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 Story of O (1954)

  "Eric has fallen head over heels in love with you, O," he told her. "This morning he called on me and begged me to grant you your freedom. He told me he wants to marry you. He wants to save you. You see how I treat you if you're mind, O, and if you are mine you have no right to refuse my commands; but you also know that you are always free to choose not to be mine. I told him so. He's coming back here at three." O burst out laughing. "Isn't it a little late?" she said. "You're both quite mad. If Eric had not come by this morning, what would you have done with me this afternoon? We would have gone for a walk, nothing more? Then let's go for a walk. Or perhaps you would not have summoned me this afternoon? In that case I'll leave..." "No," Sir Stephen broke in, "I would have called you, but not to go for a walk. I wanted..." "Go on, say it." "Come, it will be simpler to show you." He got up and opened a door in the wall opposite to the fireplace, a door identical to the one in his office. O had always thought that the door led into a closet which was no longer used. She saw a tiny bedroom, newly painted, and hung with dark red silk. Half of the room was occupied by a rounded stage flanked by two columns, identical to the stage in the music room at Samois. "The walls and ceiling are lined with cork, are they not?" O said. "And the door is padded, and you've had a double window installed?" Sir Stephen nodded. "But since when has all this been done?" O said. "Since you've been back." "Then why?..." "Why did I wait until today? Because I first wanted to hand you over to other men. Now I shall punish you for it. I've never punished you, O." "But I belong to you," O said. "Punish me. When Eric comes..." An hour later, when he was shown a grotesquely bound and spread-eagled O strapped to the two columns, the boy blanched, mumbled something and disappeared. O thought she would never see him again. She ran into him again at Roissy, at the end of September, and he had her consigned to him for three days in a row, during which he savagely abused and mistreated her. Part IV: The Owl What O failed completely to understand now was why she had ever been hesitant to speak to Jacqueline about what René rightly called her true condition. Anne-Marie had warned her that she would be changed when she left Samois, but O had never imagined that the change would be

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  The “targets” were not permitted to reply or defend themselves. The session was scheduled to last an hour, but their kvetching not only took the entire evening, it spilled over into the next morning and set “new records in inventive criticism,” Romney said. Despite the counseling, the group neared the end of the retreat wondering if they could ever work together. Then a final, one-hour exercise changed everything. In that session, the instructor taught the group that if individuals live in conflict with their core values, they will be unhappy, unhealthy, and less successful. In psychology, that is called cognitive dissonance, when people experience stress from holding contradictory beliefs or when they engage in actions that go against their values. Internal conflict between how one lives and what one values creates stress, and the consequences of stress can be dire. Further, the instructor taught, if individuals in a group have widely divergent core values, it will be very hard for the group to work together inclusively. “I thought I had my answer as to why our team was disintegrating: Our values were miles apart,” Romney said. “One partner said his life ambition was to be in the Forbes list of wealthiest people, another wanted fame and recognition to compensate for his life’s early indignities, and another cared primarily about his family life. Our instructor said that it was possible that our actual core values weren’t that disparate. Instead, it might be that what we were working for, saying to ourselves that we wanted from life, was in conflict with our own core values.” The instructor asked the group to list the five people they most respected—living or dead. Then next to each person’s name they wrote the three characteristics they most associated with that individual. Romney made his list of people and chose words and phrases to describe them. They were: “service,” “love of others,” “integrity,” “faith,” “compassion,” “vision,” “strength of character.” Finally, group members were instructed to select the three words that appeared most frequently on their lists. Romney’s words were “love,” “service,” and “faith.” “I wondered what my partners’ lists would show,” Romney says. He was surprised. “We had all arrived at basically the same values. Every one of us had included love and service. And in the list of people we most admired, every one of us had included Abraham Lincoln. “We were not so different after all,” he concludes. The partners realized they needed to align their team’s mission with its members’ core values, then work together with a keen focus on those ideals. “I can’t say that our business suddenly transformed into an enterprise of love and service,” Romney says. “But I can say that it changed, and we changed, too.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We told him not to focus on any weaknesses until he had captured all the manager’s thinking on his good attributes. He reported back that it felt remarkably weird taking notes on the good stuff his boss was saying, and even odder to ask for clarifications on those positives; but after just ten minutes of this he began to realize that his manager was well aware of his strengths. Tyler then saw the improvement ideas his boss was offering in a new light. They were to help him develop his talents so he could progress, not an indictment of his abilities overall. He left the meeting with newfound confidence. The lesson learned from this, that we have since passed along to the leaders we work with, is to take much more time than in the past to be very clear on your appreciation of your employees’ strengths. A complaint we hear about this is that it would take too much work on the part of managers to overcome uncertainty in each of their people—too much coaching, communicating, and hand-holding. Adrian heard this in Stockholm in late 2019 while conducting a workshop for the Nordic Forum for Continuous Improvement on how to lead cultural change. The several hundred people in attendance were from various companies all over Sweden. At one point, Adrian gave them a task intended to help brainstorm better ways to talk with their teams about change and improve information flow up and down in complex environments. In the debrief, one older manager complained about the younger generation: “Leading them is hard because they want excessive amounts of direction and feedback.” Sitting at the very next table were a pair of fresh-faced younger workers, clearly still in their twenties. So Adrian asked them, “Do you need excessive amounts of direction and feedback?” The group chuckled, and one of the two young people spoke up with characteristic Swedish tact. “I don’t think that’s entirely accurate,” she said. “I believe what I need is consistent direction and feedback.” Ah, the wisdom of youth! Usually when employees fail to adapt to change or refuse to push boundaries, we find that they are afraid of the consequences to their jobs, even though they may be more than capable of going beyond what is asked, modifying their behavior, or pushing the status quo. Since leaders don’t clearly ask for more out of them, these people never do any more than asked. Worse, they don’t speak up when they should. In an interview we conducted for this book with Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization , she explained, “When people feel heightened interpersonal anxiety, they worry, ‘Will I get in trouble if . . . ?’ or ‘Will I get rejected if . . . ?’

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Sexual selection’s view of nature emphasizes conflict, deceit, and dirty gene pools.” 1 No less an authority than The Advice Goddess herself (syndicated columnist Amy Alkon) voices the popularized expression of this oft-told tale: “There are a lot of really bad places to be a single mother, but probably one of the worst ever was 1.8 million years ago on the savannah. The ancestral women who successfully passed their genes on to us were those who were choosy about who they went under a bush with, weeding out the dads from the cads. Men had a different genetic imperative—to avoid bringing home the bison for kids who weren’t theirs—and evolved to regard girls who give it up too easily as too high risk for anything beyond a roll on the rock pile.” 2 Note how so much fits into this tidy package: the vulnerabilities of motherhood, separating dads from cads, paternal investment, jealousy, and the sexual double standard. But as they say at the airport, beware of tidy packages you didn’t pack yourself. As for an English lady, I have almost forgotten what she is.—something very angelic and good. C HARLES D ARWIN, in a letter from the HMS Beagle Gentry had to be pitied. They had so few advantages in respect of love. They could say they longed for a kiss from a bouncy wife in a vicarage garden. They couldn’t say she roared under me and clutched my back, and I shot my specimen to blazes. R OGER M CDONALD, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter The best place to begin a reassessment of our conflicted relationship with sexuality may be with Charles Darwin himself. Darwin’s brilliant work inadvertently lent an enduring scientific patina to what is essentially anti-erotic bias. Despite his genius, what Darwin didn’t know about sex could fill volumes. This is one of them. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, a time when little was known about human life before the classical era. Prehistory, the period we define as the 200,000 or so years when anatomically modern people lived without agriculture and writing, was a blank slate theorists could fill only with conjecture. Until Darwin and others began to loosen the link between religious doctrine and scientific truth, guesses about the distant past were restricted by church teachings. The study of primates was in its infancy. Given the scientific data Darwin never saw, it’s not surprising that this great thinker’s blind spots can be as illuminating as his insights. 3 For example, Darwin’s ready acceptance of Thomas Hobbes’s still-famous characterization of prehistoric human life as having been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” left these mistaken assumptions embedded in present-day theories of human sexuality. Asked to imagine prehistoric human sex, most of us conjure the hackneyed image of the caveman dragging a dazed woman by her hair with one hand, a club in the other. As we’ll see, this image of prehistoric human life is mistaken in every one of its Hobbesian details.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are innately aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case. Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend. In Search of Primate Continuity Two elements women share with bonobos are that their ovulation is hidden from immediate detection and that they have sex throughout their cycle. But here the similarities end. Where are our genital swellings, and where is the sex at the drop of a hat? F RANS DE W AAL 12 Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands…. It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly. P AUL T HEROUX 13 Whatever one concludes about chimp violence and its relevance to human nature, our other closest primate cousin, the bonobo, offers a fascinating counter-model. Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view. Although best known today as the proponent of the Noble Savage, Rousseau’s autobiography details a fascination with sexuality that suggests that he would have considered bonobos kindred souls had he known of them. De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.” Though bonobos surpass even chimps in the frequency of their sexual behavior, females of both species engage in multiple mating sessions in quick succession with different males. Among chimpanzees, ovulating females mate, on average, from six to eight times per day, and they are often eager to respond to the mating invitations of any and all males in the group. Describing the behavior of female chimps she monitored, primatologist Anne Pusey notes, “Each, after mating within her natal community, visited the other community while sexually receptive … They eagerly approached and mated with males from the new community.” 14 This extra-group sexual behavior is common among chimpanzees, suggesting that intergroup relations are not as violent as some claim. For example, a recent study of DNA samples taken from hair follicles collected from chimpanzee nests at the Taï study area in Ivory Coast showed that more than half the young (seven of thirteen) had been fathered by males from outside the female’s home group.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.' And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for. 'I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere. 'Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbour and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbour reason could never discover, because it's irrational.' XIII A ND Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles, and squirting milk into each other's mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin's presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger. And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by. 'That all comes of itself,' they thought, 'and there's nothing interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and always will be so. And it's all always the same.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'I am questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with all those misty blurs. What am I about? To me individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in reason and words. 'Don't I know that the stars don't move?' he asked himself, gazing at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost twig of the birch-tree. 'But looking at the movements of the stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I'm right in saying that the stars move. 'And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of the earth? All the marvellous conclusions they have reached about the distances, weights, movements, and deflections of the heavenly bodies are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies about a stationary earth, on that very motion I see before me now, which has been so for millions of men during long ages, and was and will be always alike, and can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not founded on that conception of right, which has been and will be always alike for all men, which has been revealed to me as a Christian, and which can always be trusted in my soul. The question of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of deciding.' 'Oh, you haven't gone in then?' he heard Kitty's voice all at once, as she came by the same way to the drawing-room. 'What is it? you're not worried about anything?' she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight. But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him. 'She understands,' he thought; 'she knows what I'm thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her.' But at the moment he was about to speak, she began speaking. 'Kostya! do something for me,' she said; 'go into the corner room and see if they've made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can't very well.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Sviazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a faint gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner's words absurd, he understood them better than he did Sviazhsky. A great deal more of what the gentleman with the grey whiskers said to show in what way Russia was ruined by the emancipation struck him indeed as very true, new to him, and quite incontestable. The landowner unmistakably spoke his own individual thought—a thing that rarely happens—and a thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect. 'The point is, don't you see, that progress of every sort is only made by the use of authority,' he said, evidently wishing to show he was not without culture. 'Take the reforms of Peter, of Catherine, of Alexander. Take European history. And progress in agriculture more than anything else—the potato, for instance, that was introduced among us by force. The wooden plough too wasn't always used. It was introduced maybe in the days before the Empire, but it was probably brought in by force. Now, in our own day, we landowners in the serf times used improvements in our husbandry: drying-machines and thrashing-machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements—all that we brought into use by our authority, and the peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the abolition of serfdom we have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage primitive condition. That's how I see it.' 'But why so? If it's rational, you'll be able to keep up the same system with hired labour,' said Sviazhsky. 'We've no power over them. With whom am I going to work the system, allow me to ask?' 'There it is—the labour force—the chief element in agriculture,' thought Levin. 'With labourers.' 'The labourers won't work well, and won't work with good implements. Our labourer can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when he's drunk he ruins everything you give him. He makes the horses ill with too much water, cuts good harness, barters the tyres of the wheels for drink, drops bits of iron into the thrashing-machine, so as to break it. He loathes the sight of anything that's not after his fashion. And that's how it is the whole level of husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of cultivation, overgrown with weeds, or divided among the peasants, and where millions of bushels were raised you get a hundred thousand; the wealth of the country has decreased.

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

  Tenth Proof . There is a great class of experiences in our mental life which may be described as discoveries that a subjective condition which we have been having is really something different from what we had supposed. We suddenly find ourselves bored by a thing which we thought we were enjoying well enough; or in love with a person whom we imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately analyze our motives, and find that at bottom they contain jealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to be there. Our feelings towards people are perfect wells of motivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection brings to light. And our sensations likewise: we constantly discover new elements in sensations which we have been in the habit of receiving all our days, elements, too, which have been there from the first, since otherwise we should have been unable to distinguish the sensations containing them from others nearly allied. The elements must exist, for we use them to discriminate by; but they must exist in an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to single them out.[184] The books of the analytic school of psychology abound in examples of the kind. Who knows the countless associations that mingle with his each and every thought? Who can pick apart all the nameless feelings that stream in at every moment from his various internal organs, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose in their totality his sense of bodily life? Who is aware of the part played by feelings of innervation and suggestions of possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance, shape, and size? Consider, too, the difference between a sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to . Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations; and yet the feelings and elements of feeling which it reveals must have been already there—in an unconscious state. We all know practically the difference between the so-called sonant and the so-called surd consonants, between D, B, Z, G, V, and T, P, S, K, F, respectively. But comparatively few persons know the difference theoretically , until their attention has been called to what it is, when they perceive it readily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surds plus a certain element, which is alike in all, superadded. That element is the laryngeal sound with which they are uttered, surds having no such accompaniment.

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

  How, then, does the general purpose arise? It arises as soon as the notion of a sign as such, apart from any particular import, is born; and this notion is born by dissociation from the outstanding portions of a number of concrete cases of signification. The 'yelp,' the 'beg,' the 'rat,' differ as to their several imports and natures. They agree only in so far as they have the same use—to be signs, to stand for something more important than themselves. The dog whom this similarity could strike would have grasped the sign per se as such, and would probably thereupon become a general sign-maker, or speaker in the human sense. But how can the similarity strike him? Not without the juxtaposition of the similars (in virtue of the law we have laid down (p. 506), that in order to be segregated an experience must be repeated with varying concomitants)—not unless the 'yelp' of the dog at the moment it occurs recalls to him his 'beg,' by the delicate bond of their subtle similarity of use—not till then can this thought hash through his mind: " Why, yelp and beg, in spite of all their unlikeness, are yet alike in this: that they are actions, signs, which lead to important boons. Other boons, any boons, may then be got by other signs!" This reflection made, the gulf is passed. Animals probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is not delicate enough. Each sign is drowned in its import, and never awakens other signs and other imports in juxtaposition. The rat-hunt idea is too absorbingly interesting in itself to be interrupted by anything so uncontiguous to it as the idea of the 'beg for food,' or of 'the door-open yelp,' nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea.

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

  A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. "I realize for the first time," we then say, "what that means!" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to same results by I very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief. Those to whom God' and 'Duty' are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more.[334] CHAPTER XXII.[335] "REASONING." We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.

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

  A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. "I realize for the first time," we then say, "what that means!" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to same results by I very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief. Those to whom God' and 'Duty' are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more.[334] CHAPTER XXII.[335] "REASONING." We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  one’s own popularity was baffling to me. These were not ideas I had of myself, and I did not propose to urge them on anyone else. I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High. The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal. They didn’t gush. They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community. They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work. I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  SO HOW DID the first Christians interpret the death of Jesus? What did they say about it, what did they mean, and how did they arrive at that view? This brings us at last to the heart of our investigation. I have insisted that we cannot jump straight in with the normal Western assumptions about what “dying for our sins” or even “in accordance with the Bible” might actually mean. We need to go back, as we have now done, and investigate, first, the set of first-century Jewish assumptions within which those phrases meant what they meant and, second, how the very first Christians went about putting this new vision into practice. But, having done all that, we must return to the underlying question. Already by the time of Paul, the early Christians believed that something had happened on the cross itself, something of earth-shattering meaning and implication, something as a result of which the world was now a different place. A revolution had been launched. We must remind ourselves that for a full account of “atonement”—as we have seen, more of a complex word than we often recall—we need to speak of resurrection, ascension, the Spirit, the life of faith, the ultimate resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of all things. But we must still insist that it is proper, necessary, and vital to ask: By six o’clock on the first Good Friday evening, what had changed and how had that happened? That is the task to which we must now give attention. Right away we meet something very peculiar. You might suppose that if Christian theologians were going to trace the meaning of Jesus’s death, they would begin with Jesus himself. Mostly, they do not. I possess many books on the “atonement.” Few give much attention to the gospels. None, as far as I recall, starts with Jesus himself. They may sooner or later highlight one famous saying, Mark 10:45 (“The son of man . . . came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’”), but they do not normally go much beyond that. They seldom if ever link the meaning of Jesus’s death with Jesus’s announcement of God’s kingdom coming “on earth as in heaven.” They seldom highlight the fact that Jesus chose to go to Jerusalem and (so it seems) force some kind of a showdown with the authorities not on the Day of Atonement, not at the Festival of Tabernacles, the Festival of Dedication, or any other special day on the sacred calendar, laden with meaning as they were, but at Passover.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I had one of those rare moments of clarity that don’t do you a damned bit of good when you can see the truth about anything you gaze upon. I saw that they were lovers, I saw that Roger separated us not to protect me, but because he could not bear to see his lover touch me, I saw that all of us were doomed. Still I could not weep as loudly as Roger, who had to be pulled off Professor Gregory by four campus cops. The administration shook us off like so many dead fleas. Professor Gregory was prosecuted for rape, on Roger’s testimony, and convicted. It took a lot of trouble for me to avoid finding out what his sentence was. I refused to testify because I did not want to describe, under oath, what happened when he grabbed me. I wasn’t sure, then, exactly what rape was, but I knew this was not it. An assailant and victim have nothing in common. But I had recognized him, and then made use of him. I was culpable. They expelled me when I was charged with being an accessory to violence against women, and I think I sort of deserved it, even though the woman in question was myself. A judge remanded me to the penal farm for re-education, where I stayed until Jackie set a big version of one of her rabbit traps for the bed-check matron and we high-tailed it to the bright lights, city sights, and torrid nights. The indefensible behavior of one of its leaders provided an excuse to investigate other leaders of Students for Solidarity. When dormitory rooms were raided, they found the usual assortment of contraband—proscribed reading material, illicit drugs, and an unsafe birth control device. It was enough to discredit the group. Nobody objected when it was banned. I’m out of the nice neighborhood now and walking through a sleazier part of town. There are more people on the street, but I feel safer because most of them are crooks and crazies. That says a lot for the flying buttresses of our Democratic Socialist Feminist Way of Life, don’t it? I give a wide berth to a circle of kids, music victims holding a sidewalk autism contest. I know they can’t hurt each other when they wear those helmets, but it creeps me out. Besides, they can’t see where they’re going, and I’m not wearing a crash-proof topper full of headbanging sounds. One of the helmets is defective, and I can hear snatches of music as I go by. Now I’m in trouble again. Worse, maybe. Pretty soon I’m going to be walking by the very alley where I got busted. To keep from gnawing on myself, I slip into a little reverie about the poor jane who got busted with me.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Such as what’s happening right here, right now, Myrna. Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information from me, but you’re not giving anything back! I believe you’re trying to relate to me differently now, but I’m not experiencing it as engagement. I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals.” “You mean I’m not relating because of my whining?” “No, that’s not what I said. Now, Myrna, our time is up today, and we’ve got to stop, but when you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you a minute ago about how you’re relating to me. I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” After the session Myrna wasted no time putting in the cassette and following Ernest’s instructions. Starting with “I’d say you’d pass all my physical checkpoints,” she listened intently. “But some of the other things we’ve been discussing would give me pause. . . . Listen hard to what I’m going to say. You’re collecting and hoarding. You’re accumulating information . . . but you’re not giving anything back! . . . I don’t feel yet that you’re relating to me as a person—it’s more like you regard me as a data bank from which you make withdrawals. . . . When you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you. . . . I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” Switching cassettes, Myrna listened to the countertransference dictation again. Certain phrases struck home: “She will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. . . . How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? . . . Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. . . . No tenderness . . . too self-focused . . . ungiving.” Perhaps Dr. Lash is right, she thought. I really never have thought about him, his life, his experience. But I can change that. Today. Right now as I drive home. But she couldn’t stay focused for more than a minute or two. To still her mind, she turned to a useful mind-quieting technique she had learned a few years before at a Big Sur meditation weekend (which in most other ways had been a rip-off). Keeping one part of her mind on the highway, with the rest she imagined a broom sweeping out every stray thought that popped in. That done, she concentrated only on her breathing, on the inhalation of cool air and on the exhalation of the air slightly heated in the nest of her lungs.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The particular concerns most salient to clinical work are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness—themes which form the spine of my text, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Since these sources of angst are universal—inherent in the human condition—psychotherapists cannot pretend that it is only “they,” the patients, who face these threats; instead it is “we,” all of us, who share a common destiny. Accordingly the metaphor of “fellow travelers” more aptly describes the therapist-patient relationship I strive for in my therapy work. I first met with Irene shortly after completing three years of research in which I and my colleagues studied the dynamics and clinical course of eighty bereaved spouses. * My research experience proved less relevant to the treatment course than I had expected; in fact there were many counter-productive instances—times when Irene felt, quite justifiably, that my reliance on the experience of other bereaved individuals impeded my appreciation of her unique experience. The effective therapist must be able to empty his/her mind of the expectations and stereotypes which obstruct vision in order to facilitate the patient’s unique narrative to unfold freshly in the relationship. And so, too, for therapy technique. Not only in “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” but in the other tales as well I urge the therapist to create a new therapy for each patient. Hyperbolic though that may sound, I sincerely mean that the therapeutic venture must be organic: the therapist and patient must together shape the form of therapy—indeed, the joint process of shaping the work is an integral part of the work. The contemporary managed care trend toward brief, ready-made, protocol-driven therapy is a wrong turn and is deeply threatening to the whole therapeutic enterprise; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the process of personal growth, namely that therapy consists of imparting information or advice. Ernest Lash, the therapist in the last two stories “Double Exposure” and “The Hungarian Cat Curse” had an earlier life as the protagonist of my novel, Lying on the Couch. His encore appearance is meant to signify that these two last tales are heavily fictionalized. “Double Exposure” is a “what if” story. Years ago, I regularly audiotaped the sessions of a patient who had a two-hour commute to my office and handed her the cassette to listen to on the drive to the following session. (I routinely do this with patients who come to see me from great distances. It makes good use of the commute time by priming the patient for the next hour. Therapy is always more effective if the sessions are continuous rather than episodic—I much prefer sessions that explore ongoing themes at ever deeper levels to sessions that are focused outward, upon the external events of the preceding week). Well, one week I forgot to give my patient the tape.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The chestnuts. Almost two years had passed since I’d shucked them and stored them away. In all that time no one had said a word about them. They’d been forgotten by everyone but me, and I’d kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to remind Dwight to give me the job again. We climbed up into the attic and worked our way down to where I’d put the boxes. It was cramped and musty. From below I could hear faint voices singing. Dwight led the way, probing the darkness with a flashlight. When he found the boxes he stopped and held the beam on them. Mold covered the cardboard sides and rose from the tops of the boxes like dough swelling out of a breadpan. Its surface, dark and solid-looking, gullied and creased like cauliflower, glistened in the light. Dwight played the beam over the boxes, then turned it on the basin where the beaver, also forgotten these two years past, had been left to cure. Only a pulp remained. This too was covered with mold, but a different kind than the one that had gotten the chestnuts. This mold was white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet or so above the basin. It was like cotton candy but more loosely spun. And as Dwight played the light over it I saw something strange. The mold had no features, of course, but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air. If Dwight noticed it he didn’t say anything. I followed him back downstairs and into the living room. My mother had gone to bed, but everyone else was still watching TV. Dwight picked up his saxaphone again and played silently along with the Champagne Orchestra. The tree blinked. Our faces darkened and flared, darkened and flared.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When she left home for the first time, he drove her to college and, in typical fashion, ruined the trip by grousing the entire time about the ugly, garbage-littered stream by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw a beautiful rustic, unspoiled creek. Years later, after he died, she chanced to make the trip again and noted that there were two streams, one on each side of the road. “But this time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through the driver’s window was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” All the components of this lesson—my impasse with Irene, her insistence that I read Frost’s poem, my recollection of my patient’s story of the automobile ride—had been deeply instructive. With astonishing clarity, I understood now that it was time for me to listen, to set aside my personal worldview, to stop imposing my style and my views upon my patient. It was time to look out Irene’s window. Lesson 7: Letting Go Our final session was unremarkable except for two events. First, Irene had to phone to inquire about its time. Though our meeting time had often changed because of her surgical schedule, she had not once, in five years, forgotten it. Second, I developed a splitting headache just before the session. Since I rarely get headaches, I suspect that this one was in some way related to Jack’s brain tumor, which had first made its presence known via a severe headache. “I’ve been wondering about something all week,” Irene began. “Do you plan to write about any aspect of our work together?” I had not thought of writing about her, and at that time was immersed in planning a novel. I told her so, adding, “And anyway, I’ve never written about therapy as current as ours. In Love’s Executioner, I had usually waited years, sometimes a decade or more, after a particular patient’s therapy ended before writing about it. And let me reassure you, if I ever did consider writing about you, I’d seek your permission before beginning—” “No, no, Irv,” she broke in, “I’m not worried about your writing. I’m worried about your not writing. I want my story to be told. There’s too much that therapists don’t know about treating the bereaved. I want you to tell other therapists not only what I’ve learned but what you’ve learned.” In the weeks following termination, I not only missed Irene but, again and again, found myself musing about writing her story.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  No, I didn’t believe in God’s plan. Still, I liked listening to him talk. It had so little to do with the life I’d known. I kept thinking I’d go to one last meeting, then quit. I went again. He noticed I fidgeted, and he advised I exercise, as they did. It’ll be good for you, he said. He sounded playful, but when I laughed, he didn’t. Unechoed, I heard an idiot, laughing at nothing. I stopped. He asked which kind of exercise I liked best. I told him I used to swim; he drew up a schedule. Before the piano, I’d loved being in the pool. I used to frolic with half-nereid L.A. friends: I showed off high flip dives, and I played Marco Polo until I lost my voice, but this wasn’t fun. He set goals. I kept a log. One dull lap blurred into the next, tired leg muscles singing. Push through, he urged. Each night, I thrashed across the school’s Olympic-sized pool. I watched myself, the blurred Phoebe ghost, glide along striped tiles. In time, I noticed more habits changing. I was drinking less, I realized. If I craved gin, I sipped tonic. I hadn’t known it, but I longed for discipline. It was part of the life I’d lost with the piano: a schedule, rigid expectations. With the six-plus hours I practiced each night, I’d had rules to bind me in place. They’d held me up. – I started playing the piano again, in Jejah, at John Leal’s request. I’d thought I couldn’t, but in a short while, as with the ongoing swims, I didn’t mind. Plinked single-octave hymns, simple chords that resolved, like finished stories, with each line: this wasn’t the music I’d failed. If I played well, or didn’t, I felt no pleasure. I didn’t have to be afraid. – So, I’d changed. It was possible. I often thought about what John Leal liked saying, that if we could believe all people existed in their minds as much as we did in our own, the rest followed. To love, he said, is but to imagine well. I pulled out this thought; I held it up, in private, turning it in the light as though I’d find in its prism gleam the Phoebe I could still become. –