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 The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  This book changed everything for me: my orgasms, my relationship with sex, my relationship with my orgasms, and how I shared my orgasms (or not) with other people. I’ve recommended this book to hundreds, thousands of women over the years. Like me, each woman has had her own “ah ha!” moment between these pages. You can probably guess that for me it began with learning that I had grown up with cultural values instilled in me that were actually over a hundred years old. Basically, Freud had said that women had “immature” orgasms with the clitoris, and only “mature” (read: “real”) orgasms from intercourse—vaginal—sex. And as a sex educator, I knew how many impossible standards this drivel, taken as gospel, had put into place. It boggled my mind that my generation of women could be still living under social rules about women’s orgasms from so long ago. But when I read about it, I realized I had found a definition for what my head had decided was a “real” orgasm or not. And the realization that it was not my definition at all, that it was from outside me, brought me a sense of relief. It also gave me the power to reject it. Still. It’s easy to read all of the popular sex-ed books and feel like you’re somehow missing out. So-and-so porn star can have orgasms when she blinks. That trendy bestseller will tell you there’s a “magic button” hidden somewhere inside of your ladyparts, and if you can’t find it, well, we’re sorry. Good luck. There’s always something lurking around the corner to bully your orgasm into not showing up, or when she does, to make her feel like she’s wearing the same dress to the party as she did last year. And there’s lipstick on her teeth. She felt great, but little did she realize there was something not-so-great about her the whole time. You will always read these things and feel like you don’t stack up. That you’re missing out. That you’ll never reach the summit. So I’d like to encourage you to think of these things like a glass door between you and your pleasure. And think of this book like a gentle brick—or a key, if you prefer a more subtle metaphor—to get you through to the other side. I recommended this book to “Frustrated,” and I recommend it to all women—not just those of us who can’t get to where we think we should be with orgasm. This book is for all women. Ones who are lucky and have orgasms readily, repeatedly, and easily; those who find them insanely frustratingly elusive; and women who have no idea where to even begin—as well as women who once had them and want them back. It’s a luscious, eye-opening, practical, and entertaining read. It is impossible to read this book and not learn something you really value about orgasms.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  It feels funny to know it’s ending. The whole semester has been a little strange because of that. Spring semester will probably be that way for kids graduating at the end of the year. You see things in a special way when you realize your days among them are numbered. You try to treat people a little different so you can leave them with the truest impression of what they’ve meant to you. I could always go back and hang around school like some guys do after they graduate, but I don’t want to do that. I’ll visit Gene and Leeland and Coach, but I want to make this break a clean one. I want to put the high school part of my life behind me. Carla and I and Dad and Cindy and Willa watched the old version of A Christmas Carol on TV a few nights ago, and although I didn’t bring it up, I was really impressed by this idea of seeing the end of things in that story. I mean it’s Scrooge’s knowledge of the end of things that changes his life. Those ghosts show him a glimpse of the future and it gives him a new perspective. Then he takes charge of himself and changes. It takes supernatural power to make old Scrooge realize something everybody should know just from looking around: that he’s going to die. This idea of realizing your death and accepting it and keeping its realization with you always is the major thing I got out of Carlos Castaneda’s books about his days with Don Juan. This awareness and acceptance of death sets up an almost contradictory way of looking at life. On the one hand, you know your time is short, so you use it preciously. Then on the other hand, you know it all comes to dust anyway, so you don’t value anything too highly. You have things in a perspective that allows you to live in equilibrium with the universe. I’ve tried and tried to find a way to work A Christmas Carol into my senior thesis, but it’s almost done now and I’d wreck it if I tried to stick something new in. I’ve got the Castaneda stuff all through it. You can’t graduate with honors from David Thompson unless you write a senior thesis. At the end of the school year the Honor Society has a meeting in which they tell the juniors about the thesis and hand out a little booklet of instructions. That gives you the summer and most of your senior year to get it done. The thesis is supposed to be long and serious and it has to pass a panel of teachers, so you really do need some time. Washington state colleges are supposed to dig David Thompson graduates because of our theses.

• From Little Women (1868)

  In a minute a hand came down over the page, so that she could not draw, and Laurie's voice said, with a droll imitation of a penitent child, "I will be good, oh, I will be good!" But Amy did not laugh, for she was in earnest, and tapping on the outspread hand with her pencil, said soberly, "Aren't you ashamed of a hand like that? It's as soft and white as a woman's, and looks as if it never did anything but wear Jouvin's best gloves and pick flowers for ladies. You are not a dandy, thank Heaven, so I'm glad to see there are no diamonds or big seal rings on it, only the little old one Jo gave you so long ago. Dear soul, I wish she was here to help me!" "So do I!" The hand vanished as suddenly as it came, and there was energy enough in the echo of her wish to suit even Amy. She glanced down at him with a new thought in her mind, but he was lying with his hat half over his face, as if for shade, and his mustache hid his mouth. She only saw his chest rise and fall, with a long breath that might have been a sigh, and the hand that wore the ring nestled down into the grass, as if to hide something too precious or too tender to be spoken of. All in a minute various hints and trifles assumed shape and significance in Amy's mind, and told her what her sister never had confided to her. She remembered that Laurie never spoke voluntarily of Jo, she recalled the shadow on his face just now, the change in his character, and the wearing of the little old ring which was no ornament to a handsome hand. Girls are quick to read such signs and feel their eloquence. Amy had fancied that perhaps a love trouble was at the bottom of the alteration, and now she was sure of it. Her keen eyes filled, and when she spoke again, it was in a voice that could be beautifully soft and kind when she chose to make it so. "I know I have no right to talk so to you, Laurie, and if you weren't the sweetest-tempered fellow in the world, you'd be very angry with me. But we are all so fond and proud of you, I couldn't bear to think they should be disappointed in you at home as I have been, though, perhaps they would understand the change better than I do." "I think they would," came from under the hat, in a grim tone, quite as touching as a broken one. "They ought to have told me, and not let me go blundering and scolding, when I should have been more kind and patient than ever. I never did like that Miss Randal and now I hate her!" said artful Amy, wishing to be sure of her facts this time.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness. By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control. I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

• From Little Women (1868)

  If you'd only set about another task of some sort, you'd soon be your hearty, happy self again, and forget your trouble." "That's impossible." "Try it and see. You needn't shrug your shoulders, and think, 'Much she knows about such things'. I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit. Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don't let it spoil you, for it's wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can't have the one you want. There, I won't lecture any more, for I know you'll wake up and be a man in spite of that hardhearted girl." Neither spoke for several minutes. Laurie sat turning the little ring on his finger, and Amy put the last touches to the hasty sketch she had been working at while she talked. Presently she put it on his knee, merely saying, "How do you like that?" He looked and then he smiled, as he could not well help doing, for it was capitally done, the long, lazy figure on the grass, with listless face, half-shut eyes, and one hand holding a cigar, from which came the little wreath of smoke that encircled the dreamer's head. "How well you draw!" he said, with a genuine surprise and pleasure at her skill, adding, with a half-laugh, "Yes, that's me." "As you are. This is as you were." and Amy laid another sketch beside the one he held. It was not nearly so well done, but there was a life and spirit in it which atoned for many faults, and it recalled the past so vividly that a sudden change swept over the young man's face as he looked. Only a rough sketch of Laurie taming a horse. Hat and coat were off, and every line of the active figure, resolute face, and commanding attitude was full of energy and meaning. The handsome brute, just subdued, stood arching his neck under the tightly drawn rein, with one foot impatiently pawing the ground, and ears pricked up as if listening for the voice that had mastered him. In the ruffled mane, the rider's breezy hair and erect attitude, there was a suggestion of suddenly arrested motion, of strength, courage, and youthful buoyancy that contrasted sharply with the supine grace of the 'Dolce far Niente ' sketch. Laurie said nothing but as his eye went from one to the other, Amy saw him flush up and fold his lips together as if he read and accepted the little lesson she had given him. That satisfied her, and without waiting for him to speak, she said, in her sprightly way... "Don't you remember the day you played Rarey with Puck, and we all looked on?

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  35 o Convinced by his Pharisaic convictions that Jesus was cursed by God because of his death (Gal. 3:13), Paul sought to extirpate the movement. o He had, in his words, an encounter with Jesus as Lord (1 Cor. 9:1, 15:8; Gal. 1:15–16; see Acts 9:1–9) that made him an apostle to the Gentiles. o Apart from four to six years spent in prison, he spent the rest of his life founding communities in Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia. He died a martyr under Nero. o Paul is important as a missionary of the movement, as a leader in the conversion of Gentiles, and as the first and arguably most important interpreter of the story of Jesus. • Scholars debate how many letters were written by Paul during his lifetime and how many after his death by followers, but the letters are nonetheless of unparalleled importance for what they tell us about early Christianity in the cities of the empire. o Paul’s letters are not systematic but occasional, not personal but official, not mere rants but rhetorically crafted arguments meant to persuade. o He was a firsthand witness to the convictions and claims—and troubles—found among believers 20 to 30 years after the death of Jesus. Christ appeared to Paul as to “one untimely born”; Paul interpreted that experience as his commissioning to be an apostle to the Gentiles. © Photos.com/Thinkstock. 36 Lecture 5: Paul and Christianity’s First Expansion o Paul is the source for the earliest religious claims concerning the Holy Spirit, Jesus as Lord, and the church as the body of Christ. o He is the earliest recorder of such Christian practices as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy. o His letters show the diverse forms of authority and structure the early communities developed, from the authority of the apostle himself to the local boards of elders. o In his responses to various crises in his communities, Paul illustrates the need for translation and interpretation of fundamental experiences and convictions in solving human conflicts and errors. Paul’s Letters • Paul’s letters open a window to a variety of serious tensions that challenged the first urban Christians and continued to haunt this religion through the centuries. • The issue of authority was fundamental: Jesus is Lord of all, but how is his reign exercised? Paul was sent as a delegate (apostolos) by God and the risen Christ, but his claims to authority were not self-validating or universally recognized. What was the relationship between the itinerant authority of the apostle and the local authorities placed in the church? • Becoming “God’s assembly” through conversion—this is an intentional not a national or biologically based community— demands “holiness,” but how is “difference” to be expressed? What manner of life distinguishes the “saints” from the “world”? o Distinctions from Gentiles were fairly easy, given that idolatry and the vice characteristically associated with idolatry were easy to detect and prohibit.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  More than $4 million of government largesse flows each year into the Colorado City public school district—which, according to the Phoenix New Times, “is operated primarily for the financial benefit of the FLDS Church and for the personal enrichment of FLDS school district leaders.” Reporter John Dougherty determined that school administrators have “plundered the district’s treasury by running up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on district credit cards, purchasing expensive vehicles for their personal use and engaging in extensive travel. The spending spree culminated in December [2000], when the district purchased a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane to facilitate trips by district personnel to cities across Arizona.” Colorado City has received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave its streets, improve the fire department, and upgrade the water system. Immediately south of the city limits, the federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents receive food stamps—compared to the state average of 4.7 percent. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid. “Uncle Rulon justifies all that assistance from the wicked government by explaining that really the money is coming from the Lord,” says DeLoy Bateman. “We’re taught that it’s the Lord’s way of manipulating the system to take care of his chosen people.” Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a virtuous act. Uncle Rulon and his followers believe that the earth is seven thousand years old and that men have never walked on the moon; film clips showing Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface are part of an elaborate hoax foisted on the world by the American government, they say. In addition to the edict against watching television or reading newspapers, residents of Colorado City are forbidden to have any contact with people outside the UEP—including family members who have left the religion. DeLoy, as it happens, is one such apostate. DeLoy and his immense family live in a correspondingly immense house—at sixteen thousand square feet, it is more than five times as large as a typical three-bedroom home—which he built with his own hands in the middle of town. DeLoy’s brother David lives in a similarly large home just a few yards away, on the other side of a six-foot fence. “My brother over the fence there,” says DeLoy, gesturing with his chin, “him and I are just as close as any two people on the planet. Our father was disabled when we were small children, so David and I raised each other. But now he isn’t allowed to talk to me, because I’m no longer in the religion.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  A technician gave Anders a hug, then sent him, too, into the spacecraft, where he took the right-hand seat in the small cabin. As Anders worked to get himself settled, Lovell looked down to the ground several hundred feet below. He could see the lights of the press corps as they arrived at their designated sites, and all of a sudden it hit him: These NASA people are serious. They’re going to send us to the Moon. My God, we really are doing this . He took a deep breath, then walked across the bridge, put his feet through the hatch of the spacecraft, and lowered himself into the seat between Borman and Anders.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I left when I realized that deception and mind control can never be part of any legitimate spiritual movement, and that through their use, the group had created a virtual Hell on Earth, a kingdom of slaves. Once I was able to realize that even though I wanted to believe that Moon was the Messiah and the Divine Principle was Truth, my belief didn’t make it true. I saw that, even if I remained in the group for another 50 years, the fantasy I was sacrificing myself for would never come true. By being given clear definitions of mind control, I was able to see clearly how I had been victimized and how I had learned to victimize others. I personally had to come to terms with my own values, beliefs and ideals. Once I did that, even though I had invested so much of myself in the group, become a leader, and developed close bonds with many members, I had to walk away. I could never go back to becoming a “true believer” again. Chapter 11–Strategies for Recovery People can leave a mind control group in any of three basic ways: they walk out; they are kicked out (often in a very burned-out condition, both psychologically and physically); or they are counseled out. Although they are all fortunate to leave their cults, adjusting to life in the real world can be extremely difficult for them. If they don’t get good information, support and counseling after they leave, the cult phobias they carry with them can turn some people into psychological “time bombs.” Also, many cult members have lived for so long without any kind of normal work or social life that the process of readjustment to adult life is an uphill climb. As a result, some people leave cults only to return again and again, because they miss family and friends who are still involved, but who were ordered to shun them. While such people are in the minority, they demonstrate the vulnerability of people who have left a mind control environment. Walk Outs Without a doubt the largest number of former members falls into the first category, the walk outs. These are the people who have managed to physically remove themselves from the cult, but have received no counseling about cult mind control. I occasionally meet them socially and find that some of them, even years after the cult involvement, are still dealing with the problems of mind control indoctrination. For example, I once met a woman at a dinner party who had “walked out” of the Moonies. During our conversation, she remarked that even though she had been happily married for more than six years, she was deeply afraid of having children. She told me that she couldn’t figure this out at all, because she had wanted to have children ever since she was a little girl. Now she was in her early thirties and felt she wanted children, but she still couldn’t get over her fear.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.” [image file=image_rsrc2TW.jpg] When I was twenty-four years old, one day out of the blue my mother said to me, “You need to find your father.” “Why?” I asked. At that point I hadn’t seen him in over ten years and didn’t think I’d ever see him again. “Because he’s a piece of you,” she said, “and if you don’t find him you won’t find yourself.” “I don’t need him for that,” I said. “I know who I am.” “It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about him knowing who you are, and you knowing who he is. Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you’ve become. You need to finish that story.” [image file=image_rsrc2TX.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2TY.jpg] ROBERTMy father is a complete mystery. There are so many questions about his life that I still cannot even begin to answer. Where’d he grow up? Somewhere in Switzerland. Where’d he go to university? I don’t know if he did. How’d he end up in South Africa? I haven’t a clue. I’ve never met my Swiss grandparents. I don’t know their names or anything about them. I do know my dad has an older sister, but I’ve never met her, either. I know that he worked as a chef in Montreal and New York for a while before moving to South Africa in the late 1970s. I know that he worked for an industrial food-service company and that he opened a couple of bars and restaurants here and there. That’s about it. I never called my dad “Dad.” I never addressed him “Daddy” or “Father,” either. I couldn’t. I was instructed not to. If we were out in public or anywhere people might overhear us and I called him “Dad,” someone might have asked questions or called the police. So for as long as I can remember I always called him Robert.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  So, she came to Boston, and we worked intensively over a five-day period- meeting 3 hours in the morning, a one-and-a-half-hour lunch break, and three hours in the afternoon on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday was a day off.” I did intensive psychoeducation about social psychology and Chinese communist brainwashing models, showing videos about other cults and hypnosis. I taught her to be present in the here and now in her body. I told her that I would help her to deprogram herself so that she would develop an “internal locus of control” for her own mind. I asked her to go back to when she was first deceptively recruited and asked her to imagine, “If she knew then what she knows now, would she ever have joined?” She said, “No way!” So, I asked her to visualize the scene and say what she would have wanted to say and do what she would have wanted to do.” The effect was miraculous for her. She understood that she could do this technique to exit her “younger cult self” out of the cult. Her impulses to self-harm or take her life went away as she no longer thought a demon was influencing her. She came to understand that it was just her cult identity on “auto-pilot.” This cult identity was trained to be in “God’s church or to die.” I incorporated the video of her talk in an online course I created for clinicians and everyone who wishes to recover or help someone to recover. Counseled Outs People who had had assistance are the smallest group of ex-members. Most people who are counseled out of cults are able to find the help and information they need. However, some are still carrying around cult-related psychological baggage. Just because a person has been out of a group for years, this does not mean that all of their issues are resolved. This is particularly true of those who were deprogrammed. Some deprogramees report ongoing PTSD symptoms from the deprogramming itself. While I am eternally grateful that my family deprogrammed me, I have needed to do much self healing and also have needed to turn to experts for support. Those who were exit-counseled or experienced some voluntary form of intervention do much better. However, it takes time and good support to recover fully. If the person’s family and friends did not understand mind control and cult psychology it undermines a smooth recovery. Some people are encouraged way too fast to find a job or embark on a career. A supportive cult-aware therapist can be very helpful. Much more is now known about undue influence and cults than ever before. Today there are also many more former cult members who have become professional cult counselors.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Fourteen Book VII—Faith and Reason Scope: Augustine’s reading of the Platonist philosophers enables him to come to some conclusions about intellectual problems that he has been wrestling with for years. In this lecture, we will discuss what Augustine has learned about the nature of evil and about the goodness of creation. At the end of this book, Augustine knows that Christianity is true, but he still does not make the decision to be baptized. The end of the book is a powerful meditation on the limits of reason, on the necessity for faith, and on the relationship between faith and reason. In this lecture, we will discuss what Augustine has to say about these issues. Outline I. With the new insights that Augustine has gained from his reading of the Platonists, he is ready to seek new approaches to two questions that he had been wrestling with since he was 18. A. What is the nature of God? B. What is the nature of evil? II. With a faith that is based on the fact that the Platonists gave reasons for things that the Bible simply states to be true, Augustine turns to Scripture. A. He considers Exodus 3:14: “I am who am.” B. Augustine has been trying to figure out what sort of a being God is, but he has been asking the wrong question. C. God is not a being but, rather, being itself; God simply is. D. Augustine tells the readers that all doubt vanished from him when he recognized that God is being itself. III. Augustine describes his understanding of a neo-Platonic view of the universe. A. It is a hierarchy of being with God at the top and inanimate objects at the bottom. B. Humans are somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 43

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I get that if the caretaker does not teach the lesson of the “me” and the “not-me” to the child, she may not make adequate space for herself. But why does the delivery of this lesson come at such an enormous cost? What is the cost? Withstanding a child’s rage? Isn’t a child’s rage something we should be able to withstand? Silverman also contends that a baby’s demands on the mother can be “very flattering to the mother’s narcissism, since it attributes to her the capacity to satisfy her infant’s lack, and so—by extension—her own. Since most women in our culture are egoically wounded, the temptation to bathe in the sun of this idealization often proves irresistible.” I have seen some mothers use their babies to fill a lack, or soothe an egoic wound, or bathe in the sun of idealization in ways that seemed pathological. But for the most part those people were pathological prior to having a baby. They would have had a pathological relation to carrot juice. Remnant Lacanian that she is, Silverman’s aperture does not seem wide enough to include an enjoyment that doesn’t derive from filling a void, or love that is not merely balm for a wound. So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics. Silverman does imagine, however, that this cycle could or should change: “Our culture should support [the mother] by providing enabling representations of maternal finitude, but instead it keeps alive in all of us the tacit belief that [the mother] could satisfy our desires if she really wanted to.” What would these “enabling representations” look like? Better parts for women in Hollywood movies? Books like this one? I don’t want to represent anything. At the same time, every word that I write could be read as some kind of defense, or assertion of value, of whatever it is that I am, whatever viewpoint it is that I ostensibly have to offer, whatever I’ve lived. You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That’s part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque. Think of Joan Didion’s preemptive attempt, in Blue Nights, to quash any notion that her daughter Quintana Roo’s childhood was a privileged one. “‘Privilege’ is a judgment. ‘Privilege’ is an opinion. ‘Privilege’ is an accusation. ‘Privilege’ remains an area to which—when I think of what [Quintana] endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily cop.” These remarks were a pity, since her account of “what came later”—Quintana’s death, on the heels of the death of Didion’s beloved husband—underscores Didion’s more interesting, albeit disavowed subject, which is that economic privilege does not protect against all suffering.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  69.“I ripped the card into tiny shreds and ran to my room” : Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret , p. 116.Instead, he wondered—is Nancy telling the truth? : Box 115 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 28, 2022.“It was the voice, the absence of adult regret, instruction or nostalgia” : Pat Scales, “Natural Born Editor,” School Library Journal , May 2001, pp. 50–53.“He told me, ‘This is the reason I got into doing children’s books’ ” : PS to RB, May 27, 2022.Chapter Four Menstruation“Someday, it will happen to you” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , p. 164.which took its iconic name from a typist : Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume , p. 63.Kirkus gave Are You There God? a mixed review : Kirkus Reviews , October 1, 1970. Accessed through the New York Public Library.New York Times described it as a “funny, warm and loving book” : Dorothy Broderick, “The Young Teen Scene,” New York Times , November 8, 1970.That same day, the Times included Are You There God? : “Outstanding Books of the Year,” New York Times , November 8, 1970.“That was the first time I felt ‘I can really do this’ ” : Lee, Judy Blume’s Story , p. 70.“Communist!” the voice shrieked : Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0 .“When I was 17 I discovered one of my younger siblings” : Mr Malky (@MrMalky) on X (Twitter), April 16, 2023: https://twitter.com/MrMalky/status/1647740739978244099 .“looking at the problem [of unwanted pregnancy] from the wrong end of the telescope” : Zoom interview with Jonathan Zimmerman, May 31, 2022.“Mary Calderone, despite what her enemies said” : Ibid., May 31, 2022.“The plants and animals stuff was a way to try to teach” : Ibid., May 31, 2022. “The sperm, which come from the father’s testicles” : Andrew C. Andry and Steven Schapp, How Babies Are Made (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), no page numbers.“destroy the traditional moral fiber of America” : As quoted in Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century by Jeffrey P. Moran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 182; see also Gordon V. Drake, Sex Education in the Schools (Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade Publications, 1968), pp. 16–18.“You’ll find out when you’re thirteen” : Judy Blume, Letters to Judy , p. 163.“There was something about eggs dropping down” : Ibid., pp. 163–64.“that I once put a pin in my finger to draw blood” : Lee, Judy Blume’s Story , p. 28.“Today I was feeling brave” : Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret , p. 156.in a change originally suggested by Blume’s British editor : Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0 .“I wanted to find out how it would feel” : Judy Blume, Are You There God?

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Is it possible that he also had some other things to buy, or some other errands to run? Is it possible that he decided to take a different route to the store than he ordinarily took, and that was where the accident occurred?” I asked. Phil seemed nonplussed. “How would Tom feel, now, if it had been you who had gone to the store one day and were killed in a car accident?” I asked. “Would he get depressed, think about committing suicide, and then join the Hare Krishnas?” Phil laughed. I knew this was a bull’s-eye. Within a few minutes it was Phil who started asking me questions. “How do you feel about the Krishnas, Steve?” Phil asked. I thought he was genuinely trying to test his “reality,” not just trying to find fault with me and write me off. “Boy. That’s a tough one,” I said, scratching my head. He then said, “I want to know.” “My role as a professional, Phil, is to do counseling and not to make value judgments on what people do with their lives. I do have personal feelings though,” I said. “I want to know what you think personally,” said Phil, quietly. “Well, to be honest, I am very concerned. You see, fourteen years ago I myself joined a religious group that my family disapproved of. I too had been depressed before I met the members and wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with my life. Back then, I thought that they were trying to interfere with my rights as an adult to choose what I wanted to do.” “What group?” Phil asked, with curiosity. I decided to give the formal name first. “The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. It is also known as the Unification Church,” I said. “Anyway, I was a devoted member of the group for more than two years. I slept three hours a night, and even did several seven-day fasts, drinking just water.” “That’s a long fast,” Phil said admiringly. I could tell that he was listening to every word I said. “Yeah. I lost an average of fifteen pounds at the end of the week. Anyway, in my group we revered the leader as one of the greatest spiritual masters who has ever lived. In fact, we believed that he had met with Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna and every other great spiritual leader.”172 “You believed that?” He was amazed.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  After we finished watching the A&E report, our third day was done. At the beginning of the fourth day, we continued our dialogue about Lifton. At this point we delved into what Lifton called “loaded language.” He wrote, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”966 We talked about how the label SP might fit the category of a thought-terminating cliché. We discussed how labeling people as SPs not only makes them social pariahs but also effectively ends any consideration of their ideas or personal accounts of abuse in the organization. In this sense the loaded language linked to disconnection could not only terminate thinking but also dispense with the very existence of those so declared. “The Dispensing of Existence” is yet another of Lifton’s criteria used to identify the existence of a thought-reform program or what some might call “brainwashing.” This characteristic is an expression of how “the totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right.”967 At this point we discussed how this quotation might be linked to Scientology’s disconnection policy. How people passed in and out of existence depending on their status or designation, according to Scientology. A person’s existence could be dispensed with if he or she left the organization, because there was no legitimate reason to leave. Therefore, whenever someone left, he or she was wrong and was potentially an SP; he or she could be declared an SP and then be subject to disconnection. Wasn’t Scientology’s disconnection policy an expression of what Singer described as a “closed system” that was intolerant of criticism and resisted logic? Was it simply coincidental that so many aspects of Scientology paralleled Robert Jay Lifton’s nucleus for a definition of a destructive cult? Was it happenstance that so many of Lifton’s criteria concerning thought reform and coercive persuasion techniques, as researchers such as Schein, Singer, and Ofshe explained, seemed to be evident in Scientology? The husband didn’t experience an epiphany or sudden moment of clarity. Instead, through the days as we worked together, his realization of Scientology gradually unfolded. Bit by bit and piece by piece, the program instilled in his mind over a period of decades gradually unraveled and fell apart. He increasingly asked critical questions, and on the fifth day he said he would no longer be involved in Scientology. Needless to say, his family was greatly relieved. But most importantly, he came to this conclusion through his own thought processes, analysis, and critical thinking—which the intervention had only facilitated and encouraged. On the fifth day he began to disclose previously unknown information to his family about Scientology and its inner workings. He admitted that Scientologists had encouraged him to divorce his wife and leave his family.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I went down to spend a few days with my father, and I made it my mission: This weekend I will get to know my father. As soon as I arrived I started peppering him with questions. “Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Why did you do this? How did you do that?” He started getting visibly irritated. “What is this?” he said. “Why are you interrogating me? What’s going on here?” “I want to get to know you.” “Is this how you normally get to know people, by interrogating them?” “Well…not really.” “So how do you get to know people?” “I dunno. By spending time with them, I guess.” “Okay. So spend time with me. See what you find out.” So we spent the weekend together. We had dinner and talked about politics. We watched F1 racing and talked about sports. We sat quietly in his backyard and listened to old Elvis Presley records. The whole time he said not one word about himself. Then, as I was packing up to leave, he walked over to me and sat down. “So,” he said, “in the time we’ve spent together, what would you say you’ve learned about your dad?” “Nothing. All I know is that you’re extremely secretive.” “You see? You’re getting to know me already.” [image "Part II" file=image_rsrc2TZ.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2U0.jpg] When Dutch colonists landed at the southern tip of Africa over three hundred years ago, they encountered an indigenous people known as the Khoisan. The Khoisan are the Native Americans of South Africa, a lost tribe of bushmen, nomadic hunter-gatherers distinct from the darker, Bantu-speaking peoples who later migrated south to become the Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho tribes of modern South Africa. While settling in Cape Town and the surrounding frontier, the white colonists had their way with the Khoisan women, and the first mixed people of South Africa were born. To work the colonists’ farms, slaves were soon imported from different corners of the Dutch empire, from West Africa, Madagascar, and the East Indies. The slaves and the Khoisan intermarried, and the white colonists continued to dip in and take their liberties, and over time the Khoisan all but disappeared from South Africa. While most were killed off through disease, famine, and war, the rest of their bloodline was bred out of existence, mixed in with the descendants of whites and slaves to form an entirely new race of people: coloreds. Colored people are a hybrid, a complete mix. Some are light and some are dark. Some have Asian features, some have white features, some have black features. It’s not uncommon for a colored man and a colored woman to have a child that looks nothing like either parent.

• From The City of God

  Books That Matter: The City of God one of the things about Americans that many people coming from other cultures find most patently absurd and bewildering. Many will be surprised that I might suggest that a picture of inherited sin that seems so bleak as Augustine’s could have positive lessons for people today. We have an image of doctrines like this as weapons of unremitting bleakness, driving believers into paralysis and despair. God knows they’ve been used that way enough across history. But to Augustine and most of his immediate audience, they seemed to have had the opposite effect. His was an activist and dynamic faith, seeking to reach out well beyond the churches’ walls, meaning to be empowering on the individual level as well—he was speaking a word of liberation to people and the communities. It will help us to understand how this was possible if we reset our expectations about responsibility from a juridical understanding culminating in judgment, to a therapeutic understanding oriented toward analysis and repair. For Augustine is talking about grace as divine therapy, divine medicine. For him, the church is better conceived as a hospital than as a gymnasium, and we are more usefully understood in this life as recovering patients, rather than athletes. Patients under the hand of a true—which does not, by the way, mean gentle—healer. Augustine is sometimes called the inventor of original sin, and he is frequently condemned for it. But that’s not quite right. The notion of original sin was in place in the North African Church before Augustine; so he did not invent the concept, though he gave the most powerful and fruitful account of it that anyone has yet offered, and embedded it more tightly in a larger account of the human condition and God’s salvific action in which it made sense and served a functional role. In doing this, he was trying most basically to come to grips with the stubborn gruesomeness of our condition, and to recognize the depths of our captivity to it, and then to say that nonetheless this captivity is still against the Manicheans and others not the Creation’s 326

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  And finally, sex. A student’s mother introduced on a street corner, hearing that I write about Augustine, exclaims, “Oh, yes, he’s the one who got it all wrong about sex!” On that charge, Augustine can quite plausibly mount a strong and persuasive defense. But if as a culture we think more about sex and are more divided about its expression and more inclined to paint the colors of sexual experience in chiaroscuros and colors both muted and strong at the same time, then we are adding pages, unknowingly, to the collected works of Augustine. It is easy to be ungrateful for that heritage, but I am not so sure that he did not do us at least some favors. If the alternative was Julian of Eclanum, for whom obeying the straightforward moral dictates of conventional biblical ethics was simple, easy, and obvious, then I think we are better off with the frustrations and the possibilities Augustine represents. But however we may think of him, we think with him more often than we know, even (or rather especially) when we disagree with him. EPILOGUEWE ARE NOT WHO WE THINK WE ARE The Socratic philosopher’s task was always to know himself.622 The idea was fresh and unsettling to those who found themselves and their fellows transparent, who observed the public man and inferred that they knew the man they observed. Nothing is more characteristic of the literary and philosophical culture of Greco-Roman antiquity than the exhilarating discovery that the inner self, standing ironically apart from the public man, knows itself better than anyone else can know. Ancient man has learned to talk to himself and to find meaning and direction in an inner space of the mind. Augustine stands near the head of the line of those who found meaning in the more intimate metaphor of the “heart,” the most private space, the most important space, the stage on which the real drama of a person’s life is played. The Confessions had begun with that restless heart. But that phrase contains by implication the revolution Augustine represents. Augustine is not the final authority on Augustine. “I had become a mystery to myself.”623 The mystery has an authorized solution: “What happens when we hear about ourselves from you? [i.e., god]? We come to know ourselves.”624

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet . What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will. Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt.