Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  How the young are tempted and betrayed To slaughter or conformity Is a turn of the mirror Time’s question only. If You Come Softly If you come as softly As wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly As threading dew I will take you gladly Nor ask more of you. You may sit beside me Silent as a breath Only those who stay dead Shall remember death. And if you come I will be silent Nor speak harsh words to you. I will not ask you why, now. Or how, or what you do. We shall sit here, softly Beneath two different years And the rich earth between us Shall drink our tears. Suffer the Children Pity for him who suffers from his waste. Water that flows from the earth For lack of roots to hold it And children who are murdered Before their lives begin. Who pays his crops to the sun When the fields are parched by drought Will mourn the lost water while waiting another rain. But who shall dis-inter these girls To love the women they were to become Or read the legends written beneath their skin? Those who loved them remember their child’s laughter. But he whose hate has robbed him of their good Has yet to weep at night above their graves. Years roll out and rain shall come again. But however many girls be brought to sun Someday A man will thirst for sleep in his southern night Seeking his peace where no peace is And come to mourn these children Given to the dust. A Lover’s Song Give me fire and I will sing you morning Finding you heart And a birth of fruit For you, a flame that will stay beauty Song will take us by the hand And lead us back to light. Give me fire and I will sing you evening Asking you water And quick breath No farewell winds like a willow switch Against my body But a voice to speak In a dark room. Suspension We entered silence Before the clock struck Red wine is caught between the crystal And your fingers The air solidifys around your mouth. Once-wind has sucked the curtains in Like fright, against the evening wall Prepared for storm​Before the room Exhales​Your lips unfold. Within their sudden opening I hear the clock Begin to speak again. I remember now, with the filled crystal Shattered, the wind-whipped curtains Bound, and the cold storm Finally broken, How the room felt When your word was spoken— Warm As the center of your palms And as unfree. from Cables to Rage (1970) for Elizabeth and Jonno my presents Rooming houses are old women Rooming houses are old women rocking dark windows into their whens waiting incomplete circles rocking rent office to stoop to community bathrooms to gas rings and under-bed boxes of once useful garbage city issued with a twice-a-month check

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

  Karen shook her head sadly. She was overburdened by her new responsibilities but felt that she had no choice but to forfeit her needs to the needs of her family. High school, she explained at our meeting several years later, was a blur because her home situation had hardly changed. At out last meeting, when she was twenty-five, I was very concerned about Karen’s inability to break free from a young man she was living with but did not love. She tried to explain: “You remember that when I was dating guys in college, I became very frightened that anyone I really liked would abandon me or be unfaithful, and that I would end up suffering like my mom or my dad? Well, choosing Nick was safe because he has no education and no plans, which means that he’ll always have fewer choices than me. I knew that if we lived together and maybe got married someday I wouldn’t ever have to worry about him walking out.” With tears in her eyes, she added, “Nick is very kind and caring. I’m not used to that.” Although I understood that Karen felt starved for kindness, it baffled me why a bright, attractive woman like her would feel she had so few options other than a loveless relationship. She cried bitterly as she described the loneliness of her life with Nick and the strain of his passive dependence on her. “I knew it was a mistake one day after we moved in together,” she said. “But I can’t leave him. There’s no way I could hurt him that way.” And that is how I left her, standing at a crossroads, struggling with a decision whether to leave or stay. Thus I awaited her arrival the following Thursday, two days before her wedding, with equal measures of hope and concern—hope that she had turned her life around and worry that she hadn’t. What had she done between age twenty-five and thirty-four? Had she broken free of her fears? Of her sorrow? Was she still taking care of her family while feeling guilty for never doing enough? Was the man she was marrying a good choice? Was she no longer afraid of loving and being loved? As Karen came through my front door, she looked radiant. I was suddenly aware that in all the years we’ve known each other, I had rarely seen her happy. She was dressed very simply in black wool slacks, white pullover, and herringbone suit jacket, and as always, she was beautiful. The last few years had made her somehow softer, more relaxed in her shoulders and arms.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from fiction? Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her chins or her ways or even her French—something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her, to the radiant deceit she had used in order to have me depart pleased with my own kindness, or to that swan whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a drooping dancer’s pale arms; something, in short, that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart. There is an appendix to Mademoiselle’s story. When I first wrote it I did not know about certain amazing survivals. Thus, in 1960, my London cousin Peter de Peterson told me that their English nanny, who had seemed old to me in 1904 in Abbazia, was by now over ninety and in good health; neither was I aware that the governess of my father’s two youngest sisters, Mlle Bouvier (later Mme Conrad), survived my father by almost half a century. She had entered their household in 1889 and stayed six years, being the last in a series of governesses. A pretty little keepsake drawn in 1895 by Ivan de Peterson, Peter’s father, shows various events of life at Batovo vignetted over an inscription in my father’s hand: A celle qui a toujours su se faire aimer et qui ne saura jamais se faire oublier; signatures have been appended by four young male Nabokovs and three of their sisters, Natalia, Elizaveta, and Nadezhda, as well as by Natalia’s husband, their little son Mitik, two girl cousins, and Ivan Aleksandrovich Tihotski, the Russian tutor. Sixty-five years later, in Geneva, my sister Elena discovered Mme Conrad, now in her tenth decade. The ancient lady, skipping one generation, naïvely mistook Elena for our mother, then a girl of eighteen, who used to drive up with Mlle Golay from Vyra to Batovo, in those distant times whose long light finds so many ingenious ways to reach me.

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

  They are put into the mouths of great ones of the past, like Noah, Enoch, Isaiah, Moses, the Twelve Patriarchs, Ezra and Baruch. There is something rather sad about this. Those who wrote the apocalyptic literature had the feeling that greatness had gone from the earth; they did not have the confidence in their own position and authority to put their names to their works, and attributed them to the great figures of the past, thereby seeking to give them an authority greater than their own names could have given. As the New Testament scholar Adolf Julicher put it: `Apocalyptic is prophecy turned senile.' The Pattern of Apocalyptic Apocalyptic literature has a pattern: it seeks to describe the things which will happen at the last times and the blessedness which will follow; and the same pictures occur over and over again. It always, so to speak, worked with the same materials; and these materials find their place in our Book of Revelation. (i) In apocalyptic literature, the Messiah was a divine, pre-existent, other-worldly figure of power and glory, waiting to descend into the world to begin his all-conquering career. He existed in heaven before the creation of the world, before the sun and the stars were made; and he is preserved in the presence of the Almighty (i Enoch 48:3, 48:6, 62:7; 4 Ezra 13:25-6). He will come to put down the mighty from their seats, to dethrone the kings of the earth and to break the teeth of sinners (i Enoch 42:2-6, 48:2-9, 62:5-9, 69:26-9). In apocalyptic, there was nothing human or gentle about the Messiah; he was a divine figure of avenging power and glory before whom the earth trembled in terror. (2) The coming of the Messiah was to be preceded by the return of Elijah, who would prepare the way for him (Malachi 4:5-6). Elijah was to stand upon the hills of Israel, so the Rabbis said, and announce the coming of the Messiah with a voice so great that it would sound from one end of the earth to the other. (3) The last terrible times were known as `the travail of the Messiah'. The coming of the messianic age would be like the agony of birth. In the gospels, Jesus is depicted as foretelling the signs of the end and is reported as saying: `All this is but the beginning of the birth pangs' (Matthew 24:8; Mark 13:8). (4) The last days will be a time of terror.

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

  Nowhere else, we are meant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in the American experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize the people involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classless society. Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are. Instead, we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth century). The quintessential American holiday was associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. Nevertheless, the “first” Thanksgiving has been given a date of 1621, when well-meaning Pilgrims and fair-minded Wampanoags shared a meal. The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who had helped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is the detail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had been kidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain. (Coerced labor of this kind reminds us of how the majority of white servants came to America.) Squanto’s friendship, alas, was a far more complicated affair than the fairy tale suggests. He died of a mysterious fever the very next year while engaged in a power struggle with Massasoit, the “Great Sachem” of the Wampanoag confederation. 7 In spite of the obvious stature of a Washington and a Jefferson, and Virginia’s settlement thirteen years pre-Pilgrim, the southern states lagged behind the scribbling northerners in fashioning a comprehensive colonial myth to highlight their own cultural ascendancy in the New World. Here’s what we have: Less a story than a mystery, there persists to this day a morbid curiosity about the 1587 “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, a puzzle on the order of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific. A strange allure surrounds every vanishing people—recall the wildly popular television series Lost. Or Plato’s Atlantis. Ghost ships and ghost colonies invoke a marvelous sense of timelessness; they exist outside the normal rules of history, which explains why Roanoke’s mystery mitigates the harsh realities we instinctively know the early settlers were forced to face.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  After 1923, when she moved to Prague, and I lived in Germany and France, I was unable to visit her frequently; nor was I with her at her death, which occurred on the eve of World War Two. Whenever I did manage to go to Prague, there was always that initial pang one feels just before time, caught unawares, again dons its familiar mask. In the pitiable lodgings she shared with her dearest companion, Evgeniya Konstantinovna Hofeld (1884–1957), who had replaced, in 1914, Miss Greenwood (who, in her turn, had replaced Miss Lavington) as governess of my two sisters (Olga, born January 5, 1903, and Elena, born March 31, 1906), albums, in which, during the last years, she had copied out her favorite poems, from Maykov to Mayakovski, lay around her on odds and ends of decrepit, secondhand furniture. A cast of my father’s hand and a watercolor picture of his grave in the Greek-Catholic cemetery of Tegel, now in East Berlin, shared a shelf with émigré writers’ books, so prone to disintegration in their cheap paper covers. A soapbox covered with green cloth supported the dim little photographs in crumbling frames she liked to have near her couch. She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored. With great clarity, I can see her sitting at a table and serenely considering the laid-out cards of a game of solitaire: she leans on her left elbow and presses to her cheek the free thumb of her left hand, in which, close to her mouth, she holds a cigarette, while her right hand stretches toward the next card. The double gleam on her fourth finger is two marriage rings—her own and my father’s, which, being too large for her, is fastened to hers by a bit of black thread. Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  And, really, her French was so lovely! Ought one to have minded the shallowness of her culture, the bitterness of her temper, the banality of her mind, when that pearly language of hers purled and scintillated, as innocent of sense as the alliterative sins of Racine’s pious verse? My father’s library, not her limited lore, taught me to appreciate authentic poetry; nevertheless, something of her tongue’s limpidity and luster has had a singularly bracing effect upon me, like those sparkling salts that are used to purify the blood. This is why it makes me so sad to imagine now the anguish Mademoiselle must have felt at seeing how lost, how little valued was the nightingale voice which came from her elephantine body. She stayed with us long, much too long, obstinately hoping for some miracle that would transform her into a kind of Madame de Rambouillet holding a gilt-and-satin salon of poets, princes and statesmen under her brilliant spell. She would have gone on hoping had it not been for one Lenski, a young Russian tutor, with mild myopic eyes and strong political opinions, who had been engaged to coach us in various subjects and participate in our sports. He had had several predecessors, none of whom Mademoiselle had liked, but he, as she put it, was “le comble.” While venerating my father, Lenski could not quite stomach certain aspects of our household, such as footmen and French, which last he considered an aristocratic convention of no use in a liberal’s home. On the other hand, Mademoiselle decided that if Lenski answered her point-blank questions only with short grunts (which he tried to Germanize for want of a better language), it was not because he could not understand French, but because he wished to insult her in front of everybody. I can hear and see Mademoiselle requesting him in dulcet tones, but with an ominous quiver of her upper lip, to pass her the bread; and, likewise, I can hear and see Lenski Frenchlessly and unflinchingly going on with his soup; finally, with a slashing “Pardon, monsieur,” Mademoiselle would swoop right across his plate, snatch up the breadbasket, and recoil again with a “Merci!” so charged with irony that Lenski’s downy ears would turn the hue of geraniums. “The brute! The cad! The Nihilist!” she would sob later in her room—which was no longer next to ours though still on the same floor.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, [316] and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown- personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself. He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was 'trouble back there' and he 'wanted rest.' During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practically normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion, etc., to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves. The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it ever occurred in the man's life, and that no eccentricity of character came out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the sensibilities and conduct markedly change. [317] 3. In 'mediumships' or 'possessions' the invasion and the passing away of the secondary state are both relatively abrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short—i.e., from a few minutes to a few hours. Whenever the secondary state is well developed no memory for aught that happened during it remains after the primary consciousness comes back. The subject during the secondary consciousness speaks, writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign person, and often names this foreign person and gives his history. In old times the foreign 'control' was usually a demon, and is so now in communities which favor that belief. With us he gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage. Usually he purports to be the spirit of a dead person known or unknown to those present, and the subject is then what we call a 'medium.' Mediumistic possession in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transaction. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons rested on it! The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictly correct; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith." [297] It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accurate in all its details, although it is the inessential details that suffer most change. [298] Dickens and Balzac were said to have constantly mingled their fictions with their real experiences. Every one must have known some specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even to think the truth when his autobiography was in question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference between thy real and thy fondly-imagined self! [299] 2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal alterations in the present self we have still graver disturbances. These alterations are of three main types, from the descriptive point of view. But certain cases unite features of two or more types; and our knowledge of the elements and causes of these changes of personality is so slight that the division into types must not be regarded as having any profound significance. The types are: (1) Insane delusions; (2) Alternating selves; (3) Mediumships or possessions. 1) In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which are melancholic or sanguine according to the character of the disease. But the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions of sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the patient to think that the present me is an altogether new personage. Something of this sort happens normally in the rapid expansion of the whole character, intellectual as well as volitional, which takes place after the time of puberty. The pathological cases are curious enough to merit longer notice. The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that feeling of our vitality which, because it is so perpetually present, remains in the background of our consciousness.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They reached the park. Old, slatternly women from the slums and from the East Side sat on benches, usually alone, sometimes sitting with gray-haired, matchstick men. Ladies from the big apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, vaguely and desperately elegant, were also in the park, walking their dogs; and Negro nursemaids, turning a stony face on the grown-up world, crooned anxiously into baby carriages. The Italian laborers and small-business men strolled with their families or sat beneath the trees, talking to each other; some played chess or read L’Espresso. The other Villagers sat on benches, reading—Kierkegaard was the name shouting from the paper-covered volume held by a short-cropped girl in blue jeans—or talking distractedly of abstract matters, or gossiping or laughing; or sitting still, either with an immense, invisible effort which all but shattered the benches and the trees, or else with a limpness which indicated that they would never move again. Rufus and Vivaldo—but especially Vivaldo—had known or been intimate with many of these people, so long ago, it now seemed, that it might have occurred in another life. There was something frightening about the aspect of old friends, old lovers, who had, mysteriously, come to nothing. It argued the presence of some cancer which had been operating in them, invisibly, all along and which might, now, be operating in oneself. Many people had vanished, of course, had returned to the havens from which they had fled. But many others were still visible, had turned into lushes or junkies or had embarked on a nerve-rattling pursuit of the perfect psychiatrist; were vindictively married and progenitive and fat; were dreaming the same dreams they had dreamed ten years before, clothed these in the same arguments, quoted the same masters; and dispensed, as they hideously imagined, the same charm they had possessed before their teeth began to fail and their hair began to fall. They were more hostile now than they had been, this was the loud, inescapable change in their tone and the only vitality left in their eyes. Then Vivaldo was stopped on the path by a large, good-natured girl, who was not sober. Rufus and Leona paused, waiting for him. “Your friend’s real nice,” said Leona. “He’s real natural. I feel like we known each other for years.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  Ah, yes, thought Cass, I don’t doubt it, for both of you. But suddenly she felt weary and inexplicably sad. What in the world was she doing here, and why was she needling this absurd little woman? The music changed, becoming louder and swifter and more raucous; and all their attention returned, with relief, to the dance floor. Ida and Ellis had begun a new dance; or, rather, Ida had begun a new cruelty. Ida was suddenly dancing as she had probably not danced since her adolescence, and Ellis was attempting to match her—he could certainly not be said to be leading her now, either. He tried, of course, his square figure swooping and breaking, and his little boy’s face trying hard to seem abandoned. And the harder he tried—the fool! Cass thought—the more she eluded him, the more savagely she shamed him. He was not on those terms with his body, or with hers, or anyone’s body. He moved his buttocks by will, with no faintest memory of love, no hint of grace; his thighs were merely those of a climber, his feet might have been treading grapes. He did not know what to do with his arms, which stuck out at angles to his body as though they were sectioned and controlled by strings, and also as though they had no communion with his hands—hands which had grasped and taken but never caressed. Was Ida being revenged? or was she giving him warning? Ellis’ forehead turned slick with sweat, his short, curly hair seemed to darken, Cass almost heard his breathing. Ida circled around him, in her orange dress, her legs flashing like knives, and her hips cruelly grinding. From time to time she extended to him, his fingers touched, her lean, brown, fiery hand. Others on the floor made way for them—for her: it must have seemed to Ellis that the music would never end. But the juke box fell silent, at last, and the colored lights stopped whirling, for the band was coming on again. Ida and Ellis returned to the table. The lights began to dim. Cass stood up. “Ida,” she said, “I promised to have one drink, and I have, and now I must go. I really must. Richard will kill me if I stay out any longer.” Her voice unaccountably shook, and she felt herself blushing as she said this. At the same time, she realized that Ida was in an even more dangerous mood now than she had been before her dance. “Oh, call him up,” Ida said. “Even the most faithful of wives deserves a night out.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  As no conversation was possible because of Mademoiselle’s deafness, my friend and I decided to bring her next day the appliance which we gathered she could not afford. She adjusted the clumsy thing improperly at first, but no sooner had she done so than she turned to me with a dazzled look of moist wonder and bliss in her eyes. She swore she could hear every word, every murmur of mine. She could not for, having my doubts, I had not spoken. If I had, I would have told her to thank my friend, who had paid for the instrument. Was it, then, silence she heard, that Alpine Silence she had talked about in the past? In that past, she had been lying to herself; now she was lying to me. Before leaving for Basle and Berlin, I happened to be walking along the lake in the cold, misty night. At one spot a lone light dimly diluted the darkness and transformed the mist into a visible drizzle. “Il pleut toujours en Suisse” was one of those casual comments which, formerly, had made Mademoiselle weep. Below, a wide ripple, almost a wave, and something vaguely white attracted my eye. As I came quite close to the lapping water, I saw what it was—an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat. He could not do it. The heavy, impotent flapping of his wings, their slippery sound against the rocking and plashing boat, the gluey glistening of the dark swell where it caught the light—all seemed for a moment laden with that strange significance which sometimes in dreams is attached to a finger pressed to mute lips and then pointed at something the dreamer has no time to distinguish before waking with a start. But although I soon forgot that dismal night, it was, oddly enough, that night, that compound image—shudder and swan and swell—which first came to my mind when a couple of years later I learned that Mademoiselle had died.

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

  b. When the rock was smitten by Moses the water flowed to quench the thirst of the people. As water quenches a raging flame, so the Blood of Jesus, signified by water, quenches the burning of anger, of avarice, of sinful love, and of sinful desire. St. Augustin says, ‘Write, O Lord Jesus Christ, Thy wounds on my heart in Thy Precious Blood, that I may so read in them Thy sorrow, as to bear all sorrow for Thee; and that I may so read in them Thy love, as to despise all wrong love for Thee.’ Thus it is seen that the Blood of Jesus, like water, quenches evil flames in the soul. c. Elias went in the strength of his miraculous food to the mount of God, that is Horeb. Drink carries food to the members, and moves them to go or to do; so a draught of the Blood of Jesus carries to the heart the word of God or His commandments, that all the powers of the soul and all the members of the body may live by that word, may be ruled by it, and by it may do good works. The Wise Man says that we have to eat and drink and leave childish things; that is to say, we must eat, for food, the word of God and His commandments, and drink the Blood of Jesus. Then He will bring home that commandment to our heart, our senses, and our members. So by His warning we shall leave all that is bad, and cleave to all that is good. 2. The Blood of Jesus is the wine of the Spirit. Looked at in this light it has three effects: a, it washes; b, it warms; c, it gladdens. It washes away the filth of guilt; it warms hearts with love; and it gladdens them with the sweetness of God. a. Jesus washes His garments in the blood of the grape. His garments are faithful souls in which He is clothed. We have now fellowship with God, being brought from darkness to light, for the Blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from our sins. b. In the sweet Body of Jesus, received in the Sacred Host, we eat the marrow of wheat and drink the grape’s purest blood. That Blood is pure and warm: pure, to take away all stain of sin; warm, to inflame the heart with love. The cellar of wine, spoken of in Scripture, is the Church of God, where is set forth the warm wine of the Blood of Jesus, to kindle our hearts with love for God and for our neighbour.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  There was a queen in France who had in her house- hold several young ladies of good birth, and among the rest one named Rolandine, who was her near relation. But the queen, being displeased with this young lady's father, punished the innocent for the guilty, and behaved not very well to Rolandine. Though this young lady was neither a great beauty nor the reverse, such was the propriety of her demeanour and the sweetness of her disposition, that many great lords sought her in mar- riage, but obtained no reply, for Rolandine's father was so fond of his money that he neglected the establish- ment of his daughter. On the other hand, she was so little in favour of her mistress that she was not wooed by those who wished to ingratiate themselves with the queen. Thus, through the negligence of her father and the disdain of her mistress, this poor young lady remained long unmarried. At last she took this sorely to heart, not so much from eagerness to be married, as from shame at not being so. Her grief reached such a pitch that she forsook the pomp and mundane pursuits of the court to occupy herself only with prayer and some little handiworks. In this tranquil manner she passed her youth, leading the most blameless and devout of lives. When she was approaching her thirtieth year, she became acquainted with a gentleman, a bastard of an nirdday.] QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 1 93

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY VOLUME 1 of 2 BY WILLIAM JAMES A Digireads.com Book Digireads.com Publishing Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3822-7 Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-1674-4 This edition copyright © 2011 Please visit www.digireads.com ABOUT THE AUTHOR WILLIAM JAMES William James was a man who had a profound influence in the 19th century in the fields of both philosophy and psychology. Being a physician, he contributed to the growing field of psychology in its earliest days, assisting to certain branches of the field such as behaviorism, clinical psychology, and others. Another notable contribution of his was to religious psychology. Additionally, he conformed to the school of thought known as pragmatism, making multiple commentaries and notes on the subject. Even towards the end of his life, he had significant influence on other pioneers of the fields of psychology and philosophy. William James was born January 11, 1842 in New York City. His siblings included Henry, who would go on to become a prominent writer of novels, and Alice, who would posthumously become famous for her diary writings. He also had two other younger brothers. James and his brothers and sister received a fine education, being taught in trans-Atlantic schools and becoming fluent in languages such as French and German. The family would often takes trips across the Atlantic for vacation in Europe, and these types of trips would continue for the young William into his adulthood. Originally, the young boy pursued artistic endeavors, gaining an apprenticeship at a Rhode Island studio in Newport. This interest waned over time, and by the age of 19, he had decided to pursue a more active role in the scientific community by enrolling in college at Harvard University's Lawrence Scientific School. As a young adult, James was plagued with a number of physical illnesses. He suffered a wide array of symptoms and was diagnosed as having a condition known as neurasthenia. Neurasthenia, though no longer an included diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, included symptoms such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, digestive disorders, and headaches, among other symptoms. James often suffered from bouts of depression in his young adulthood, contemplating suicide at some points. This ailment came on at the start of America's Civil War, and though two of his other brothers enlisted, William did not, citing his neurasthenia as the cause. This period in his life very likely had a profound impact on his eventual contribution to the field of psychology. While still in college, James began studying the field of medicine in 1864. He took a break the following year to join an expedition along the Amazon.

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

  Then Billy’s world caved in. “I’m tired of full-time mothering,” his mom told me during our first interview, five months after the separation. Young and attractive, Billy’s mother started dating the minute her husband packed his bags and within weeks was spending all her time with Tom, the man she would later marry. “Billy adores Tom,” she exclaimed. In fact, Billy and his mother spent most of that first summer visiting Tom in Petaluma where Tom owns a sporting goods store, away from Billy’s friends and regular summer activities. “All Billy does is sit home on the couch and mope,” she said. “It drives me nuts. The more he demands my attention, the more obnoxious he gets. I’ve devoted my life to this child,” she said earnestly, leaning toward me. “He has to realize that I need a life of my own!” Billy’s mother was a gregarious woman who was an accomplished amateur musician. His father, a native Australian, built a successful restaurant franchise and spent the rest of his time engaged in his true passion, racquet sports. The parents had an active social life but maintained predictable routines at home for Billy. When they went out in the evenings, Billy was cared for by a retired nurse whom he had known all his life. One of the only times that Billy came out of his shell during our first interview together was when I asked if it was hard for him to miss so much school. He looked at me sharply and then his eyes fell on the bony little hands tightly laced in his lap. In a low voice, he muttered, “Mom made it okay. We used to do things together.” “What sorts of things?” Billy huddled into his parka. He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then he said, softly, “We had games we played only on those days. We’d use my spelling words and it was really fun to learn them that way. We made multiplication dominos and I knew all the times tables up to twelve even before third grade ended. We read the kid’s National Geographic and made up stories to go with it. And we had big maps of imaginary worlds that we kept adding to and coloring.” His voice trailed off and he looked very sad. “That sounds wonderful!” I said, glad to have found a topic that evoked some interest in him. Billy looked at me almost angrily and again twisted his hands. “Yeah, but she doesn’t do it anymore.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  If Lenski happened to come tripping downstairs while, with an asthmatic pause every ten steps or so, she was working her way up (for the little hydraulic elevator of our house in St. Petersburg would constantly, and rather insultingly, refuse to function), Mademoiselle maintained that he had viciously bumped into her, pushed her, knocked her down, and we already could see him trampling her prostrate body. More and more frequently she would leave the table, and the dessert she would have missed was diplomatically sent up in her wake. From her remote room she would write a sixteen-page letter to my mother, who, upon hurrying upstairs, would find her dramatically packing her trunk. And then, one day, she was allowed to go on with her packing. 7She returned to Switzerland. World War One came, then the Revolution. In the early twenties, long after our correspondence had fizzled out, by a fluke move of life in exile I chanced to visit Lausanne with a college friend of mine, so I thought I might as well look up Mademoiselle, if she were still alive. She was. Stouter than ever, quite gray and almost totally deaf, she welcomed me with a tumultuous outburst of affection. Instead of the Château de Chillon picture, there was now one of a garish troika. She spoke as warmly of her life in Russia as if it were her own lost homeland. Indeed, I found in the neighborhood quite a colony of such old Swiss governesses. Huddled together in a constant seething of competitive reminiscences, they formed a small island in an environment that had grown alien to them. Mademoiselle’s bosom friend was now mummy-like Mlle Golay, my mother’s former governess, still prim and pessimistic at eighty-five; she had remained in our family long after my mother had married, and her return to Switzerland had preceded only by a couple of years that of Mademoiselle, with whom she had not been on speaking terms when both had been living under our roof. One is always at home in one’s past, which partly explains those pathetic ladies’ posthumous love for a remote and, to be perfectly frank, rather appalling country, which they never had really known and in which none of them had been very content.

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

  I was shocked to discover that many of the lasting bad marriages in this group were as troubled or more troubled that the marriages their parents had escaped. Their problems may have been different but their unhappiness was not. If the goal of the parent who had left the marriage decades ago was to safeguard the children, then I’m sorry to say they failed. Many of the still married but unhappy couples were mutually addicted to drugs and alcohol. There were sexual difficulties and some violence. We saw both infidelity and serious sexual inhibitions. One young woman who stayed in her marriage cut off all sexual relations after the birth of their two children. Apparently her husband accepted the ban. Another woman told me, “We don’t talk to each other. We don’t tell each other anything personal. We don’t make demands on the other.” One unhappy wife allowed her husband to bring his lovers into their bedroom. There was never any mention of divorce in these homes. The man and woman decided to settle for what they had. Who were the women who stayed in these poor marriages? I can’t put my finger on any one trait but I can say that they all shared low expectations of themselves and of marriage. Several grew up in chaotic, violent families. Some maintained the caregiver role they’d learned in childhood; the husband was a stand-in for the mother or father or both. One woman from a seemingly stable postdivorce family who maintained close contact with both parents married a man who criticizes her constantly for her sexual frigidity and humiliated her for “doing nothing right.” Her mother told me twenty-five years earlier that these were her husband’s complaints. A few of the women had devoted stepfathers, but somehow this did not brighten their expectations of marriage. Many had been very young when their parents divorced and grew up like Paula, feeling lonely and driven to sexual frenzy. The women who married early and then divorced tell similar stories about drug and alcohol abuse, low expectations, and anxieties about leaving the marriage. At their core, the bad marriages that lasted and those that ended in divorce all looked pretty much alike. But the women who did leave finally said “enough.” The decision to divorce was fraught with anxiety because these women had few resources and little money to start over again. They did not expect to get child support. Paula will shed more light on this aspect of the story in the next chapter.

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

  The mother’s advances in education and in employment and her very human need for adult love and play all enhanced her life and took her more and more away from the lives of her children. While highly valuing education and strictly demanding that her daughters do well in school, Paula’s mother was rarely there to oversee or to help with schoolwork. She did not notice, and her daughters didn’t tell her, when they were having problems or difficulties. Notes from the school were left crumpled in backpacks. This mother was present so little at the school that several teachers reported that they barely knew who she was. Paula and Joan were not encouraged to participate in after-school activities, nor would their mom have been able to attend extracurricular events. While friends were driven to piano and ballet lessons, Paula and Joan continued to walk home to an empty house. Being bright children, they got passing grades in school and learned to get by without getting into trouble that would call the teacher’s attention to them. (A depressed child often goes unnoticed in school, especially if she is doing passing work.) What was missing was the feeling that their efforts were noticed and valued. Lost was a sense that their progress as children—learning to study, acquiring an excitement in learning, developing special talents and having talent appreciated and fostered—really mattered. They learned to comply with adult demands but without a growing inner sense of confidence and direction. When their marriages fail there is no way most mothers can maintain the same level of physical and emotional involvement with their children. As Paula and every other young child of divorce told me, the biggest loss they faced was the loss of their mother. One day she was there, giving hugs of encouragement, fetching and carrying as needed, and the next day she was out the door, giving orders as she exited. For young children, the sudden loss of mommy’s attention is unimaginably traumatic—akin to slowly freezing after being plucked from a warm, balmy climate. Your mother is your whole world. She provides food and comfort. Under her watchful approval, you experience growth and joy in your own development. And then you’re placed in the care of strangers. Tragically, in their thankless task of providing everything to keep the family afloat, mothers often lose the ability to keep their primary emotional investment in their children. The focus of divorce policy and intervention has centered on the loss of the father, which is profound for many divorced children. But the loss of a mother pervades and forever changes the way a child, especially a young child, experiences the world. For the preschool children in our study the loss of their mother was central and their suffering was enduring. Twenty-five years later they cried as they remembered, “My mother was really not there.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Having named two sources of opposition, that from seducers, and that from enemies, He adds a third, that from false brethren; And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. See Paul bewailing these same things, Without were fightings, within were fears; (2 Cor. 7:5. 2 Cor. 11:26. v. 13.) and in another place; In perils among false brethren, of whom he says, Such are false Apostles, deceitful workers. REMIGIUS. As the capture of Jerusalem approached, many rose up, calling themselves Christians, and deceived many; such Paul calls false brethren, John Antichrists. HILARY. Such was Nicolaus, one of the seven deacons, who led astray many by his pretences. And Simon Magus who, armed with diabolic works and words, perverted many by false miracles. CHRYSOSTOM. And He adds, what is still more cruel, that such false Prophets shall have no alleviation in charity; Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. REMIGIUS. That is, true love towards God and our neighbour, in proportion as each surrenders himself to iniquity, in that proportion will the flame of charity in his heart be extinguished. JEROME. Observe, He says, the love of many, (Rom. 8:35.) not ‘of all,’ for in the Apostles, and those like them, love would continue, as Paul speaks, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? REMIGIUS. Whoso shall endure unto the end, i. e. to the end of his life; for whoso to the end of his life shall persevere in the confession of the name of Christ, and in love, he shall be saved. CHRYSOSTOM. Then that they should not say, How then shall we live among so many evils? He promises not only that they should live, but that they should teach every where. And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world. REMIGIUS. For the Lord knew that the hearts of the disciples would be made sad by the destruction of Jerusalem, and overthrow of their nation, and He therefore comforts them with a promise that more of the Gentiles should believe than of the Jews should perish.