as she can eat. She’s round as a turkey now, and part of me has been waiting for her to get wild. A fat goshawk is a wild goshawk, say the books. They are wrong. Of course they are.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. For an hour he stands there, sometimes giving up and lying down in the pasture among the cows, then getting up again and waiting for the hawk to fly to him. The hawk does not fly to him. He walks back to six yards from the well, holds out his fist and whistles again. Gos stares at him. He does not know what he is expected to do. The man does not know how to teach him. The minutes stretch. Now the waiting is too much to bear. He takes hold of the creance; tugs it. Then he pulls on it, dragging Gos forcibly from his perch. The hawk crashes to the ground, sits there for a few seconds and flies back up onto the railing. White pulls him down again. And again. And again. On the fourth time, the hawk, defeated, starts wandering about through the thistles towards him. White retreats. The hawk, confused, uncertain, follows. White retreats faster, waving the rabbit leg, and Gos starts to run. ‘Skipping and leaping, fluffed full, a horrible toad, he bounded in my train,’ White wrote; and ‘the last two yards of the twenty-four were flown to the fist. Later that evening he rewarded the hawk with a crop of rabbit. The day had been a success, he supposed, of a sort. He is beginning to understand how to bring his hawk into condition. The condition of a hawk, White wrote, ‘was evidently a matter of exquisite assessment which could only be judged by the austringer who knew his hawk, whose subconscious mind was in minutely contact with the subconscious mind of the bird.’ It was a hard-won revelation, and it was a truth. Looking at Mabel I can see she’s reached her flying weight: it is as obvious to me as a change in the weather. Agitation, nervousness, a tendency to bate from her perch when she was bored: all these are gone at two pounds and one and a half ounces, are replaced by a glassy calm, a flow of perfect attention as if everything inside her were exactly aligned.

• From Educated (2018)

  There was a moment that winter. I was kneeling on the carpet, listening to Dad testify of Mother’s calling as a healer, when my breath caught in my chest and I felt taken out of myself. I no longer saw my parents or our living room. What I saw was a woman grown, with her own mind, her own prayers, who no longer sat, childlike, at her father’s feet. I saw the woman’s swollen belly and it was my belly. Next to her sat her mother, the midwife. She took her mother’s hand and said she wanted the baby delivered in a hospital, by a doctor. I’ll drive you, her mother said. The women moved toward the door, but the door was blocked—by loyalty, by obedience. By her father. He stood, immovable. But the woman was his daughter, and she had drawn to herself all his conviction, all his weightiness. She set him aside and moved through the door. I tried to imagine what future such a woman might claim for herself. I tried to conjure other scenes in which she and her father were of two minds. When she ignored his counsel and kept her own. But my father had taught me that there are not two reasonable opinions to be had on any subject: there is Truth and there are Lies. I knelt on the carpet, listening to my father but studying this stranger, and felt suspended between them, drawn to each, repelled by both. I understood that no future could hold them; no destiny could tolerate him and her. I would

• From Educated (2018)

  different father, a different man, is born from those details. I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe, and I was there. I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass. I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father, not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he is there, laying him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock. What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families. When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, our father was not the man we thought he would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both. Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments— thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To believe that should we fall, he would not intervene. We would die first. We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir— trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.

• From Educated (2018)

  — GRANDMA-OVER-IN-TOWN DIED ON MOTHER’S Day. I was doing research in Colorado when I heard the news. I left immediately for Idaho, but while traveling realized I had nowhere to stay. It was then that I remembered my aunt Angie, and that my father was telling anyone who would listen that she had put his name on a terrorist watch list. Mother had cast her aside; I hoped I could reclaim her. Angie lived next door to my grandfather, so again I parked along the white picket fence. I knocked. Angie greeted me politely, the way Grandpa had done. It was clear that she had heard much about me from my mother and father in the past five years. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll forget everything my dad has said about you, if you’ll forget everything he’s said about me.” She laughed, closing her eyes and throwing back her head in a way that nearly broke my heart, she looked so much like my mother. I stayed with Angie until the funeral. In the days before the service, my mother’s siblings began to gather at their childhood home. They were my aunts and uncles, but some of them I hadn’t seen since I was a child. My uncle Daryl, who I barely knew, suggested that his brothers and sisters should spend an afternoon together at a favorite restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. My mother refused to come. She would not go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie. It was a bright May afternoon when we all piled into a large van and set off on the hour-long drive. I was uncomfortably aware that I had taken my mother’s place, going with her siblings and her remaining parent on an outing to remember her mother, a grandmother I had not known well. I soon realized that my not knowing her was wonderful for her children, who were bursting with remembrances and loved answering questions about her. With every story my grandmother came into sharper focus, but the woman taking shape from their collective memories was nothing like the woman I remembered. It was then I realized how cruelly I had judged her, how my perception of her had been distorted, because I’d been looking at her through my father’s harsh lens. During the drive back, my aunt Debbie invited me to visit her in Utah.

• From Educated (2018)

  the peak had covered them in black dust, which turned to grime when it mixed with the oils on the iron. Shawn said they had to be washed before they could be loaded, so I fetched a rag and a bucket of water. It was a hot day, and I wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. My hairband broke. I didn’t have a spare. The wind swept down the mountain, blowing strands in my eyes, and I reached across my face and brushed them away. My hands were black with grease, and each stroke left a dark smudge. I shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from behind an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his face broke into a wide smile. “Our N—r’s back!” he said. — THE SUMMER SHAWN AND I had worked the Shear, there’d been an afternoon when I’d wiped the sweat from my face so many times that, by the time we quit for supper, my nose and cheeks had been black. That was the first time Shawn called me “N—r.” The word was surprising but not unfamiliar. I’d heard Dad use it, so in one sense I knew what it meant. But in another sense, I didn’t understand it as meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black person, a little girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad obviously hadn’t meant her. Shawn had called me N—r that entire summer: “N—r, run and fetch those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, N—r!” It had never given me a moment’s pause. Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university, where I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind buzzing, to lectures on American history. The professor was Dr. Richard Kimball, and he had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s favorite book on the American founding. I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made sense to me. The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead screen with a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large; as in a movie theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic. Women

• From Educated (2018)

  I don’t know what caused the transformation, why suddenly I could engage with the great thinkers of the past, rather than revere them to the point of muteness. But there was something about that city, with its white marble and black asphalt, crusted with history, ablaze in traffic lights, that showed me I could admire the past without being silenced by it. I was still breathing in the fustiness of ancient stone when I arrived in Cambridge. I rushed up the staircase, anxious to check my email, knowing there would be a message from Drew. When I opened my laptop, I saw that Drew had written, but so had my sister. — I OPENED AUDREY’S MESSAGE. It was written in one long paragraph, with little punctuation and many spelling errors, and at first I fixated on these grammatical irregularities as a way to mute the text. But the words would not be hushed; they shouted at me from the screen. Audrey said she should have stopped Shawn many years ago, before he could do to me what he’d done to her. She said that when she was young, she’d wanted to tell Mother, to ask for help, but she’d thought Mother wouldn’t believe her. She’d been right. Before her wedding, she’d experienced nightmares and flashbacks, and she’d told Mother about them. Mother had said the memories were false, impossible. I should have helped you, Audrey wrote. But when my own mother didn’t believe me, I stopped believing myself. *1 It was a mistake she was going to correct. I believe God will hold me accountable if I don’t stop Shawn from hurting anyone else, she wrote. She was going to confront him, and our parents, and she was asking me to stand with her. I am doing this with or without you. But without you, I will probably lose. I sat in the dark for a long time. I resented her for writing me. I felt she had torn me from one world, one life, where I was happy, and dragged me back into another. I typed a response. I told her she was right, that of course we should stop Shawn, but I asked her to do nothing until I could return to Idaho. I don’t know why I asked her to wait, what benefit I thought time would yield. I don’t know what I thought would happen when we talked to our

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

  The whole assumption of a long and deep inward preparation, both intellectual and moral, for a change, is without any evidence, and cannot set aside the fact that Paul was, according to his repeated confession, at that time violently persecuting Christianity in its followers. His conversion can be far less explained from antecedent causes, surrounding circumstances, and personal motives than that of any other disciple. While the older apostles were devoted friends of Jesus, Paul was his enemy, bent at the very time of the great change on an errand of cruel persecution, and therefore in a state of mind most unlikely to give birth to a vision so fatal to his present object and his future career. How could a fanatical persecutor of Christianity, "breathing threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," stultify and contradict himself by an imaginative conceit which tended to the building up of that very religion which he was laboring to destroy!395 But supposing (with Renan) that his mind was temporarily upset in the delirium of feverish excitement, he certainly soon recovered health and reason, and had every opportunity to correct his error; he was intimate with the murderers of Jesus, who could have produced tangible evidence against the resurrection if it had never occurred; and after a long pause of quiet reflection he went to Jerusalem, spent a fortnight with Peter, and could learn from him and from James, the brother of Christ, their experience, and compare it with his own. Everything in this case is against the mythical and legendary theory which requires a change of environment and the lapse of years for the formation of poetic fancies and fictions. Finally, the whole life-work of Paul, from his conversion at Damascus to his martyrdom in Rome, is the best possible argument against this hypothesis and for the realness of his conversion, as an act of divine grace. "By their fruits ye shall know them." How could such an effective change proceed from an empty dream? Can an illusion change the current of history? By joining the Christian sect Paul sacrificed everything, at last life itself, to the service of Christ. He never wavered in his conviction of the truth as revealed to him, and by his faith in this revelation he has become a benediction to all ages. The vision-hypothesis denies objective miracles, but ascribes miracles to subjective imaginations, and makes a he more effect ive and beneficial than the truth. All rationalistic and natural interpretations of the conversion of Paul turn out to be irrational and unnatural; the supernatural interpretation of Paul himself, after all, is the most rational and natural. Remarkable Concessions.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  ‘I had only just escaped from humanity,’ White wrote, ‘and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.’ But he hadn’t escaped, not quite. When you read The Goshawk you’re given to understand that his cottage was miles from anywhere, a remote outpost deep in a wood half a mile from the nearest road. But the cottage was on the Stowe estate; it had been built on one of the old roads laid out as carriage routes to the great house centuries before. They were called the Ridings, and one ran in a shifting river of grass straight past White’s cottage, over the crest of a sheep-cropped hill and down to the doors of the school. The house was rustic, yes: it had an earth-closet and a well, and when White stood with his hawk in the barn he could still see where a Victorian gamekeeper had written of vanished bags of game in pencil on the back of the door. Phesant, it said. Harn. But remote it was not. There was his house, not quite in a wood, sitting on the old and open road to Stowe, like a promise not quite kept, and White in it, like a dog who sits at the very end of his chain, or the sad divorcee who moves out of their partner’s house to live at the bottom of the road. For all his joy in freedom, the schoolmaster had not escaped the bounds of the school, and he’d not escaped schoolmastering either. In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude. The training of a hawk mirrored the education of the public schoolboy. In both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilised; was taught good manners and obedience. But the methods were different, and this gave White much pleasure. ‘I had been a schoolmaster for so long,’ he wrote, ‘in which profession the standard way of meeting a difficult situation was by punishment. It was nice after this to discover a profession of education where punishment was treated as ridiculous.’

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

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

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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