Relief

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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Then, one spring day in 1918, when the pink puffs of blossoming almond trees enlivened the dark mountainside, the Bolsheviks vanished and a singularly silent army of Germans replaced them. Patriotic Russians were torn between the animal relief of escaping native executioners and the necessity of owing their reprieve to a foreign invader—especially to the Germans. The latter, however, were losing their war in the west and came to Yalta on tiptoe, with diffident smiles, an army of gray apparitions easy for a patriot to ignore, and ignored it was, save for some rather ungrateful snickers at the halfhearted KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs that appeared on park lawns. A couple of months later, having nicely repaired the plumbing in various villas vacated by commissars, the Germans faded out in their turn; the Whites trickled in from the east and soon began fighting the Red Army, which was attacking the Crimea from the north. My father became Minister of Justice in the Regional Government located in Simferopol, and his family was lodged near Yalta on the Livadia grounds, the Tsar’s former domain. A brash, hectic gaiety associated with White-held towns brought back, in a vulgarized version, the amenities of peaceful years. Cafés did a wonderful business. All kinds of theatres thrived. One morning, on a mountain trail, I suddenly met a strange cavalier, clad in a Circassian costume, with a tense, perspiring face painted a fantastic yellow. He kept furiously tugging at his horse, which, without heeding him, proceeded down the steep path at a curiously purposeful walk, like that of an offended person leaving a party. I had seen runaway horses, but I had never seen a walkaway one before, and my astonishment was given a still more pleasurable edge when I recognized the unfortunate rider as Mozzhuhin, whom Tamara and I had so often admired on the screen. The film Haji Murad (after Tolstoy’s tale of that gallant, rough-riding mountain chief) was being rehearsed on the mountain pastures of the range. “Stop that brute [Derzhite proklyatoe zhivotnoe],” he said through his teeth as he saw me, but at the same moment, with a mighty sound of crunching and crashing stones, two authentic Tatars came running down to the rescue, and I trudged on, with my butterfly net, toward the upper crags where the Euxine race of the Hippolyte Grayling was expecting me.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Laura rings for the elevator, presses the button for her floor. Under a glass pane on the elevator wall is a photograph of the eggs Benedict that can be ordered in the hotel restaurant until two in the afternoon. She looks at the photograph, thinks about how it is just barely too late to order eggs Benedict. She has been nervous for so long, and her nervousness has not dissipated but its nature seems to have suddenly changed. Her nervousness along with her anger and disappointment in herself are all perfectly recognizable to her but they now reside elsewhere. The decision to check into this hotel, to rise in this elevator, seems to have rescued her the way morphine rescues a cancer patient, not by eradicating the pain but simply by making the pain cease to matter. It’s almost as if she’s accompanied by an invisible sister, a perverse woman full of rage and recriminations, a woman humiliated by herself, and it is this woman, this unfortunate sister, and not Laura, who needs comfort and silence. Laura could be a nurse, ministering to the pain of another. She steps out of the elevator, walks calmly down the hall, fits the key into the lock of room 19. Here is her room, then: a turquoise room, not surprising or unusual in any way, with a turquoise spread on the double bed and a painting (Paris, springtime) in a blond wood frame. The room has a smell, alcohol and pitch pine, bleach, scented soap, all floating heavily over something that is not rancid, not even stale, but not fresh. It is, she thinks, a tired smell. It is the smell of a place that’s been used and used. She goes to the window, parts the filmy white curtains, raises the blinds. There, below, is the V-shaped plaza, with its fountain and struggling rosebushes, its empty stone benches. Again, Laura feels as if she’s entered a dream—a dream in which she looks onto this peculiar garden, so uninhabited, at a little past two in the afternoon. She turns from the window. She takes off her shoes. She puts her copy of Mrs. Dalloway on the glass-topped night table, and lies on the bed. The room is full of the particular silence that prevails in hotels, a tended silence, utterly unnatural, layered over a substratum of creaks and gurglings, of wheels on carpet. She is so far away from her life. It was so easy.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “Please don’t worry,” Laura says to Kitty. “You’ll be fine.” Kitty stands, gracefully, without haste. “You know the routine, right? Just give him half a can in the evening, and check his water every now and then. Ray can feed him in the morning.” “Is Ray driving you to the hospital?” “Mm-hm.” “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of things here.” “Thank you.” Kitty looks briefly around the room with an expression of weary approval, as if she had decided, somewhat against her better judgment, to buy this house after all, and see what she can do about fixing it up. “Bye,” she says. “I’ll call you tomorrow, at the hospital.” “Okay.” With a reluctant smile, a small compression of her lips, Kitty turns and leaves. Laura faces her little boy, who stares at her nervously, suspiciously, adoringly. She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything. There is the heat falling evenly on the streets and houses; there is the single string of stores referred to, locally, as downtown. There is the supermarket and the drugstore and the dry cleaner’s; there is the beauty parlor and the stationery shop and the five-and-dime; there is the one-story stucco library, with its newspapers on wooden poles and its shelves of slumbering books. . . . life, London, this moment of June. Laura leads her son back into the living room, reintroduces him to his tower of colored wooden blocks. Once he is settled, she returns to the kitchen and, without hesitation, picks up the cake and tips it from its milk-glass platter into the garbage can. It lands with a surprisingly solid sound; a yellow rose is smeared along the can’s curved side. She immediately feels relieved, as if steel cords have been loosened from around her chest. She can start over now. According to the clock on the wall, it is barely ten-thirty. She has plenty of time to make another cake. This time, she will prevent crumbs from getting caught in the icing. This time, she will trace the letters with a toothpick, so they’ll be centered, and she’ll leave the roses for last. Mrs. Woolf She is reading proofs with Leonard and Ralph when Lottie announces that Mrs. Bell and the children have arrived. “That can’t be,” Virginia says. “It’s not two-thirty yet. They’re coming at four.” “They’re here, ma’am,” says Lottie in her slightly numbed tone. “Mrs. Bell has gone straight into the parlor.” Marjorie glances up from the parcel of books she’s been wrapping in twine (she, unlike Ralph, will compliantly wrap parcels and sort type, which is a blessing and a disappointment). She says, “Is it two-thirty already? I’d hoped to have these off by now.” Virginia does not wince, not visibly, at the sound of Marjorie’s voice.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Louis sort of, well, broke down. He stayed almost an hour. I had a long talk with him. He seemed better when he left. Sort of better.” “I’m sorry, Julia. I’m sorry you had to handle all this.” “It was fine. Please don’t worry about me.” Clarissa nods. She says to Laura, “You must be exhausted.” “I’m not quite sure what I am,” Laura says. “Please sit down,” Clarissa says. “Do you think you could eat something?” “Oh, I don’t believe so. Thank you.” Clarissa guides Laura to the sofa. Laura sits gratefully but cautiously, as if she were very tired but could not be certain the sofa was entirely stable. Julia comes and stands before Laura, leans close to her ear. “I’m going to make you a cup of tea,” she says. “Or there’s coffee. Or a brandy.” “A cup of tea would be nice. Thank you.” “You really should eat something, too,” Julia says. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten since you left home, have you?” “Well—” Julia says, “I’m just going to put a few things out in the kitchen.” “That’s very nice, dear,” Laura says. Julia glances at Clarissa. “Mother,” she says, “you stay here with Mrs. Brown. Sally and I will go see what we’ve got.” “Fine,” Clarissa says. She sits beside Laura on the sofa. She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street. Sally says to Clarissa, “Does it seem too morbid to eat the food from the party? It’s all still here.” “I don’t think so,” Clarissa says. “I think Richard would probably have appreciated that.” She looks nervously at Laura. Laura smiles, hugs her elbows, seems to see something on the toes of her shoes. “Yes,” Laura says. “I think he would, indeed.” “Okay, then,” Sally says. She and Julia go into the kitchen. According to the clock, it is ten minutes past midnight. Laura sits with a certain prim self-containment, lips pressed together, eyes half closed. She is, Clarissa thinks, just waiting for this hour to end. She is waiting until she can be in bed, alone. Clarissa says, “You can go right to bed if you’d like to, Laura. The guest room’s just down the hall.” “Thank you,” Laura says. “I will, in a little while.” They settle into another silence, one that is neither intimate nor particularly uncomfortable.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight. Clarissa pulls the flowers from their paper, puts them in the sink. She is disappointed and more than a little relieved. This is, in fact, her apartment, her collection of clay pots, her mate, her life. She wants no other. Feeling regular, neither elated nor depressed, simply present as Clarissa Vaughan, a fortunate woman, professionally well regarded, giving a party for a celebrated and mortally ill artist, she goes back to the living room to check the messages on the answering machine. The party will go well or badly. Either way, she and Sally will have dinner afterward. They will go to bed. On the tape is the new caterer (he has an untraceable accent; what if he’s incompetent?) confirming his three o’clock delivery. There is a guest asking for permission to bring along a guest of her own, and another announcing that he has to leave town that morning to see a childhood friend whose AIDS has developed, unexpectedly, into leukemia.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The maid, having greatly commended her mistress for this her humanity, went and opening to Rinaldo, brought him in; whereupon the lady, seeing him well nigh palsied with cold, said to him, 'Quick, good man, enter this bath, which is yet warm.' Rinaldo, without awaiting farther invitation, gladly obeyed and was so recomforted with the warmth of the bath that himseemed he was come back from death to life. The lady let fetch him a suit of clothes that had pertained to her husband, then lately dead, which when he had donned, they seemed made to his measure, and whilst awaiting what she should command him, he fell to thanking God and St. Julian for that they had delivered him from the scurvy night he had in prospect and had, as he deemed, brought him to good harbourage.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Richie rushes in from the living room. He is flushed, alarmed, all but overwhelmed by love and relief. There is the feeling that Laura has caught him and Mrs. Latch at something; the feeling that they’ve both stopped what they were doing and hurriedly stashed some sort of evidence. No, she has a guilty conscience today; it’s just, she thinks, that he’s confused. He’s spent the last few hours in another realm altogether. Staying at Mrs. Latch’s house, even for a few hours, he has begun losing track of his own life. He has begun to believe, and not happily, that he lives here, has perhaps always lived here, amid this massive yellow furniture, these grass-cloth-covered walls. Richie breaks into tears and runs toward her. “Oh, now,” Laura says, picking him up. She inhales his smell, the deep essence of him, a profound cleanliness, undefinable. Holding him, inhaling, she feels better. “He’s glad to see you,” Mrs. Latch says with elaborately hearty, bitter good cheer. Had she imagined she was some kind of treat for him, a favorite, and her house a house of marvels? Yes, she probably had. Does she suddenly resent him for being a momma’s boy? She probably does. “Hey there, Bug,” Laura says, close to her son’s small pink ear. She is proud of her maternal calm, her claim on the boy. She is embarrassed by his tears. Do people think she’s overprotective? Why does he do this so often? “Did you get it all done?” Mrs. Latch asks. “Yes. More or less. Thanks so much for taking him.” “Oh, we had a fine time together,” she says heartily, angrily. “You can bring him by any time.” “Did you have fun?” Laura asks. “Uh-huh,” Richie says, his tears abating. His face is a min iature agony of hope, sorrow, and confusion. “Were you good?” He nods. “Did you miss me?” “Yes!” he says. “Well, I had a lot to do,” Laura says. “We have to give your daddy a proper birthday tonight, don’t we?” He nods. He continues staring at her with teary, abashed suspicion, as if she might not be his mother at all. Laura pays Mrs. Latch, accepts a bird of paradise from her yard. Mrs. Latch always offers something—a flower, cookies— as if that were the object of payment, and the babysitting were free. Laura, apologizing again for her tardiness, citing her husband’s imminent arrival, cuts short the customary fifteen-minute conversation, puts Richie in the car, and pulls away with a last, slightly exaggerated wave. Her three ivory bangles click together. Once they are away from Mrs. Latch, Laura says to Richie, “Boy oh boy, we’re in trouble now. We’ve got to race right home and get that dinner started. We should have been there an hour ago.”

• From The Hours (1998)

  Let’s see. Room 19.” Laura signs the registration form with her own name (an invented one would feel too strange, too sordid), pays now (“We may be leaving very early in the morning, we’ll be in a terrible hurry, I’d just as soon have it taken care of ”). She receives the key. Leaving the desk, she can hardly believe she’s done it. She has gotten the key, passed through the portals. The doors to the elevators, at the far end of the lobby, are hammered bronze, each topped by a horizontal line of brilliant red numerals, and to reach them she passes various arrangements of empty sofas and chairs; the cool slumber of miniature potted palms; and, behind glass, the interior grotto of a combination drugstore and coffee shop, where several solitary men in suits sit with newspapers at the counter, where an older woman in a pale pink waitress costume and a red wig seems to be saying something humorous to no one in particular, and where an almost cartoonishly large lemon-meringue pie, with two slices missing, stands on a pedestal under a clear plastic dome. Laura rings for the elevator, presses the button for her floor. Under a glass pane on the elevator wall is a photograph of the eggs Benedict that can be ordered in the hotel restaurant until two in the afternoon. She looks at the photograph, thinks about how it is just barely too late to order eggs Benedict. She has been nervous for so long, and her nervousness has not dissipated but its nature seems to have suddenly changed. Her nervousness along with her anger and disappointment in herself are all perfectly recognizable to her but they now reside elsewhere. The decision to check into this hotel, to rise in this elevator, seems to have rescued her the way morphine rescues a cancer patient, not by eradicating the pain but simply by making the pain cease to matter. It’s almost as if she’s accompanied by an invisible sister, a perverse woman full of rage and recriminations, a woman humiliated by herself, and it is this woman, this unfortunate sister, and not Laura, who needs comfort and silence. Laura could be a nurse, ministering to the pain of another. She steps out of the elevator, walks calmly down the hall, fits the key into the lock of room 19. Here is her room, then: a turquoise room, not surprising or unusual in any way, with a turquoise spread on the double bed and a painting (Paris, springtime) in a blond wood frame. The room has a smell, alcohol and pitch pine, bleach, scented soap, all floating heavily over something that is not rancid, not even stale, but not fresh. It is, she thinks, a tired smell. It is the smell of a place that’s been used and used.

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

  Most say that what is to be remembered must first be rationally conceived and assimilated. [607] There is an interesting fact connected with remembering, which, so far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was the first writer expressly to call attention to. We can set our memory as it were to retain things for a certain time, and then let them depart. "Individuals often remember clearly and well up to the time when they have to use their knowledge, and then, when it is no longer required, there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces. Many schoolboys forgot their lessons after they have said them, many barristers forgot details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy learns thirty lines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets them so that he could not say five consecutive lines the next morning, and a barrister may be one week learned in the mysteries of making cog-wheels, but in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy of the ribs instead." [608] The rationale of this fact is obscure; and the existence of it ought to make us feel how truly subtle are the nervous processes which memory involves. Mr. Verdon adds that "When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawn from it, and we think no more about it, we know that we experience a feeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some way liberated. If the . . . attention is not withdrawn, so that we keep the record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief does not take place. . . . Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling of relief takes place, the record does not seem so well conserved as before, but that we have real difficulty in attempting to remember it." This shows that we are not as entirely unconscious of a topic as we think, during the time in which we seem to be merely retaining it subject to recall. "Practically," says Mr. Verdon, "we sometimes keep a matter in hand not exactly by attending to it, but by keeping our attention referred to something connected with it from time to time. Translating this into the language of physiology, we mean that by referring attention to a part within, or closely connected with, the system of traces [paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that the traces are preserved with the utmost delicacy." This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explanation.

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

  It is matter of experience that such feelings of successful achievement do tend to fix in our memory whatever processes have led to them; and we shall have a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come to the Chapter on the Will. My conclusion then is this: that some of the restitution of function (especially where the cortical lesion is not too great) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function on the part of the centres that remain; whilst some of it is due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words, both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory are true in their measure. But as for determining that measure, or saying which centres are vicarious, and to what extent they can learn new tricks, that is impossible at present. FINAL CORRECTION OF THE MEYNERT SCHEME. And now, after learning all these facts, what are we to think of the child and the candle-flame, and of that scheme which provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance after surveying the actions of the frog? (Cf . pp. 21-3, supra .) It will be remembered that we then considered the lower centres en masse as machines for responding to present sense-impressions exclusively, and the hemispheres as equally exclusive organs of action from inward considerations or ideas; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemispheres to have no native tendencies to determinate activity, but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up the various reflexes performed by the lower centres, and combining their motor and sensory elements in novel ways. It will also be remembered that I prophesied that we should be obliged to soften down the sharpness of this distinction after we had completed our survey of the farther facts. The time has now come for that correction to be made. Wider and completer observations show us both that the lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemispheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme allows. Schrader's observations in Goltz's Laboratory on hemisphereless frogs[83] and pigeons[84] give an idea quite different from the picture of these creatures which is classically current.

• From The Hours (1998)

  “A cup of tea would be nice. Thank you.” “You really should eat something, too,” Julia says. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten since you left home, have you?” “Well—” Julia says, “I’m just going to put a few things out in the kitchen.” “That’s very nice, dear,” Laura says. Julia glances at Clarissa. “Mother,” she says, “you stay here with Mrs. Brown. Sally and I will go see what we’ve got.” “Fine,” Clarissa says. She sits beside Laura on the sofa. She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street. Sally says to Clarissa, “Does it seem too morbid to eat the food from the party? It’s all still here.” “I don’t think so,” Clarissa says. “I think Richard would probably have appreciated that.” She looks nervously at Laura. Laura smiles, hugs her elbows, seems to see something on the toes of her shoes. “Yes,” Laura says. “I think he would, indeed.” “Okay, then,” Sally says. She and Julia go into the kitchen. According to the clock, it is ten minutes past midnight. Laura sits with a certain prim self-containment, lips pressed together, eyes half closed. She is, Clarissa thinks, just waiting for this hour to end. She is waiting until she can be in bed, alone. Clarissa says, “You can go right to bed if you’d like to, Laura. The guest room’s just down the hall.” “Thank you,” Laura says. “I will, in a little while.” They settle into another silence, one that is neither intimate nor particularly uncomfortable. Here she is, then, Clarissa thinks; here is the woman from Richard’s poetry. Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide; here is the woman who walked away. It is both shocking and comforting that such a figure could, in fact, prove to be an ordinary-looking old woman seated on a sofa with her hands in her lap. Clarissa says, “Richard was a wonderful man.” She regrets it instantly. Already, the doomed little eulogies begin; already someone who’s died is reassessed as a respectable citizen, a doer of good deeds, a wonderful man. Why did she say such a thing? To console an old woman, really, and to ingratiate herself. And, all right, she said it to stake her claim on the body: I knew him most intimately, I am the one who’ll be first to take his measure. She would like, at this moment, to order Laura Brown to go to bed, shut the door, and stay in her room until morning. “Yes,” Laura says. “And he was a wonderful writer, wasn’t he?”

• From The Hours (1998)

  She imagines him searching the house for her, checking the garden. She thinks of him rushing out, past the body of the thrush, through the gate, down the hill. She is suddenly, immensely sorry for him. She should, she knows, tell him that his premonition was not entirely wrong; that she had in fact staged an escape of sorts, and had in fact meant to disappear, if only for a few hours. “Nothing’s happened,” she says. “Just an airing along the avenues. It’s such a night.” “I was so worried,” he says. “I don’t know why.” They stand together in a brief, unaccustomed silence. They look into the window of the butcher’s shop, where they are reflected, brokenly, in the golden letters. Leonard says, “We must go back for Nelly’s joint. We have approximately fifteen minutes before she goes on a rampage and burns the house down.” Virginia hesitates. But London! She still wants, desperately, to get on the train. “You must be hungry,” she says. “I am, a bit. You surely are, too.” She thinks suddenly of how frail men are; how full of terror. She thinks of Quentin, going into the house to wash the thrush’s death off his hands. It seems, at that moment, that she straddles an invisible line, one foot on this side, the other on that. On this side is stern, worried Leonard, the row of closed shops, the dark rise that leads back to Hogarth House, where Nelly waits impatiently, almost gleefully, for her chance at further grievances. On the other side is the train. On the other side is London, and all London implies about freedom, about kisses, about the possibilities of art and the sly dark glitter of madness. Mrs. Dalloway, she thinks, is a house on a hill where a party is about to begin; death is the city below, which Mrs. Dalloway loves and fears and which she wants, in some way, to walk into so deeply she will never find her way back again. Virginia says, “It’s time for us to move back to London. Don’t you think?” “I’m not at all sure,” he answers. “I’ve been better for a long while now. We can’t haunt the suburbs forever, can we?” “Let’s discuss it over dinner, shall we?” “All right, then.” “Do you want so much to live in London?” he asks. “I do,” she says. “I wish it were otherwise. I wish I were happy with the quiet life.” “As do I.” “Come along,” she says. She keeps the ticket in her bag. She will never mention to Leonard that she’d planned on fleeing, even for a few hours.

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

  You can expect nothing from me contrary to the obligations which this quality imposes on me; my other feelings must be silent.” Gotthold went … To the funeral, however, when the crowd of relatives, acquaintances, business friends, deputations, grain carriers, office clerks and warehouse workers filled the rooms, stairs and corridors and all the hired carriages in the city were standing down the whole of Meng Street – he came to the funeral to genuine joy of the consul again; yes, he even brought his wife, née Stuwing, and his three grown-up daughters: Friederike and Henriette, who were both very tall and gaunt, and Pfiffi, the eighteen-year-old youngest, who seemed all too small and corpulent. And then when at the grave, at Buddenbrook's inheritance burial, out there in front of the castle gate, on the edge of the wooded cemetery, Pastor Kölling von Sankt Marien, a robust man with a thick head and a coarse way of speaking, had praised the moderate, godly life of the deceased, in contrast to that of the "Wursers, gluttons and drunkards" - that was his expression, although some people, remembering the discretion of the late old Wunderlich, shook their heads - when the festivities and formalities were over and the 70 or 80 hired carriages rolled back into town began ... then Gotthold Buddenbrook offered to accompany the consul because he wished to speak to him privately. Lo and behold: here, next to the stepbrother on the back seat of the high, wide, clumsy carriage, one of his short legs crossed over the other, he showed himself forgiving and gentle. He realized, he said, more and more that the Consul must act as he did, and that his father's memory should not be bad for him. He renounced his claims, all the more since he was disposed to retire from all business and settle down with his inheritance and what else he had left, for the linen business gave him little pleasure and went like that moderate that he will not make up his mind to put more into it ... "The defiance of his father has brought him no blessing!" thought the Consul with an inward, pious look; and Gotthold probably thought the same thing. and the memory of the father should not be bad for him. He renounced his claims, all the more since he was disposed to retire from all business and settle down with his inheritance and what else he had left, for the linen business gave him little pleasure and went like that moderate that he will not make up his mind to put more into it ... "The defiance of his father has brought him no blessing!" thought the Consul with an inward, pious look; and Gotthold probably thought the same thing. and the memory of the father should not be bad for him.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  It did not take long for that nagging feeling of fear, the false feeling of security that money gives us, to subside. I remember a particular midnight, three weeks into our stay, walking into a meadow surrounded by thick aspens and above me all that glorious heaven glowing, and I felt like I was a part of it, what with the trees clapping hands and me feeling like I was floating there beneath the endlessness. I looked up so long I felt like I was in space. Light. No money and no anxiety. It is possible to feel that way again. It is possible not to let possessions own me, to rest happily in the security that God, not money, can give. I have been feeling that a little lately. Rick asked me how I was doing with the money thing, with the tithe thing, and I told him I was on the up-and-up. He asked me how I was feeling about all of that, and I told him I was feeling good, free, light. He told me not to get a big head about it. 17 Worship The Mystical Wonder I READ A BOOK A LONG TIME AGO ABOUT MOTHER Teresa. Somebody in the book asked her how she summoned the strength to love so many people. She said she loved people because they are Jesus, each one of them is Jesus, and this is true because it says so in the Bible. And it is also true that this idea contradicts the facts of reality: Everybody can’t be Jesus. There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don’t make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God. It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable. When we worship God we worship a Being our life experience does not give us the tools with which to understand. If we could, God would not inspire awe. Eternity, for example, is not something the human mind can understand. We may be able to wrap our heads around living forever (and we can do this only because none of us has experienced death), but can we understand what it means to have never been born?

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

  a very, very serious interview, my dear Tony. Is Herr Kesselmeyer here?” "Yes, papa, he's sitting in the Pensee room looking at the album..." "Where's Erika?" 'Upstairs, with Thinka, in the children's room, she's fine. She bathes her doll...not in water, of course...a wax doll...in short, she's pretending..." "Of course." The Consul breathed a sigh of relief and continued: "I cannot assume, dear child, that you are informed of the situation... of your husband's situation?" He was perched on one of the armchairs that surrounded the large table, while Tony sat at his feet in a small armchair shaped like three silk cushions piled diagonally one on top of the other. The fingers of his right hand played gently with the diamonds on her neck. "No, papa," replied Tony; "I have to admit that, I don't know anything. My God, I'm a goose, you know, I have no insight! The other day I listened a little while Kesselmeyer was talking to Grünlich... In the end it seemed to me that Herr Kesselmeyer was just kidding again... he always talks so ridiculously. I caught your name once or twice..." "You understood my name? In which relationship?" "No, I don't know anything about the relationship, papa!... Grünlich has been morose since that day... yes, intolerable, I must say!... Until yesterday... yesterday he was in a gentle mood and asked ten or twelve times if I loved him if I would put in a good word for him if he had something to ask of you..." "Ah …" 'Yes... he told me he'd written to you saying you were coming... Good thing you're here! It's a little spooky ... Grünlich has prepared the green gaming table ... there are a lot of papers and pencils on it ... you are to hold a consultation with him and Kesselmeyer afterwards ..." “Listen, my dear child,” said the Consul, stroking her hair with his hand… “I must ask you something now, something serious! Tell me, don't you love your husband with all your heart?" "Certainly, papa," Tony said, with as childishly hypocritical a face as she used to manage when asked: You're never going to annoy the Puppenliese again, are you, Tony?... The Consul was silent for a moment. "You love him so much," he then asked, "that you couldn't live without him... under any circumstances, could you? even if, by the will of God, his situation should change, if he should be put into circumstances which would no longer permit him to surround you with all these things any longer...?" And his hand made a fleeting movement over the furniture and portage of the room, over the gilded dress clock on the mirrored shelf and finally down over her dress. 'Certainly, papa,' repeated Tony in the comforting tone she almost always adopted when someone was speaking to her seriously. She looked past her father's face at the window, behind which a soft, dense veil of rain was silently moving down.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Chance treated us kindly; nothing happened beyond the shock we got in the middle of a January night, when a brigand-like figure, all swathed in leather and fur, crept into our midst—but it turned out to be only our former chauffeur, Tsiganov, who had thought nothing of riding all the way from St. Petersburg, on buffers and in freight cars, through the immense, frosty and savage expanse of Russia, for the mere purpose of bringing us a very welcome sum of money unexpectedly sent us by some good friends of ours. He also brought the mail received at our St. Petersburg address; among it was that letter from Tamara. After a month’s stay, Tsiganov declared the Crimean scenery bored him and departed—to go all the way back north, with a big bag over his shoulder, containing various articles which we would have gladly given him had we thought he coveted them (such as a trouser press, tennis shoes, nightshirts, an alarm clock, a flat-iron, several other ridiculous things I have forgotten) and the absence of which only gradually came to light if not pointed out, with vindictive zeal, by an anemic servant girl whose pale charms he had also rifled. Curiously enough, he had prevailed upon us to transfer my mother’s precious stones from the talcum powder container (that he had at once detected) to a hole dug in the garden under a versatile oak—and there they all were after his departure.

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

  “Guys, can you see how it wasn’t either one of your fault? Brian was old enough to know better. He was sixteen. And no matter what his story was, he had to know it’s never okay to have sex with kids. You were children,” James assured them. Jeff and Trevor nodded, acknowledging they were children, innocent children. “Good work, gentlemen. This is exactly how we heal. Can you feel it?” Ted asked. “Yeah, I feel like a dark cloud has lifted for me,” Jeff said. Trevor paused before he said, “Clarity—I feel peaceful—I don’t think I have ever felt peaceful. But right now, I feel like the fog has lifted, and maybe, just maybe, there is hope for my life. I also feel a warmth in my chest. What is that?” “Is it love, son?” Ted asked. “Do you feel loved?” “I’m not sure. I just feel warm and peaceful. Content,” Trevor explained. “Jesus says He is close to the broken hearted. You have been broken hearted, Trevor. You didn’t know your biological parents. And your adoptive parents didn’t know how to create a healthy family. You were sexually abused by the neighbor you hoped would be a male role model for you, and you were rejected by your dad. That’s a lot for any man to bear, son,” Ted comforted him. “You remind me of King David,” Ted said. “His own father called him the worthless one. David confesses in Scripture that both his father and mother abandoned him. He had sexual struggles and I imagine he wondered if he was lovable and if his life had meaning. He also cried out to God and asked Him to forgive the shame of his youth. I often wonder if he experienced sexual abuse of some sort. It’s not unusual. And yet God calls him a man after God’s own heart. I believe God called him that because David poured his heart out to God on a regular basis. He told God the good, the bad, and the ugly. He expressed anger when he was angry. He expressed sorrow and disappointment. He trusted God with his heart and kept nothing hidden from God, well, almost nothing. When David lustfully took Bathsheba and then killed her husband because she was pregnant with David’s child, he tried to keep that a secret, and it ended up being a mess. God wants to know your hurt, your pain, even your secrets, from you. He loves a person who will open up and let Him in. You have done that today with God and with us.

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

  Her veil shifts revealing her flushed face; but that doesn't matter. And though one of her fur-lined overshoes keeps slipping out in the watery snow, and hindering her in the most vicious way, everyone overtakes her. She first reaches the corner house on the Bäckergrube, she rings the fire and murder at the porch, she calls to the girl who opens the door: "They're coming, Kathrin, they're coming!" is a little pale, puts the newspaper aside and you one something makes a dismissive gesture with her hand … she hugs him and repeats: “They're coming, Tom, they're coming! It's you, and Hermann Hagenstrom failed!" That was a Friday. The very next day Senator Buddenbrook stood in the council chamber before the chair of the late James Möllendorpf, and in the presence of the assembled fathers and the citizens' committee he took this oath: "I want to run my office conscientiously, strive for the welfare of the state with all my strength, the faithfully follow the constitution, administer the public good honestly and, in the conduct of my office, especially in all elections, take no account of my own advantage, of relatives or friendship. I want to administer the laws of the state and do justice to everyone, rich or poor. I also want to be secretive in everything that requires secrecy, but I especially want to keep secret what I am commanded to keep secret. So help me God!” Fifth Chapter Our desires and undertakings spring from certain needs of our nerves that are difficult to describe in words. What was called Thomas Buddenbrook's "vanity," the care he took in his appearance, the luxury he indulged in with his toilette, was in fact something radically different. Originally it was about nothing more than the striving of a person in action to be always conscious from head to toe of that correctness and intactness that gives the attitude. But the demands that he and the people made of his talent and his strength grew. He was overwhelmed with private and public duties. When the council was appointed, the distribution of offices among the members of the senate, taxation was his main responsibility. But also railway Customs and other government affairs occupied him, and at the thousands of meetings of administrative and supervisory boards at which he had presided since his election, it took all his prudence, kindness, and elasticity to constantly consider the vulnerability of much older people seeming to subordinate themselves to their older experience and still hold the power in their hands. If the remarkable thing was to observe that at the same time his "vanity", that is, this need to refresh himself physically, to renew himself, to change his clothes several times a day, to restore himself and to freshen up in the morning, increased in a striking way, that meant that, although Thomas Buddenbrook was barely 37 years old, quite simply a decrease in his elasticity, a more rapid wear and tear ...

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  About twelve hours after I had the conversation with my pastor, a friend and I jumped into one of those Volkswagen camping vans and shoved off for the green lumpy places. A week into our American tour, we found ourselves at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which is more lumpy than green, it turns out. It was a heck of a hike, let me tell you. I was in no shape to do it. So by the time I got to the bottom of that gargantuan hole in the ground, I was miserable. It was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but when your head is throbbing and you can’t feel your lower half, you don’t want to sit and reflect on how beautiful things are. Lumpy or not. The canyon is more spectacular from the rim than from the river. Once in it, everything looks like Utah. As my friend and I fell asleep by the river, however, I had a cherished moment with God. I was in a lot of pain from the hike, so I was in no mood to mess around. There was no trying to impress Him, no speaking the right words. I simply began to pray and talk to God the way a child might talk to his father. Beneath the billion stars and beside the river, I called out to God, softly. “Hello?” The stars were quiet. The river spoke in some other tongue, some vernacular for fish. “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry I got so confused about You, got so fake. I hope it’s not too late anymore. I don’t really know who I am, who You are, or what faith looks like. But if You want to talk, I’m here now. I could feel You convicting me when I was a kid, and I feel like You are trying to get through to me. But I feel like You are an alien or something, somebody far away.” Nothing from the stars. Fish language from the river. But as I lay there, talking to God, being real with Him, I began to feel a bit of serenity. It felt like I was apologizing to an old friend, someone with whom there had been a sort of bitterness, and the friend was saying it was okay, that he didn’t think anything of it. It felt like I was starting over, or just getting started. That is the thing about giving yourself to God. Some people get really emotional about it, and some people don’t feel much of anything except the peace they have after making an important decision. I felt a lot of peace.

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

  Roff writes: "She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mr. Roff, and talked with me as a young girl would, not being acquainted. I asked her how things appeared to her—if they seemed natural. She said it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers in a very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears of gladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time, fairly smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleven o'clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirely well." Lurancy's mother writes, a couple of months later, that she was "perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after her return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been before she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural change that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her as though she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has been smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restoration to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs. Roff, by their obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was perfected. We firmly believe that, had she remained at home, she would have died, or we would have been obliged to send her to the insane asylum; and if so, that she would have died there; and further, that I could not have lived a short time with the care and trouble devolving on me. Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now believe she was cured by spirit power, and that Mary Roff controlled the girl." Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married and a mother, and in good health. She had apparently outgrown the mediumistic phase of her existence.[319] On the condition of the sensibility during these invasions, few observations have been made. I have found the hands of two automatic writers anæsthetic during the act. In two others I have found this not to be the case. Automatic writing is usually preceded by shooting pains along the arm-nerves and irregular contractions of the arm-muscles. I have found one medium's tongue and lips apparently insensible to pin-pricks during her (speaking) trance. If we speculate on the brain-condition during all these different perversions of personality, we see that it must be supposed capable of successively changing all its modes of action, and abandoning the use for the time being of whole sets of well organized association-paths. In no other way can we explain the loss of memory in passing from one alternating condition to another.