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 The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And when, after the four rounds of Louis Treize and a chocolate souffle dusted with a few grains of sea salt and the petit-fours and a single spoonful of Meyer lemon sorbet, Rob emerged from the kitchen to dazzle the girls (who were now so drunk as to be nearly unable to speak) and receive sincere thanks from Cleveland, Roland Schutz sat Rob Holland down and did what he did so well. He made a multiunit, multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal, acquiring (after the lawyers and accountants had looked things over and cleared the way of any obstacles) a 65-percent share in the soon-to-be-formed Rob Holland Group International. The Boston and Philly partners would be bought out and the restaurants closed. The airport operations would be sold (at a tidy profit) to Wolfgang Puck, who needed more locations to sell pizzas. New Rob Holland restaurants would open in Schutz-owned casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and in hotels in Miami, London, and Dubai. Trusted Holland associates Paul, Kevin, and Michelle would each head up a unit. Other loyalists would be similarly rewarded with positions suiting their skills. Even Thierry scored a position as chief of operations at the retail baking and pastry wing in the soon-to-be-erected Schutz Plaza in midtown Manhattan. Marvin accepted a very generous offer of two million five for his stake in Saint Germain, which would allow him to return to the more secure prospects of the auto body business. (Which, he had to admit these days, he'd always loved and never should have left. He'd be able to quickly open up five new stores across Long Island and become wealthier than his wildest dreams—a rare survivor of the New York restaurant industry. There was the added perk that Marvin would still be able to eat and entertain for free at Saint Germain whenever he wished.) Saint Germain, as the flagship of the new Schutz-Holland Axis, was allowed to retain its 60-percent food cost and to run even higher labor percentages as it was the showcase (and loss leader) for the whole empire. Schutz and eventually the repugnant Hitchcock were favored with regular tables of their choosing. Hitchcock was additionally favored with the offering of a free renovation of his kitchens in Bucks County, South Hampton, and Manhattan (supposedly from Rob but actually from a Schutz-controlled contractor). The restaurant was saved. The Puebla Posse soon ran the kitchen—even hiring additional friends and family members from their hometown of Atlixco. Though Rob continued to retain the title of chef, Manuel was given the day-to-day responsibility of running the kitchen and the title of chef de cuisine and a sizable raise to go with it. Needless to say, everyone got a generous Christmas bonus. No one got kicked out of their apartment. Credit card payments were made. Thousands of miles away, new satellite dishes appeared on rooftops in tiny Mexican towns. Best of all, Rob continued to cook now and again.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Every cell of my body relaxed as he continued on: “We’re thrilled with how well you’re still doing. If you feel comfortable enough, we’re confident that it would be safe for you to have even more time between scans. You can come back in three to five years if you want—whatever works for you.” Sweet Jesus. After comparing 16 years of my scans, the doctors’ consensus was that my cancer was stable enough to give me more breathing room between checkups. “Are you serious!?” I exclaimed. “This is incredible! Thank you so much, Dr. D.! I’ll be back in five.” The force of my enthusiastic response surprised even me. But after nearly two decades of anxiety-provoking doctors’ appointments, I was ready to leave fear in my rearview. As I was doing a happy dance in my head, Brian interjected: “Let’s go with three.” For him, five years felt like too much time to allow, as cancer can be a trickster and show up at the most unlikely times. Oh, and the lump in my arm? Turns out it was a glamorous fatty tumor. No metastasis. That night Brian and I toasted my milestone with an expensive glass of champagne at a fancy hotel bar. Perhaps I could even retire my lucky underwear (the elastic had certainly seen better days). When I called my parents to share the news, they were ecstatic. These were the kinds of calls they prayed for. Despite the outward celebration, on the inside I felt awful—guilty. It seemed cruel that I was OK while Dad’s fate hung in the balance. My incredible news felt as if I were intentionally pouring alcohol on his open wound. This isn’t fair! Why me? Why not him? Why ask why? I know better. While my fear of dying was fading to a more manageable level, my fear of losing Dad was on the rise. I knew he wasn’t a statistic; he was a real person with real hopes and real potential. Just because the five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is only 10 percent didn’t mean he couldn’t be one of the “lucky ones.” Every patient’s circumstances, genetic makeup, and capacity to heal are different. But I still couldn’t shake the idea that I knew where this was ultimately going. That my dad wouldn’t make it.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  PART SIX Faith, Reason and Unreason (1648– 1870) T HE TWO DECADES of the 1640s and 1650s form one of the great watersheds in the history of Christianity. Up to this point, the ideal of the total Christian society, embracing every aspect of man’s existence, still seemed attainable; and masses of men were prepared to wage war, to massacre, hang and burn to realize it. Christendom was split, but each of the rival parties saw their system of belief ultimately becoming coextensive with humanity, and themselves bidden by divine command to hasten the process at whatever cost. They were still, in a sense, mesmerized by the Augustinian vision conceived over 1200 years before. With the 1650s we get a change: war and suffering are replaced by exhaustion and doubt, and the European mind seems to sicken of the unattainable objective, and focus on more mundane ends. There is a huge, long-delayed and grateful relaxation of the spirit, a dousing of angry embers. Anthony Wood, writing his diary from an Oxford coign of vantage, gives a sardonic picture of the university moving back, in the years 1660–1, from republican commonwealth to parliamentary monarchy, from the dominance of Calvinism to Anglican conformity. A century before, the fires had burned fiercely outside St John’s College. Now the atmosphere is low-key, a mere heightening of the customary struggle for places, fellowships and influence, the raucous exchange of abuse and insult, low japes and ribaldry. The age of the martyrs had ended, for a second time. Wood relates what happened when the triumphant Anglicans brought back vestments to the cathedral services. ‘On the night of 21 January 1661, some varlets of Christ Church’ took all the new surplices issued to the choristers, and threw them ‘in a common privy house belonging to Peckwater Quadrangle, and there with long

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Luther now expected that he would at long last get the fair hearing he had been seeking, and he reckoned that the archbishop of Salzburg would probably be the judge. But what happened in the meantime would affect that too. And then, on January 12, the news came that the emperor had died. Years later, Luther recalled that with the earthshaking news of Maximilian’s death “the storm ceased to rage a bit.”17 CHAPTER EIGHTThe Leipzig DebateA simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it. —Martin Luther A plague on it! —Duke George the Bearded AS PROGRESS ON Luther’s case had slowed down in Rome and the Vatican, things again heated up in Germany. Luther had written his response to Eck’s Obelisks, titled Asterisks, but he had intended this to be rather private, along with their larger disagreement. And it had been, until Luther’s somewhat bumbling Wittenberg colleague Andreas Karlstadt had on his own accord—and without telling Luther—replied to Eck publicly, with his own 406 (sic) Theses. Karlstadt sometimes seems to have been angling to upstage Luther, but whatever his reasons for doing this, it was now unhelpful in the extreme, and the banked fires of the disagreement with Eck once more flared up. This was because Eck now felt compelled to respond publicly. Eck’s response to Karlstadt—titled Response—appeared in mid-August 1518. But Eck now escalated things dramatically. For some reason, he no longer was interested in a quiet academic dispute in writing between the universities of Wittenberg and Ingolstadt but rather in something more like a colossal public spectacle. On the title page of his Response, he called for a debate that should be decided by no less a person than the pope himself, which should be held at the university of Paris or Cologne—or Rome! He thought early April of the following year, 1519, would be about right for the date but said he would allow Karlstadt to decide the venue. The Wittenbergers thought that something closer to home would be far less expensive, not to mention theologically friendlier, so they suggested either of the universities at Erfurt or Leipzig. Eck chose Leipzig and immediately asked Duke George of Saxony for permission. [image file=image_rsrc6KW.jpg] A portrait of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When Marcus arrives at the house of his girlfriend, it’s after a long day of being the boss. With a sexually powerful woman, a dominating woman, he gets a respite from having to be in control. With his girlfriend in charge, in the role of dominatrix, he can give it up, for he knows that she can withstand the intensity of his urges. The surrender not only pleases him erotically, it nurtures him emotionally as well. Like Elizabeth, Marcus gets to experience a submerged but vital facet of himself in the erotic mirror. In our culture, passivity is perceived as female and weak. Consequently, it generates great emotional conflict for men (and for many women). But that doesn’t eradicate it from our psyche, or make it any less desirable. Marcus fears surrender as much as he craves it. His fantasy permits a bounded passivity, a safe but masked return to the mother’s arms. And while he is not interested in intellectual or heavy-duty psychological explanations of his “motivation,” his erotic inclinations challenge the stereotypical power distribution that always sees the man on top. There Is No Love Without Hate The defenders of modern intimacy—with marital counselors and self-help authors on the front line—have continuously sought to neutralize the thorny issue of power in committed relationships. The ideal partnership is said to be one of absolute equality in every area of the relationship, as if, with scale in hand, we could measure power quantitatively. Many of us, steeped in this ideology of fairness and mutuality, want nothing less. But the fact is that negotiating power is part and parcel of all human relationships. We recognize it most easily when it’s expressed outright, through authority, coercion, bullying, aggression, and castigation. The powerful one metes out punishments and rewards depending on one’s degree of compliance with his or her wishes. But there is also the power of the weak. Deference, passivity, withholding, ingratiation, and the moral one-upmanship of the victim are their own manifestations of might. Power and power imbalances are inescapable. Ethel Spector Person, in Feeling Strong, writes that we first learn about power differentials in the power grid of our families. “All power relationships, all desires either to dominate or submit, have their psychological roots in the fact that we were all once little children with big parents, and their existential roots in our feelings of being small people in an out-of-control big world that we need to be able to tame.” Childhood is our basic training for power tactics. We have our will; our parents have theirs. We demand; they object. We bargain for what we want; they tell us what we can have. We learn to resist, and we learn to surrender. At best we learn to balance, to mediate, to understand.

• From Open (2009)

  I drive J.P. all over Vegas, up and down the Strip, then into the mountains that circle the town. I show him what the Vette can do, open up the engine on a lonely stretch of highway, then open up myself. I tell him my story, in a ragged and disorderly fashion, and he has Perry’s knack for saying it all back to me, artfully reworded. He understands my contradictions, and reconciles a few of them. You’re a kid who still lives with his parents, he says, but you’re known around the planet. That’s got to be hard. You’re trying to express yourself freely and creatively and artistically, and you’re slammed at every turn. That’s very hard. I tell him about the knock on me, that I’ve snuck up on my high ranking, that I’ve never beaten anyone good, that I’ve been lucky. Horseshoe up my ass. He says I’m experiencing backlash, and never even got to enjoy the lash. I laugh. He says it must be bizarre to have strangers think they know me, and love me beyond reason, while others think they know me and resent me beyond reason—all while I’m a relative stranger to myself. What makes it perverse, I tell him, is that it all revolves around tennis, and I hate tennis. Right, sure. But you don’t actually hate tennis. Yes. Yes, I do. I talk about my father. I tell J.P. about the yelling, the pressure, the rage, the abandonment. J.P. gets a funny look on his face. You do realize, don’t you, that God isn’t anything like your father? You know that—don’t you? I almost drive the Corvette onto the shoulder. God, he says, is the opposite of your father. God isn’t mad at you all the time. God isn’t yelling in your ear, harping on your imperfections. That voice you hear all the time, that angry voice? That’s not God. That’s still your father. I turn to him: Do me a favor? Say that again. He does. Word for word. Say it once more. He does. I thank him. I ask about his own life. He tells me that he hates what he does. He can’t abide being a pastor. He no longer wants to be responsible for people’s souls. It’s a round-the-clock job, he says, and it leaves him no time for reading and reflection. (I wonder if this is a slight jab at me.) He’s also hounded by death threats. Prostitutes and drug pushers come to his church and reform, and then their pimps and junkies and families, who’ve depended on that stream of income, blame J.P. What do you think you’d like to do instead? Actually, I’m a songwriter. A composer. I’d like to make music for a living. He says he’s written a song, When God Ran, that’s a huge hit on the Christian charts. He sings a few bars. He has a nice voice and the song is moving.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Like Jia, what I learned is this: you get to set the tone. The guy at my door made his request with an air of confidence, and I followed suit. Now, you may ask, what if he was faking it? What if he psyched himself up beforehand with an internal chant of, Act casual. Act casual? Quite honestly, it doesn’t matter. Either way, my roll-with-it response underscored that if you approach something as if it’s totally reasonable, it will be. Or you can just pretend you’re Beyoncé. Or, in this guy’s case, Trojan Man. To this day, I’m indebted to that guy, who inadvertently taught me one of my earliest lessons about social anxiety. For everyone’s sake, I really hope he found a condom. * * * Despite the lesson of Trojan Man, I hung on to some of my own safety behaviors for years. Whenever my words went out to an audience of strangers—as a guest on a podcast or during a radio interview—the old anxiety would come rolling back. So for a long time, safety equaled having scripted responses in front of me—sometimes, I admit, word for word. I knew I’d be more natural and give a better interview if I wasn’t clinging to my life preserver of pre-prepared answers, but with lots of people watching and listening, letting go and loosening up didn’t feel like an option. Unfortunately, that meant that’s exactly what I had to do. If I wanted to graduate from social anxiety school, I had to do interviews with no notes. I’d still give the interview the respect and preparation it deserved, but I needed to trust myself to remember the points I wanted to make. So when the opportunity to do a live radio interview came along, I let myself cringe for a minute (or an hour), then said to myself, “Do it before you feel confident and the confidence will catch up.” (Thanks, chapter 7!) This was the next phase of my Challenge List, sans safety behaviors: 5. Smile and start conversation with people I think don’t like me (several grumpy moms, one grumpy teacher, several grumpy co-workers). Do this repeatedly. 6. Be a guest on a pre-recorded podcast where mistakes can be edited out, but without my usual notes. Do this as often as is offered. 7. Do a live radio interview (ack, no do-overs!) without my usual notes (but whew, no camera!). Over time, I did all of these and they turned out just fine. I was anxious for each of them, but I went over the mountain. That’s important: I was anxious. You will be, too. You won’t stop feeling anxious. You’ll feel anxious, square your shoulders, and do it anyway.

• From The Varieties of Religious Experience

  “But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my conversion I went into the hay‐field to lend a hand with the harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart‐broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously. She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew that God’s work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life.” So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion’s fruits.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  A second privilege that I would like to acknowledge, as it has greatly shaped the ideas in this book, is what many in the trans community call “passing privilege.” This privilege (one that most cissexual people take for granted) allows me to be accepted in my identified gender, to move through the world without constantly having to correct people’s use of pronouns, deflect their unwanted stares, or have them harass me because of my gender difference. For me, this privilege mostly stems from my size—it is the flip side of the same coin that made my life as male so difficult to manage, as I grappled with gender difference both in regard to being trans and because I was inevitably the smallest guy in any room that I entered. While my small stature made me the target of other people’s anxiety and ridicule, particularly during my school years, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Once I began taking female hormones, my small size allowed me to be gendered by others as female without having to alter my appearance or behaviors, which gave me unique insight into the processes of gendering and cissexual privilege that I describe in this book. Needless to say, if I did not “pass” on a regular basis, I probably would have written a much different book.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Anthony button pinned to her lapel that declared, “All Men Are Beasts.” Late mornings, once she’d taken her bath, she might head to St. Francis Xavier School for her turn at playground duty, breaking up fights, cleaning skinned knees, and making sure kids’ coats were buttoned up against the stiff winds that blew off the shores of nearby Lake Michigan. After school, she would lug us around Chicago’s North Shore in her wood-paneled station wagon while she ran errands or tended to one of her many corporal works of mercy. She delivered breast milk for the La Leche League and care packages of clothing, toys, and food that she’d assemble for the Cordi-Marian Society, the church’s mission. When one of her friends had a baby or a parent who died, she’d make them her signature lemon bars. We’d wait in the car with the engine running while my mother scurried to the door to deliver any treats that were left after we’d raided the basement refrigerator the night before, ignoring the skulls and crossbones that she scrawled on her warning labels: DO NOT EAT!!!! [image file=Image00006.jpg] After that, she would haul us to our basketball games or play practices or scout meetings where my mother often presided as leader. Good enough, she’d say, handing us our fitness badges as we turned lopsided somersaults and cartwheels. Then she’d schlep us over to the Hi-Lo Gro cery store on Green Bay Road and buy us all ice cream cones for a nickel apiece, even if it was almost dinnertime. My mother mixed her first martini at 5 p.m. sharp. The second, a half an hour later. In between, she might pop a tranquilizer. Once the dishes were done, bedtime books were read, and the little kids were tucked away, she’d throw on her nightgown and brush her teeth, then scurry to the side of her bed, where she’d kneel, take a deep breath, and bow her head. After making a quick sign of the cross over her chest, she’d bury her face in her hands. I always wondered what she was praying for so intently. Thanks? More energy? A way out? Only then would she hop under the covers and, with the world’s widest shit-eating grin, declare herself, Just happy to be in bed. By 8 or 9 p.m., she was down for the count. The house was more or less all ours to do as we pleased. Holmer tried his best with us, too. He would swoop into the house from New York City on Friday nights, tipsy from airplane booze, and make his way around the kitchen table. Put your cheeks up here, he’d say, yanking our faces toward his as he kissed us all so hard that we shook like Jell-O. He’d call us his “little tortfeasors,” a term he learned in law school that we thought sounded like a German swear word.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Then each person was sent forth into their own one-on-one five-minute conversation. What happened was nothing short of amazing: First, participants who dropped their safety behaviors looked less anxious. Indeed, when they stopped trying to conceal, rather than all that unconcealed anxiety spilling out, they looked more comfortable. Next, when Alden and Taylor asked the confederates about their experience, guess whom they enjoyed talking to more? The group who dropped their safety behaviors. Who would they like to spend more time with? Ditto. Who did they want as a friend? You guessed it. But most interesting is that participants who dropped their safety behaviors thought the confederates liked them because they seemed less anxious. But in reality, the confederates said they liked them because they were friendlier, talked more openly, conveyed interest, and were actively engaged. In other words, the participants thought their partners liked them because they did less of the bad stuff, but in reality the partners liked them because they did more of the good stuff. Once all the bandwidth used for rehearsing sentences or managing their appearance was freed up, authentic friendliness—the good stuff—naturally filled in the gaps. There’s that word again: “authentic.” In other words, being yourself. Indeed, when we use safety behaviors we know we’re coming off as fake. We know it’s not our true self that we’re presenting to the world—instead, it’s a filtered, highly managed version. Safety behaviors are designed to hide your true self, the one your Inner Critic says is flawed. But instead, safety behaviors keep us stuck in the idea that we’re unlikable or deficient. We never get the chance to prove those ideas wrong. Ironically, when the study participants stopped trying to save themselves they could be themselves. And that, in turn, made them connect on a genuine level. Plus, unsurprisingly, they had a much better time than the participants who were simply told to hang in there. For Jia Jiang, the difference between his first two attempts at rejection illustrates the difference between concealing with safety behaviors and leaving them behind. For his inaugural rejection attempt, Day One, he decided to ask a stranger—the security guard in the lobby of his office building—if he could borrow a hundred dollars. In the video of the encounter Jia filmed on his phone, the security guard is sitting at his desk, hunched over a computer screen. Jia approaches. Before he even gets to the desk, he blurts out, “Excuse me, do you think I could borrow a hundred dollars from you?” The guard looks puzzled and says no. But then a hint of a smile crosses his face. He looks up at Jia. “Why?” But Jia is too freaked out to hear him. “No? All right. No. Okay, thanks,” and he scurries away.

• From The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self _in posse_ which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? “He must relax,” says Dr. Starbuck,—“that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively.”(114) “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity” is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self‐surrender; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, “Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact.(115) To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, “hands off” is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided! We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self‐surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning‐point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self‐ surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure “liberalism” or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind‐cure type, taking in the mediæval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  You can make a choice, either to throw it all off and go into the forest to meditate, or to stay in the world, both in the life of your job, which is the kingly job of politics and achievement, and in the love life with your wife and family. Now, this is a very nice myth, it seems to me. MOYERS: And it says much of what modern science is discovering, that time is endless— CAMPBELL: —and there are galaxies, galaxies, galaxies, and our God—our personification of God and his son and the mystery—is for this little set of time. MOYERS: Culture, though, has always influenced our thinking about ultimate matters. CAMPBELL: Culture can also teach us to go past its concepts. That is what is known as initiation. A true initiation is when the guru tells you, “There is no Santa Claus.” Santa Claus is metaphoric of a relationship between parents and children. The relationship does exist, and so it can be experienced, but there is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus was simply a way of clueing children into the appreciation of a relationship. Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery—this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been. MOYERS: Zorba says, “Trouble? Life is trouble.” CAMPBELL: Only death is no trouble. People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.” MOYERS: Doesn’t that lead to a rather passive attitude in the face of evil? CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. MOYERS: What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light? CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans . “All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow—loss, loss, loss.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Her relief upon its arrival a month later is palpable. “I have been unpacking him and trying to hang him all the morning,” she enthused to Berenson about the enormous painting, which measured almost eighty by forty inches. The young Hapsburg king is clothed in simple black, with a white linen collar (called a golilla) encircling his long, distinctive face, topped by sandy hair. He holds a folded note in his right hand and the hilt of his sword in his left, a typical pose for him, with his feet placed beneath him, like a dancer’s. The king was aptly described in an 1897 book on Velázquez that Isabella kept on her shelves: “Few characters in history have offered such a curious compound of contradictory qualities as Philip IV,” the author stated. He had “many of the gifts that make a strong and wise ruler, but never were such qualities less effectively exercised. To a handsome person, a distinguished bearing, courtly manners, and proficiency in all the accomplishments of a cavalier, he added the more sterling virtues of a kind heart, a tolerant disposition, and a self-control so remarkable that he is said never to have shown anger, and only to have laughed three times in his life!” The author offers a possible reason for the king’s shortcomings as a ruler, speculating that his “innumerable love affairs no doubt diverted his attention from more weighty matters.” It was said that he fathered thirty-two children. Isabella couldn’t have been more pleased with the portrait, eventually hanging it in her Beacon Street dining room. She finally had her own Velázquez. She told Berenson: “He is glorious. I am quite quivering and feverish over him. How simple and great.” At this time, she and Berenson exchanged numerous letters about the purchase of other works, including A Lady with a Rose by the Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck, which she won for £4,000. She also bought a small but striking portrait of a weeping Christ, thought to be by the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione, now attributed to Giovanni Bellini or his circle. She and Berenson would go back and forth about the latter painting, Christ Carrying the Cross, over the course of more than a year, until it finally arrived in Boston in late 1898, much to the relief of both. With stakes so high, these exchanges both strengthened their friendship and strained it.

• From Chasing Beauty

  It is a little unclear what happened next. Isabella wired the purchase price of the three Hope pictures to Berenson’s account, saying she’d been in bed sick for a week and ending her brief note with a modest bridge-building question: “how are you?” Berenson replied in two letters, both dated October 18, 1898, but only fragments of the letters remain, most likely because Isabella tore up the parts she didn’t want anyone else to read. Berenson is diplomatic in what few lines are left, saying, “Please, dear friend, do not conceive that I am feeling any animosity toward Mr. Gardner.” Then he praises her to the skies: “I shall worship you as without exception the most life-enhancing, the most utterly enviable person I have had the good fortune to know.” He also reiterates the struggle he had in securing the three paintings for her—“it took all my persuasion, all my threats, and all my influence.” In other words, he was worth all her worry. Though this issue of trusting Berenson would not go away entirely, she was ready to blame the whole fracas on Colnaghi. “And do you understand why I hate Colnaghi,” she asked Berenson in a November 7 missive, again referring to how Colnaghi had delayed the delivery of the Crivelli. She wanted to change the topic and talk about friendlier things. “The November gray look is over the land—but I love it,” she enthused to Berenson a few weeks later, from Green Hill. “As I write I look over the waving trees, see the dim city beyond . . .” She regaled him with a funny scene at the Somerset Club, where she had recently lunched. “At another table was a man I knew, eating with another I didn’t know. This latter turned out to be Dibblee . . .” Benjamin Dibblee was the dashing captain of Harvard’s winning football team. “Up got the man I knew,” she explained, who “came to me and said, ‘Mrs. Gardner would you mind knowing Dibblee; he has asked to be presented?’ Mind? It was the proudest day of my life!” She couldn’t help herself; she turned into a giggly schoolgirl around young, handsome athletes. Flirtation, even a description of a flirtation, was also an efficient means of defusing conflict. *** THE DAYS TURNED DARKER IN DECEMBER. “WE HAVE HAD SUCH STORMS—snow and wind,” Isabella noted to Berenson, with another strong nor’easter expected. Jack had been unusually tired, and in a break from custom, they did not host the family Thanksgiving at Green Hill. She was fighting off a nasty cold, which she blamed on two mishaps, when her carriage hit snowdrifts that made passage on the streets almost impossible, and she was delayed out in the frigid air.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  A similar phenomenon occurs in experiments when people write about the same trauma several days in a row. The description of the event is gradually shortened and summarized. Irrelevant issues and tangential impressions are dropped; central features of the traumas are highlighted and analyzed. The experimental volunteers have created a mental summary of their experience that often is psychologically less daunting to deal with. One woman, after writing about being raped by a casual acquaintance, explained: I haven’t been able to talk about the rape in detail to anyone. In the last three months, it has dominated my being. I’ve had fears and problems with other people that I’ve never had before. Being in this [writing experiment] has made a difference. Somehow, just writing about what happened has made it all less overwhelming. I won’t ever forget what happened but I see more clearly that it was an isolated event in my life. SUMMARIZING AND SHARING MEMORY TO REDUCE STRESS Nearly any type of an event is less overwhelming and easier to think about once it is summarized in some way. Many times, when we write something down, we don’t have to think about it any longer. You may have noticed this when you are preparing to go on a vacation. There’s packing, stopping the mail, getting the car checked, and on and on. In the middle of meetings or talking to someone on the phone, overlooked chores come to mind. “Oh, I can’t forget to pack the fishing rod” or “get someone to water the plants.” As much as you try to avoid it, you probably break down and start making lengthy lists of last-minute tasks to perform. Before list making, you have to actively juggle the tasks in your mind. Once you start the lists, however, your mind becomes freer and you probably feel a little less distressed. You have, in essence, transferred your mental notes from your head onto a piece of paper. Several researchers have discussed how memory and thought processes can be viewed as external to our brains. Dan Wegner provided fascinating examples of how partners in a marriage gradually become repositories of each other’s thoughts and memories. One spouse may remember restaurants; the other may keep track of movies. One spouse never has to think about finances, for example, because all financial thoughts are housed in the other spouse’s brain.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  At the start of his reign, Liu Bang had commissioned the Confucian ritualists (ru) to devise a court ceremonial, and when it was performed for the first time, the emperor exclaimed: “Now I realize the nobility of being a Son of Heaven!”122 The ru slowly gained ground at court, and as the memory of the Qin trauma faded, there was a growing desire for more solid moral guidance.123 In 136 BCE the court scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104) suggested to Emperor Wu (r. 140–87) that there were too many competing schools and recommended that the six classical Confucian texts become the official state teaching. The emperor agreed: Confucianism supported the family; its emphasis on cultural history would forge a cultural identity; and state education would create an elite class that could counter the enduring appeal of the old aristocracy. But Wu did not make the mistake of the First Emperor. In the Chinese Empire there would be no sectarian intolerance: the Chinese would continue to see merit in all the schools that could supplement one another. Thus, however diametrically opposed the two schools might be, there would be a Legalist-Confucian coalition: the state still needed Legalist pragmatism, but the ru would temper Fajia despotism. In 124 BCE Wu founded the Imperial Academy, and for over two thousand years all Chinese state officials would be trained in a predominantly Confucian ideology, which presented the rulers as Sons of Heaven governing by moral charisma. This gave the regime spiritual legitimacy and became the ethos of the civil administration. Like all agrarian rulers, however, the Han controlled their empire by systemic and martial violence, exploiting the peasantry, killing rebels, and conquering new territory. The emperors depended on the army (wu), and in the newly conquered territories the magistrates summarily expropriated the land, deposed existing landlords, and seized between 50 and 100 percent of the peasants’ surplus. Like any premodern ruler, the emperor had to maintain himself in a state of exception as the “one man” to whom ordinary rules did not apply. At a moment’s notice, therefore, he could order an execution, and nobody dared object. Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall.124

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

  This went on until everyone was standing. It was beautiful. I had them get in groups and pray over each thing that had kept them from being free while I asked God what He wanted to tell them next. This is when a student came up to me and said, “I think you should tell them this no longer has power over them.” I handed her the mic and said, “You tell them.” Her voice reached across the field and beyond as she shouted, “Dishonesty no longer has power over me! Dishonesty no longer has power over Baylor’s campus!” Impromptu lines began to form on each side of the stage, and students took turns shouting in the mic that their sin and their wounds no longer had power over them. “Suicide no longer has power over me! Suicide no longer has power over Baylor’s campus!” “Pornography no longer has power over me! Pornography no longer has power over Baylor’s campus!” I have never seen anything like it! Not only were they throwing down their last 2 percent publicly; they were also denying the enemy’s power over them. God can make that kind of breakthrough happen anywhere and with anyone. So this shame? This fear? This doubt? It no longer has power over you! It no longer has power over our generation! So let’s train our minds to think on that truth. The Well-Trained Mind I talked with an astronaut recently. He goes up into space from time to time and hangs out. My jaw was dropped for the entirety of our conversation. His normal everyday reality is that cool. His name is Shane Kimbrough, and my favorite thing about him is that he is afraid of heights. Or he used to be afraid of heights. (Does anyone ever really get over a fear of heights? Evidently, Shane did, because the last time he was set for a space mission, he was so relaxed that he fell asleep on the launch pad. I’m not even kidding. His fellow astronaut people had to nudge him and say, “Hey. Shane. We’re about to blast off, man.”) Shane said that his whole life is spent either preparing for a space mission, participating in a space mission, or “cooling off” from a mission, as he calls it. I asked what a mission is like, and here are some tidbits from what he said.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Many hours afterwards I awoke: it was night, candles were burning and Dr. Richards was leaning over me: “do you know me?” he asked and at once I answered: “Of course I know you, Richards”, and I went on jubilant to say: “I’m saved: I’ve won through. Had I been going to die, I should never have recovered consciousness.” To my astonishment his brow wrinkled and he said, “drink this and then go to sleep again quietly: it’s all right”, and he held a glass of whitish liquid to my lips. I drained the glass and said joyously: “Milk! how funny you should give me milk; that’s not prescribed in any of your books.” He told me afterwards it was Castor-oil he had given me and I had mistaken it for milk. I somehow felt that my tongue was running away with me even before he laid his hand on my forehead to quiet me saying: “There please! don’t talk, rest! please!” and I pretended to obey him; but couldn’t make out why he shut me up! I could not recall my words either—why? A dreadful thought shook me suddenly: had I been talking nonsense? My father’s face too appeared to be dreadfully perturbed while I was speaking. “Could one think sanely and yet talk like a madman? What an appalling fate!” I resolved in that case to use my revolver on myself as soon as I knew that my state was hopeless: that thought gave me peace and I turned at once to compose myself. In a few minutes more I was fast asleep. The next time I awoke, it was again night and again the Doctor was beside me and my sister: “Do you know me?” he asked again, and again I replied: “Of course I know you and Sis here as well.” “That’s great”, he cried joyously, “now you’ll soon be well again.” “Of course I shall”, I cried joyously, “I told you that before: but you seemed hurt; did I wander in my mind?” “There, there”, he cried, “don’t excite yourself and you’ll soon be well again!” “Was it a near squeak?” I asked. “You must know it was”, he replied, “you took sixty grains of belladonna fasting and the books give at most quarter of a grain for a dose and declare one grain to be generally fatal. I shall never be able to brag of your case in the medical journals”, he went on smiling, “for no one would ever believe that a heart could go on galloping far too fast to count, but certainly two hundred odd times a minute for thirty odd hours without bursting. You’ve been tested”, he concluded, “as no one was ever tested before and have come back safe! But now sleep again”, he said, “sleep is Nature’s restorative.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  relief: “Installed at”: JLG Jr. 1890 Diary, JLGJr-P. rooms were “delightful”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 5, 1890, GFP. “an enchanting dream”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 30, 1890, GFP. “my books don’t sell”: HJ to Robert Louis Stevenson, January 12, 1891, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 326. “snatch of Venice”: HJ to ISG, June 24, 1890, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 294. “building hospitals”: Clayton Johns, Reminiscences of a Musician (Cambridge: Washburn and Thomas, 1929), 65. “4 gilt wood things”: JLG Jr. 1890 Diary, JLGJr-P. a lacy, ethereal effect: Betty Hughes Morris, A History of the Church of the Advent (Boston: Church of the Advent, 1995), 156–57. See also Memorial, 204. “easier even to worship”: John Winthrop to ISG, March 29, 1891, ISG Papers, ISGM. Saint Augustine started: For a history of Saint Augustine Church, which joined with Saint Martin Mission to become the Church of Saint Augustine and Saint Martin in 1908, see undated essay by Eldridge Pendleton, SSJE, Archives of the Church of the Advent, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See also The Record: Mission Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Boston, vol. 2, no. 4 (September 1891): 3-7, and saintaugustinesaintmartin.org. of about $12,000: The Record, 1891, 7. The simple Italianate: Sister Catherine Louise, SSM, The House of My Pilgrimage: A History of the American House of the Society of St. Margaret, 1873–1973 (Glenside, PA: Little Page Press, 1973), 59–70. According to a story: This scene of Isabella at the Boston Lying-In Hospital has long been part of the oral history of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. See Brother James Koester, SSJE, sermon preached at the ISGM, April 14, 2018, SSJE Archives. ball in downtown Boston: Documentation of the ball’s location in 1891 was not found; the same ball in 1903 was held at the Somerset Hotel. photographer, James Notman: James Notman, photographs of Myopia Hunt Club Party, June 28, 1891, ISGM. “sadly at the window”: A. J. Jephson to ISG, February 8, 1901, ISG Papers, ISGM. Jephson reminded her of their time on Roque Island in the summer of 1891; details of her time there are taken from Jephson’s recollections. She canceled all: “Personal and Social Gossip,” Sunday Herald, July 26, 1891, 23: “Owing to the death of the father of Mrs. John L. Gardner, she was not one of the party on the coach Independence Friday last, as was expected.” SEVENTEEN: THE CONCERT, 1892 “a musical meteor”: Johns, Reminiscences of a Musician, 53. “out of the kindness”: Johns, Reminiscences of a Musician, 54. This scene is described in Carter, 122–23. Johns remembered he was the only other person at the private concert, a memory contradicted somewhat by later accounts. Tharp cites a woman who claims she too was present for the evening performance and dinner, but Tharp doesn’t specify more than the name and “museum archives” on how she knows this. She also gives a slightly different account of what happened than Carter. Tharp, 158–59. her “charming idea”: HLH to ISG, February 27, 1892, ISG Papers, ISGM.