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 White Oleander (1999)

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

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

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

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

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

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

  I wanted to keep running. But in actuality, my resistance was keeping me running in the opposite direction of love. ACCEPTING LOSS The hardest thing for any of us to accept is loss, especially when it comes to the death of someone we love or even our own mortality. As we’ve explored, allowing the pain of our losses is how we ultimately start feeling alive again. We may never “get over it.” But over time, we become more adept at breathing again and moving forward. As grief expert David Kessler writes: We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. This is not an easy process, but I agree wholeheartedly with Kessler. Accepting whatever reality we’re in—no more summer boat rides together, no more inside jokes, no more random dance parties—is necessary to being fully present. If you find that you’re still not ready to accept what’s going on in your life right now, no judgment here. As valuable as acceptance is, there are going to be times when you’re just not there. And that’s OK, too. If this is the case, I love the following insight from trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté: “Acceptance also means accepting how downright difficult it can be to accept.” Accept that it’s really hard to accept and then stay open to accepting someday . And that’s enough for now. As his health hung in the balance, Dad was instrumental in teaching me even more about the power of acceptance. He gave me a trail of bread crumbs to follow as I watched him become softer and more selfaccepting—finally allowing himself to believe that he was good enough and had done a good enough job at parenting, working, friendship, marriage, and life. He stopped being so embarrassed by his bald head and, in particular, about his overall appearance. Did he accept that he was going to die? I think so, because at a certain point, even the smallest things became worthy of celebration. In Chapter 1 , I talked about surrender and acceptance interchangeably, which, in a lot of ways, I think they are. Surrender and acceptance are the twin flames of leaning into our lives as they are. The main distinction, as I see it, is that acceptance happens in the head space, while surrender happens in the heart space.

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

  Enter the Bioré strips. Within a few weeks, Dad would be cremated. Yet here he was, caring for his pores and himself. Not because he wanted to look good for anyone else but because he wanted to look and feel good for himself. It made me think of those Tibetan sand mandalas. A team of Buddhist monks tirelessly work building colorful geometric sand designs in intricate detail. The mandalas represent many things, including our journey from ignorance to enlightenment. Once the mandala is done, and the ceremonies and public viewings are over, the monks destroy the beautiful work of art by sweeping it away—signifying that nothing lasts forever. In this way, our bodies are like mandalas, too. Beautiful. Intricate. Full of wisdom, and, despite their fragility, worthy of spiffing until our very last breath. DR. PORN AND HOSPICE Mom called and asked me if I could come over and give her a break. “I’d love to take a shower and actually find the time to blow-dry my hair. Can you take care of Dad?” It never ceased to amaze me how little it took for her to recharge and “feel like a new woman.” Once I got there, Dad and I picked up where we left off in our game of gin rummy. We usually only got a few turns in before he nodded off. Just then the doorbell rang, and there was the hospice doctor. This was the first time I had met him. I invited him in and steadied myself and my COVID mask for the conversation about Dad’s status. The pandemic was good for one thing: those damn masks helped me hide my quivering lips whenever I was attempting to choke back tears. (Having become more emotionally brave, I’d retired the anchovies and dead mice by then.) “We’re going to take good care of you, Ken,” the doctor said. “And we’re going to make sure that you’re comfortable, but at this point you know we can’t fix the disease, right?” “Yes, I do, Doctor,” Dad replied, as I could feel the tears welling. “Now is a good time to tie up any loose ends, too. Have you sorted out your will yet?” “Yes, I’m all set there.” “Have you chosen if you want to be buried or cremated?” “Yes. I’ve decided to be cremated.” “Are you religious?” “I follow my own path with that.” “Well, if you want to see the chaplain, just let us know and we’ll send him.” You got this, Kris. You got this. Hold fast. Damn, this was rough. “What about porn?” My sorrow instantly shut down. Dad looked stunned, so the doctor continued, “While you can still get around with your walker, you might want to get rid of it if you have any. This way no one else will have to deal with it after you’re gone.”

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

  Alexithymia: No Words for FeelingsI had a widowed aunt with a painful trauma history who became an honorary grandmother to our children. She came on frequent visits that were marked by much doing—making curtains, rearranging kitchen shelves, sewing children’s clothes—and very little talking. She was always eager to please, but it was difficult to figure out what she enjoyed. After several days of exchanging pleasantries, conversation would come to a halt, and I’d have to work hard to fill the long silences. On the last day of her visits I’d drive her to the airport, where she’d give me a stiff good-bye hug while tears streamed down her face. Without a trace of irony she’d then complain that the cold wind at Logan International Airport made her eyes water. Her body felt the sadness that her mind couldn’t register—she was leaving our young family, her closest living relatives. Psychiatrists call this phenomenon alexithymia—Greek for not having words for feelings. Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean. They may look furious but deny that they are angry; they may appear terrified but say that they are fine. Not being able to discern what is going on inside their bodies causes them to be out of touch with their needs, and they have trouble taking care of themselves, whether it involves eating the right amount at the right time or getting the sleep they need. Like my aunt, alexithymics substitute the language of action for that of emotion. When asked, “How would you feel if you saw a truck coming at you at eighty miles per hour?” most people would say, “I’d be terrified” or “I’d be frozen with fear.” An alexithymic might reply, “How would I feel? I don’t know.…I’d get out of the way.”[18] They tend to register emotions as physical problems rather than as signals that something deserves their attention. Instead of feeling angry or sad, they experience muscle pain, bowel irregularities, or other symptoms for which no cause can be found. About three quarters of patients with anorexia nervosa, and more than half of all patients with bulimia, are bewildered by their emotional feelings and have great difficulty describing them.[19] When researchers showed pictures of angry or distressed faces to people with alexithymia, they could not figure out what those people were feeling.[20]

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

  I marveled at how dressed up he looked in his wingtips and crisp button-down shirt. In his words, “You have to look spiffy for these things.” He was still groggy as we were leaving the hospital. Seeing him looking so vulnerable was foreign territory. It reduced me to feeling like a little girl trying to imagine what a grown-up would do in this situation. How should I act? What should I say? “I’m sorry your rock is a little wobbly right now,” Dad whispered as I held his arm to steady his balance. I dug my nails into my palms to shove my tears back into their ducts. “You have absolutely nothing to be sorry about, Dad. I’m lucky to be your rock for a change.” We sat quietly on a bench, our faces warmed by the sun, as we waited for my mom to bring the car around. After a bit, Dad turned to me with tears in his eyes. “I don’t like being in this cancer club, but if there’s anyone I’d want to be in it with, it’s you.” “Ditto, Dad,” I said. “I hate that you’re in the club with me, but we’ll do this together.” That I was sure of. THE QUESTION ISN’T WHY—IT’S WHAT Dad getting cancer didn’t make any sense. It was the summer of 2016, and he had been feeling great, working out with a trainer, and in very good shape for a 67-year-old man. His body was lean, his diet was healthy, and he was actively managing his stress better by learning to meditate (thanks to my mom). I couldn’t help but ask, Why Dad? The difficult thing I’ve learned about getting caught up in the “why” of any curveball is that this question is rarely answered. But I get it. It’s hard for us humans to accept that there are many things we don’t know, can’t know, or may never know. Instead, we like to fill in the mystery with our own clever, overactive imaginations. In fact, it’s one of the things our brains are designed to do—look at the past and scan it for clues in order to create risk assessments. The more we’re able to troubleshoot, the better chance we have at survival. The problem is, when our brains don’t have enough data, they can get anxious and make shit up. Cue the cuckoo—or is that just me? In the early days of my own diagnosis, I wondered what I had done to cause my cancer. Was I too angry or moody? Did I eat too many processed foods or enjoy a little too much cocaine in the ’90s? Perhaps it was karma for sending an adult sex toys catalog to my uptight school principal?

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Twenty-seven names for tears?” A guard made a motion toward us, and she quickly dropped my wrist. She stood and kissed me on the cheek, embraced me lightly. We were the same height but I could feel how strong she was, she was like the cables that held up bridges. She hissed in my ear, “All I can say is, keep your bags packed.” CLAIRE STARED out at the road. A tear slipped from her overfilled eyes. Twenty- seven names for tears. But no, that wasn’t my thought. I refused to be brainwashed. This was Claire. I put my hand on her shoulder as she made the turn onto the rural highway. She smiled and patted it with her small, cold one. “I think I did well with your mom, don’t you?” “You did,” I told her, gazing out the window so I wouldn’t have to lie to her face. “She really liked you.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and I brushed it away with the back of my hand. “What did she say to you?” Claire shook her head, sighed. She started the windshield wipers, though it was only a mist, turned them off when they started squeaking on the dry glass. “She said I was right about Ron. That he was having an affair. I knew it anyway. She just confirmed it.” “How would she know,” I said angrily. “For God’s sake, Claire, she just met you.” “All the signs are there.” She sniffled, wiped her nose on her hand. “I just didn’t want to see them.” But then she smiled. “Don’t concern yourself. We’ll work it out.” I SAT AT MY DESK under the ridiculous pyramid, drawing my self-portrait, looking in a hand mirror. I was doing it in pen, not glancing down, trying not to lift the pen from the paper. One line. The squarish jaw, the fat unsmiling lips, the round reproachful eyes. Broad Danish nose, mane of pale hair. I drew myself until I could make a good likeness even with my eyes closed, until I’d memorized the pattern of the movement in my hand, in my arm, the gesture of my face, until I could see my face on the wall. I’m not you, Mother. I’m not. Claire was supposed to go to an audition. She had told Ron she would, but she had me call in and say she was sick. She was soaking in the bathtub with her lavender oil and a chunk of amethyst, trying to soothe her jagged edges. Ron was supposed to be home on Friday, but something came up. His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.

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

  The challenge for people like Ute is to become alert and engaged, a difficult but unavoidable task if they want to recapture their lives. (Ute herself did recover—she wrote a book about her experiences and started a successful journal called Mental Fitness.) This is where a bottom-up approach to therapy becomes essential. The aim is actually to change the patient’s physiology, his or her relationship to bodily sensations. At the Trauma Center we work with such basic measures as heart rate and breathing patterns. We help patients evoke and notice bodily sensations by tapping acupressure[19] points. Rhythmic interactions with other people are also effective—tossing a beach ball back and forth, bouncing on a Pilates ball, drumming, or dancing to music. Numbing is the other side of the coin in PTSD. Many untreated trauma survivors start out like Stan, with explosive flashbacks, then numb out later in life. While reliving trauma is dramatic, frightening, and potentially self-destructive, over time a lack of presence can be even more damaging. This is a particular problem with traumatized children. The acting-out kids tend to get attention; the blanked-out ones don’t bother anybody and are left to lose their future bit by bit. Learning to Live in the PresentThe challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past but, even more, enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience. One reason that traumatic memories become dominant in PTSD is that it’s so difficult to feel truly alive right now. When you can’t be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive—even if those places are filled with horror and misery. Many treatment approaches for traumatic stress focus on desensitizing patients to their past, with the expectation that reexposure to their traumas will reduce emotional outbursts and flashbacks. I believe that this is based on a misunderstanding of what happens in traumatic stress. We must most of all help our patients to live fully and securely in the present. In order to do that, we need to help bring those brain structures that deserted them when they were overwhelmed by trauma back. Desensitization may make you less reactive, but if you cannot feel satisfaction in ordinary everyday things like taking a walk, cooking a meal, or playing with your kids, life will pass you by. Chapter 5Body-Brain Connections Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood. We are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are. —Mickey Hart

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

  In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women.[8] Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.”[9] In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being. In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships. As we now know, war is not the only calamity that leaves human lives in ruins. While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop serious posttraumatic problems,[10] the majority of Americans experience a violent crime at some time during their lives, and more accurate reporting has revealed that twelve million women in the United States have been victims of rape. More than half of all rapes occur in girls below age fifteen.[11] For many people the war begins at home: Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect. One million of these cases are serious and credible enough to force local child protective services or the courts to take action.[12] In other words, for every soldier who serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes. This is particularly tragic, since it is very difficult for growing children to recover when the source of terror and pain is not enemy combatants but their own caretakers.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I feel the magic of my own house lulling me. We all sit by the fire. This is the moment when the house diffuses a charm, and the fire melts one’s nerves. I can sit complete, as though I were part of a mural. Their admiration and love is sweet to me. I lose my sense of secrecy. I open the iron boxes and show them my early journals. Fred grasps the first volume and begins to cry and laugh over it. I have given Henry the red journal, all about himself, a thing I have never done with anyone. I read over his shoulder. Henry and I are waiting for the train on a high platform. The rain has washed the trees. The earth pours out essences like a woman a man has ploughed and seeded. Our bodies draw close. At the moment I do not think of how June and I stood pressed against each other in the same way. I think of it now because yesterday, for the first time, he hurt me, although I was prepared for his sarcasm and ridicule. I knew about his love of finding defects, because of all he had written about June. We were reading my red journal. He came to an entry where Fred had said that I was beautiful. “You see,” said Henry. “Fred thinks you are beautiful. I don’t. I think you have great charm, yes.” I was sitting close to him. I looked at him with bewilderment and then swiftly put my head on the pillow and cried. When he put his hand on my face and felt the tears, he was amazed. “Oh, Anaïs, I never thought that could mean anything to you. I hate myself for having said it so cruelly. But you remember, I also told you I didn’t think June was beautiful. The most powerful women have not been the most beautiful. But to think I could make you cry, that I could do that, when it is one thing I never wanted to do to YOU. ” He now sat in front of me, and I lay sunk in the pillows, hair rumpled and eyes swimming in tears. At that moment I remembered what the painters thought of me, and I told him. And suddenly I kicked him. I pawed him, like a cat, he said. And when that was over, which amused him, we felt strangely closer, until I said teasingly, in the train—because he was telling me that he had thought me beautiful the first day he had seen me, but had begun to think not because Fred insisted on it so much; and because of June, too—I said, “You’ve got bad taste!”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After attending to the morning’s minor chores, after lunching and then resting for our siesta, we always went out to a big clearing in the heart of the wood. The place itself was very beautiful, if I can judge from details that occur to me even today. The forest guarded it jealously, drawn tight all around it with wonderful ancient oak trees that rose to mingle their branches in a vault above us. The light filtered through the leaves and was scattered in a greenish haze that shifted gradually to the tender pink of the heather and the purple of wild mint that grew all over the ground in this huge natural palace. But even today the tart scent of mint and the smell of honey and heather still make me feel sick at my stomach; the mere sight of little boats made of cork or of wooden canes such as we used to carve all day long, like invalids or prisoners in institutions, fills me with a sadness that cuts me off from the world. A wave of anguish sometimes comes over me quite suddenly in the course of conversation with someone who is in other respects quite indifferent to me; then I discover an odor, a color, a fragment of some object that has reminded me of those hateful afternoons. I developed the habit of secretly wandering away from my companions and the clearing in the wood. As soon as I no longer heard their voices clearly, I was even more lonely, but at last able to weep over my own loneliness. I wept bitter tears, my breathing interrupted by my gasps as I allowed myself an orgy of pity for myself and my own powerlessness. My Christian companions had at least one event that came to interrupt the monotony of those days — I mean Sunday morning mass. I was surprised to note that I no longer knew the days of the week, though I had been accustomed never to be wrong on this point. Sunday mass brought order into the week of the Christians: as early as Saturday night, they were aroused from their weekday apathy. They had managed to obtain permission, on that day, to remain in the camp in order to brush and press their clothes and take their weekly baths. I envied them their preoccupations, their awareness of the importance of the moment. The next morning, close to the dormitory, we watched the believers gather in a small group. Their hair shiny with lotion, their clean shirts, everything about them conspired to make them at the same time unusually excited and quiet. On their return from the village where they attended mass, well after noon, they would describe to us with interest everything that they had seen. As for us, our Sunday morning was made different only by their gaiety.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I studied at a little dressing table which I covered with thick layers of newspaper to smooth its broken marble top and to avoid touching the cold stone surface which I detested. Each time I raised my eyes from my notebook, I met my own face in the broken mirror. I can see once more, in the wintry semidarkness, a thin boy with a long neck and hectic black eyes, his hair tousled by his nervous fingers; he had to put two cushions on his low stool in order to reach the high dressing table. I loved to study by myself and to ask the mirror who I was and what my face promised. From having worked before the glass all through my adolescence, much of it has remained vivid in my memory. Night fell early but, for the sake of economy, my mother was always late in lighting the tiny lamp that strained my eyes and made me nearsighted. To this day, I still experience real anguish from that yellow light. When I roam at night in poor neighborhoods and peep indiscreetly through their feebly-lighted windows, I am overcome by the painful memory of a crazily furnished flat with distant corners that the light could never reach. When my father came home, he noisily threw the big store key on the marble-topped dresser. Then he flung himself heavily on the creaking bed. Climbing the stairs had worn him out. He didn’t speak, nor did anyone else dare to speak until his breathing whistled less loudly. Since he never came home for lunch, we managed to forget him during the day; but seeing him each evening like this, glum and broken, was a poignant reminder of how hard his life was. His asthma attacks grew more and more frequent, more and more violent, and the idea of death began to torment him. In silence, we felt guilty as we watched him suffer. He left the house at seven in the morning, winter and summer, and worked without a break until night had fallen. When the days were too short, he managed to work longer by the light of a large oil lamp. The youngest among us always brought my father’s lunch to the shop; we had all had our turn at bringing the meal which not only turned cold on the way but arrived — meat, salad, and bread — jolted into one messy dish. We had often suggested he buy a little stove to heat his meal; but he always refused, rejecting any improvement in his life, as if he were too trapped to hope for any relief.

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

  The results were unambiguous: Compared with girls of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and self-mutilation. They dropped out of high school at a higher rate than the control group and had more major illnesses and health-care utilization. They also showed abnormalities in their stress hormone responses, had an earlier onset of puberty, and accumulated a host of different, seemingly unrelated, psychiatric diagnoses. The follow-up research revealed many details of how abuse affects development. For example, each time they were assessed, the girls in both groups were asked to talk about the worst thing that had happened to them during the previous year. As they told their stories, the researchers observed how upset they became, while measuring their physiology. During the first assessment all the girls reacted by becoming distressed. Three years later, in response to the same question, the nonabused girls once again displayed signs of distress, but the abused girls shut down and became numb. Their biology matched their observable reactions: During the first assessment all of the girls showed an increase in the stress hormone cortisol; three years later cortisol went down in the abused girls as they reported on the most stressful event of the past year. Over time the body adjusts to chronic trauma. One of the consequences of numbing is that teachers, friends, and others are not likely to notice that a girl is upset; she may not even register it herself. By numbing out she no longer reacts to distress the way she should, for example, by taking protective action. Putnam’s study also captured the pervasive long-term effects of incest on friendships and partnering. Before the onset of puberty nonabused girls usually have several girlfriends, as well as one boy who functions as a sort of spy who informs them about what these strange creatures, boys, are all about. After they enter adolescence, their contacts with boys gradually increase. In contrast, before puberty the abused girls rarely have close friends, girls or boys, but adolescence brings many chaotic and often traumatizing contacts with boys. Lacking friends in elementary school makes a crucial difference. Today we’re aware how cruel third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade girls can be. It’s a complex and rocky time when friends can suddenly turn on one another and alliances dissolve in exclusions and betrayals. But there is an upside: By the time girls get to middle school, most have begun to master a whole set of social skills, including being able to identify what they feel, negotiating relationships with others, pretending to like people they don’t, and so on. And most of them have built a fairly steady support network of girls who become their stress-debriefing team. As they slowly enter the world of sex and dating, these relationships give them room for reflection, gossip, and discussion of what it all means.

• From Bluets (2009)

  99. After a few months in the hospital, my injured friend is visited by a fellow quadriparalytic as part of an out-reach program. From her bed she asks him, If I remain paralyzed, how long will it take for my injury to feel like a normal part of my life? At least five years, he told her. As of next month, she will be at three. 100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed. 101. “The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to,” says a character in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants . After reading this I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between “a blinding, bad time” and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of my friends—I imagine that most Americans would give themselves about a year, maybe two, before they castigated themselves into some form of yanking up the bootstraps. On September 21, 2001, for example, George Bush II told the country that the time for grief had passed, and the time for resolute action had taken its place. 102. After my friend’s accident I take care of her. It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain. For two years, to get her in and out of her wheelchair, we have to perform a complicated maneuver called “the transfer.” “The transfer” often sends her legs into excruciating spasms, during which time all I can do is press down on them and say, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, until the shaking stops. She has diffuse nerve pain along the surface of her skin which no doctor understands, pain she says makes her skin feel like crinkly, burning Saran Wrap. We look at her skin together as she describes this pain. 103. When the pain is bad it drains her color. When it breaks through the drugs, of which there are many, she says it feels like a scrim goes up between her and the rest of the world. In my mind’s eye, I imagine it as an invisible jacket of burn hovering between us.

• From Bluets (2009)

  5. But first, let us consider a sort of case in reverse. In 1867, after a long bout of solitude, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: “These last months have been terrifying. My Thought has thought itself through and reached a Pure Idea. What the rest of me has suffered during that long agony, is indescribable.” Mallarmé described this agony as a battle that took place on God’s “boney wing.” “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth,” he told Cazalis with exhausted satisfaction. Eventually Mallarmé began replacing “le ciel” with “l’Azur” in his poems, in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations. “Fortunately,” he wrote Cazalis, “I am quite dead now.” 6. The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain. 7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature—in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)—that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you. 9. So please do not write to tell me about any more beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty. 10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  The sadness I experience as I listen to him shows how deeply his songs and sweetness have receded for me, into a past linked to the present hour only by the continuity of memories. Memories alone hold Hugo and me together; and my journal preserves them. Oh, to be able to leap forward without this web around me. Index The following abbreviations are used in this index : AN = Anaïs Nin HM = Henry Miller JM = June Edith Miller A Age d’Or (film by Buñurel), 11 Albertine disparue (Proust), 13 , 91 Allendy, René Félix (Dr.), 140 , 158 , 182 , 186 , 204 , 216 AN’s analysis with, 115–17 , 125 , 128–34 , 138–39 , 144–45 , 156–57 , 159–60 , 162 , 165–67 , 172–77 , 189–90 , 194–98 , 206 , 231 , 235 , 238 , 246 , 258–60 , 262 , 268–69 , 271 AN’s meetings with, 161 , 197–98 , 249–50 , 253–56 AN’s seduction of, 238–39 , 243–47 , 249–52 , 257–58 as Eduardo’s psychoanalyst, 96 , 105 , 107 , 113 , 115–17 on frigidity, 130 , 173 , 176–77 and HM, 114 , 129–30 , 227–30 , 238–39 , 241 , 268 as Hugo’s psychoanalyst, 246–47 , 250 , 253 , 254 , 257 , 260–61 , 264 , 266–67 on women, 188 , 194 , 237 Allendy, Yvonne, 165–66 , 172 B Bald, Wambly, 50 Blue Angel (film), 11 Buñuel, Luis, 10 C Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 108 Cocteau, Jean, 75 Collazo, Ramiro, 257 “Count Bruga” (puppet), 29 , 32 , 48 D Debussy, Claude, 49 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 5 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 88–89 , 126–27 , 210 212 HM likened to, 116 , 135 Drake, Lawrence, 6–10 , 12 , 14 , 21 Drugs, 21 , 25 , 28 , 34 , 179 , 201–2 , 206 , 207 E Eduardo. See Sánchez, Eduardo Emilia (AN’s maid), 18 , 37–38 , 49 , 121 , 264 Erskine, John, 58 , 75 , 98 , 140 , 182 , 232 , 246 , 247 , 249 , 253 , 260 and AN’s earlier diaries, vii , 41 , 49 , 149 influence of, on AN, 8 , 50 , 111 , 119 , 122 , 129 prank involving letter from, 216–18 F Faithfulness. See also Love: and passion AN on, 12 , 25 , 55 , 107 , 111 , 120 , 141 , 159 , 192–93 , 202 , 217 , 229 , 230 , 250 HM on, 102 , 107 , 147–48 , 230 Father. See Nin y Castellanos, Joaquin J. Femmes fatales, 135 , 146 , 173–74 Fraenkel, Michael, 160 , 161–62 , 212 France, Anatole, 127 Frank, Waldo, 11 Fred.

• From Bluets (2009)

  196. I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is “the fucking.” Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool. “Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!” Goethe wrote years after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther . Sei Sh ō nagon felt similarly: “Whatever people may think of my book,” she wrote after her pillow book gained fame and notoriety, “I still regret that it ever came to light.” 197. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. “No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness,” wrote Williams. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too. 198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns. 199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). 200. “You cannot step into the same river twice”—a heartening anthem, without a doubt. But really this is but one version of the fragment left behind by Heraclitus, who was justly nicknamed “The Riddler” or “The Obscure.” Other versions: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow”; “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not”; “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on.” It seems that something is staying the same here, but what? 201. I believe in the possibility—the inevitability, even—of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” But I also sense something in Heraclitus’s fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrified cheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity.

• From Bluets (2009)

  236. Do not be overly troubled by this fact. “Nine days out of ten,” wrote Merleau-Ponty of Cézanne, “all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.” 237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days. 238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.” 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light. (2003–2006) Credits THE PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Rebecca Baron, Joshua Beckman, Brian Blanchfield (aka Student Blue), Mike Bryant, Lap-Chi Chu, Christina Crosby, Cort Day, Annie Dillard, Doug Goodwin, George Hambrecht, Christian Hawkey, Wayne Koestenbaum, Aaron Kunin, PJ Mark (aka Balarama), Anthony McCann, Sean Nevin, Martín Plot, Janet Sarbanes, Mady Schutzman, Matthew Sharpe, Craig Tracy (who supplied the ink), and my dearest Harry (who brought the light) . THE PRINCIPAL SUPPLIERS Ludwig Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake . OTHER SUPPLIERS American Folk Art Museum; David Batchelor , Chromophobia; Victoria Finlay , Color: A Natural History of the Palette; John Gage , Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction; Michel Pastoureau , Blue: The History of a Color; Patrick Trevor-Roper , The World through Blunted Sight; The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online); Vermont Studio Center . OTHER APPEARANCES Some of these propositions first appeared, in various forms, in Black Clock, The Canary, The Hat, and MiPOesias. Grateful acknowledgment to their editors . DEDICATION For Lily Mazzarella first and forever princess of blue . BIOGRAPHY Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007; winner of the 2008 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship) and The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007; named a Notable Book of the Year by the State of Michigan). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). A recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she currently teaches on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, and lives in Los Angeles .

• From Bluets (2009)

  75. Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. 76. At one point in history, to approximate the color of ultramarine, which comes from lapis, which for quite some time was available in only one mine, in what we now call Afghanistan— Sar-e-Sang, the Place of the Stone— and had to be journeyed out via hundreds of miles of treacherous trade roads, Westerners would churn up cheaper pigments with blood and copper. Generally speaking we don’t do this anymore. We don’t store our oils in the bladders of pigs. We go to the store. If we want to know what a phosphene is, we don’t mash our fists into our eyes. We Google the word. If you’re depressed, you take a pill. Some of these pills are bright blue. If you’re lonely, there’s a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey’s. He has posted a photograph to prove it. 77. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau). 78. Once I traveled to the Tate in London to see the blue paintings of Yves Klein, who invented and patented his own shade of ultramarine, International Klein Blue ( IKB ), then painted canvases and objects with it throughout a period of his life he dubbed “l’epoque bleue.” Standing in front of these blue paintings, or propositions, at the Tate, feeling their blue radiate out so hotly that it seemed to be touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs, I wrote but one phrase in my notebook: too much . I had come all this way, and I could barely look. Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. “From the mountain you see the mountain,”wrote Emerson. 79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,” wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly. 80. What I have heard: when the mines of Sar-e-Sang run dry (locals say the repressive rule of the Taliban, who, in 2000, blew up the two giant statues of Buddha at the mines’ entrance—Buddhas whose blue auras were the oldest-known application of lapis on earth—caused a particularly long dry spell; God only knows what the American bombing has done since), the miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, in hopes of starting a “blue rush.” 81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.