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 Giovanni's Room (1956)

  I have thought about Jacques* question since. The question is banal but one of the real troubles with Uving is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Jacques' garden was not the same as Giovanni's, of course. Jacques' garden was involved with football players and Giovanni's was involved with maidens—but that seems to have made so Uttle difference. Perhaps every- body has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of inno- cence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who for- get. Heroes are rare. Jacques had not wanted to have supper in his apartment because his cook had run away. His cooks were always running away. He was GIOVANNI'S ROOM 37 always getting young boys from the provinces, God knows how, to come up and be cooks; and they, of course, as soon as they were able to find their way around the capital, decided that cooking was the last thing they wanted to do. They usually ended up going back to the provinces, those, that is, who did not end up on the streets, or in jail, or in Indochina, I met him at a rather nice restaurant on the rue de Crenelle and arranged to borrow ten thousand francs from him before we had fin- ished our aperitifs. He was in a good mood and I, of course, was in a good mood too, and this meant that we would end up drinking in Jacques' favorite bar, a noisy, crowded, ill-lit sort of tunnel, of dubious— or perhaps not dubious at all, of rather too emphatic—reputa- tion. Every once in a while it was raided by the police, apparently with the connivance of Guillaume, the patron, who always managed, on the particular evening, to warn his favorite customers that if they were not armed with identification papers they might be better off elsewhere. I remember that the bar, that night, was more than ordinarily crowded and noisy. All of the habitues were there and many strangers, some looking, some just staring. There were three or four very chic Parisian ladies sitting at a table with their gigolos or their lovers or perhaps simply their country cousins, God knows; the ladies seemed extremely animated, their males seemed rather stiff; the ladies

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  But today’s trailer trash are merely yesterday’s vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear. Our very identity as a nation, no matter what we tell ourselves, is intimately tied up with the dispossessed. We are, then, not only preoccupied with race, as we know we are, but with good and bad breeds as well. It is for good reason that we have this preoccupation: by calling America not just “a” land of opportunity but “the” land of opportunity, we collectively have made a promise to posterity that there will always exist the real potential of self-propulsion upward. Those who fail to rise in America are a crucial part of who we are as a civilization. A cruel irony is to be found in the aftermath of the Hollywood film Deliverance, a gruesome adventure that exploited the worst stereotypes of white trash and ignored the poverty that existed in the part of the country where the movie was made. One actor stands out who was not a trained actor at all: Billy Redden. He played the iconic inbred character who sat strumming the banjo. He was fifteen when he was plucked from a local Rabun County, Georgia, school by the filmmakers because of his odd look (enhanced with makeup). He didn’t play the banjo, so a musician fingered from behind, and the cameraman did the rest. Interviewed in 2012 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the film, Billy said he wasn’t paid much for his role. Otherwise, the fifty-six-year-old said, “I wouldn’t be working at Wal-Mart right now. And I’m struggling really hard to make ends meet.” 6 The discomfort middle-class Americans feel when forced to acknowledge the existence of poverty highlights the disconnect between image and reality. It seems clear that we have made little progress since James Agee exposed the world of poor tenant farmers in 1941. We still today are blind to the “cruel radiance of what is.” The static rural experience is augmented by the persistence of class-inflected tropes and the voyeuristic shock in televised portraits of degenerate beings and wasted lives in the richest country that has ever existed. And what of Billy Redden? In 1972, a country boy was made up to fit a stereotype of the retarded hillbilly, the idiot savant. Today his mundane struggle to survive can satisfy no one’s expectations, because his story is ordinary. He is neither eccentric nor perverse. Nor does he don a scraggly beard, wear a bandanna, or hunt gators. He is simply one of the hundreds of thousands of faceless employees who work at a Wal-Mart.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  There were little violently yellow iced cakes with scalloped edges called “marigolds,” that came from Cushman’s Bakery. There was a spice bun and rock-cakes from Newton’s, the West Indian bakery across Lenox Avenue from St. Mark’s School, and iced tea in a wrapped mayonnaise jar. There were sweet pickles for us and dill pickles for my father, and peaches with the fuzz still on them, individually wrapped to keep them from bruising. And, for neatness, there were piles of napkins and a little tin box with a washcloth dampened with rosewater and glycerine for wiping sticky mouths. I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that Black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947. As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention. I learned later that Phyllis’s high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis “would not be happy,” meaning, Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. “We will take among-you to Washington, ourselves,” my father had avowed, “and not just for an overnight in some measly fleabag hotel.” American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in america and the fact of american racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to trust.

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

  She could plainly see what I’d been so desperate to hide: I was a full-blown mess. After the remains of my mascara finished streaming down my face, I felt a sense of relief similar to when medicine kicks in, giving you a break from a hallucinogenic fever. I’d somehow overlooked how cleansing it could be to let my feelings rip. After this happened a few more times (shout-out to Home Depot and their decision to pipe Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?” through their stereo system), I’d started to realize that these breaks helped me survive. They made me realize that the only way through my sadness was to allow the waves of big feelings to move through my body—something I’d been hell-bent on avoiding, for fear I would drown. If embracing my intense emotions helped me feel even the slightest bit better, why had I been so determined to avoid them? And given how all-encompassing these hints of catharsis felt, I couldn’t help but wonder, Where else in my life have I been avoiding grief? Did that avoidance have anything to do with the strange existential angst that had been creeping up on me over the last few years, where I sensed that I was not, in fact, living as fully as I could be? The more I thought about it, the instinct to avoid grief made perfect sense to me. As well-meaning as my family friend’s advice was, Keep that mascara intact, honey was not going to help me heed my soul’s call to grow. For that, I would need to surrender to my grief and other big emotions. GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FEEL While we may not want to even think about grief, loss, or unexpected (and unwanted) change, in order to feel less alone, less broken, less crazy (you’re not!), we need to talk about and tend to our most tender feelings. We also need to find the right kind of support for our emotions and ourselves in the process. Only then will we be able to pick up the pieces of our shattered hearts and lives and put ourselves back together. Only then can we heal. That is what this book is all about: learning how to be a Mourning Person when we’d rather stay under the covers and go back to sleep. That said, I’m not going to sugarcoat it: grief sucks—and it isn’t a solo flier. Grief rolls with an entourage of complicated friends, who all demand bottle service at the club—emotions like weariness, judgment, shame, jealousy, self-loathing, and all the other not-so-glamorous feelings we don’t want people to know we’re experiencing. This is to be expected, and so is the lengthy amount of time it takes to feel like a human being who wants to get out of pajamas as a complete wardrobe and wash her hair again. That’s because grief isn’t linear.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  At his retirement, Alexander the Third offered him to choose between the title of count and a sum of money, presumably large—I do not know what exactly an earldom was worth in Russia, but contrary to the thrifty Tsar’s hopes my grandfather (as also his uncle Ivan, who had been offered a similar choice by Nicholas the First) plumped for the more solid reward. (“Encore un comte raté,” dryly comments Sergey Sergeevich.) After that he lived mostly abroad. In the first years of this century his mind became clouded but he clung to the belief that as long as he remained in the Mediterranean region everything would be all right. Doctors took the opposite view and thought he might live longer in the climate of some mountain resort or in Northern Russia. There is an extraordinary story, which I have not been able to piece together adequately, of his escaping from his attendants somewhere in Italy. There he wandered about, denouncing, with King Lear-like vehemence, his children to grinning strangers, until he was captured in a wild rocky place by some matter-of-fact carabinieri. During the winter of 1903, my mother, the only person whose presence, in his moments of madness, the old man could bear, was constantly at his side in Nice. My brother and I, aged three and four respectively, were also there with our English governess; I remember the windowpanes rattling in the bright breeze and the amazing pain caused by a drop of hot sealing wax on my finger. Using a candle flame (diluted to a deceptive pallor by the sunshine that invaded the stone slabs on which I was kneeling), I had been engaged in transforming dripping sticks of the stuff into gluey, marvelously smelling, scarlet and blue and bronze-colored blobs. The next moment I was bellowing on the floor, and my mother had hurried to the rescue, and somewhere nearby my grandfather in a wheelchair was thumping the resounding flags with his cane. She had a hard time with him. He used improper language. He kept mistaking the attendant who rolled him along the Promenade des Anglais for Count Loris-Melikov, a (long-deceased) colleague of his in the ministerial cabinet of the eighties. “Qui est cette femme—chassez-la!” he would cry to my mother as he pointed a shaky finger at the Queen of Belgium or Holland who had stopped to inquire about his health. Dimly I recall running up to his chair to show him a pretty pebble, which he slowly examined and then slowly put into his mouth. I wish I had had more curiosity when, in later years, my mother used to recollect those times.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I was saddened but not surprised by what had happened to Billy when he attempted college. Like so many of the young people in our study, Billy’s parents were both college educated and both had been given a higher education by their families. I had no doubt at all that if these two had stayed together, they would have sent Billy to college no questions asked. Moreover, their lack of concern for Billy’s future was striking. I was certainly aware that a vulnerable young man like Billy needed a high level of specialized knowledge in order to enter the workplace because his poor health precluded so many jobs. But when I talked to Billy’s mother she seemed politely regretful that her son hadn’t continued in college. Billy’s father told me flatly that he didn’t care one way or another. Neither parent seemed to expect that Billy would achieve to at least their own educational and occupational levels. In fact, neither seemed to have many expectations for Billy at all. When they reach their eighteenth birthday, many young adults in divorced families suddenly feel like second-class citizens. That’s when the last child support check arrives and that’s when they realize how disadvantaged they are compared with their friends in intact families. In California and the great majority of the states, a parent has no obligation to help a child after the age of eighteen or the end of high school. The child’s continued education, including tuition, books, supplies, and living expenses, is all up to him. Many young people consider the cutoff at age eighteen the worst hit of their parents’ divorce. They tell me bitterly, “I paid for my folks’ divorce.” Among middle-class children, a college education is an expected rite of passage. Americans believe that the university is a necessary step for success in our technologically advanced, competitive society. Many parents in intact families make enormous sacrifices to send their children to college. As men and women of the world who benefited from their own professional training and contacts, they know that without a college education young people are handicapped all through their lives. Thus they save their money for many years ahead. In turn, they expect their kids to work hard as students and in part-time jobs. But they do not expect the children to do it all by themselves.

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

  In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-7006-2 E-book ISBN: 978-1-4019-7007-9 Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-4019-7008-6 For Dad CONTENTS Introduction: Never Let Them See You Grieve Chapter 1: I’m Not OK Chapter 2: The Rupture Chapter 3: Fear & Anxiety Chapter 4: Becoming Unbecoming Chapter 5: Grief & Trauma: The Golden Repair Chapter 6: Acceptance Chapter 7: Rest in Love Chapter 8: Beyond the Stars Chapter 9: Awkward Times, Awkward People Chapter 10: Love Is Love, Grief Is Grief Chapter 11: Self-Care in the Storm Chapter 12: Listening to Your Life Acknowledgments About the Author Empower You: Unlimited Audio Mobile App Continue Your Journey with Hay House INTRODUCTION Never Let Them See You Grieve Only cry in the shower. No one will see you, and you won’t wreck your mascara. This bit of wisdom was given to me by a family friend when my father was dying. At the time, overwhelmed by emotion and desperately trying to maintain some semblance of control, I thought it was a brilliant tip. Not only did I attempt to follow this guideline—I also added a few of my own. Things like: Stuff yourself into the nearest closet and scream into a pillow (or any dense fabric that muffles agony). Dig your nails into your palms so the physical pain overrides your emotional distress. Think gruesome thoughts to distract yourself from your grueling feelings. These strategies worked for a while, until my pent-up sorrow took on a life of its own, refusing to abide by any rules. I remember the exact moment the dam broke. My dad had just received news that his cancer was progressing and there were no more treatment options. Numb from the arresting prognosis, I walked through the aisles of my local drugstore, having offered to run an errand to pick up more Ensure—the only nourishment he could stomach. I stood frozen, staring at the chocolate-flavored protein drinks, incapable of deciding how many to buy. Will he live long enough for a case, or should I just stick to the four-packs? That question hit me hard. An emotional tsunami was about to unleash itself on me and all the innocent shoppers in my immediate vicinity. Shit! Here come my feelings. And no shower in sight. I blinked heavily through the checkout line, fighting back the deluge of tears that were mere seconds away, until I was able to rush to the safety of my car and sob uncontrollably. Let me tell you: the parking lot at CVS is no shower stall. My once- compartmentalized grief was now on full display. Hunched over my steering wheel in a teary puddle, I happened to notice an older woman, probably coming to fetch a prescription or buy toilet paper, glancing my way.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I had no reading on how that would go once her full adolescent agenda came into play. Would she allow herself independence or even a little rebellion? I felt some disquiet about her inordinately close tie to her mother and wondered if leaving home would be a problem for her. Would she hold back on that, too? And I was concerned about her taking responsibility for the delicate equilibrium between her parents and for having to walk on eggs to maintain the precarious balance. But in all she showed me reserves of strength and good sense that left me enormously optimistic. Feelings Are Painful LISA AND I next met each other when she was twenty years old—a pretty, shy, and very appealing young woman who was finishing her second year at a small college in Oregon. Her hair was long and pulled up into a neat bun held with a chopstick, and she wore the usual college costume—faded jeans, Doc Martins, and a long sweater with a boat neck. She had added a bright red silk scarf that looked stunning in its simplicity. Lisa still liked school, continued to do well academically, and enjoyed a wide circle of women friends. But she was newly troubled by many questions about herself. Her major problem, as she described it, was feeling numb when she had sex. “Have you had many boyfriends?” I asked. “Not that many,” she replied. “We have co-ed dorms and so lots of kids end up sleeping with each other. I’m not nearly as wild as some of my friends, but it’d be hard to stay a virgin around here. So sex is easy. But,” she said, frowning, “sex with a guy I care about is hard for me. It’s much easier to be with someone I don’t feel close to. If I care about him, then when it’s over I’m left with a sad feeling. When sex is just play and has nothing to do with love, I have no problem and I feel fine. Sometimes I feel that I was brought up on a desert island.” She thought for a moment and summed up her feelings. “Love combined with sex is a strange idea to me.” She paused again. “Sometimes I just get numb.” “Tell me about feeling numb.” “What you have to understand about me is that I’m able to cut off feelings instantly when they hurt. My feelings are there but it’s hard for me to reach them. As a child I hardly knew what it was like to cry. Basically I still feel out of touch with my feelings. If you were to tell me right now that my lover died, I would not have feeling until tomorrow.” “This protected you?” “One thing you learn very quickly as a child of divorce is that feelings are painful. It’s a lot easier if you can learn to turn them off. It’s not simple, but otherwise you spend a lot of time worrying about your family.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The blunting of childhood memories about play is not restricted to children of divorce. Children all over the world experience war, famine, forced labor, and all kinds of traumas. Nevertheless the differences in play among well-to-do children from protective intact families and children of divorce who lived next door was an unexpected finding that came early in the study. These differences are important because play is a critical aspect of a child’s social and moral development. It forms the basis of learning where you fit into the world of equals, how to share and when not to share, when to put up your dukes and when to run. These are all things that grown-ups can’t teach. You have to learn them yourself. Unstructured play—where children build forts or tree houses to keep out the adults—is especially important. It enables a child to take a step toward independence and into the world of peers. It’s the basis for honing leadership skills, for learning not to cry, not to run home to Mommy, but to trust yourself. It’s climbing a tree by yourself and learning how to test the branch before you put your foot on it. Imaginative play is the basis for creativity and fantasy life. Recent research has called attention to the central importance of peer relationships in the development of children and adolescents.3 There’s no question in my mind as to the significance of these friendships. How harmful is it in the long run to miss out on play? Many very creative people have had twisted childhoods and so we know that building forts is not a prerequisite for a successful adulthood. But it’s clear that divorce shuts out some of the special happiness and early friendships that childhood can offer. For children of divorce, growing up is a lonelier road. One result may be a decrement in social skills. One father who grew up in an intact family and now coaches a Little League team said, “I can always spot the boys from divorced families. They get into more fights and they’re sore losers. Not all of them, but enough so that they’re a headache for all the coaches.” Another result could be the kind of feeling I saw in Karen when she said, “My fiancé tells me that I’m too serious because I never learned how to play. He wants to teach me how. He’s right. I never had a chance to do things for me. It’s still hard for me to think about what I want for myself.” She understood perfectly that play is something that one does for pleasure, for oneself. This is what she feels she gave up when she learned early on to think of others before herself.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I’ve seen this sort of passivity in both men and women who grew up in divorced families, although it seems to affect more men. In my earliest writing about the responses of children at the time of the breakup, I described how helpless children feel. As we’ve seen, they don’t protest largely because no one is willing to take them seriously and listen to their complaints. They learn to keep their heads down, to lower their expectations, and to keep their feelings to themselves. The passivity of young men like Billy makes sense if you think of it as a masked form of helpless rage. How else to explain their extraordinary willingness to put the worst face on incidents that might or might not have meaning? Does riding on a motorbike with a guy really establish infidelity and warrant the man’s leaving? Perhaps she hurt her ankle. Perhaps the man was an old friend. Perhaps the meeting with her girlfriends was canceled. Of the many possibilities, Billy chooses infidelity. His suspicions are so powerfully convincing—and his fear of being hurt is so overriding—that he cannot summon the courage to ask the woman. His anger happens so fast that he loses his capacity to consider other alternatives rationally. If you suspect infidelity, then it must be true. This suspecting the worst and acting on it without thought and without delay is surely the most dangerous recipe for a stable relationship that anyone could devise. Nothing LastsBILLY SIGHED RESIGNEDLY and shrugged. “To go on with the scenario, I was married for five years. We met when I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five. I was managing one of the plants. She was a waitress in the bakery restaurant. I was also going to junior college in the morning to get a management degree. It wasn’t a very good course but it was all I could afford. I think by then I’d gotten over being so scared of women and had decided to do something about being so alone. She was nice to be around. She smiled a lot. She was no beauty but neither was I. We soon found out that we had a lot in common. Her folks divorced when she was eight and she had a pretty miserable childhood, lots of moving around, money worries, and a hard time making friends because of all the moves. She was a lonely kid just like me. We agreed that it was the unhappiest time of our lives. We both understood how to put on a cheery face for the world and feel different inside. So we decided it was better to be together and that we would be less lonely.” “Were you pretty optimistic at that time?” He looked forlorn. “I don’t know whether I ever loved her or whether she loved me. How in hell would anyone love me anyway? What did I know about finding a wife? I thought at the time that it probably wouldn’t last.”

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  At the corner, in a faint patch of the morn- ing sun, I looked in my wallet to count my bus tickets. In the wallet I found three hundred francs, taken from Hella, my carte d'identite, my address in the United States, and paper, paper, scraps of paper, cards, photographs. On each piece of paper I found addresses, tele- phone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept— or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remem- bered, hopes probably not fulfilled: certainly not fulfilled, or I would not have been standing on that street corner. I found four bus tickets in my wallet and I 193 GIOVANNI'S ROOM walked to the arrSt. There was a policeman standing there, his blue hood, weighted, hang- ing down behind, his white club gleaming. He looked at me and smiled and cried, 'Qa vaT *Ouiy merct And you?' Toujours. It's a nice day, no?' Tes/ But my voice trembled. The autumn is beginning.' Vest ga: And he turned away, back to his contemplation of the boulevard. I smoothed my hair with my hand, feeling foolish for feeling shaken. I watched a woman pass, coming from the market, her string bag full; at the top, precariously, a liter of red wine. She was not young but she was clear-faced and bold, she had a strong, thick body and strong, thick hands. The policeman shouted something to her and she shomted back—something bawdy and good-natured. The policeman laughed; but refused to look at me again. I watched the women continue down the street—home, I thought, to her husband, dressed in blue work- ing clothes, dirty, and to her children. She passed the corner where the patch of sunlight fell and crossed the street. The bus came and the policeman and I, the only people waiting, got on—he stood on the platform, far from me. The policeman was not young, either, but he had a gusto which I admired. I looked out of the window and the streets rolled by. Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for James Baldwin 194 each flying face which trapped my brief atten- tion some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of aU.

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

  If you feel it, say it, because life is too precious to hold back.” I never knew when a nugget was coming, so I kept a notes doc on my phone to capture each word, typing with a mixture of inspiration and desperation, not wanting to forget even a syllable. In the beginning, he weaved these bombs into relevant conversations, which made them easier to process. But as his time grew shorter, the bombs became more frequent, more urgent, and definitely more unexpected, totally catching me off guard. Naturally, these bombs could set off a chain reaction of feelings I had been trying to quell. But the last thing I wanted was to burst into tears at the mere suggestion that I “consider a car trade-in after 50,000 miles.” I mean, maybe the guy just wanted to talk about cars. No big life lessons. No trying to squeeze in as much fatherly advice while he still could—just cars (and common sense). Next thing he knows, he’s comforting a hysterical daughter, when he is the one who needs comforting in the form of a normal conversation that has nothing to do with dying. I’d get so angry with myself for my inability to contain my emotions, especially if my waterworks were triggered by something as harmless as a TV commercial (unless it was for the ASPCA and featured a senior collie named Wags who desperately needed a home—those are impossible to survive without tears streaming down your face). One such occasion was when my parents came to our home for a visit. As I was helping Dad bring their luggage upstairs to our guest room, he paused to catch his breath and drop a wisdom bomb while he was at it. “You know, love, sometimes the golden years are for shit.” Oh sweet Jesus, here we go. “Look at this bag,” he said, pointing to a small suitcase. “You know what’s in it? Medications! This entire bag is filled with our pills. Everyone works so hard so things can be better later, but we’ve got it all backward. You have to live your life now, love. Make now your golden years. Slow down and give yourself more of the good stuff along the way. Sometimes I worry that you’re following in my footsteps and missing too many of the moments that matter.” His words hit me hard. Not only could I feel his regret, but there was a reason he was saying this to me. As one of the few people who really knew how I was wired, he was highlighting the code I hadn’t yet cracked, the one I was uncomfortable discussing, even with him. There was only one way to respond. DEAD MOUSE! That’s right. When a sudden onset of feelings triggers a tidal wave of overwhelm, sadness, or regret, one of the ways I dam them up is by conjuring awful images in my mind, stuff like eating anchovies or, say, a dead mouse in my sink.

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

  Whether evil is properly the motive of mercy?Objection 1: It would seem that, properly speaking, evil is not the motive of mercy. For, as shown above (Q[19], A[1]; [2590]FS, Q[79], A[1], ad 4; [2591]FP, Q[48] , A[6]), fault is an evil rather than punishment. Now fault provokes indignation rather than mercy. Therefore evil does not excite mercy. Objection 2: Further, cruelty and harshness seem to excel other evils. Now the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 8) that “harshness does not call for pity but drives it away.” Therefore evil, as such, is not the motive of mercy. Objection 3: Further, signs of evils are not true evils. But signs of evils excite one to mercy, as the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii, 8). Therefore evil, properly speaking, is not an incentive to mercy. On the contrary, Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii, 2) that mercy is a kind of sorrow. Now evil is the motive of sorrow. Therefore it is the motive of mercy. I answer that, As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei ix, 5), mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress, impelling us to succor him if we can. For mercy takes its name “misericordia” from denoting a man’s compassionate heart [miserum cor] for another’s unhappiness. Now unhappiness is opposed to happiness: and it is essential to beatitude or happiness that one should obtain what one wishes; for, according to Augustine (De Trin. xiii, 5), “happy is he who has whatever he desires, and desires nothing amiss.” Hence, on the other hand, it belongs to unhappiness that a man should suffer what he wishes not. Now a man wishes a thing in three ways: first, by his natural appetite; thus all men naturally wish to be and to live: secondly, a man wishes a thing from deliberate choice: thirdly, a man wishes a thing, not in itself, but in its cause, thus, if a man wishes to eat what is bad for him, we say that, in a way, he wishes to be ill. Accordingly the motive of “mercy,” being something pertaining to “misery,” is, in the first way, anything contrary to the will’s natural appetite, namely corruptive or distressing evils, the contrary of which man desires naturally, wherefore the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 8) that “pity is sorrow for a visible evil, whether corruptive or distressing.” Secondly, such like evils are yet more provocative of pity if they are contrary to deliberate choice, wherefore the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 8) that evil excites our pity “when it is the result of an accident, as when something turns out ill, whereas we hoped well of it.” Thirdly, they cause yet greater pity, if they are entirely contrary to the will, as when evil befalls a man who has always striven to do well: wherefore the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 8) that “we pity most the distress of one who suffers undeservedly.”

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  (In the original letters, there were no chapter or verse divisions. The chapters were not divided up until the thirteenth century and the verses not until the sixteenth century; and, because of that, the arranging of the collection of letters would be much more difficult.) (2) News came to Paul, from various sources, of trouble at Corinth. (a) News came from members of the household of Chloe (I Corinthians i:ii). They brought news of the disputes with which the church was torn. (b) News came with the visit of Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus to Ephesus (i Corinthians 16:17). By personal contact, they were able to fill in the gaps in Paul's information. (c) News came in a letter in which the Corinthian church had asked Paul's guidance on various problems. In i Corinthians 7:1, Paul begins: `Now concerning the matters about which you wrote . . .' In answer to all this information, Paul wrote i Corinthians and despatched it to Corinth, apparently by the hand of Timothy (i Corinthians 4:17). (3) The result of the letter was that things became worse than ever; and, although we have no direct record of it, we can deduce that Paul paid a personal visit to Corinth. In 2 Corinthians 12:14, he writes: `Here I am, ready to come to you this third time.' In 2 Corinthians 13:1-2, he says again that he is coming to them for the third time. Now, if there was a third time, there must have been a second time. We have the record of only one visit, the story of which is told in Acts 18:1-17. We have no record at all of the second, but it only took two or three days to sail from Ephesus to Corinth. (4) The visit did no good at all. Matters were only exacerbated, and the result was an exceedingly severe letter. We learn about that letter from certain passages in 2 Corinthians. In 2:4, Paul writes: `I wrote to you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.' In 7:8, he writes: `For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it (though I did regret it, for I see that I grieved you with that letter, though only briefly).' It was a letter which was the product of anguish of mind, a letter so severe that Paul was almost sorry that he ever sent it. Scholars call this `the Severe Letter'. Have we got it? It obviously cannot be i Corinthians, because that is not a tearstained and anguished letter. When Paul wrote it, it is clear enough that things were under control. Now, if we read through 2 Corinthians, we find an odd situation. In chapters 1-9, everyone has made up, there is complete reconciliation and all are friends again; but at chapter io comes the strangest break. Chapters 10-13 are the most heartbroken cry Paul ever wrote.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I think they don’t hear their wives because in large measure they don’t hear themselves. They’ve told me many times that their own feelings are muted or shut down in situations that evoke strong feelings. They learned long ago in childhood that feelings are painful and that it’s better and safer to shut down feelings and not respond to their own or to others. But sadly, people who are inhibited in acknowledging their own feelings also have trouble in recognizing the feelings of others. They’re especially clueless about how to gauge the quality of a woman’s feelings, needs, and wishes or how to assess the importance of her complaints.4 It’s as if everything is experienced in the same monotone key. Such men are hardly able to read a woman’s facial expressions or her body language or to distinguish a minor upset from a serious grievance. They have no good models in their head for a good relationship between a man and a woman, and the subtleties of the interaction is a foreign language to them. Billy and the other young men in this group understood concrete requests. When Debbie wanted a house, he bought her a little house. Had she asked for shoes or a dress, he would have happily purchased these items for her. But she wanted her husband to talk to her in the evenings. She was lonely and wanted companionship. She was bored and wanted to go out dancing. These requests he found baffling and disconcerting. He failed utterly to observe the mounting distress or the rising anger that prompted these requests. Like others, he ignored all the signs of the coming storm. The woman became increasingly agitated and left in a towering rage. The men were shattered. Vulnerability and ResilienceBY THE END of the interview I was keenly aware of how much Billy had suffered and how hard it had been for him to grow up with hardly any help from his family after the divorce. I was also impressed with his courage and perseverance. Despite his poor physical health, lack of education, and continuing sadness, he held a responsible, well-paying job that required skill, attention to detail, and an ability to make quick decisions. He had taken full responsibility for himself in recovering from a serious depression. And he had been able to live a life of extraordinary isolation and sadness without succumbing to alcoholism and drug abuse. He had survived each day while hoping that it would be his last. Last seen, Billy was starting a new relationship with a seemingly nice woman who had her own problems but was willing to work on the relationship. They at least had a fighting chance. I was also aware of how, with the help of his wry humor and courage, Billy had been able to hold on to his integrity and honesty. In all he was very likable, friendly, and generous. But he had been unhappy for most of his life.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  My father and my aunt got on very badly and, without ever knowing how or why I felt it, I felt that their long battle had everything to do with my dead mother. I remember when I was very young how, in the big living room of the house in San Francisco, my mother's photograph, which stood all by itself on the mantelpiece, seemed to rule the room. It was as though her photograph proved how her spirit dominated that air and controlled us all. I remember the shadows gathering in the far comers of that room, in which I never felt at home, and my father washed in the gold hght which spilled down on him from the tall lamp which stood beside his easy chair. He would be reading his newspaper, hidden from me behind his newspaper, so that, desperate to conquer his attention, I sometimes so annoyed him that our duel ended with me being carried from the room in tears. Or I remember him sitting bent forward, his elbows on his knees, staring towards the great window which held back the inky night. I used to wonder what he was thinking. In the eye of my memory he always wears a grey, sleeveless sweater and he has loosened his tie, and his sandy hair falls forward over a square, ruddy face. He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from GIOVANNI'S ROOM 19 some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down.

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

  I witnessed the worry that came from not knowing how she would have enough money to pay the heating bill or make sure we had enough food to eat. Maybe if I’d never been born, she’d be better off was a thought that played on a loop in my childhood . . . that is, until Ken showed up, making our family—and me—feel whole. NO MUD, NO LOTUS I was 38 when BD died. Our shared histories of grief and trauma were too big to heal in this lifetime, at least with each other. Neither of us had the emotional skills needed to tend to the wounds and regret between us, and that’s OK. It’s safe to say that all of us have experienced trauma in our lives, in some capacity, whether it be financial insecurity, chronic illness, abuse, or injustice. And, like grief, trauma is something that few of us know how to care for. Some of us may not even recognize the ways trauma lives inside us. Though our world is becoming more trauma literate, for many of us it remains yet another taboo subject that we lock away (consciously or unconsciously). Before writing this book, I was pretty clueless, too. I used to think of trauma as an “event,” but, according to Gabor Maté, physician and trauma expert: Trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you. And that’s the good news. Because if trauma was what happened to you, there’s nothing you can do to change that. But if the trauma is the wound that occurred inwardly, you can heal that wound at any time. So recognizing that trauma is an internal psychological wound with manifestations in your body actually allows you to heal it. Maté’s definition of trauma explains why two siblings may go through the same traumatic event (like their parents’ acrimonious divorce) and have completely different responses to it. Or how two people can be in the same car accident and have completely different recoveries from similar injuries. While there’s no right or wrong way to react to trauma, there is a universal place to begin the healing process: your body. That’s because trauma hides in our bodies, where it often remains dormant until something like a smell or a sound triggers it. As we’ve explored, when our brains perceive a threat, our bodies instantly go into self-protection mode. This physiological response is designed to be temporary. But when trauma goes unaddressed, it often gets stuck in our bodies, continuing to signal that we’re in danger even when we’re not. You’re already familiar with the three main responses to perceived danger: fight (when we react with aggression), flight (when we react by leaving a situation), and freeze (when we react by going numb and possibly dissociating). Therapist and trauma expert Pete Walker popularized a fourth response, which he calls “fawn.”

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'SROOM 93 if your maman, she is dead— thatisverysadl — your Papa willbe very happy tosee bambinos from you/ She pauses, herblackeyes soften; sheis lookingat me, but sheis looking beyond me, too.'We had threesons.Twoof them were killed in thewar. In the war,too,we lostall our money. It issad, isitnot,to have worked so hard allone's hfein order to have alittle peace in one's oldage and thentohaveitall taken away? It almost killed myhusband; he has never been the same since.'Then I see that her eyesarenot merelyshrewd;theyare alsobitter andverysad. Sheshrugsher shoulders. *Ah! Whatcanonedo? Itis better not to think about it.' Thenshesmiles.'Butourlast son,he lives in thenorth;hecame to seeus two years ago, andhe brought withhimhishttle boy. His little boy, he wasonlyfouryears oldthen. He was so beautiful! Mario,he iscalled.She gestures. It is myhusband's name.They stayed about ten days and we felt youngagain.' She smiles again. ^Especially my husband.' Andshe stands there a moment with this smile onher face. Then she asks, abruptly, 'Do you pray?' I wonder ifI can stand this another moment. TSfo,' I stammer. 'No. Not often.' 'But you are a beUever?' Ismile. It is not even a patronizing smile, though, perhaps, Iwish it could be, Tes.' But I wonder what my smile could have looked Uke. It did not reassure her. Tou must pray,' she says, very soberly. 1 assure you. Even 94 James Baldwin just a little prayer, from time totime. Light a littlecandle. Ifit were not for the prayers of the blessed saints, one could not live in this worldat all. Ispeak to you,'she says, drawing herself up sUghtly, 'as though I were your maman. Donot beoffended.' 'ButIam notoffended. Youare very nice. Youarevery niceto speak to me this way.' She smiles a satisfied smile. 'Men — not just babies like you, but old men, too — they always need a woman totell them the truth. Les hommes. Ussont impossibles/ Andshe smiles, andforces me to smile at the cunning ofthis imiversal joke,and turns out thelight in the master bedroom. We godown thehallagain, thankheaven, to mydrink.Thisbedroom, of course,is quite untidy, thelight burning, my bathrobe,books,dirtysocks, and a couple of dirty glasses,anda coffee cuphalf fullof stale coffee — lying around,all overtheplace;and the sheetson the bed a tangledmess. Ill fixthis up before morning,'Isay. *Bien sur'She sighs. 'You really musttake my advice, monsieur,and getmarried/ At this, suddenly,we both laugh. Then I finishmy drink. The inventoryis almost done.Wegointo the last room, the big room, where the bottleis, be- fore the window. She looksat the bottle, then at me. 'But you will be drunkby morning,' she says. 'Oh,nol I'm taking thebottle with me/

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  4Not only were the kitchen and the servants’ hall never visited by my mother, but they stood as far removed from her consciousness as if they were the corresponding quarters in a hotel. My father had no inclination, either, to run the house. But he did order the meals. With a little sigh, he would open a kind of album laid by the butler on the dinner table after dessert and in his elegant, flowing hand write down the menu for the following day. He had a peculiar habit of letting his pencil or fountain pen vibrate just above the paper while he pondered the next ripple of words. My mother nodded a vague consent to his suggestions or made a wry face. Nominally, the housekeeping was in the hands of her former nurse, at that time a bleary, incredibly wrinkled old woman (born a slave around 1830) with the small face of a melancholy tortoise and big shuffling feet. She wore a nunnish brown dress and gave off a slight but unforgettable smell of coffee and decay. Her dreaded congratulation on our birthdays and namedays was the serfage kiss on the shoulder. Age had developed in her a pathological stinginess, especially in regard to sugar and preserves, so that by degrees, and with the sanction of my parents, other domestic arrangements, kept secret from her, had quietly come into force. Without knowing it (the knowledge would have broken her heart), she remained dangling as it were, from her own key ring, while my mother did her best to allay with soothing words the suspicions that now and then flitted across the old woman’s weakening mind. Sole mistress of her moldy and remote little kingdom, which she thought was the real one (we would have starved had it been so), she was followed by the mocking glances of lackeys and maids as she steadily plodded through long corridors to store away half an apple or a couple of broken Petit-Beurre biscuits she had found on a plate.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  There is no one she knows to whom she can turn for help because her sister died last year. I felt very sorry for her. Here it is, almost New Year’s Eve, and there isn’t even anyone she can talk to about her worries except two strange americans in a tea shop. Then she went on to explain that she and her sister had had to live with foreign workers (she meant Italians) in the factory where they worked during World War II, and that the foreigners were very dirty, with lice and fleas, so she and her sister would sprinkle DDT in their hair and their beds every night so as not to catch diseases! And she is sure that is why the cancer has spread to her bones now. There was something so grotesque about this sad lonely old woman dying of bone cancer still holding on to her ethnic prejudices, even when she was realizing that they were going to cost her her life. The image of her as a young healthy aryan bigot was at war inside me with the pathetic old woman at our table, and I had to get out of there immediately. December 31, 1985 Arlesheim Old Year’s Day, the last day of this troubled year. And yes, all the stories we tell are about healing in some form or the other. In this place that makes such a point of togetherness and community, Frances and I sat through an ornate New Year’s Eve dinner tonight surrounded by empty chairs on each side of us, an island unto ourselves in the festive hall. It’s good that we have each other, but why should I have to suffer through this ostracism and pay for it as well? I guess because the point is not that I enjoy it but that I gain from it, and that’s up to me. As Gloria said on the phone, “Take what you can use and let the rest GO!” They don’t have to love me, just help me. My Maori jade tiki is gone forever, either lost or stolen from my room. How much more do I have to lose before it is enough? I cannot bear to think that this might be my last New Year’s Eve. But it might be. What a bummer! But if that’s true at least I have had others which were sweet and full past comparing, and filled with enough love and promise to last forever and beyond me.