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

  When my mother was nine years old, she told my gran that she didn’t want to live with her anymore. She wanted to live with her father. “If that’s what you want,” Gran said, “then go.” Temperance came to pick my mom up, and she happily bounded up into his car, ready to go and be with the man she loved. But instead of taking her to live with him in the Meadowlands, without even telling her why, he packed her off and sent her to live with his sister in the Xhosa homeland, Transkei—he didn’t want her, either. My mom was the middle child. Her sister was the eldest and firstborn. Her brother was the only son, bearer of the family name. They both stayed in Soweto, were both raised and cared for by their parents. But my mom was unwanted. She was the second girl. The only place she would have less value would be China. My mother didn’t see her family again for twelve years. She lived in a hut with fourteen cousins—fourteen children from fourteen different mothers and fathers. All the husbands and uncles had gone off to the cities to find work, and the children who weren’t wanted, or whom no one could afford to feed, had been sent back to the homeland to live on this aunt’s farm. The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.” Of course, this was a lie. For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the country’s land. There was no running water, no electricity. People lived in huts. Where South Africa’s white countryside was lush and irrigated and green, the black lands were overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding. Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond subsistence-level farming. My mother’s aunt hadn’t taken her in out of charity. She was there to work. “I was one of the cows,” my mother would later say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up at half past four, plowing fields and herding animals before the sun baked the soil as hard as cement and made it too hot to be anywhere but in the shade.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They sat on the cold stone steps of an apartment building. They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body. “You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.” “How so?” “You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.” “I seem strange because I’m special.” “I think it’s because you take so many pills.” “You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.” “I’m not going into combat.” There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey. The man coughed, quite unnecessarily. “Excuse me,” said the woman. “We only live here.” “You have plenty of room,” said Daisy sharply. “You have no business being here,” said the man. The couple stood on the sidewalk and frowned, their shoulders indignant. “Why do you care?” said Daisy. “We aren’t in your way.” Her voice quivered oddly. “Ssssh,” said Joey. “Let them live their lives.” “You are very rude,” said the woman. “If you’re here when we get back, we’re going to call the police.” She swept away, sweeping her husband with her. They were probably in a hurry. Joey watched the woman’s dress fluttering along the pavement. “That was strange,” he said. “I’ve sat on lots of steps before and that’s never happened.” Daisy didn’t answer. “I guess it’s different in the East Village.” Daisy sniffed wetly. He reached into his pocket and got out his bag of jelly beans. He offered some to Daisy, but she ignored him. Her head was down, and slow, quiet tears ran singly down her nose. He put his arms around her. “Hey, come on,” he said. He felt no response from her. She didn’t move or look at him. He dropped his arm and looked away, confused. He ate his jelly beans and looked at the pool of lamplight in the black street.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible—it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brownstone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out in the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple—you just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s just what the bastards don’t want you to do—to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Oh, no. That probably had nothing to do with it.” “Well, maybe not. I think part of it was that he was intrigued by me as a variation of her.” “Exactly!” He said this with great emphasis, as though she’d hit upon something important. “I almost seduced my wife’s sister the first time we separated, but we both balked at the last minute, mostly her. We were at the kitchen table, drinking gin.” He smiled. “Of course your sister’s boyfriend wanted you. One wants them all.” She began to talk about an old lover of hers who reminded her of Bernard, but as she talked she kept imagining Bernard on a clean tiled kitchen floor, humping his blond wife’s blond sister. It reminded her of the stories in The New Yorker about decent professional people having extramarital affairs. The more she contemplated this picture, the more difficult it was to imagine sex with this man…this customer. She had a quick feeling of sympathy for his wife, lying in her single bed, in her separate room, next to the room of a man who wanted them all. She started to feel something like guilt, and to forestall it, she began to kiss him. The bed creaked and he parted her legs. From that moment on, the same sense of disaffection that she’d felt in the restaurant overtook her. Afterward, they spoke some more, but the conversation didn’t work. They even had a strangely snide argument about whether or not Nabokov was a good writer. In the frequent silences, she felt that he sensed her sudden disapproval of him. She was a little sorry, because she liked him, but at the same time she was relieved when he got up to go. When he said “Take good care of yourself,” she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him again. It wasn’t until half an hour after he’d left that she realized that for the first time he hadn’t left her any money. This had an entirely unexpected effect on her; she sat on her bed and cried. She couldn’t have said what she was crying about. Christine’s, Brett, Jackson, her first miserable, lonely year in New York and Bernard the lawyer all seemed to have something to do with it, although she couldn’t tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness. She cried until she was sure she was absolutely finished. Then she got up, put on her shoes and went out for a walk.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had to be filled—with limburger sandwiches and beer and kümmel and turkey legs if there were any about. They wept in their beer, like children. And the next minute they were laughing, laughing over some curious quirk in the dead person’s character. Even the way they used the past tense had a curious effect upon me. An hour after he was shoveled under they were saying of the defunct—“he was always so good-natured”—as though the person in mind were dead a thousand years, a character in history, or a personage out of the Nibelungenlied . The thing was that he was dead, definitely dead for all time, and they, the living, were cut off from him now and forever, and today as well as tomorrow must be lived through, the clothes washed, the dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck down there would be a coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it would be all in the daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow was sinful because God, if there was a God, had ordained it that way and we on earth had nothing to say about it. To go beyond the ordained limits of joy or grief was wicked. To threaten madness was the high sin. They had a terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvelous to behold if it had been truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than dull German torpor, insensitivity. And yet, somehow, I preferred these animated stomachs to the hydra-headed sorrow of the Jew. At bottom I couldn’t feel sorry for Kronski—I would have to feel sorry for his whole tribe. The death of his wife was only an item, a trifle, in the history of his calamities. As he himself had said, he was born unlucky. He was born to see things go wrong—because for five thousand years things had been going wrong in the blood of the race. They came into the world with that sunken, hopeless leer on their faces and they would go out of the world the same way. They left a bad smell behind them—a poison, a vomit of sorrow. The stink they were trying to take out of the world was the stink they themselves had brought into the world. I reflected on all this as I listened to him. I felt so well and clean inside that when we parted, after I had turned down a side street, I began to whistle and hum. And then a terrible thirst came upon me and I says to meself in me best Irish brogue—shure and it’s a bit of a drink ye should be having now, me lad—and saying it I stumbled into a hole in the wall and I ordered a big foaming stein of beer and a thick hamburger sandwich with plenty of onions.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought face to face with truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued. I look back rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove at Chula Vista. Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched, forlorn, miserable person. I seem to have lost everything. In fact, I am hardly a person—I am more nearly an animal. All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. “Pourri avant d’être mûri!” Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California sunshine? Is there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think a bit. . . . There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I first set foot on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse of a fading mesa. I am walking through the main street of a little town whose name is lost. What am I doing here on this street, in this town? Why, I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which I search for in vain with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the Arizona which I had brought from New York—even after we had crossed the state line. Was there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my reverie? A bridge such as I had never seen before, a natural bridge created by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of years ago? And over this bridge I had seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an Indian, and he was riding a horse and there was a long saddlebag hanging beside the stirrup. A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like the youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so durable, there passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing more. This then was Arizona, and Arizona was not a figment of the imagination but the imagination itself dressed as a horse and rider. And this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no aura of ambiguity but only sharp and dead isolate the thing itself which was the dream and the dreamer himself seated on horseback.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked. Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting ménage à trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake.” When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.” It was too bad Leisha couldn’t see her now, with her steady job, her matching housewares, her kind and gentle boyfriend. It was also annoying to know that Leisha would come to some happy conclusion about her based on the current trappings of her life (“How wonderful it is that Susan has become so stable”) and then compare her favorably with the younger Susan. Susan examined her clearly lined face as she stood before the mirror. There had been changes in her during the last six years, and she thought most of them were good. But she was still, for better or worse, the same woman who had drunkenly screwed a stranger in the reeking can of a tacky bar and then run out into a cab, smiling as she pressed her phone number into his hand. She sighed and went into the “living area,” leaning against an exposed brick wall to look out a curtainless window.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  An Italian, of course. O’Mara, my assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to persuade me to take her on. She’s a whore clean through and I know if I put her on there’ll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building uptown—because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student, arrives; he says one of the boys I’ve just hired has Parkinson’s disease. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer from hemorrhoids, so O’Rourke tells me. He’s been having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me, as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can’t keep the force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed for part-time messengers. All the charity bureaus and relief societies have been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don’t even last an hour. It’s a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it’s totally unnecessary. But that’s not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says: I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I have his height, weight, color, religion, education, experience, etc. All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory, hence no longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties. Certainly, as he stood then, in the full plenitude of self- realization, no one was necessary to him, least of all the father of flesh and blood whom he vainly sought in Mr. MacGregor. It must have been in the nature of a last test for him, his coming East and seeking out his real father, for when he said good-by, when he renounced Mr. MacGregor and Mr. Hamilton also, he was like a man who had purified himself of all dross. Never have I seen a man look so single, so utterly alone and alive and confident of the future as Roy Hamilton looked when he said good-by. And never have I seen such confusion and misunderstanding as he left behind with the MacGregor family. It was as though he had died in their midst, had been resurrected, and was taking leave of them as an utterly new, unknown individual. I can see them now standing in the areaway, their hands sort of foolishly, helplessly empty, weeping they knew not why, unless it was because they were bereft of something they had never possessed. I like to think of it in just this way. They were bewildered and bereft, and vaguely, so very vaguely aware that somehow a great opportunity had been offered them which they had not the strength or the imagination to seize. It was this which the foolish, empty fluttering of the hands indicated to me; it was a gesture more painful to witness than anything I can imagine. It gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought face to face with truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued. I look back rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove at Chula Vista. Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched, forlorn, miserable person. I seem to have lost everything. In fact, I am hardly a person—I am more nearly an animal. All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Her neighbor rattled his castanets with ominous urgency. Constance slumped on the miserable old mattress that she and Deana had covered with fabric and large pillows and used as a couch. The mattress depressed her because it was like something that hippies would have in their apartment and because it was the same silly mattress that, in another life, had squeaked and rattled under the various activities of the two thousand and one dates. Yet, somehow she’d become attached to it, even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it, it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another. She collapsed across it now, supporting herself on one elbow planted deeply in the mattress, and surveyed the dustballs collecting under the desk and chair. No matter how often she and Deana swept, these animate-looking things slunk from corner to corner and left their residue on the cats’ whiskers. The late afternoon light filtered in, eerie and faded through the gauzy float of dust, and cast an odd perspective on the room, at least from where she lay, making it look elongated and stark. The splintery floor looked craggy and forsaken with its dead dustball vegetation. The cats, suddenly alert, ran to the door. There were footsteps, a key in the lock: Deana entered, encumbered by the cats. “Boy, the guy downstairs is going bananas today,” she said. She tossed her hair off her forehead with the usual nervous gesture. “Didn’t you feed these guys?” “Yeah, they just got their faces out of the dish two minutes ago.” Connie rolled up and out of the mattress as gracefully as possible and put her arms around Deana’s waist and her head on her shoulder. “What’s this?” Deana tenderly felt the lumps of Connie’s spine, lingering in the spaces between the bones. “Nothing. I was just spacing out and the room was beginning to look like a set for Giant Ants from Pluto or something.” “What?” “I was in a weird mood.” “I guess so.” Deana rubbed her briskly, let go and turned toward the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I have to have some carrots or something.” “What do you want for dinner?” Connie put one foot on the other knee and stood like an aborigine in a textbook photograph. “I was thinking that we could order Chinese food from Empire. I’m too cranky to cook. And you’re too weird to cook, apparently.” She got the bag of carrots out of the refrigerator’s vegetable bin and began scattering the sink with bright orange peels. “Why are you cranky?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body. “You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.” “How so?” “You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.” “I seem strange because I’m special.” “I think it’s because you take so many pills.” “You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.” “I’m not going into combat.” There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey. The man coughed, quite unnecessarily. “Excuse me,” said the woman. “We only live here.” “You have plenty of room,” said Daisy sharply. “You have no business being here,” said the man. The couple stood on the sidewalk and frowned, their shoulders indignant. “Why do you care?” said Daisy. “We aren’t in your way.” Her voice quivered oddly. “Ssssh,” said Joey. “Let them live their lives.” “You are very rude,” said the woman. “If you’re here when we get back, we’re going to call the police.” She swept away, sweeping her husband with her. They were probably in a hurry. Joey watched the woman’s dress fluttering along the pavement. “That was strange,” he said. “I’ve sat on lots of steps before and that’s never happened.” Daisy didn’t answer. “I guess it’s different in the East Village.” Daisy sniffed wetly. He reached into his pocket and got out his bag of jelly beans. He offered some to Daisy, but she ignored him. Her head was down, and slow, quiet tears ran singly down her nose. He put his arms around her. “Hey, come on,” he said. He felt no response from her. She didn’t move or look at him. He dropped his arm and looked away, confused. He ate his jelly beans and looked at the pool of lamplight in the black street. A Romantic Weekend She was meeting a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. Perhaps her body tilted too far forward as she walked, perhaps her jacket made her torso look bulky in contrast to her calves and ankles, which were probably skinny.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Afterward, they spoke some more, but the conversation didn’t work. They even had a strangely snide argument about whether or not Nabokov was a good writer. In the frequent silences, she felt that he sensed her sudden disapproval of him. She was a little sorry, because she liked him, but at the same time she was relieved when he got up to go. When he said “Take good care of yourself,” she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him again. It wasn’t until half an hour after he’d left that she realized that for the first time he hadn’t left her any money. This had an entirely unexpected effect on her; she sat on her bed and cried. She couldn’t have said what she was crying about. Christine’s, Brett, Jackson, her first miserable, lonely year in New York and Bernard the lawyer all seemed to have something to do with it, although she couldn’t tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness. She cried until she was sure she was absolutely finished. Then she got up, put on her shoes and went out for a walk. It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it. Other Factors Constance was disconcerted by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!” The last time she had seen him had been at his wedding party; he’d been lip-synching to Grand Master Flash and doing an arm-flapping dance that threatened to tear the armpits out of his rented tux. Since then his nose seemed to have grown larger and lumpier, his face broader and his eyes more prone to wander frantically over the head of whomever he was talking to. But he still had his kind demeanor and his air that whatever he was talking about and whomever he was talking to were both equally and desperately important. She remembered something he had said to her sometime before: “Don’t worry, Connie. In fifteen years, I’ll be doing my retrospective at the Whitney and you’ll be publishing regularly in The New Yorker .” He paused. “But by then we’ll be ugly.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I didn’t like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?” “Yes.” She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. “Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?” “Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know.” He could feel the sarcasm of her silence. He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. “I guess it’s only natural that you’ve begun to get jaded.” She snorted. “I wouldn’t call it that.” “What would you call it?” She didn’t answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, “Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It’s awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won’t your wife wonder where it’s going?” He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you see how special you are? No other girl I’ve seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I’m spending. I’m not trying to flatter you, you are different.” “Aren’t you worried about getting AIDS?” “From a girl like you? C’mon, don’t put yourself down.” She smiled, sad and strained, but sort of affectionate, and put her hands on his shoulders. She felt to him like one of his puppy patients embracing him as he carried it across the room for a shot. “I’m sorry I’m being so shitty,” she said. “I just hate this job and this place.” “Here,” he said. “I’m going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet.” He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. “This is so nice and glamorous,” he said. “When is your wife coming back?” asked a voice from the nuzzling bundle on his arm. “In three days.” He sighed and stared at the stupid, lovely slivers of fish darting around their ugly castle. — Of course he knew that concern for his financial situation wasn’t the only reason she’d suggested that he shouldn’t see her so often.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the Roman Empire, the norms of female sexuality were static, and even the fi elds of tension that gave women the capacity to maneuver were relatively unchanging. Th e real novelty was the extraordi- nary prosperity of Mediterranean society under Roman rule and a highly articulated class system in which women played an essential role in the maintenance and transmission of an aristocratic and bourgeois ethos.  Th e danger of speaking of women’s liberation in the Roman context is that it attributes to antiquity a concept that was intellectually unavailable. We risk misunderstanding the sexual culture of the Roman Mediterranean if we believe that repressive sexual norms were imposed on women by men. Th e relation between life and sexual culture is never so simple. Many women seized on the values of pudicitia and sōphrosynē and promoted them with verve. It would be surprising if it were otherwise. Women made their lives, they fashioned their sense of self- respect, out of traditional norms. Perhaps the most realistic character in Leucippe and Clitophon is Leucippe’s mother, distraught at the prospect of her daughter’s loss of chastity. After lamenting Leucippe’s willingness to surrender her modesty, the mother added, with what has been called “bathetic class consciousness,” that hope- fully Leucippe was, at the very least, not sleeping with a slave. Adherence to the old ways ensured a woman’s position in society. Chastity was a badge of honor, separating the Roman matron from the slaves whose bodies she os- tentatiously controlled. Th e wealthy Roman woman could stroll through the forum, accompanied by her slaves, and point to the statues of her ances- tors. Sexual liberation was not on the agenda of the woman who had thor- oughly appropriated the values that made her what she was.  If there was authentic dissent, it surely resided among those whose life condition exposed them to systemic exploitation. Th e high Roman Empire was a genuine slave society, consuming slaves as ferociously as any previous period, and perhaps on a wider, Mediterranean scale. Women accounted for at least half of the slave population, and they bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Without legal or social protection, they were devastatingly vulnerable. Sexual abuse was simply presumptive, and many slave girls probably experi- enced sexual initiation traumatically early. Th e slave woman’s life course was undiff erentiated by the great threshold between childhood and marriage  FROM SHAME TO SIN that marked the stages of a free woman’s development. Slaves in the house may have been more integrated into the rhythms of the free family’s life, but at the same time proximity meant vulnerability and close control. Th e slave’s public behavior could be seen as a refl ection of the free family’s honor; “the morals of the mistress are judged by those of the slave girls.”

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

  At age 16, Lee went back to live with her mother, who was then a baptized Witness. A year later, Lee was baptized and encouraged to marry a Witness, a man she hardly knew. They had two children, and she remembers the enormous pressure on her to be a good example to others in the congregation. Meanwhile, her husband—who appeared to be a fine and upstanding Witness—sexually and emotionally abused her. However, she carried a secret. On the outside, their family life looked good. But inside she was depressed and suicidal. She had never received counseling for her childhood abuse, and the emotional and sexual abuse in the marriage only exacerbated many of the long-term effects of abuse that she only realized later on. The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ prominent magazine, counsels Witnesses to be wary of therapy and counseling, as they are supposedly ways for the Devil to destroy their faith. But after struggling for years with bad Watchtower advice, Lee received permission from the elders to get counseling. However, she was forbidden to tell her counselor that she was a Jehovah’s Witness. After two sessions, Lee realized what was happening in her life, that her husband was a repetition of the abuse she endured as a child. She realized she needed to get out of the marriage. She also knew that this would not be easy, as there were only two acceptable ways to make that happen among Witnesses—death or adultery. After talking to the elders about the situation, she was granted a trial separation. But Witnesses believe that a wife’s role is to provide sex to her husband. So despite the fact that they were separated and her husband was living elsewhere, he believed he had the right to come to her house for sex. Understandably, she could not deal with sex-on-demand, and the only approved way to stop him was to commit adultery, so that is what she did. After she told her husband and the elders about this once-only incident, she was “disfellowshipped,” and everyone in her congregation—even her mother—was obligated to shun her. Her husband convinced their kids to live with him, and soon Lee was homeless. She filed for divorce and it was granted. She needed to support herself, but had few marketable skills, because of the Witness taboo against college. Lee went on public assistance and made the brave decision to register for college. She did well in her first two courses and decided to study full-time. In that environment, she began to thrive, ask critical questions, and challenge assumptions—none of which is permitted in the Witness world. Lee graduated with honors, formed a small nonprofit organization to help incest survivors, and provided counseling for over 600 people over seven years before she retired, due to ill health.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Mother would drive me around to look for jobs. First we would go through ads in the paper, drawing black circles, marking X’s. The defaced newspaper sat on the dining room table in a gray fold and we argued. “I’m not friendly and I’m not personable. I’m not going to answer an ad for somebody like that. It would be stupid.” “You can be friendly. And you are personable when you aren’t busy putting yourself down.” “I’m not putting myself down. You just want to think that I am so you can have something to talk about.” “You’re backing yourself into a corner, Debby.” “Oh, shit.” I picked up a candy wrapper and began pinching it together in an ugly way. My hands were red and rough. It didn’t matter how much lotion I used. “Come on, we’re getting started on the wrong foot.” “Shut up.” My mother crossed her legs. “Well,” she said. She picked up the “Living” section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank. “I’m dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable.” “You are that.” — We wound up in the car. My toes swelled in my high heels. My mother and I both used the flowered box of Kleenex on the dashboard and stuck the used tissue in a brown bag that sat near the hump in the middle of the car. There was a lot of traffic in both lanes. We drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop. They still hadn’t put the letter Y back on the Amy sign. Our first stop was Wonderland. There was a job in the clerical department of Sears. The man there had a long disapproving nose, and he held his hands stiffly curled in the middle of his desk. He mainly looked at his hands. He said he would call me, but I knew he wouldn’t. On the way back to the parking lot, we passed a pet store. There were only hamsters, fish and exhausted yellow birds. We stopped and looked at slivers of fish swarming in their tank of thick green water. I had come to this pet store when I was ten years old. The mall had just opened and we had all come out to walk through it. My sister, Donna, had wanted to go into the pet store. It was very warm and damp in the store, and smelled like fur and hamster. When we walked out, it seemed cold. I said I was cold and Donna took off her white leatherette jacket and put it around my shoulders, letting one hand sit on my left shoulder for a minute. She had never touched me like that before and she hasn’t since.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Valentine’s Day was a week ago. Can’t I have it now?” She put her fingers on his shoulders like soft claws. “Give it to me now.” When he handed it to her, she hugged him and pressed against him. He giggled and put his arm around her. He sadly let go of his shadow captive. — That night he couldn’t eat his spinach salad. The radish, gaily flowering red and white, was futile enticement. Diane sat across from him, stonily working her jaws. She sat rigidly straight-backed, her throat drawn so taut it looked as if it would be hard for her to swallow. He picked at the salad, turning the clean leaves this way and that. He stared past her, sighing, his dry eyes hot in their sockets. “You look like an idiot,” she said. “I am.” The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time. “You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.” She smiled, he thought, uncertainly. “You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.” “No, I’m not.” “I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.” “What about Diane?” “I’ll leave Diane.” She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her. She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said. “Why not? I love you.” “Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?” “I can’t. I’m medicated.” “You’re what?” He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot. They left the restaurant and walked around the block. Daisy butted her head against the harsh wind; her short gray coat floated in back of her like a sail. He held her mittened hand. “I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I want to cast my mantle of protection over you.” “Let’s sit here,” she said. She sat down on an even rise of yellow brick in front of an apartment building that was an impression of yellow brick and shadowy gray glass shielding the sad blur of a doorman. He sat very near her and held her hand. “I have to tell you some things about myself,” she said. “I don’t take admiration very well.” “I don’t care if you take it well or not. It’s there.” “But won’t it make you unhappy if I don’t return it?” “I’d be disappointed, I guess.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I don’t care what you do or where you go. I’d hate to see you leave town.... I’d miss you, I’m telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa, beat it, get out of her clutches, she’s no good for you. Sometimes when I get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there’s something nice for Henry—and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of course I forget. But Jesus, man, there’s thousands of cunts in the world you can get along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that. . . . Do you want more bacon? You’d better eat what you want now, you know, there won’t be any dough later. Have another drink, eh? Listen, if you try to run away from me today I swear I’ll never lend you a cent. . . . What was I saying? Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you going to do it or not? Every time I see you you tell me you’re going to run away, but you never do it. You don’t think you’re supporting her, I hope? She don’t need you, you sap, don’t you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the kid. . . . well, shit, if I were in your boots I’d drown it. That sounds kind of mean, doesn’t it, but you know what I mean. You’re not a father. I don’t know what the hell you are . . . I just know you’re too goddamned good a fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don’t you try to make something of yourself? You’re young yet and you make a good appearance. Go off somewhere, way the hell off, and start all over again. If you need a little money I’ll raise it for you. It’s like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I’ll do it for you just the same. The truth is, Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I’ve taken more from you than I would from anybody in the world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighborhood. Funny I didn’t know you in those days. Shit, I’m getting sentimental. . . .” The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the beach, studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too—one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy-go-lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But what a poor substitute for a man who had known the joys of that food which the body craved and which, without the pangs of conscience, had flooded even his spongelike soul with a light and space that was ungodly but radiant and terrestrial. I think again of his seemly little “corporation” over which the thick gold chain was strung and I think that with that death of his paunch there was left to survive only the sponge of a soul, a sort of appendix to his own bodily death. I think of the minister who had swallowed him up as a sort of inhuman sponge eater, the keeper of a wigwam hung with spiritual scalps. I think of what subsequently ensued as a kind of tragedy in sponges, for though he promised light and space, no sooner had he passed out of my father’s life than the whole airy edifice came tumbling down. It all came about in the most ordinary lifelike way. One evening, after the customary men’s meeting, the old man came home with a sorrowful countenance. They had been informed that evening that the minister was taking leave of them. He had been offered a more advantageous position in the township of New Rochelle and, despite his great reluctance to desert his flock, he had decided to accept the offer. He had of course accepted it only after much meditation—as a duty, in other words. It would mean a better income, to be sure, but that was nothing compared to the grave responsibilities which he was about to assume. They had need of him in New Rochelle and he was obeying the voice of his conscience. All this the old man related with the same unctuousness that the minister had given to his words. But it was immediately apparent that the old man was hurt. He couldn’t see why New Rochelle could not find another minister. He said it wasn’t fair to tempt the minister with a bigger salary. We need him here, he said ruefully, with such sadness that I almost felt like weeping. He added that he was going to have a heart-to-heart talk with the minister, that if anybody could persuade him to remain it was he. In the days that followed he certainly did his best, no doubt much to the minister’s discomfiture. It was distressing to see the blank look on his face when he returned from these conferences. He had the expression of a man who was trying to grasp at a straw to keep from drowning. Naturally the minister remained adamant. Even when the old man broke down and wept before him he could not be moved to change his mind. That was the turning point. From that moment on the old man underwent a radical change.

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

  Eventually, a Moonie leader told me that I had created a “bad condition” by going inside for a cold drink; that Satan had tempted me; and that I had failed. He told me that, in my weakness, I had crucified Jesus on the cross one more time. That evening I prayed and repented and tried to quash any memory of what had happened. I never thought of that experience again, until after I was deprogrammed. Now, let’s take a look at another full-scale intervention, this time with a Krishna devotee. Phil and the Hare Krishnas/ Iskcon171 Although most Americans don’t realize it, the Hare Krishna sect, also known as ISKCON or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, is still very much around even though its founder passed away in 1977. Below is an account of my efforts with Phil, who had been a member of the Hare Krishna sect for over three years. Phil had become involved with the group about six months after his twin brother, Tom, was killed in an automobile accident while walking to a neighborhood store. The death hit his family hard, and sent Phil into a severe depression. He seriously contemplated suicide. He received medication and therapy, but nothing seemed to help him. Then one day, while walking downtown, he was approached by a Krishna. Not long afterward, he became a member. I met Phil during one of his infrequent visits to his family, and was introduced as a family counselor who had been working with his parents and his two sisters for many months. I told Phil that I felt I needed to speak with him alone, before I could do any sessions with him and the whole family. I told him that in my view he was a very significant member of the family, and that his participation was badly needed. After introducing myself to him, I suggested we go outside for a walk, so that we could get acquainted. He was dressed in full Krishna clothes, including sandals. I spent the first few minutes explaining my background as a counselor who specialized in communication strategies and family dynamics, and who was committed to helping people grow and enjoy better relationships with their loved ones. He told me that he now went by the name Gorivinda. “So, Gorivinda—Phil (it is best to use the pre-cult name)—would you mind telling me about how you feel toward your family now?” I kept my hands in my pockets and my eyes directed toward the pavement. “I don’t know,” he responded, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “Well, are you happy with your present relationship with your mother? Your father? Your siblings?” He answered, “Things have gotten a lot better since they stopped criticizing my religious commitment.” “How do you feel when you come home for a visit?” I asked, as gently as possible. “To be honest, it’s a bit strange,” he said. I was glad at his response. “What do you mean?” I probed for more information.