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 Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She looked in the other mirror's reflection at her back, her waist, her loins. She was getting thinner, but to her it was not becoming. The crumple of her waist at the back, as she bent back to look, was a little weary; and it used to be so gay-looking. And the longish slope of her haunches and her buttocks had lost its gleam and its sense of richness. Gone! Only the German boy had loved it, and he was ten years dead, very nearly. How time went by! Ten years dead, and she was only twenty-seven. That healthy boy with his fresh, clumsy sensuality that she had then been so scornful of! Where would she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-second spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and freshens the whole being. Still she thought the most beautiful part of her was the long-sloping fall of the haunches from the socket of the back, and the slumberous, round stillness of the buttocks. Like hillocks of sand the Arabs say, soft and downward-slipping with a long slope. Here the life still lingered hoping. But here too she was thinner, and going unripe, astringent. But the front of her body made her miserable. It was already beginning to slacken, with a slack sort of thinness, almost withered, going old before it had ever really lived. She thought of the child she might somehow bear. Was she fit, anyhow? She slipped into her nightdress, and went to bed, where she sobbed bitterly. And in her bitterness burned a cold indignation against Clifford, and his writings and his talk: against all the men of his sort who defrauded a woman even of her own body. Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very soul. But in the morning, all the same, she was up at seven, and going downstairs to Clifford. She had to help him in all the intimate things, for he had no man, and refused a woman-servant. The housekeeper's husband, who had known him as a boy, helped him, and did any heavy lifting; but Connie did the personal things, and she did them willingly. It was a demand on her, but she had wanted to do what she could. So she hardly ever went away from Wragby, and never for more than a day or two; when Mrs. Betts, the housekeeper, attended to Clifford. He, as was inevitable in the course of time, took all the service for granted. It was natural he should. And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, began to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I omit nothing. I tell her she is right about my life—up to a point. “Yet you’re not right when you say I have no experience of tragedy. I do whatever I can to bring tragedy closer to me. I keep my death in focus. When I’m with you I often imagine how it would be if my wife were fatally ill, and each time I’m filled with indescribable sadness. I am aware, fully aware, that I’m on the march, that I’ve moved into another life stage. Taking early retirement from Stanford is an irreversible step. All the signs of aging—my torn knee cartilage, my fading vision, my backaches, my senile plaques, my graying beard and hair, my dreams of my own death—tell me I’m moving toward the end of my life. “For ten years, Irene, I chose to work with patients dying of cancer, hoping that they would draw me closer to the tragic core of life. That, indeed, happened, and I went back into three years of therapy, seeing Rollo May, whose book Existence had been so important to me in my psychiatric training. That therapy was unlike any other personal work I had done before, and I plunged deeply into the experience of my own death.” Irene nodded. I knew that gesture—that characteristic cluster of movements, one sharp chin jerk followed by two or three soft nods, her somatic Morse code signifying that I had made a reasonably satisfactory response. I had passed the test—for now. But I wasn’t finished with the dream. “Irene, I think there’s more to your dream.” I referred to my notes (almost the only notes I take during a session are of dreams because, owing to their evanescence, patients often repress or distort them immediately) and read aloud the first part of her dream: ‘“I am in this office, in this chair. But there is a strange wall in the middle of the room between us. I can’t see you.’ “What impresses me,” I continued, “is that last sentence. In the dream it is you who can’t see me. Yet this whole session we’ve been discussing it the other way around—that it is I who don’t see you. Let me ask you something: a few minutes ago when I talked about my aging, you know, my knee surgery, my eyes—” “Yes, yes, I heard all that,” Irene exclaimed, rushing me on. “You heard it—but as usual, whenever I mention something about my health, your eyes glazed over. Like those couple of weeks after my eye surgery, when I was obviously having a rough time and wore dark glasses, you never asked about the surgery or inquired about how I was doing.” “I don’t need to know about your health. I’m the patient here.” “Oh, no, it’s much more than that, more than lack of interest, more than your being the patient and me the doctor. You avoid me. You block yourself from learning anything about me.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Sometimes that is not appreciated because of our ability to make lightning-quick decisions.” “Here’s the inconsistency. You say you want your ninth life to go on and on, but in fact you’re not living your ninth life. You’re merely existing in some state of suspended animation. ” “Not living my ninth life?” “You said it yourself: you’re waiting. I’ll tell you what comes to my mind. A famous psychologist once said that some people so fear the debt of death that they refuse the loan of life.” “Meaning what? Talk plainly,” said Merges, who had stopped grooming his belly and now sat on his haunches. “Meaning that you seem so fearful of death that you refrain from entering into life. It’s as though you fear using up life. Remember what you taught me just a few minutes ago about essential catness? Tell me, Merges, where now is the territory you defend? Where are the toms you battle? Where are the lustful, howling females you subdue? And why,” Ernest asked, emphasizing each word, “do you allow your precious Merges sperm seeds to rot unused?” As Ernest spoke, Merges’s head bowed low. Then, somewhat mournfully, he asked, “And you have only one life? How far are you into it?” “About halfway through.” “How can you stand it?” Suddenly Ernest felt a sharp pang of sadness. He reached for one of the napkins from the Chinese dinner and dabbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” said Merges, unexpectedly gently, “to have caused pain.” “Not at all. I was prepared. This turn in our conversation was inevitable,” Ernest said. “You ask how I can stand it? Well, first of all, by not thinking about it. And more, sometimes I even forget about it. And at my age that’s not too hard.” “At your age? What does that mean?” “We humans go through life in stages. As very young children, we think about death a great deal; some of us even obsess about it. It’s not hard to discover death. We simply look around and see dead things: leaves and lilies and flies and beetles. Pets die. We eat dead animals. Sometimes we’re privy to the death of a person. And before long we realize that death will come to everyone—to our grandma, to our mother and father, even to ourselves. We brood about this in private. Our parents and teachers, thinking it’s bad for children to think about death, keep silent about it or give us fairy tales about a heaven and angels, eternal reunion, immortal souls.” Ernest stopped, hoping Merges was following his words. “And then?” Merges was following all right. “We comply. We push it out of our minds, or we openly defy death with great feats of daredevilry. And then, just before we become adults, we brood a great deal about it again.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I only meant that a feeling is merely a feeling. A subjective state can never substantiate an objective truth. A wish, a fear, a sense of awe, of the tremendum, doesn’t mean that—” “Yes, yes,” Paula interrupted me with a smile, “I know your hard-line materialist litany. I’ve heard it many times, and I’ve always been struck by the amount of passion, of devoutness, of faith you put into it. I remember that in our last conversation you told me you had never had a close friend, never known anyone whose mind you respected, who was a devout believer.” I nodded. “Well, there’s something I should have said to you then: you forgot one friend who is a believer—me! How I wish I could introduce you to the holy! How strange that you phoned now because I’ve been thinking much about you the last two weeks. I’ve just returned from a two-week church retreat in the Sierras, and I so much wish I could have taken you with me. Sit back and let me tell you about it. “One morning we were asked to meditate upon someone who had died, some beloved person from whom we really hadn’t parted. I chose to think of my brother, whom I had loved very much but who died at seventeen when I was still a child. We were asked to write a letter of farewell telling that person all the important things we had never said. Next we searched in the forest for an object symbolizing that person to us. Finally we were to bury the object together with the letter. I chose a small granite boulder and buried it in the shade of a juniper. My brother was like a rock—solid, steadfast. If he had lived, he would have supported me. He would never have passed me by.” Paula looked into my eyes as she said this, and I started to lodge a protest. But she put her finger on my lips and continued. “That night at midnight the monastery bells chimed for the person each of us had lost. There were twenty-four of us on the retreat, and the bells rang twenty-four times. Sitting in my room, hearing the first bell, I experienced, really experienced, my brother’s death, and a wave of indescribable sadness descended upon me as I thought of all the experiences he and I together had had, and also those we never had. Then a strange thing happened: as the bells continued to toll, each chime brought to mind a member of our Bridge Group who had died. When the chimes stopped, I had remembered twenty-one.

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

  The sagging eaves had been propped up with long planks, and the front steps were rotted through. To get inside you had to go around to the back door. Behind the house was a partly collapsed barn that little kids liked to sneak into, drawn there by the chance to play with broken glass and rusty tools. My mother took it on the spot. The price was right, next to nothing, and she believed in its possibilities, a word used often by the man who showed it to her. He insisted on meeting us there at night and led us through the house like a thief, describing its good points in a whisper. My mother, listening with narrowed eyes to show that she was shrewd and would not be easily taken in, ended up agreeing with him that the place was just a few steps away from being a real nice home. She signed the contract on the hood of the man’s car while he held a flashlight over the paper. The other houses on the street were small, obsessively groomed Cape Cods and colonials with lawns like putting greens. Ivy grew on the chimneys. Each of the colonials had a black, spread-winged eagle above its door. The people who lived in these houses came outside to watch us move in. They looked very glum. Later on we found out that our house, the original farmhouse in the area, had recently been scheduled for demolition and then spared at the last hour by the cynical manipulations of its owner. Kathy and Marian went mute when they saw it. Shoulders hunched, faces set, they carried their boxes up the walk without looking to right or left. That night they slammed and banged and muttered in their rooms. But in the end my mother wore them down. She gave no sign that she saw any difference between our house and the houses of our neighbors except for a few details that we ourselves, during a spare hour now and then, could easily put right. She helped us picture the house after we had made these repairs. She was so good at making us see it her way that we began to feel as if everything needful had already been done, and settled in without lifting a finger to save the house from its final decrepitude. Soon after we took the house, Kathy had a baby boy, Willy. Willy was a clown. Even when he was alone he cackled and squawked like a parrot. The sweet, almost cloying smell of milk filled the house. Kathy and my mother worked at their jobs downtown while Marian kept the house and did the meals and looked after Willy. She was supposed to take care of me, too, but I ran around with Taylor and Silver after school and didn’t come home until just before I knew my mother would arrive. When Marian asked me where I’d been I told her lies.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  My mother had died just three weeks before, and her death profoundly influenced what was about to transpire in my therapy group meeting. Entering the group room, I looked around and immediately spotted the eager young faces of the three new psychiatry residents. As always, I felt a wave of affection toward my students and wanted nothing so much as to give them something—a good demonstration, the type of dedicated teaching and sustenance I had been given when I was their age. But as I surveyed the meeting room, my spirits dropped. It was not simply that the clutter of medical paraphernalia—intravenous stands, indwelling catheters, cardiac monitors, wheelchairs—reminded me that this particular ward specialized in psychiatric patients who had a severe medical illness and hence were likely to be particularly resistant to talking therapy. No, it was the sight of the patients themselves. There were five in the room, sitting in a row. The head nurse had briefly described their conditions to me on the phone. First there was Martin, an elderly man in a wheelchair with a severe muscle-wasting disease. He was belted into his chair and draped to his waist with a sheet that permitted only a glimpse of his lower legs—fleshless twigs covered by dark, leathery skin. One of his forearms was heavily bandaged and supported by an external frame: no doubt he had slashed his wrist. (I learned later that his son, exhausted and bitter from having nursed him for thirteen years, had greeted his suicide attempt with, “So you botched that too.”) Next to Martin was Dorothy, a woman who had been paraplegic for a year since trying to end her life by leaping from a third-story window. She was in such a depressive stupor that she could barely lift her head. Then there were Rosa and Carol, two anorexic young women who, both hooked up to IVs, were being fed intravenously because their blood chemistry was unbalanced from self-purging and their weight was dangerously low. Carol’s appearance was particularly unsettling: she had exquisite, nearly perfect facial features but almost no covering flesh. Looking at her, sometimes I saw the face of an astonishingly beautiful child, sometimes a grinning skull. Last there was Magnolia, an unkempt, obese seventy-year-old black woman whose legs were paralyzed and whose paralysis was a medical mystery. Her thick gold-rimmed spectacles had been mended with a small piece of adhesive tape, and a tiny, delicate lace cap was pinned to her hair. I was struck, when she introduced herself, by the way she held my gaze with her creamy brown eyes and by the dignity in her soft Southern drawl. “Ah’m very pleased to meet you, Doctah,” she said. “Ah heah good things about you.” The nurses had told me that Magnolia, then sitting quietly and patiently in her wheelchair, was often agitated and tore at imaginary insects crawling on her skin.

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

  Hence others found another explanation. For Antissiodorensis [*William of Auxerre, Archdeacon of Beauvais] (Sent. iv, Tract. 14) said that suffrages profit the damned not by diminishing or interrupting their punishment, but by fortifying the person punished: even as a man who is carrying a heavy load might bathe his face in water, for thus he would be enabled to carry it better, and yet his load would be none the lighter. But this again is impossible, because according to Gregory (Moral. ix) a man suffers more or less from the eternal fire according as his guilt deserves; and consequently some suffer more, some less, from the same fire. wherefore since the guilt of the damned remains unchanged, it cannot be that he suffers less punishment. Moreover, the aforesaid opinion is presumptuous, as being in opposition to the statements of holy men, and groundless as being based on no authority. It is also unreasonable. First, because the damned in hell are cut off from the bond of charity in virtue of which the departed are in touch with the works of the living. Secondly, because they have entirely come to the end of life, and have received the final award for their merits, even as the saints who are in heaven. For the remaining punishment or glory of the body does not make them to be wayfarers, since glory essentially and radically resides in the soul. It is the same with the unhappiness of the damned, wherefore their punishment cannot be diminished as neither can the glory of the saints be increased as to the essential reward. However, we may admit, in a certain measure, the manner in which, according to some, suffrages profit the damned, if it be said that they profit neither by diminishing nor interrupting their punishment, nor again by diminishing their sense of punishment, but by withdrawing from the damned some matter of grief, which matter they might have if they knew themselves to be so outcast as to be a care to no one; and this matter of grief is withdrawn from them when suffrages are offered for them. Yet even this is impossible according to the general law, because as Augustine says (De Cura pro Mort. xiii)—and this applies especially to the damned—“the spirits of the departed are where they see nothing of what men do or of what happens to them in this life,” and consequently they know not when suffrages are offered for them, unless this relief be granted from above to some of the damned in spite of the general law. This, however, is a matter of great uncertainty; wherefore it is safer to say simply that suffrages profit not the damned, nor does the Church intend to pray for them, as appears from the authors quoted above.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: Some things do actually happen, not because God wills, but because He permits them to happen—such as sins. Consequently a will that is opposed to sin, whether in oneself or in another, is not discordant from the Divine will. Penal evils happen actually, even by God’s will. But it is not necessary for the rectitude of his will, that man should will them in themselves: but only that he should not revolt against the order of Divine justice, as stated above ([1340]Q[19], A[10]). Whether sorrow can be a useful good?Objection 1: It would seem that sorrow cannot be a useful good. For it is written (Ecclus. 30:25): “Sadness hath killed many, and there is no profit in it.” Objection 2: Further, choice is of that which is useful to an end. But sorrow is not an object of choice; in fact, “a thing without sorrow is to be chosen rather than the same thing with sorrow” (Topic. iii, 2). Therefore sorrow is not a useful good. Objection 3: Further, “Everything is for the sake of its own operation,” as stated in De Coel. ii, 3. But “sorrow hinders operation,” as stated in Ethic. x, 5. Therefore sorrow is not a useful good. On the contrary, The wise man seeks only that which is useful. But according to Eccles. 7:5, “the heart of the wise is where there is mourning, and the heart of fools where there is mirth.” Therefore sorrow is useful. I answer that, A twofold movement of the appetite ensues from a present evil. One is that whereby the appetite is opposed to the present evil; and, in this respect, sorrow is of no use; because that which is present, cannot be not present. The other movement arises in the appetite to the effect of avoiding or expelling the saddening evil: and, in this respect, sorrow is of use, if it be for something which ought to be avoided. Because there are two reasons for which it may be right to avoid a thing. First, because it should be avoided in itself, on account of its being contrary to good; for instance, sin. Wherefore sorrow for sin is useful as inducing a man to avoid sin: hence the Apostle says (2 Cor. 7:9): “I am glad: not because you were made sorrowful, but because you were made sorrowful unto penance.” Secondly, a thing is to be avoided, not as though it were evil in itself, but because it is an occasion of evil; either through one’s being attached to it, and loving it too much, or through one’s being thrown headlong thereby into an evil, as is evident in the case of temporal goods. And, in this respect, sorrow for temporal goods may be useful; according to Eccles. 7:3: “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of feasting: for in that we are put in mind of the end of all.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But I never did. Too much to do: wife, children, patients, students, writing. I wrote my page a day and ignored all else—friends, mail, phone calls, invitations to lecture. Everything, all the other parts of my life, would wait until the book was finished. And Paula too would have to wait. Paula, of course, did not wait. A few months later I received a note from her son—the boy I had envied for having Paula as a mother, the son to whom years before she had so wonderfully written of her approaching death. He wrote simply, “My mother died, and I am certain she would have wanted me to let you know.” 6 The Hungarian Cat Curse B ut tell me, Halston, why do you want to stop therapy? It seems to me we’re only just beginning. We’ve met only, what—three times?” Ernest Lash skimmed though the pages of his appointment book. “Yes, that’s right. This is our fourth meeting.” Waiting patiently for a response, Ernest gazed at his patient’s gray paramecium-patterned tie and his six-button gray vest and tried to remember when he had last seen a patient who wore a formal three-piece business suit or a paisley tie. “Please don’t take it wrong, Doctor,” Halston said. “It’s not you; it’s that there are too many unexpected things going on. It’s hard taking time off to come here in the middle of the day—harder than I expected . . . causes more stress . . . a paradox because, after all, the point of seeing you was to reduce stress. . . . And the money for therapy, I cannot deny it’s a factor . . . feeling a financial pinch now. There’s child support . . . three thousand a month alimony . . . oldest son commences Princeton in the fall . . . thirty thousand a year . . . you know how it is. I considered just outright canceling today, but I thought it was the proper thing, that I owed it to you, to come to a final session.” One of his mother’s Yiddish expressions suddenly crept out of a deep cortical crevice, and Ernest whispered it to himself: “ Geh Gesunter Heit ” (Go in good health), similar to the blessing said after a sneeze. But Geh Gesunter Heit , as his mother mockingly used the phrase, was more insult than blessing and meant, “Go away and stay away,” or “God willing, it will be a long time before I ever see you again.” Yes, it’s true, Ernest acknowledged to himself, I wouldn’t mind if Halston went away and stayed away. I cannot get interested in this man. Ernest took a good look at his patient—a partial profile because Halston never met his gaze. Long, mournful face, slate-black skin—he was from Trinidad, the great-great-grandchild of fugitive slaves.

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

  I answer that, As is evident from what has been said above ([1328]Q[23], A[4] ), pleasure is a kind of repose of the appetite in a suitable good; while sorrow arises from something unsuited to the appetite. Consequently in movements of the appetite pleasure is to sorrow, what, in bodies, repose is to weariness, which is due to a non-natural transmutation; for sorrow itself implies a certain weariness or ailing of the appetitive faculty. Therefore just as all repose of the body brings relief to any kind of weariness, ensuing from any non-natural cause; so every pleasure brings relief by assuaging any kind of sorrow, due to any cause whatever. Reply to Objection 1: Although not every pleasure is specifically contrary to every sorrow, yet it is generically, as stated above ([1329]Q[35], A[4]). And consequently, on the part of the disposition of the subject, any sorrow can be assuaged by any pleasure. Reply to Objection 2: The pleasures of wicked men are not a cause of sorrow while they are enjoyed, but afterwards: that is to say, in so far as wicked men repent of those things in which they took pleasure. This sorrow is healed by contrary pleasures. Reply to Objection 3: When there are two causes inclining to contrary movements, each hinders the other; yet the one which is stronger and more persistent, prevails in the end. Now when a man is made sorrowful by those things in which he took pleasure in common with a deceased or absent friend, there are two causes producing contrary movements. For the thought of the friend’s death or absence, inclines him to sorrow: whereas the present good inclines him to pleasure. Consequently each is modified by the other. And yet, since the perception of the present moves more strongly than the memory of the past, and since love of self is more persistent than love of another; hence it is that, in the end, the pleasure drives out the sorrow. Wherefore a little further on (Confess. iv, 8) Augustine says that his “sorrow gave way to his former pleasures.” Whether pain or sorrow is assuaged by tears?Objection 1: It would seem that tears do not assuage sorrow. Because no effect diminishes its cause. But tears or groans are an effect of sorrow. Therefore they do not diminish sorrow. Objection 2: Further, just as tears or groans are an effect of sorrow, so laughter is an effect of joy. But laughter does not lessen joy. Therefore tears do not lessen sorrow. Objection 3: Further, when we weep, the evil that saddens us is present to the imagination. But the image of that which saddens us increases sorrow, just as the image of a pleasant thing adds to joy. Therefore it seems that tears do not assuage sorrow. On the contrary, Augustine says (Confess. iv, 7) that when he mourned the death of his friend, “in groans and in tears alone did he find some little refreshment.”

• From Cleanness (2020)

  A group of young people nudged us aside as they passed, raucous, singing melodies from the opera and swinging two-liter plastic bottles of beer: music students from the university, who seemed to know their way well enough in the dark. I let go of R.’s arm as we reached the bottom of the hill, where lights met us again along the stone road, from which it was a five- or ten-minute walk to the observatory point where we would watch the show. Not many of the other operagoers joined us there, they scattered to their cars or set off on foot for home. The benches at the little plaza were full anyway, packed with children and what I took for their grandparents, the very old and the very young, as though everyone of vital age had been called away. R. and I stood behind the benches, watching the last well-dressed couples bend into their cars and slide off, until the speakers behind us popped awake and the lights in the square went out. R. made a humming noise of anticipation, and all of the bodies on the benches stiffened with attention. But as the music started, a kitsch fusion of folk instruments and Slavic chorus and dated synthesizer, as different quadrants of the hill and its ancient walls were illuminated, now in red, now blue and green, I felt myself receding from the square, from the light and sound. For hours I had managed not to think about R. leaving, about the uncertainty of our future, the guilt I felt no matter how I tried to dismiss it. I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace. But what I felt for R. was different, it didn’t dissolve, and I wanted to believe in our language of boundlessness and the impossibility of change; to let it go would mean there had been bad faith, on one or both of our parts, maybe it isn’t fair to think that but I thought it. The lights were acting out some mounting drama, it was hard to say precisely what. The hill, which had at first been illuminated quadrant by quadrant, was now swept by red and blue lights, first in one direction and then the other.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The sun had fully set now, and between the streetlamps in the park at NDK there was utter darkness. We passed the entrance to the underground passageway, where there was a metro stop now, still new, and also the toilets where men went for sex, where I had spent so many weekend evenings; walking with my student I felt the weird dissonance of my private and public lives. M. had been walking quietly, listening to the sound of the drums that drifted back to us from the front of the march. People weren’t shouting as we walked through the park at NDK, the mood was restrained, contemplative, a little respite from the noise. Some people had let their signs drop in the dark, tucking them under their arms, but others still held them aloft, and I saw that several people were wearing glow bracelets, little rings of light that hovered over their heads. I asked M. if she usually came with friends, if there were many students marching from the school. Not so many, she said, and not my friends, usually I come alone. Lots of parents are scared, she said, and anyway we have so much work for school, it’s hard to have time for anything else. But this is important, she went on, it’s important for my country, it’s important that the young people are here. I don’t know, she said, some of my friends say it’s stupid to come because we’re leaving so soon, but I don’t feel like that, it’s still my country, she said, even if I’m leaving. Maybe I’ll come back if things get better, I would like to come back. That’s the real problem, I said, agreeing with her, so many people leave, so many of the best people, it’s hard for things to get better when so many people leave. We had crossed onto Vitosha now, where there was more light, I could see her face when she turned to look at me. Do you think we’re wrong to leave, she asked me, do you think we should stay? I hesitated before answering. It wasn’t my place to answer, of course, and I told her this, and also I had left my own country, where there were so many problems, where I had done so little, really, to stand against them. But no, I said finally, I don’t think you’re wrong. You only have one life, I said, and I want you to be happy, I want you to go where you can live most fully, and even as I spoke I could hear the argument against each of my phrases canceling out what I said, I didn’t know what I thought. But you’re going back, M. said, you must be excited about that, to be going home. I’m not going home, I said, what would that even mean, I’m going back to America but I’m not going home. And maybe I won’t stay, I said, I don’t know, I like living abroad. And then I threw up my hands, I don’t know anything, I said, don’t listen to anything I say.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O had never been to the south of France before. The clear blue sky, the almost mirror-like sea, the motionless pines beneath the burning sun: everything seemed mineral and hostile to her. “No real trees,” she remarked sadly to herself as she gazed at the fragrant thickets full of shrubs and bushes, where all the stones, and even the lichens, were warm to the touch. “The sea doesn’t smell like the sea,” she thought. She blamed the sea for washing up nothing more than an occasional piece of wretched seaweed which looked like dung, she blamed it for being too blue and for always lapping at the same bit of shore. But in the garden of Sir Stephen’s villa, which was an old farmhouse that had been restored, they were far from the sea. To left and right, high walls protected them from the neighbors; the servants’ wing faced the entrance courtyard, while the side of the house overlooking the garden faced the east; O’s bedroom was on this side, and opened directly onto a second-story terrace. The tops of the tall black cypress trees were level with the overlapping hollow tiles which served as a parapet for the terrace, which was protected from the noon sun by a reed latticework. The floor of the terrace was of red tile, the same as the tiles in her bedroom. Aside from the wall which separated O’s bedroom from Sir Stephen’s—and this was the wall of a large alcove bounded by an archway and separated from the rest of the room by a kind of railing similar to the railings of stairways, with banisters of hand-carved wood—all the other walls were whitewashed. The thick white run on the tile floor was made of cotton, the curtains were of yellow-and-white linen. There were two armchairs upholstered in the same material, and some triple-layered Oriental cushions. The only furniture was a heavy and very handsome Regency bureau made of walnut, and a very long, narrow peasant table in light-colored wood which was waxed till it shone like a mirror. O hung her clothes in a closet.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But we tried, he said, and I can’t live here. I’d just sit all day by myself, waiting for you to come home, playing computer games, that’s not a life, he said, we couldn’t be happy like that. I started to say that he would make friends, that he could keep looking for a job; there were call centers where they needed European languages, with Portuguese and good English he could find something at one of them. Or he could take classes, I said, he could study again at the school in Studentski grad where he had spent a semester. You could stay, I said, you could make a life here, you wouldn’t have to just sit at home. But I couldn’t put much energy into what I said; he had made a decision, what was the point of talking. I love you, I said, we love each other, it should be enough, though even as I said this I knew it was unfair. R. had been watching me, but at this he lowered his eyes. He brought his hand to his face and then bent his head forward, spreading his fingers as if to run them through his hair, which had been long until a few days before, when he buzzed it down to a centimeter or two. He rubbed his scalp a few times, and then dropped his hand back to the table. Skupi , he said, his tone imploring me for something, I don’t know, what if we can’t make it work once I leave, maybe this is my chance and I’m ruining it, he said, maybe I only have one chance to be happy. Am I doing the wrong thing, he said, looking at me, tell me what I should do. He met my eyes, and I felt that he really did want me to choose for him, that he would accept the decision I made; I can say yes to him, I thought, I can say yes, stay with me, I can grab hold of him. The words were on my tongue, I even took a breath to speak them, but I couldn’t speak them, and I looked back down at my food. It would have violated something to say them, his freedom, I suppose, the choice he was so ready to hand over. You have to decide, I said finally, I can’t tell you what to do. He looked out the window, nodded, then turned back. Well, he said, we’ve already decided, right, we bought the ticket, it would be stupid to change our minds. Besides, he said, we’re not giving up, we’ll make it work, you’ll come to Lisbon when you’re on vacation, and there’s the job fair in London this winter, you’ll find something. I had been looking for a teaching job in a city where he would want to live, somewhere in the north, in a clean place, he had said, a country where things worked like they should.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Irene had learned about her mother’s moods indirectly. On good days, for example, her mother might say, “I think I’ll put some irises in the blue-and-white vase,” or convey her mood by the way she arranged the dolls on Irene’s bed each morning. The article opened with Brodsky’s analysis of the first two stanzas of Robert Frost’s poem “Come In”: As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music—hark! Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark. Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing. “Come In” is, I had always thought, a lovely, and simple, nature poem, one I had memorized as an adolescent and recited aloud while bicycle riding through the Old Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C. But here, in a brilliant line-by-line, word-by-word analysis, Brodsky demonstrated that the poem conveys a darker meaning. For example, in the first stanza, there is something sinister in the thrush’s (the poet, the bard himself) coming to the edge of the woods and contemplating the dark interior. And doesn’t the second stanza seem far more than a lyrical tune? Indeed, what does the poet mean by saying that it is too dark in the woods for a poet by “sleight of wing” to better his or her perch for the night? Does “sleight of wing” refer to religious ritual, perhaps last rites? Is Frost lamenting that it is too late, that he is slated for damnation? And indeed, later stanzas confirm that view. In short, Brodsky makes a powerful case not only for the poem’s being a dark poem indeed but for Frost’s being a far darker poet than many have realized. I was fascinated. This discussion illuminated why this poem, like many of Frost’s other deceptively simple works, had so gripped me as a youth. But the connection with Irene? The key to our problems in therapy she had promised? I read on. Brodsky next turned to an analysis of a long narrative poem, the grim pastoral “Home Burial.” The poem, set on a banistered stairway in a small farmhouse, is a conversation, a series of movements, a ballet, between a farmer and his wife. (I immediately thought, of course, of Irene’s parents, who had lived on a Midwestern farm, and also of the stairway with banister that Irene had descended almost three decades ago to answer the phone bringing her the news of Allen’s death.) The poem begins: He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. The farmer advances to his wife, asking, “What is it you see/From up there always?—for I want to know.” Although the wife is terrified and refuses to answer, she is confident that he will never see what she sees and allows him to mount the stairs.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  There was only so much one could do in a single session. It was like being permanently sentenced to the first few minutes of a potentially rich conversation. I yearned for more. I wanted to go deeper, to matter more in the lives of my patients. So, many years ago, I stopped leading inpatient groups and concentrated on other forms of therapy. But every three months, when new residents came on service, I would bicycle over from my office in the medical school to the inpatient ward for a week at a stretch to teach them to lead inpatient therapy groups. That was why I had come today. But my heart wasn’t in it. I felt heavy. I was still licking my wounds. My mother had died just three weeks before, and her death profoundly influenced what was about to transpire in my therapy group meeting. Entering the group room, I looked around and immediately spotted the eager young faces of the three new psychiatry residents. As always, I felt a wave of affection toward my students and wanted nothing so much as to give them something—a good demonstration, the type of dedicated teaching and sustenance I had been given when I was their age. But as I surveyed the meeting room, my spirits dropped. It was not simply that the clutter of medical paraphernalia—intravenous stands, indwelling catheters, cardiac monitors, wheelchairs—reminded me that this particular ward specialized in psychiatric patients who had a severe medical illness and hence were likely to be particularly resistant to talking therapy. No, it was the sight of the patients themselves. There were five in the room, sitting in a row. The head nurse had briefly described their conditions to me on the phone. First there was Martin, an elderly man in a wheelchair with a severe muscle-wasting disease. He was belted into his chair and draped to his waist with a sheet that permitted only a glimpse of his lower legs—fleshless twigs covered by dark, leathery skin. One of his forearms was heavily bandaged and supported by an external frame: no doubt he had slashed his wrist. (I learned later that his son, exhausted and bitter from having nursed him for thirteen years, had greeted his suicide attempt with, “So you botched that too.”) Next to Martin was Dorothy, a woman who had been paraplegic for a year since trying to end her life by leaping from a third-story window. She was in such a depressive stupor that she could barely lift her head. Then there were Rosa and Carol, two anorexic young women who, both hooked up to IVs, were being fed intravenously because their blood chemistry was unbalanced from self-purging and their weight was dangerously low.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Now things were click-click-clicking in the group. I glanced proudly toward the psychiatry residents. My last comment—a beautiful example of refraining—was a gem. I hoped they had heard it. Magnolia heard it. She seemed deeply moved and wept for several minutes. We honored the moment by sitting in respectful silence. Magnolia’s next comment took me aback. Obviously I had not listened well to her. “You right, Doctah. You right.” Then she added, “You right, but you ain’t right. Ah had a dream. Ah wanted to be a real teachuh, to get paid white teachuh’s pay, to have real students, to have them call me ‘Mrs. Clay.’ Das what Ah mean.” “But Magnolia,” Rosa persisted, “look at what you did do—think of Darnell and those fifteen foster kids who call you Momma.” “Dat got nuthin’ to do with what Ah wanted, with mah dreams,” said Magnolia, her voice sharp and forceful. “Ah had dreams too, like white folk. Black folk have dreams too! And Ah was very disappointed with mah marriage. Ah wanted a whole-life marriage, an all Ah got was a fourteen-month marriage. Ah was a fool; Ah picked the wrong man. He liked his gin—lot more’n he liked me. “God is my witness,” she continued, turning to me, “Ah nevah before—till this meetin’ today—bad-mouthed mah husband. Ah don’ want my Darnell to evah hear anythin’ bad about his daddy. But Doctah, you right. You right. Ah got complaints. A lot of things Ah wanted Ah nevah got. Nevah got my dream. Sometimes Ah can feel real bitter.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she sobbed softly. Then she turned away from the group, stared out the window, and began scratching her skin, at first softly and then with deep, long digs. “Real bitter. Real bitter,” she repeated. I felt disoriented. Like Rosa, I grew alarmed. I wanted the old Magnolia back. And her clawing unnerved me. Was she trying to scrape away the insects? Or her blackness? I wanted to grab her wrists and still her hands before she lacerated her flesh. A long pause and then: “And they is other things Ah could say too, but they is very personal.” I knew that Magnolia was primed. I had no doubt that with the slightest prod, she would tell us everything. But she had gone far enough for the rest of us. Too far. Rosa’s distraught eyes were telling me, “Please, please, no more! Stop this!” And it was enough for me too. I had taken the lid off, but for once I did not want to look inside. After two or three minutes, Magnolia stopped weeping, stopped scratching. Slowly her smile reappeared and her voice became soft again. “But then Ah figure that the good Lawd has His reasons for giving us each a burden.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Years later, after he died, she chanced to make the trip again and noted that there were two streams, one on each side of the road. “But this time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through the driver’s window was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” All the components of this lesson—my impasse with Irene, her insistence that I read Frost’s poem, my recollection of my patient’s story of the automobile ride—had been deeply instructive. With astonishing clarity, I understood now that it was time for me to listen, to set aside my personal worldview, to stop imposing my style and my views upon my patient. It was time to look out Irene’s window. Lesson 6: Never Send to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls One day, in the fourth year of therapy, Irene arrived carrying a large portfolio. She put it on the floor, slowly unbuckled it, and pulled out a big canvas, keeping its back toward me so I couldn’t see it. “Did I tell you I was taking art lessons?” she asked in an uncharacteristically playful manner. “No. First I’ve heard of it. But I think that’s great.” And I did. I took no umbrage that she mentioned it en passant; every therapist is used to patients’ forgetting to mention the good things in their lives. Perhaps it’s simply a misunderstanding, a mistaken assumption by patients that since therapy is pathology-oriented, therapists want to hear only about problems. Other patients, however, who are dependent upon therapy choose to conceal positive developments lest their therapists conclude that they no longer need help. Now, taking a breath, Irene flipped the canvas. Before me gleamed a still life, a simple wooden bowl containing a lemon, an orange, and an avocado. While impressed with her graphic skills, I felt disappointed in her subject matter, so flat and pointless. I would have hoped for something more relevant to our work. But I feigned interest and was convincingly enthusiastic in my praise. Not as convincing as I had thought, I soon learned. In the next session she announced, “I’m signing up for another six months of art lessons.” “That’s wonderful. Same teacher?” “Yes, same teacher, same class.” “You mean a still-life class?” “You’re hoping not, I think. Obviously there’s something you’re not sharing.” “Like what?” I began to feel uncomfortable. “What’s your hunch?” “I see I’ve hit on something.” Irene grinned. “Almost never do you fall back on the traditional shrink practice of answering a question with a question.” “Never miss a trick, Irene. Okay, the truth is that I had two very different feelings about the painting.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Then and there I lost interest in my project of appearing grown-up. I wanted my mother; I wanted to cycle home so she could hold me. I wanted to reverse time, erase everything, start the day over. But there was no turning back and nothing to do but watch Roger grab the chicken by its battered head and whirl it around like a bolo until, finally, it was still. We must have plucked it, cleaned it, put it on a spit. We must have roasted it over the fire and eaten it. Perhaps with gusto. But, though I remember with an eerie clarity trying to wish away the whole catastrophe, of all we actually did I recall nothing. Still, the memory of that afternoon gripped me until I freed myself by asking why it had emerged now after so many decades in deep storage. What linked the wheelchair-filled hospital group room with the events played out so long ago around the campfire in a copse of the Old Soldiers’ Home? Perhaps the idea of going too far—as I had gone too far with Magnolia. Perhaps some visceral apprehension of the irreversibility of time. Perhaps the aching, the longing, for a mother to protect me from the brute facts of life and death. Though the aftertaste of the group meeting was still bitter, I felt closer to its source: undoubtedly my deep craving for motherly comfort, fanned by my mother’s death, had resonated mightily with Magnolia’s earth-mother image. Had I stripped away that image, secularized her, obliterated her power in an effort to face down my yearning for comfort? That song, that earth-mother song—bits of the lyrics now began to return: “Pack up your sorrows and give them all to me. You would lose them. . . . I could use them....” Silly, puerile words. I could remember only faintly the snug, bountiful, warm place into which they had once led me. Now those words no longer worked. Much as I blink at a Vasarely or an Escher illusion to reinstate the alternate image, I tried to flip my mind back to that place—but in vain. Could I do without that illusion? All my life I had sought comfort in a variety of earth mothers.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  A famous psychologist once said that some people so fear the debt of death that they refuse the loan of life.” “Meaning what? Talk plainly,” said Merges, who had stopped grooming his belly and now sat on his haunches. “Meaning that you seem so fearful of death that you refrain from entering into life. It’s as though you fear using up life. Remember what you taught me just a few minutes ago about essential catness? Tell me, Merges, where now is the territory you defend? Where are the toms you battle? Where are the lustful, howling females you subdue? And why,” Ernest asked, emphasizing each word, “do you allow your precious Merges sperm seeds to rot unused?” As Ernest spoke, Merges’s head bowed low. Then, somewhat mournfully, he asked, “And you have only one life? How far are you into it?” “About halfway through.” “How can you stand it?” Suddenly Ernest felt a sharp pang of sadness. He reached for one of the napkins from the Chinese dinner and dabbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” said Merges, unexpectedly gently, “to have caused pain.” “Not at all. I was prepared. This turn in our conversation was inevitable,” Ernest said. “You ask how I can stand it? Well, first of all, by not thinking about it. And more, sometimes I even forget about it. And at my age that’s not too hard.” “At your age? What does that mean?” “We humans go through life in stages. As very young children, we think about death a great deal; some of us even obsess about it. It’s not hard to discover death. We simply look around and see dead things: leaves and lilies and flies and beetles. Pets die. We eat dead animals. Sometimes we’re privy to the death of a person. And before long we realize that death will come to everyone—to our grandma, to our mother and father, even to ourselves. We brood about this in private. Our parents and teachers, thinking it’s bad for children to think about death, keep silent about it or give us fairy tales about a heaven and angels, eternal reunion, immortal souls.” Ernest stopped, hoping Merges was following his words. “And then?” Merges was following all right. “We comply. We push it out of our minds, or we openly defy death with great feats of daredevilry. And then, just before we become adults, we brood a great deal about it again.