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 Chronology of Water (2011)

  That day though what I also felt was it’s over. This small thing I did with these men I’ll never see again. Something about that made me feel irrecoverably sad. But I was of course also thrilled to be “done” with my punishment. I closed my eyes and drank a Coke from a glass bottle. So simple. I wished Ernesto were there. Drinking a Coke. When I opened my eyes, I stared at my hands and how not Mexican they looked. My hands, they just looked … dumb. Then I looked up the hill and saw the giant concrete and wood sign of the facility we had just carved our way up to. The Cerritos Olympic Swim Center. I’d competed there when I was 14. I’d won the 100-meter breaststroke. Sometimes I think I’ve been everywhere before. Conversion I’VE BEEN THINKING. MAYBE RECOVERING CATHOLICS turn to movies for salvation. I mean, in an informal poll that I took recently, a whole lot of ex-catholics seem unusually moved by film. The bigger and more epic the better. And we still really like sitting in the dark- if they ever get rid of movie theaters you are going to see a bunch of lapsed catholics wandering around in the street looking for a dark box to go sit inside so we can experience catharsis … Enter the Mingo, stage left. Andy Mingo in a shitty ass Isuzu Trooper. After my head-on collision, an M FA thesis student of mine at San Diego State University walked into my life like a movie star, offering to loan me one of his cars. By the time I met him in San Diego, I was a woman who had to crash her car. The first time I really saw Andy was at my SDSU job interview. He very nearly fucked my shit up - sitting there looking a little like Marlon Brando. I’m up there trying like crazy to sound cogent and smart, jawing it around postmodernism like someone a university should hire and he’s zinging me with puffy lips and intense stares and is that a flattened spot just above his nose like in On the Waterfront? I swear to god the line “I coulda been a contendah” crept into my frontal lobe. I distinctly remember thinking, whoa. That guy is trouble. When it came time for the question answer portion of the presentation, Andy Mingo raised his hand and asked, “What is your teaching philosophy with regard to what graduate students in creative writing should be reading?” All the grad students leaned forward at me. I said, “Everything. They should read everything they can get their hands on. What they love, what they hate, all of it. You wouldn’t jump into an empty pool, would you? Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it.” He crossed his arms over his chest. He glared at me. Pissed. It was not the answer he was apparently hoping for.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  This time when I saw her though, I felt something in my chest that hurt. It felt good to feel something for someone else. Even pain. Maybe especially pain. Sitting there as they went out of view I tasted something warm in my mouth. Then I realized I’d bitten the inside of my cheek. I didn’t do anything but grade papers, that day. My chest and cheek aching. That night I threw up for no particular reason. Which was not eventful for that time. But the next time I saw her, something very small and specific caught my eye. An important detail. A bruise at the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t the bruise. It was the bruise that let me see … her eyes, were blue. Like mine. I let the papers I was grading slide to the floor. I watched her walk by and wondered how much she weighed. I wondered her age - impossible to guess. I wondered what jobs she’d tried and failed, this walking woman in cut-offs with dangling maps for arms and a bruise and blue eyes. I tried to picture how much money I had in my wallet in my bookbag by the front door. I watched her ass hanging out of her shorts - it hung limply - two little flesh commas. Then she was around the corner. I waited for her dance partner to come into view. Without thinking I knocked on the window. Without thinking I got up and walked to my front door and opened it and walked outside and walked up to him and said “ How much.” In the short story I wrote about what happened next I ask her in. I tell her to sit down. She sits down. In the story she smokes and bobbing machines her left knee. Her hand shakes. In the story I say this is what it feels like to be me a woman who teaches English looking down at a woman who sucks dicks all day and all night every night as she sits on my couch smoking. This is what me an addict upwardly mobile given something infinitesimally small to believe in called words thinks looking at her: she looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history that moves the world without her body. When I see an image of christ I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face. In the story I say, what do I think I’m going to do, teach her?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Over the years I have become very disappointed in the idea that there can be only one, monolithic narrative about alcoholism or addiction. What I mean is, we’ve come to a time in both capitalism and literary history where unless you tell the right story about drug and alcohol dependency, you don’t get to tell it at all. And that one, right story is most often dictated by the market - by agents and editors and publishers and media. What a consumer audience needs the story to be. If you write outside of those lines, you will more often than not be coached back into the center. I think of the writers and painters and musicians who have inspired me to not kill myself and keep going. Most of them did drugs and alcohol. All of them, really. I never say in this book what happened to the woman I hit head on with my car. I have deferred that information purposefully. Because I want you to stay with me - me drunk driving across eight lanes of freeway traffic at midnight in my car - stay with me inside my own pain and grief and vodka breath and pee and barf-stay with me as the gunpowder smell from the airbags fills the car. Sometimes we’re just sad. And wrong-headed. And drunk. That’s all. There are so many stories to tell about what we do to our bodies. There is a history to the mythos about addiction in the country-we’ve always burned witches - but I think the potent turning point was probably the establishment and codification of A.A. in this country. And the subsequent nationalized embrace of the general principles of the A .M. A. and the A .P.A. and the bible of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - how each of these defines illness and cures. Not to mention religion’s role in the false narrative of redemption. Now a whole industrial complex exists to serve the addiction narrative, along with a handy pharmaceutical empire. My mother was an alcoholic. But I never think of her that way. I think she was in pain most of her life. I think she was just trying to drown a sadness that wouldn’t lift. I think if I had been her I would have killed myself like she tried to. I wish I had come conscious sooner. Maybe we could have talked about it. What drinking is. What it isn’t. The other thing I’d say is that if we didn’t have drugs and alcohol, we wouldn’t have art. I know that is not a popular thing to say but I believe it is true nonetheless. Our drug and alcohol excesses kill people. Yes. But they also are part of who we are as artists. Part of why cultural production exists. Whether we want to admit it or not.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I liked so much the way she would suddenly sit down on a wall, or a broken pillar in that shattered backyard to Pompey’s Pillar, and be plunged in an inextinguishable sorrow at some idea whose impact had only just made itself felt in her mind. ‘You really believe so?’ she would say with such sorrow that one was touched and amused at the same time. ‘And why do you smile? You always smile at the most serious things. Ah! surely you should be sad?’ If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made — ironic tenderness and silence. In a night so brilliant with stars where the glow-worms in the shrill dry grass gave back their ghostly mauve lambence to the sky there was nothing else to do but sit by her side, stroking that dark head of beautiful hair and saying nothing. Underneath, like a dark river, the noble quotation which Balthazar had taken as a text and which he read in a voice that trembled partly with emotion and partly with the fatigue of so much abstract thought: ‘The day of the corpora is the night for the spiritus. When the bodies cease their labour the spirits in man begin their work. The waking of the body is the sleep of the spirit and the spirit’s sleep a waking for the body.’ And later, like a thunderclap: ‘Evil is good perverted.’* * * * * * That Nessim had her watched I for a long time doubted; after all, she seemed as free as a bat to flit about the town at night, and never did I hear her called upon to give an account of her movements. It could not have been easy to spy upon someone so protean, in touch with the life of the town at so many points. Nevertheless it is possible that she was watched lest she should come to harm. One night an incident brought this home to me, for I had been asked to dine at the old house. When they were alone we dined in a little pavilion at the end of the garden where the summer coolness could mingle with the whisper of water from the four lions’ heads bordering the fountain. Justine was late on this particular occasion and Nessim sat alone, with the curtains drawn back towards the west reflectively polishing a yellow jade from his collection in those long gentle fingers.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It’s like - like having a roast in the pantry, and eating nothing but bits of crusts and cups of water.What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’‘You ain’t having her!’‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips.‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy. You can meet my Miss Raymond...’‘I don’t know,’ answered Florence. The words were followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was in a slightly different tone.‘You cannot grieve for her for ever,’ she said. ‘She would never have wanted that...’Florence tutted. ‘Being in love, you know,’ she said, ‘it’s not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can’t just go out and get another to replace her.’‘I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’‘That’s what you do, Annie.’‘But Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a little ... There is a new canary in your own front room, banging its handsome head against the bars.’‘Suppose I let the new one in,’ said Flo then, ‘then find I don’t care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose - Oh!’ I heard a thump. ‘I can’t believe that you have got me here, comparing her to a budgie!’ I knew she meant Lilian, not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn’t listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly.‘Do you think it’s true, though, what you said, about the new canary and the bars ... ?’My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a little thoughtfully.Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to her books.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had performed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexandria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the contempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her. Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared. She was not ‘in society’ as the saying goes.… For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier. Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait. That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still. It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought — the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh. Clea’s generous innocence — it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sorrows — factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints. The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appropriate the mystery of true experience, true suffering — as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks. The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another — to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine’s ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine’s sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  And further to render down this sad relationship which had caused me so much pain — I saw that pain itself was the only food of memory: for pleasure ends in itself — all they had bequeathed me was a fund of permanent health — life-giving detachment. I was like a dry-cell battery. Uncommitted, I was free to circulate in the world of men and women like a guardian of the true rights of love — which is not passion, nor habit (they only qualify it) but which is the divine trespass of an immortal among mortals — Aphrodite-in-arms. Beleaguered thus, I was nevertheless defined and realized in myself by the very quality which (of course) hurt me most: selflessness. This is what Justine loved in me — not my personality. Women are sexual robbers, and it was this treasure of detachment she hoped to steal from me — the jewel growing in the toad’s head. It was the signature of this detachment she saw written across my life with all its haphazardness, discordance, disorderliness. My value was not in anything I achieved or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I presented to her something which was indestructible — a person already formed who could not be broken. She was haunted by the feeling that even while I was loving her I was wishing at the same time only to die! This she found unendurable. And Melissa? She lacked of course the insight of Justine into my case. She only knew that my strength supported her where she was at her weakest — in her dealings with the world. She treasured every sign of my human weakness — disorderly habits, incapacity over money affairs, and so on. She loved my weaknesses because there she felt of use to me; Justine brushed all this aside as unworthy of her interest. She had detected another kind of strength. I interested her only in this one particular which I could not offer her as a gift nor she steal from me. This is what is meant by possesion — to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other’s personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She greets me with a shy smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch. Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the eyes of a young girl, she seems lost. I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her mother might never come. I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at times she seems flat. Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense emotion, and she lapses into long silences. I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control, and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it might take a while for her to look at me or say anything. “I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week. Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe way to communicate. “When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said ‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe a chat room where they share information and give each other advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles but seems sadder than ever . She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.” She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I’m blessed to be part of the incredible community of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. I’m especially grateful to my dear colleagues, students, and friends who have read and commented on early versions of these chapters: Dr. Jessica Benjamin, Dr. Carina Grossmark, Dr. Jonathon Slavin, Karen Tocatly, Dr. Velleda Ceccoli, Nina Smilow, Dr. Yael Kapeliuk, Colette Linnihan, Dr. Noga Ariel-Galor, Dr. Lauren Levine, Kristin Long, Avital Woods, Dr. Merav Roth, Dr. Robert Grossmark, Dr. Yifat Eitan-Persico, Ivri Lider, Orly Vilnai, Anat Binur, Limor Laniado-Tiroche, Jamie Ryerson, and Amy Gross. To Dr. Roberto Colangeli for sharing with me his work on epigenetics and psychoanalysis. To Dr. Judith Alpert for her help on the chapter on sexual abuse. To Dr. Beatrice Beebe for her inspiration and edits of the chapter on babies. To Ezra Miller for their helpful guidance on gender binary. A special thank you to Dr. Melanie Suchet for her generous ongoing love and support. To Dr. Steve Kuchuck for his invaluable contribution to this book and for years of friendship and creative collaboration. I couldn’t do it without your talent, wit, and loyalty. About ten years ago, aiming to investigate psychoanalytic “ghosts,” I joined a group of psychoanalysts in New York City who were analyzing the many ways in which ghosts appear in our practices. I would like to thank Adriene Harris and the group: Margery Kalb, Susan Klebanoff, Heather Ferguson, Michael Feldman, and Arthur Fox. Many thanks to Emma Sweeney, who held my hand and believed in this book before it was born. Thank you for your insightful advice and deep care. Thanks also to Margaret Sutherland Brown at Folio. A special thank-you to my wonderful agent Gail Ross. I’m deeply grateful to Sally Arteseros for her remarkably keen eye and endless dedication. I’m so lucky to have you be part of this creation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have Tracy Behar as my editor and publisher. Thank you for your brilliant work and for believing in this book and in me. Thank you for your close reading, deep attention, thoughtful guidance, and unique ability to respond not only to the words on the page, but also to the words that need to be there. To the extraordinary group at Little, Brown Spark: Ian Straus, Betsy Uhrig, Laura Mamelok, Lucy Kim, Jessica Chun, Juliana Horbachevsky, and Lauren Ortiz. To SallyAnne McCartin of McCartin Daniels PR. To Bob Miller, who is my rock and my sanctuary. Thank you for joining me on a constant search for emotional truths, for always being there to catch me, for reading every word I write with curiosity and breathtaking intelligence. Thank you for sharing with me your gifted mind and soul and for loving me the way you do.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Being poor was also a deep bond. For the most part our excursions were the simple excursions that all provincials make in a sea-side town. The little tin tram bore us with the clicking of its wheels to the sand-beaches of Sidi Bishr, or we spent Shem El Nessim in the gardens of Nouzha, camped on the grass under the oleanders among some dozens of humble Egyptian families. The inconvenience of crowds brought us both distraction and great intimacy. By the rotting canal watching the children dive for coins in the ooze, or eating a fragment of water-melon from a stall we wandered among the other idlers of the city, anonymously happy. The very names of the tram stops echoed the poetry of these journeys: Chatby, Camp de César, Laurens, Mazarita, Glymenopoulos, Sidi Bishr.… Then there was the other side: coming back late at night to find her asleep with her red slippers kicked off and the little hashish-pipe beside her on the pillow … I would know that one of her depressions had set in. At such times there was nothing to be done with her; she would become pale, melancholy, exhausted-looking, and would be unable to rouse herself from her lethargy for days at a time. She talked much to herself, and would spend hours listening to the radio and yawning, or going negligently through a bundle of old film magazines. At such times when the cafard of the city seized her I was at my wits’ end to devise a means of rousing her. She would lie with far-seeing eyes like a sibyl, stroking my face and repeating over and over again: ‘If you knew how I have lived you would leave me. I am not the woman for you, for any man. I am exhausted. Your kindness is wasted.’ If I protested that it was not kindness but love she might say with a grimace: ‘If it were love you would poison me rather than let me go on like this.’ Then she would begin to cough with her uncollapsed lung and, unable to bear the sound, I would go for a walk in the dark Arab-smudged street, or visit the British Council library to consult reference books: and here, where the general impression of British culture suggested parsimony, indigence, intellectual strap-hanging — here I would pass the evening alone, glad of the studious rustle and babble around me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  There is so much pain buried inside her, sadness that she is used to covering up with irritation and anger. She doesn’t want anyone to know that just like her mother, she secretly mourns. She doesn’t want her daughter to have to experience her grief, the way she carried her mother’s grief. She knows what a burden that was on her, and she is worried that her daughter will have to live that legacy. “I told Art about our session,” Alice says when she walks into my office the following week. “We had a long conversation about breastfeeding and hormones, and it’s like I had another session with him after my session with you.” She adds with a smile, “Victory. We made a decision.” Alice pulls a bottle of water from her bag. She places it on the table. “Do you notice how anxious I am?” she asks. “I want everything in place before our baby is born. And I made the decision that I won’t take hormones. One thing is crossed off my list and it’s a relief, so thank you.” “Tell me more,” I ask. “How did you make that decision?” “Suddenly, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. I told Art that I realized my wish to breastfeed was based on the fear that I wouldn’t be able to love the baby without those hormones. I told him how upsetting it was for me to realize that I doubt myself as a woman, and that under the surface this was about my feelings that my father didn’t love me. Art knows the whole story, and a lot has changed between my father and me since I met him. I think he helped me to see my father as a full person. You will appreciate this,” she says playfully. “I think I fell in love with Art when I realized how afraid he was of losing his daughter, Lili, in his divorce. Isn’t that a good psychological link?” she asks with a smile. “He was the father I never had, and I betrayed my mother for the first time when I fell in love with him,” she says. I ask her to explain. “It was as if my mother and I had a secret contract that we were the family. Even when I got married the first time, my marriage was similar to hers—not a big love but what she thought a woman should do. I was married, but I was still hers. We planned that if I had a baby I’d move to live closer to her, and she would help me raise my child. It was like she was my partner. But then I met Art, and it was a double betrayal.” Alice looks at me to see if I can put it all together. “A betrayal because you actually fell in love with him and he became your partner instead of her,” I say. “But what else? Why double?”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt. It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period. Or perhaps it is not so strange — for compared to the city life I had lived my new life was dull and uneventful. I remember the back-breaking sweat of school work: walks in the flat rich fields with their bumper crops feeding upon dead men’s bones: the black silt-fed Nile moving corpulently through the Delta to the sea: the bilharzia-ridden peasantry whose patience and nobility shone through their rags like patents of dispossessed royalty: village patriarchs intoning: the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels, blind-folded against monotony — how small can a world become? Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. The fathers of the school were kindly and left me alone in my spare time, sensing perhaps my distaste for the cloth, for the apparatus of the Holy Office. The children of course were a torment — but then what teacher of sensibility does not echo in his heart the terrible words of Tolstoy: ‘Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning’? Unreal as all correspondence seemed, I kept up a desultory contact with Melissa whose letters arrived punctually. Clea wrote once or twice, and surprisingly enough old Scobie who appeared to be rather annoyed that he should miss me as much as he obviously did. His letters were full of fantastic animadversion against Jews (who were always referred to jeeringly as ‘snipcocks’) and, surprisingly enough, to passive pederasts (whom he labelled ‘Herms’, i.e. Hermaphrodites). I was not surprised to learn that the Secret Service had gravelled him, and he was now able to spend most of the day in bed with what he called a ‘bottle of wallop’ at his elbow. But he was lonely, hence his correspondence. These letters were useful to me. My feeling of unreality had grown to such a pitch that at times I distrusted my own memory, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been such a town as Alexandria. Letters were a lifeline attaching me to an existence in which the greater part of myself was no longer engaged.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Whitstable, when I drew into it later that morning, seemed very changed - very small and grey, and with a sea that was wider, and a sky that was lower and less blue, than I remembered. I leaned from the carriage window to gaze at it all, and so saw Father and Davy, at the station, a moment or two before they saw me. Even they looked different - I felt a rush of aching love and strange regret, to think it - Father a little older, a little shrunken, somehow; Davy slightly stouter, and redder in the face. When they saw me, stepping from the train on to the platform, they came running. ‘Nance! My dearest girl ... !’ This was Father. We embraced - awkwardly, for I had all my parcels with me, and a hat upon my head with a veil around it. One of the parcels fell to the ground and he bent to retrieve it, then hurried to help me with the others. Davy, meanwhile, took my hand, then kissed my cheek through the mesh of my veil. ‘Just look at you,’ he said. ‘All dressed up to the ninety-nines ! Quite the lady, ain’t she, Pa?’ His cheek grew redder than ever. Father straightened, and looked me over, then gave a wide smile that seemed to pull, somewhat, at the corners of his eyes. ‘Very smart,’ he said. ‘Your mother won’t know you, hardly.’ I did indeed, I suppose, look a little dressy, but I had not thought about it until that moment. All my clothes were good ones, these days, for I had long ago got rid of those girlish hand-me-downs with which I’d first left home. I had only wanted, that morning, to look nice. Now I felt self-conscious. The self-consciousness did not diminish as I walked, on Father’s arm, the little distance to our oyster-shop. The house, I thought, was shabbier than ever. The weather-boards above the shop showed more wood, now, than blue paint; and the sign - Astley’s Oysters, the Best in Kent - hung on one hinge, and was cracked where the rainwater had soaked it. The stairs we climbed were dark and narrow, the room into which I finally emerged smaller and more cramped than I could have believed possible. Worst of all the street, the stairs, the room, the people in it, all reeked of fish! It was a stink that was as familiar to me as the scent of my own armpit; but I was startled, now, to think that I had ever lived in it and thought it ordinary. My surprise, I hope, was lost in the general bustle of my arrival. I had expected Mother and Alice to be waiting for me; they were - but so were half-a-dozen other people, each one of whom exclaimed when I appeared, and stepped forward (except for Alice) to embrace me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Each year, in mid-April, everyone observes two minutes of silence. By 10 a.m. all children are standing in a circle in the schoolyard waiting for the sound of the air-raid siren, signaling that the silence is to begin. Everyone pauses whatever they are doing. Pedestrians stop walking, diners in restaurants stop eating and stand up, and on the busiest highway, every single car pulls to the side and people step out to stand still. It is time to remember the six million who were murdered during the Holocaust. As children, we learned that terrible things can happen to people. This wasn’t an explicit statement but a fact that—like a hot spice added to our food—had become a regular ingredient in our lives. In almost every apartment building there was someone from “there,” the Europe of World War II, a Holocaust survivor. We usually knew who those people were, even if we didn’t know their history, even if we didn’t see the numbers tattooed on their arms, even if we were often afraid of them, devastated by their life stories. In the schoolyard, when the siren began, we tried not to catch each other’s eyes, imitating the teachers, who kept their heads down. We tried as hard as we could to stay serious, to feel sad, to think about the concentration camps, the gas chambers, to imagine our own families being there. It was important, we learned, never to forget. But as hard as we tried, inevitably as the siren began one of the kids would start giggling, and we would cover our faces, trying not to burst into laughter. Nervous laughter during the Holocaust Day siren is a familiar childhood memory of people who grew up in Israel, where horror stories shape part of the national identity and a special form of dark humor characterizes the younger generations. Years later, in New York City, far from my homeland, I am surprised by how many of my patients are second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. These high-functioning, successful, and productive people all have something in common: the ghosts of persecution who show themselves in unpredictable ways and at unexpected times. Under the surface they carry the trauma and guilt of the survivors. I learn that from childhood, images and daydreams of the Holocaust have been frequent visitors in their minds, even and especially for those whose parents never talked about what happened to their families during the war. The memories of the Holocaust live inside them even as they are unknown to them, and those invasive thoughts and images are often trivialized. Sometimes I learn about them only years into the therapy. When their stories are told, we recognize how that history has shaped their present lives. We identify the ways in which the past continues to play itself out in the present and how they live and relive their families’ untold stories.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Scobie is a sort of protozoic profile in fog and rain, for he carries with him a sort of English weather, and he is never happier than when he can sit over a microscopic wood-fire in winter and talk. One by one his memories leak through the faulty machinery of his mind until he no longer knows them for his own. Behind him I see the long grey rollers of the Atlantic at work, curling up over his memories, smothering them in spray, blinding him. When he speaks of the past it is in a series of short dim telegrams — as if already communications were poor, the weather inimical to transmission. In Dawson City the ten who went up the river were frozen to death. Winter came down like a hammer, beating them senseless: whisky, gold, murder — it was like a new crusade northward into the timberlands. At this time his brother fell over the falls in Uganda; in his dream he saw the tiny figure, like a fly, fall and at once get smoothed out by the yellow claw of water. No: that was later when he was already staring along the sights of a carbine into the very brain-box of a Boer. He tries to remember exactly when it must have been, dropping his polished head into his hands; but the grey rollers intervene, the long effortless tides patrol the barrier between himself and his memory. That is why the phrase came to me: a sea-change for the old pirate: his skull looks palped and sucked down until only the thinnest integument separates his smile from the smile of the hidden skeleton. Observe the braincase with its heavy indentations: the twigs of bone inside his wax fingers, the rods of tallow which support his quivering shins.… Really, as Clea has remarked, old Scobie is like some little old experimental engine left over from the last century, something as pathetic and friendly as Stephenson’s first Rocket.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Prayer is the misfortunate's sweetest comfort; strength reenters him once he has fulfilled this duty. My courage renewed, I raised myself up, I gathered together the rags the villain had left me, and I hid myself in a thicket so as to pass the night in less danger. The security I believed I enjoyed, the satisfaction I had just tasted by communing with my God, all combined to help me rest a few hours, and the sun was already risen high when I opened my eyes. For the wretched, the instant of awakening is hideous: the imagination, refreshed by sleep's sweet ministrations, very rapidly and lugubriously fills with the evils these moments of deceiving repose have smoothed into oblivion. Very well, I said as I examined myself, it is then true that there are human creatures Nature reduces to the level of wild beasts! Lurking in this forest, like them flying the sight of man, what difference now exists between them and me? Is it worth being born for a fate so pitiable?... And my tears flowed abundantly as I meditated in sorrow; I had scarcely finished with my reflections when I heard sounds somewhere about; little by little, two men hove into view. I pricked up my ears: "Come, dear friend," said one of them, "this place will suit us admirably; the cruel and fatal presence of an aunt I abhor will not prevent me from tasting a moment with you the pleasures I cherish." They draw near, they station themselves squarely in front of me and so proximately that not one of their words, not one of their gestures is able to escape me, and I observe... Just Heaven, Madame, said Therese, interrupting herself, is it possible that destiny has placed me in none but situations so critical that it becomes quite as difficult for Virtue to hear them recited as for modesty to describe them? That horrible crime which equally outrages both Nature and social conventions, that heinous deed, in a word, which the hand of God has so often smitten, rationalized, legitimized by Coeur-de-fer, proposed by him to the unhappy Therese, despite her wishes consummated against her by the butcher who has just immolated her, in brief, I did see that revolting execration carried out before my own eyes, together with all the impure gropings and fumblings, all the frightful episodes the most meditated depravity can devise. One of the men, he who gave himself, was twenty-four years old, of such a bearing and presence one might suppose him of an elevated degree, the other, of about the same age, appeared to be one of his domestics.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Case in point: how heartening it is to see the lovely, caring, vibrant woman Hedda Nussbaum has become. She is now an activist who speaks out against violence in venues all over the country. PART TWOThe Healing ProcessThink wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself -DORIS LESSING [image file=img/img0011.jpg] Each person's cult experience is different. Some may dabble with a meditation technique yet never get drawn into taking advanced courses or moving to a group's ashram. Others may quickly give up everything-including college, career, possessions, home, and family-to do missionary work in a foreign country or to move into cult lodgings. Still others may have been born or raised in a cult, never having the choice to join or be part of the group. After cult involvement, some people carry on with their lives seemingly untouched; more typical are those who experience a variety of emotional or psychological difficulties, ranging from inability to sleep, restlessness, and lack of direction to panic attacks, memory loss, and depression. To varying degrees, former members may feel guilty, ashamed, enraged, lost, confused, betrayed, paranoid, panicked, sad, unreal, or as if they are living in a sort of fog. Professionals who work with cult survivors note that it can take from one to two years for former members "to return to their former level of adaptation, while some may have psychological breakdowns or remain psychologically scarred for years."' Once again, those born and raised in a cult will face a whole different set of challenges and adjustments (see Part Three). The following case examples highlight the range of responses: Cynthia N., age thirty-eight, spent twelve years in a New Age group where she achieved a high level of leadership. She left because "I didn't feel right staying there anymore. I knew something was terribly wrong with the group and thought I'd go crazy if I stayed." She moved in with her parents, resumed college, and had a good job when she entered therapy five years after her cult departure to address some of the residual issues. Cynthia started therapy for treatment of a mild depression, complaining that life seemed rather flat and uninteresting. She had difficulty making friends and trusting people and she felt she had missed out on life, particularly compared to others her age who were married, had children, owned their own homes, and were advanced in their careers. After three months of intensive course work and counseling in the same group as Cynthia, Brian R. was hospitalized because of a suicide attempt. An eighteen-year-old college freshman at the time of his recruitment, his class work deteriorated immediately after he got involved with the group. He began hallucinating, seeing and hearing his leader talk to him, and he feared that he was being possessed by demons. Brian's behavior prompted the group to ask him to leave; he was becoming a hindrance.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A thousand conversations, seeking out for each other like the tap-roots of trees for moisture — the hidden meaning of lives disguised in brilliant smiles, in hands pressed upon the eyes, in malice, in fevers and contents. (Justine now breakfasted silently surrounded by tall black footmen, and dined by candle-light in brilliant company. She had started from nothing — from the open street — and was now married to the city’s handsomest banker. How had all this come about? You would never be able to tell by watching that dark, graceful form with its untamed glances, the smile of the magnificent white teeth.…). Yet one trite conversation can contain the germ of a whole life. Balthazar, for example, meeting Clea against a red brocade curtain, holding a glass of Pernod, could say: ‘Clea, I have something to tell you’; taking in as he spoke the warm gold of her hair and a skin honeyed almost to the tone of burnt sugar by sea-bathing in the warm spring sunshine. ‘What?’ Her candid eyes were as blue as corn-flowers and set in her head like precision-made objects of beauty — the life-work of a jeweller. ‘Speak, my dear.’ Black head of hair (he dyed it), lowered voice set in its customary sardonic croak, Balthazar said: ‘Your father came to see me. He is worried about an illicit relationship you are supposed to have formed with another woman. Wait — don’t speak, and don’t look hurt.’ For Clea looked now as if he were pressing upon a bruise, the sad grave mouth set in a childish expression, imploring no further penetration. ‘He says you are an innocent, a goose, and that Alexandria does not permit innocent people to.…’ ‘ Please, Balthazar.’ ‘I would not have spoken had I not been impressed by his genuine anguish — not about scandal: who cares for gossip? But he was worried lest you should be hurt.’ In a small compressed voice, like some packaged thought squeezed to a hundredth of its size by machinery, Clea said:

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Then sometimes she wished to go away simply in order to belong more fully to her familiar! Poor fool, she was not spared anything in the long catalogue of self-deceptions which constitute a love affair. She tried to fall back on other pleasures, to find that none existed. She knew that the heart wearies of monotony, that habit and despair are the bedfellows of love, and she waited patiently, as a very old woman might, for the flesh to outgrow its promptings, to deliver itself from an attachment which she now recognized was not of her seeking. Waited in vain. Each day she plunged deeper. Yet all this, at any rate, performed one valuable service for her, proving that relationships like these did not answer the needs of her nature. Just as a man knows inside himself from the first hour that he has married the wrong woman but that there is nothing to be done about it. She knew she was a woman at last and belonged to men — and this gave her misery a fugitive relief. But the distortions of reality were deeply interesting to someone who recognized that for the artist in herself some confusions of sensibility were valuable. ‘Walking towards the studio she would suddenly feel herself becoming breathlessly insubstantial, as if she were a figure painted on canvas. Her breathing became painful. Then after a moment she was overtaken by a feeling of happiness and well-being so intense that she seemed to have become weightless. Only the weight of her shoes, it seemed, held her to the ground. At any moment she might fly off the earth’s surface, breaking through the membrane of gravity, unable to stop. This feeling was so piercing that she had to stop and hold on to the nearest wall and then to walk along it bent double like someone on the deck of a liner in a hurricane. This was itself succeeded by other disagreeable sensations — as of a hot clamp round her skull, pressing it, of the beating of wings in her ears. Half-dreaming in bed, suddenly horns rammed downwards into her brain, impaling her mind; in a brazen red glare she saw the bloodshot eyes of the mithraic animal. It was a cool night with soft pockets of chemical light in the Arab town. The Ginks were abroad with their long oiled plaits and tinselled clothes; the faces of black angels; the men-women of the suburbs.’ (I copy these words from the case history of a female mental patient who came under Balthazar’s professional care — a nervous breakdown due to ‘love’ — requited or unrequited who can say? Does it matter? The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree, and this passage could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us.)

• From Less (2017)

  How does Less get the world so wrong? Over and over again? Where is the exit from moments like this? Where is the donkey door out? “Mohammed, I am honored to be with you tonight.” “I am very great fan of Kalipso. Of course, I read not the English but the French. I am honored to be with you. And happy birthday, Arthur Less.” Probably now Tom and Freddy are packing their bags; they are many hours ahead, after all, and in Tahiti it is midday. Surely the sun is already hammering the beach like a tinsmith. The grooms are folding their linen shirts, their linen pants and jackets, or surely Freddy is folding them. He recalls Freddy was always the packer, while Less lounged on the hotel sofa. “You’re too fast and sloppy,” Freddy said that last morning in Paris. “And everything comes out wrinkled—see, watch this.” He spread out the jackets and shirts on the bed like they were clothes for a great paper doll, placed the pants and sweaters on top, and folded the whole thing up in a bundle. Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene). “And now what?” Less asked. Freddy shrugged: “Now we just put it in the luggage.” But of course this bolus was too large for the luggage to swallow, no matter how Freddy coaxed it, and after many tries of sitting and pressing, he eventually remade it into two packages, which he fit neatly into two bags. Victorious, he looked smugly at Less. Framed in the window, with that lean silhouette from his early forties, the spring Paris rain dotting the window behind him, Freddy’s former lover nodded and asked, “Mr. Pelu, you’ve packed everything; now what are we going to wear?” Freddy attacked him in a fury, and for the next half an hour, they wore nothing at all. Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding. Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday. And now Less stands on the balcony of the Swiss hotel, looking out over the frozen town. The railing is carved, absurdly, with cuckoos, each with a sharp protruding beak. In his glass: the last coin of champagne. Now he is off to India. To work on his novel, on what was supposed to be a mere final glaze and now appears to be breaking the whole novel to shards and starting again. To work on the tedious, self-centered, pitiable, laughable character Swift. The one nobody feels bad for. Now he is fifty.