Sadness

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 Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  In any case, as far as I can tell, within Israel’s scriptures it is only in Isaiah 53 that the intense suffering is the means , and not simply the context , of the expected deliverance, of the forgiveness of sins. This is all the more striking in view of what we saw earlier, that such an idea—one person suffering to redeem many—was widespread in the ancient non -Jewish world, turning up in Homer, Euripides, and many other famous non-Jewish writers as well as in reported speeches from heroes in battle. Did the great poet who penned Isaiah 53 intend to allude to that pagan tradition? It seems unlikely. When we read Isaiah 40–55 as a whole, we find that the motif of redemptive suffering in chapter 53 is new. Up to this point in the poem there is the promise of redemption from suffering, on the one hand, and the strange vocation of suffering for the “servant,” on the other. But only in the final poem (52:13–53:12) are the two brought together. When this happens, as in many great poems and indeed other art forms, we realize that the new thing has grown organically out of the varied elements of the poem as a whole, so that its meaning is not isolated, a strange new idea sitting by itself, but rather is held in place by the major themes of the surrounding chapters. This observation will be all the more important when we consider the striking ways in which Isaiah 53, above all other passages, is used in the New Testament as the scriptural clue to the meaning of Jesus’s death. It is not a proof-text taken out of the context of either Isaiah 40–55 as a whole (or 40–66 as a whole) or the entire larger narrative of Israel we have been considering. It is simultaneously a quintessential summing up of the plight of Israel and the promise of deliverance, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a unique new statement of the hope that this plight and this promise would somehow dovetail together. The “servant” represents Israel’s plight (“You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified”; Isa.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, recent investigations have demonstrated something akin to self-awareness in chimps and even in elephants. I have elected, along with others, to view awareness as occurring along a continuum, with so-called self-awareness at the upper end. Awareness, whether in mankind or in the animal kingdom, may emanate from an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or through external events by way of sensory perception. Awareness provides the raw material from which animals (including humans) develop qualia or subjective meanings about their experience. Awareness of our internal milieu lets us know when we are hungry or horny, thirsty or tired, happy or sad, distressed or at peace; and this awareness facilitates what we do to address these internal states. With awareness of discomforts or imbalances, and with determination and will, we can set out to meet these needs. For example, when we experience hunger pangs, we set out to find food. When the rain starts to drench us, we seek shelter; and when we are sexually primed, we seek out a mate, court and procreate. Awareness, most simply stated, derives from the moment-to-moment sensing of internal and external environments in the service of satisfying organismic needs and reestablishing “self-regulation.” Unfortunately, most all of us have misplaced the capacity for awareness for a multitude of reasons. Tuning out begins at the earliest stages of life. As infants, all of our basic needs must be met by the ministrations of a caregiver—when we get fed, held, rocked and soothed; when our uncomfortable diapers are changed and when we are too hot or cold. All of these primitive needs must be met by “the other.” When they are not, we protest, escalating to a cacophony of screaming, wailing and the flailing of our limbs. Moreover, when our needs are repeatedly not met in a timely and consistent fashion, the sensations of distress become so intense and unbearable that shutting down is the final option for the infant. This is the only semblance of agency left to the baby. As we grow and mature, we learn to actively suppress our instinctual impulses, needs and emotions in fear of retribution from our parents. Implicitly, we can sense their subtle disapproval and discomfort, turning away from this invalidation and further shutting down nascent awareness. In immediately offering to buy a new “replacement” puppy to extinguish a child’s shock, grief, horror and rage at witnessing his beloved pet getting run over, the parent teaches the child not only that his emotions do not matter but also, essentially, that they don’t even exist. Is it any surprise that as adults our capacity for awareness is so blunted and diminished?

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  As far back as Sherry could remember, her mother had run a foster home, and their house was often packed with as many as fifteen strange, disruptive, frightened, and frightening kids who disappeared as suddenly as they arrived. Sherry had grown up taking care of these transient children, feeling that there was no room for her and her needs. “I know I wasn’t wanted,” she told me. “I’m not sure when I first realized that, but I’ve thought about things that my mother said to me, and the signs were always there. She’d tell me, ‘You know, I don’t think you belong in this family. I think they gave us the wrong baby.’ And she’d say it with a smile on her face. But, of course, people often pretend to joke when they say something serious.” Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation.[1] Sherry turned out to be a living example of these findings: Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating at any age, but it is particularly destructive for young children, who are still trying to find their place in the world. Sherry had graduated from college, but she now worked in a joyless clerical job, lived alone with her cats, and had no close friends. When I asked her about men, she told me that her only “relationship” had been with a man who’d kidnapped her while she was on a college vacation in New Orleans. He’d held her captive and raped her repeatedly for five consecutive days. She remembered having been curled up, terrified and frozen for most of that time, until she realized she could try to get away. She escaped by simply walking out while he was in the bathroom. When she called her mother collect for help, her mother refused to take the call. Sherry finally managed to get home with assistance from a domestic violence shelter. Sherry told me that she’d started to pick at her skin because it gave her some relief from feeling numb. The physical sensations made her feel more alive but also deeply ashamed—she knew she was addicted to these actions but could not stop them. She’d consulted many mental health professionals before me and had been questioned repeatedly about her “suicidal behavior.” She’d also been subjected to involuntary hospitalization by a psychiatrist who refused to treat her unless she could promise that she would never pick at herself again. However, in my experience, patients who cut themselves or pick at their skin like Sherry, are seldom suicidal but are trying to make themselves feel better in the only way they know.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Soon afterward an article appeared in the journal Dreaming suggesting that EMDR was related to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep— the phase of sleep in which dreaming occurs.[7] Research had already shown that sleep, and dream sleep in particular, plays a major role in mood regulation. As the article in Dreaming pointed out, the eyes move rapidly back and forth in REM sleep, just as they do in EMDR. Increasing our time in REM sleep reduces depression, while the less REM sleep we get, the more likely we are to become depressed.[8] Of course, PTSD is notoriously associated with disturbed sleep, and self-medication with alcohol or drugs further disrupts REM sleep. During my time at the VA my colleagues and I had found that the veterans with PTSD frequently woke themselves up soon after going into REM sleep[9]—probably because they had activated a trauma fragment during a dream.[10] Other researchers have also noticed this phenomenon, but thought that it was irrelevant to understanding PTSD.[11] Today we know that both deep sleep and REM sleep play important roles in how memories change over time. The sleeping brain reshapes memory by increasing the imprint of emotionally relevant information while helping irrelevant material fade away.[12] In a series of elegant studies Stickgold and his colleagues showed that the sleeping brain can even make sense out of information whose relevance is unclear while we are awake and integrate it into the larger memory system.[13] Dreams keep replaying, recombining, and reintegrating pieces of old memories for months and even years.[14] They constantly update the subterranean realities that determine what our waking minds pay attention to. And perhaps most relevant to EMDR, in REM sleep we activate more distant associations than in either non-REM sleep or the normal waking state. For example, when subjects are wakened from non-REM sleep and given a word-association test, they give standard responses: hot/cold, hard/soft, etc. Wakened from REM sleep, they make less conventional connections, such as thief/wrong.[15] They also solve simple anagrams more easily after REM sleep. This shift toward activation of distant associations could explain why dreams are so bizarre.[16] Stickgold, Hobson, and their colleagues thus discovered that dreams help to forge new relationships between apparently unrelated memories.[17] Seeing novel connections is the cardinal feature of creativity; as we’ve seen, it’s also essential to healing. The inability to recombine experiences is also one of the striking features of PTSD. While Noam in chapter 4 could imagine a trampoline to save future victims of terrorism, traumatized people are trapped in frozen associations: Anybody who wears a turban will try to kill me; any man who finds me attractive wants to rape me.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  I’d never been able to tell anyone what was going on inside. So I forced these images back, away, for years. I began to reintegrate that split-off part of my experience only after I actually began to imagine that kid as a kid, my kid perhaps. Then, out came this overwhelming sadness—and healing. Integrating the feelings of sadness, rage, or all of the above with the action should be standard operating procedure for all soldiers who have killed face-to-face. It requires no sophisticated psychological training. Just form groups under a fellow squad or platoon member who has had a few days of group leadership training and encourage people to talk.[7] Getting perspective on your terror and sharing it with others can reestablish the feeling that you are a member of the human race. After the Vietnam veterans I treated joined a therapy group where they could share the atrocities they had witnessed and committed, they reported beginning to open their hearts to their girlfriends. The Miracle of Self-DiscoveryDiscovering your Self in language is always an epiphany, even if finding the words to describe your inner reality can be an agonizing process. That is why I find Helen Keller’s account of how she was “born into language”[8] so inspiring. When Helen was nineteen months old and just starting to talk, a viral infection robbed her of her sight and hearing. Now deaf, blind, and mute, this lovely, lively child turned into an untamed, isolated creature. After five desperate years her family invited a partially blind teacher, Anne Sullivan, to come from Boston to their home in rural Alabama as Helen’s tutor. Anne began immediately to teach Helen the manual alphabet, spelling words into her hand letter by letter, but it took ten weeks of trying to connect with this wild child before the breakthrough occurred. It came as Anne spelled the word “water” into one of Helen’s hands while she held the other under the water pump. Helen later recalled that moment in The Story of My Life: “Water! That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning.…Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought. I learned a great many words that day.” Learning the names of things enabled the child not only to create an inner representation of the invisible and inaudible physical reality around her but also to find herself: Six months later she started to use the first-person “I.” Helen’s story reminds me of the abused, recalcitrant, uncommunicative kids we see in our residential treatment programs. Before she acquired language, she was bewildered and self-centered—looking back, she called that creature “Phantom.” And indeed, our kids come across as phantoms until they can discover who they are and feel safe enough to communicate what is going on with them.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He let himself be persuaded, and I unjustly reflected that no one can put himself in the place of another. He took a new copybook and, on its cover, wrote: “Argentina.” He listed first the indispensable things that still had to be done and divided the work between us. He was very busy when I left. It was late, and I could not hope to sleep after so long a nap. When I reached our Passage, seats and benches were being noisily moved. For all these beings with regular and unconscious lives each hour had its meaning. To avoid useless questions, I sought refuge on the terrace. The moon had risen high and it would have been easy to read. I leaned on the white railing. The scent of the night was forever marked with the sulfurous odor of bombs. Of the eight buildings in the Passage — four to the left and four to the right — three had been hit. The last one to the right was a spectacular ruin, cut in two as by a knife, with a piece of wall hanging from the third floor by its iron supports, motionless above sheer void. Fifteen yards from the ground, the tiles of an open kitchen reflected the blue light. Hard and perpendicular in the Passage, the moonlight flooded the smallest detail. Soon the last sounds died out; a dreaming baby screamed and went back to sleep. Complete silence. The chime of a Westminster clock broke it, and then the hoarse spasms of my father’s fit of coughing seemed to wrench the night air, drowning the elegant chimes, then becoming fainter as the music gained the upper hand, delicate as a thin spiral of smoke that a sudden wind had scattered for an instant. I tried to count the strokes, in spite of the blanks that the cough had blotted out: three... five... six... eight... ten, eleven. Eleven or twelve? How can I find out? The world is dead and I have no watch. For once, Henry planned efficiently and he soon had our passage booked. We were to sail in five days’ time. I used these days to do my share of the preparations and make a few calls. After much hesitation I went to see Poinsot. I had not seen him since the beginning of the German occupation, after the incident I have described. I did not find him at home. Because of a slight nervous depression, he had gone back to France for treatment. Why did this give me a certain strange pleasure? It was as though it excused Poinsot. Even such clear certainties, it seemed, could save nobody, and Poinsot’s piercing vision could also get blurred.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Nighttime offered no relief—his sleep was constantly interrupted by nightmares about an ambush in a rice paddy back in ’Nam, in which all the members of his platoon were killed or wounded. He also had terrifying flashbacks in which he saw dead Vietnamese children. The nightmares were so horrible that he dreaded falling asleep and he often stayed up for most of the night, drinking. In the morning his wife would find him passed out on the living room couch, and she and the boys had to tiptoe around him while she made them breakfast before taking them to school. Filling me in on his background, Tom said that he had graduated from high school in 1965, the valedictorian of his class. In line with his family tradition of military service he enlisted in the Marine Corps immediately after graduation. His father had served in World War II in General Patton’s army, and Tom never questioned his father’s expectations. Athletic, intelligent, and an obvious leader, Tom felt powerful and effective after finishing basic training, a member of a team that was prepared for just about anything. In Vietnam he quickly became a platoon leader, in charge of eight other Marines. Surviving slogging through the mud while being strafed by machine-gun fire can leave people feeling pretty good about themselves—and their comrades. At the end of his tour of duty Tom was honorably discharged, and all he wanted was to put Vietnam behind him. Outwardly that’s exactly what he did. He attended college on the GI Bill, graduated from law school, married his high school sweetheart, and had two sons. Tom was upset by how difficult it was to feel any real affection for his wife, even though her letters had kept him alive in the madness of the jungle. Tom went through the motions of living a normal life, hoping that by faking it he would learn to become his old self again. He now had a thriving law practice and a picture-perfect family, but he sensed he wasn’t normal; he felt dead inside.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  During morning rounds the young doctors presented their cases to their supervisors, a ritual that the ward attendants were allowed to observe in silence. They rarely mentioned stories like the ones I’d heard. However, many later studies have confirmed the relevance of those midnight confessions: We now know that more than half the people who seek psychiatric care have been assaulted, abandoned, neglected, or even raped as children, or have witnessed violence in their families.[1] But such experiences seemed to be off the table during rounds. I was often surprised by the dispassionate way patients’ symptoms were discussed and by how much time was spent on trying to manage their suicidal thoughts and self-destructive behaviors, rather than on understanding the possible causes of their despair and helplessness. I was also struck by how little attention was paid to their accomplishments and aspirations; whom they cared for, loved, or hated; what motivated and engaged them, what kept them stuck, and what made them feel at peace—the ecology of their lives. A few years later, as a young doctor, I was confronted with an especially stark example of the medical model in action. I was then moonlighting at a Catholic hospital, doing physical examinations on women who’d been admitted to receive electroshock treatment for depression. Being my curious immigrant self, I’d look up from their charts to ask them about their lives. Many of them spilled out stories about painful marriages, difficult children, and guilt over abortions. As they spoke, they visibly brightened and often thanked me effusively for listening to them. Some of them wondered if they really still needed electroshock after having gotten so much off their chests. I always felt sad at the end of these meetings, knowing that the treatments that would be administered the following morning would erase all memory of our conversation. I did not last long in that job. On my days off from the ward at MMHC, I often went to the Countway Library of Medicine to learn more about the patients I was supposed to help. One Saturday afternoon I came across a treatise that is still revered today: Eugen Bleuler’s 1911 textbook Dementia Praecox. Bleuler’s observations were fascinating: Among schizophrenic body hallucinations, the sexual ones are by far the most frequent and the most important. All the raptures and joys of normal and abnormal sexual satisfaction are experienced by these patients, but even more frequently every obscene and disgusting practice which the most extravagant fantasy can conjure up. Male patients have their semen drawn off; painful erections are stimulated. The women patients are raped and injured in the most devilish ways.…In spite of the symbolic meaning of many such hallucinations, the majority of them correspond to real sensations.[2]

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  Passive sadness is characterized, as we know, by dejected behaviour; there is muscular relaxation, paleness and cold at the extremities; one turns away towards some corner to sit there motionless, making the least possible contact with the world. One prefers twilight to full daylight, silence to sound, and solitude in one's room to frequented roads and public places. 'To be alone,' as they say, 'with one's sorrow.' But that is not true at all: it is good form, of course, to appear to meditate deeply over one's grief. But cases in which a sorrow is really cherished are rather rare. There is quite another reason: one of the accustomed conditions of our activity has vanished, yet we are still required to act in and upon the world without it. Most of the potentialities of our world (work to be done, people to see, duties of the daily round to be accomplished) remain the same. Only the means for realizing them, the paths traced over our 'hodological space' have changed. If for example, I have just learned that I am ruined, I no longer dispose of the same means (a private car, etc.) to accomplish them. I shall have to substitute means new to me (taking the motor-bus, etc.), which is precisely what I do not want to do. My melancholy is a method of suppressing the obligation to look for these new ways, by transforming the present structure of the world, replacing it with a totally undifferentiated structure. What it comes to, in short, is that I make the world into an affectively neutral reality, a system which is, affectively, in complete equilibrium. Objects highly charged with affect are de-charged, brought down to affective zero, and therefore apprehended as perfectly equivalent and interchangeable. In other words, lacking both the ability and the will to carry out the projects I formerly entertained, I behave in such a manner that the universe requires nothing more from me. This one can do only by acting upon oneself, by 'lowering the flame of life to a pin-point' — and the noetic correlate of this attitude is what we call Bleakness: the universe is bleak; that is, of undifferentiated structure. At the same time, therefore, we naturally draw back into ourselves, we 'efface ourselves', and the noetic counterpart of that is the Refuge. The entire universe is bleak, and it is precisely in order to protect ourselves from its frightful, illimitable monotony that we make some place or other into a 'shelter'. That is the one differentiating factor in the absolute monotony of the world: a bleak wall, a little darkness to screen us from that bleak immensity.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Therapy and TheaterI once heard Tina Packer declare to a roomful of trauma specialists: “Therapy and theater are intuition at work. They are the opposite of research, where one strives to step outside of one’s own personal experience, even outside your patients’ experience, to test the objective validity of assumptions. What makes therapy effective is deep, subjective resonance and that deep sense of truth and veracity that lives in the body.” I am still hoping that someday we will prove Tina wrong and combine the rigor of scientific methods with the power of embodied intuition. Edward, one of the Shakespeare & Company teachers, told me about an experience he’d had as a young actor in Packer’s advanced training workshop. The group had spent the morning doing exercises aimed at getting the muscles of the torso to release, so that the breath could drop in naturally and fully. Edward noticed that every time he rolled through one section of his ribs, he’d feel a wave of sadness. The coach asked if he’d ever been injured there, and he said no. For Packer’s afternoon class he’d prepared a speech from Richard II where the king is summoned to give up his crown to the lord who has usurped him. During the discussion afterward, he recalled that his mother had broken her ribs when she was pregnant with him and that he’d always associated this with his premature birth. As he recalled: When I told Tina this, she started asking me questions about my first few months. I said I didn’t remember being in an incubator but that I remembered times later when I stopped breathing, and being in the hospital in an oxygen tent. I remembered being in my uncle’s car and him driving through red lights to get me to the emergency room. It was like having sudden infant death syndrome at the age of three. Tina kept asking me questions, and I started to get really frustrated and angry at her poking away at whatever shield I had around that pain. Then she said, “Was it painful when the doctors stuck all those needles in you?” At that moment, I just started screaming. I tried to leave the room, but two of the other actors—really big guys—held me down. They finally got me to sit in a chair, and I was trembling and shaking. Then Tina said, “You’re your mother and you’re going to do this speech. You’re your mother and you’re giving birth to yourself. And you’re telling yourself that you’re going to make it. You’re not going to die. You must convince yourself. You must convince that little newborn that you’re not going to die.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  There is also on my desk in New York a framed photograph she herself took one Christmas on Barbados: the rocks outside the rented house, the shallow sea, the wash of surf. I remember the Christmas she took that picture. We had arrived on Barbados at night. She had gone immediately to bed and I had sat outside listening to a radio and trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.” At some point after she went to sleep news had come on the radio: since our arrival on Barbados the United States had invaded Panama. When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “For Mom and Dad,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  At this point I suggested that it was time to call Maria’s real mother into the room. Maria scanned the group and smiled brightly as she asked Kristin, a blonde, Scandinavian-looking artist, to play the part of her real mother. Kristin accepted in the formal words of the structure: “I enroll as your real mother, who was warm and loving and without whom you would not have survived but who failed to protect you from your abusive father.” Maria had her sit on a pillow to her right, much closer than her real father. I encouraged Maria to look at Kristin and then I asked, “So what happens when you look at her?” Maria angrily said, “Nothing.” “A witness would see how you stiffen as you look at your real mom and angrily say that you feel nothing,” I noted. After a long silence I asked again, “So what happens now?” Maria looked slightly more collapsed and repeated, “Nothing.” I asked her, “Is there something you want to say to your mom?” Finally Maria said, “I know you did the best you could,” and then, moments later: “I wanted you to protect me.” When she began to cry softly, I asked her, “What is happening inside?” “Holding my chest, my heart feels like it is pounding really hard,” Maria said. “My sadness goes out to my mom; how incapable she was of standing up to my father and protecting us. She just shuts down, pretending everything’s okay, and in her mind it probably is, and that makes me mad today. I want to say to her: ‘Mom, when I see you react to dad when he is being mean…when I see your face, you look disgusted and I don’t know why you don’t say, “Fuck off.” You don’t know how to fight—you are such a pushover—there is a part of you that is not good and not alive. I don’t even know what I want you to say. I just want you to be different—nothing you do is right, like you accept everything when it is totally not okay.’” I noted, “A witness would see how fierce you are as you want your mother to stand up to your dad.” Maria then talked about how she wanted her mother to run off with the kids and take them away from her terrifying father.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, the greater the cause the greater the effect. Now the cause which makes us grieve for the sins which we recall to memory is charity. Since then charity is perfect in the saints after the resurrection, they will grieve exceedingly for their sins, if they recall them to memory: yet this is impossible, seeing that according to Apoc. 21:4, “Sorrow and mourning shall flee away from them.” [*The quotation is from Is. 35:10. The text of the Apocalypse has: “Nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more.”] Therefore they will not recall their own sins to memory. Objection 4: Further, at the resurrection the damned will be to the good they once did as the blessed to the sins they once committed. Now seemingly the damned after rising again will have no knowledge of the good they once did, since this would alleviate their pain considerably. Neither therefore will the blessed have any knowledge of the sins they had committed. On the contrary, Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xx) that “a kind of Divine energy will come to our aid, so that we shall recall all of our sins to mind.” Further, as human judgment is to external evidence, so is the Divine judgment to the witness of the conscience, according to 1 Kings 16:7, “Man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart.” Now man cannot pass a perfect judgment on a matter unless evidence be taken on all the points that need to be judged. Therefore, since the Divine judgment is most perfect, it is necessary for the conscience to witness to everything that has to be judged. But all works, both good and evil, will have to be judged (2 Cor. 5:10): “We must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil.” Therefore each one’s conscience must needs retain all the works he has done, whether good or evil.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  But you can never leave— So goes the lyric to “Hotel California.” Depths and shallows, quicksilver changes. She was already a person. I could never afford to see that. 6What about the “Craftsman” dinner knife of my mother’s? The “Craftsman” dinner knife on Aunt Kate’s table, the one I recognize in the photographs? Was it the same “Craftsman” dinner knife that dropped through the redwood slats of the deck into the iceplant on the slope? The same “Craftsman” dinner knife that stayed lost in the iceplant until the blade was pitted and the handle scratched? The knife we found only when we were correcting the drainage on the slope in order to pass the geological inspection required to sell the house and move to Brentwood Park? The knife I saved to pass on to her, a memento of the beach, of her grandmother, of her childhood? I still have the knife. Still pitted, still scratched. I also still have the baby tooth her cousin Tony pulled, saved in a satin-lined jeweler’s box, along with the baby teeth she herself eventually pulled and three loose pearls. The baby teeth were to have been hers as well. 7In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things,” their totems. The detritus of this misplaced belief now fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want, on reflection, to see. There is no closet I can open with room left for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that might otherwise be put to such use I see, instead, three old Burberry raincoats of John’s, a suede jacket given to Quintana by the mother of her first boyfriend, and an angora cape, long since moth-eaten, given to my mother by my father not long after World War Two. In another closet I find a chest of drawers and perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open one of the boxes. I find photographs taken by my grandfather when he was a mining engineer in the Sierra Nevada in the early years of the twentieth century. In another of the boxes I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that my mother had salvaged from her own mother’s boxes of mementos. The jet beads. The ivory rosaries. The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge? Tom and his fellow veterans became my first teachers in my quest to understand how lives are shattered by overwhelming experiences, and in figuring out how to enable them to feel fully alive again. Trauma and the Loss of SelfThe first study I did at the VA started with systematically asking veterans what had happened to them in Vietnam. I wanted to know what had pushed them over the brink, and why some had broken down as a result of that experience while others had been able to go on with their lives.[3] Most of the men I interviewed had gone to war feeling well prepared, drawn close by the rigors of basic training and the shared danger. They exchanged pictures of their families and girlfriends; they put up with one another’s flaws. And they were prepared to risk their lives for their friends. Most of them confided their dark secrets to a buddy, and some went so far as to share each other’s shirts and socks. Many of the men had friendships similar to Tom’s with Alex. Tom met Alex, an Italian guy from Malden, Massachusetts, on his first day in country, and they instantly became close friends. They drove their jeep together, listened to the same music, and read each other’s letters from home. They got drunk together and chased the same Vietnamese bar girls.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  For everything there is a season. I’d miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons: it has for example “fire season” or “the season when the fire comes,” and it also has “the season when the rain comes,” but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York—the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves—suggest only death. For my having a child there was a season. That season passed. I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I wanna dance. The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil. Something else I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles. You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar. 14Before she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon. We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed. Including, suddenly, a baby. That year, 1966, during which the American military presence in Vietnam would reach four hundred thousand and American B-52s had begun bombing the North, was not widely considered an ideal year to take an infant to Southeast Asia, yet it never occurred to me to abandon or even adjust the plan. I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif. In the end this trip to Saigon did not take place, although its cancellation was by no means based on what might have seemed the obvious reason—we canceled, it turned out, because John had to finish the book he had contracted to write about César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association and the DiGiorgio grape strike in Delano—and I mention Saigon at all only by way of suggesting the extent of my misconceptions about what having a child, let alone adopting one, might actually entail. How could I not have had misconceptions?

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Janet treated Irène for several months, mainly with hypnosis. At the end he asked her again about her mother’s death. Irène started to cry and said, “Don’t remind me of those terrible things.…My mother was dead and my father was a complete drunk, as always. I had to take care of her dead body all night long. I did a lot of silly things in order to revive her.…In the morning I lost my mind.” Not only was Irène able to tell the story, but she had also recovered her emotions: “I feel very sad and abandoned.” Janet now called her memory “complete” because it now was accompanied by the appropriate feelings. Janet noted significant differences between ordinary and traumatic memory. Traumatic memories are precipitated by specific triggers. In Julian’s case the trigger was his girlfriend’s seductive comments; in Irène’s it was a bed. When one element of a traumatic experience is triggered, other elements are likely to automatically follow. Traumatic memory is not condensed: It took Irène three to four hours to reenact her story, but when she was finally able to tell what had happened it took less than a minute. The traumatic enactment serves no function. In contrast, ordinary memory is adaptive; our stories are flexible and can be modified to fit the circumstances. Ordinary memory is essentially social; it’s a story that we tell for a purpose: in Irène’s case, to enlist her doctor’s help and comfort; in Julian’s case, to recruit me to join his search for justice and revenge. But there is nothing social about traumatic memory. Julian’s rage at his girlfriend’s remark served no useful purpose. Reenactments are frozen in time, unchanging, and they are always lonely, humiliating, and alienating experiences. Janet coined the term “dissociation” to describe the splitting off and isolation of memory imprints that he saw in his patients. He was also prescient about the heavy cost of keeping these traumatic memories at bay. He later wrote that when patients dissociate their traumatic experience, they become “attached to an insurmountable obstacle”:[18] “[U]nable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is…as if their personality has definitely stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements.”[19] He predicted that unless they became aware of the split-off elements and integrated them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. This phenomenon has now been well documented in contemporary research.[20]

• From White Oleander (1999)

  If I could contemplate a future at all, it was because she believed there was one. Claire had given me back the world. And what was I doing now that she needed me? Rolling up my windows, loading in supplies, unreeling the barbed wire. I got up and went to her room. “Claire?” I called through the closed door. I tried the door but it was locked. She never locked the door, except when they were having sex. I knocked. “Claire, are you okay?” I heard her say something, but I couldn’t make it out. “Claire, open up.” I jiggled the doorhandle. Then I heard what it was she was saying. “Sorry. So sorry. I’m just so goddamned sorry.” “Open up, please, Claire. I want to talk to you.” “Go away, Astrid.” Her voice was almost unrecognizably drunk. I was surprised. I thought she’d be sobering up or passed out by now. “Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.” I heard her sobbing dryly, almost retching, almost laughing, it became a sort of hum through the door. I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked. She was going to call Ron wherever it was he went, and say, you’re right, send her back. I can’t live without you. “You can’t send me back,” I said through the door. “Your mother was right,” she said, slurring the words. I heard things crash to the floor. “I am a fool. I can’t even stand myself.” My mother. Making everything worse. I’d sent back all the letters I could find, but there must have been others. I sat down on the floor. I felt like an accident victim, holding on to my falling-out insides. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the urge to go back to my room, fall into bed, under the clean sheets, and sleep. But I fought it, tried to think of something to say through the door. “She doesn’t know you.” I heard the squeak of her bed, she was up, staggered to the door. “He’s not coming back, Astrid.” She was right on the other side. Her voice fell from standing height to sitting as she spoke through the crack. “He’s going to divorce me.” I hoped he would. Then she might have a chance, the two of us, taking it slow, no more Ron coming home, trailing fear, selling hope, leaving her on Christmas, arriving home just when she was getting used to him being gone. It would be fine. No more pretending, holding our breaths, listening in as he talked on the phone. “Claire, you know, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I too was unable to weep. ~ 6. BAR MITZVAH ~ We moved away from Tarfoune Alley the year of my bar mitzvah. For some time my father had been thinking of renting a larger room if my mother became pregnant again. The situation was beginning to be critical, in this respect, when my Uncle Aroun, my mother’s eldest brother, built a tenement house, where we managed to get a small apartment. My parents then decided to anticipate the traditional date for my bar mitzvah in order to make its celebration coincide with those of the expected event and of our housewarming. Uncle Aroun, in building a tenement house, was indeed achieving the ambition of all little men who have made good. In this form, the money he had managed to earn acquired a material shape, seemed to strike root, and bore fruit. But all his brothers and sisters asked for permission to move into the house, which upset his plans considerably, though we all lived, as I soon had occasion to observe, in a truly tribal manner. That is why he was unable to reject these applications. My father, however, was too proud and postponed applying. When he finally made up his mind to let Mother speak about the matter to her brother, there were no longer any small apartments free in the house. My father immediately took it as an offense. With my Aunt Abbou, who was obviously too poor to afford such a home, we were the only members of all my mother’s family not to be living in the new building. Through my mother as his go-between, my father then offered to invest his own meager savings in altering two small laundry-rooms that were on the flat roof terrace so as to make an apartment where we froze in winter and roasted in summer. It is quite probable that my father’s asthma became considerably worse as a result of this removal, and that the new premises were also responsible for my mother’s rheumatism. But we did at least have a toilet to ourselves, and electric light.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  This model of royal consciousness does not require too much interpretation to be seen as a characterization of our own cultural situation. I have no need to be too immediately “relevant” about these matters, for the careful discernment of these texts will in any case illuminate our own situation. So I offer this paradigm with the prospect that it may indeed help us understand our own situation more effectively. It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition. Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it. Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors. Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology. Perhaps you are like me, so enmeshed in this reality that another way is nearly unthinkable. The dominant history of that period, like the dominant history of our own time, consists in briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems. And that is not a place where much dancing happens and where no groaning is permitted. We are seldom aware that a minority report may be found in the Bible, the vision of some fanatics who believe that the royal portrayal of history is not accurate because it does not do justice ( sic ) either to this God or to these brothers and sisters. In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon, the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon. He is a God with a name of his own, which cannot be uttered by anyone but him. He is not the reflection of any, for he has his own person and retains that all to himself. He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the