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 Another Country (1962)

  And Vivaldo smiled to himself suddenly, a smile as sad as his tears, thinking of shooting matches and other contests on rooftops and basements and in locker-rooms and cars half his lifetime ago. And he had dreamed of it since, though it was only now that he remembered the dreams that he had dreamed. Feeling very cold now, inwardly cold, with Harold’s hand on his cock and Harold’s head on his chest, and knowing that: yes, something could happen, he recalled his fantasies—of the male mouth, male hands, the male organ, the male ass. Sometimes, a boy—who always rather reminded him of his younger brother, Stevie, and perhaps this was the prohibition, as, in others, it might be the key—passed him, and he watched the boy’s face and watched his ass, and he felt something, wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his young behind. So he knew that it was there, and he probably wasn’t frightened of it any more; but it was, possibly, too expensive for him, it did not matter enough. So he said to Harold, gently, “Understand me, man, I’m not putting you down. But my time with boys was a long time ago. I’ve been busy with girls. I’m sorry.” “And nothing can happen now?” “I’d rather not. I’m sorry.” Harold smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Then, “Can I lie here with you, like this, just the same?” Vivaldo held him and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the sky was a great brass bowl above him. Harold lay near him, one hand on Vivaldo’s leg, asleep. Belle and Lorenzo lay wrapped in the blanket, like two dirty children. He stood up, moving too close to the edge, getting a dreadful glimpse of the waiting, baking streets. His mouth felt like Mississippi in the days when cotton was king. He hurried down the stairs into the streets, hurrying home to Ida. She would say, “My God, Vivaldo, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling this house all night long to let you know I had to go and sit in with some fellows in Jersey City. I keep telling you we better get an answering service, but you never hear anything I say!”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For a start, this was an emphatically royal action, a claim to be Israel’s true king. But Zechariah’s prophecy also makes it clear that this king will come as a man of peace. As we have just seen, Jesus redefined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of “us” against “them,” of the forces of light fighting with literal weapons against the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the arrival of this peaceable king will mean the establishment of his worldwide rule; as in the Psalms and Isaiah, Israel’s true king will be the king of the whole world, “from sea to sea.” The result will be the establishment of God’s covenant with his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting (think once more of Egypt, of the Exodus, of Passover) in prisoners being set free. And, as often in Zechariah and in other prophecies of the time, if this great event were to happen, it could only mean that Israel’s God was at last coming back. His glorious Presence was once again to appear. All this, I suggest, Jesus’s followers and the watching people of Jerusalem would have taken in right away, with no particular mental effort. Their minds were already in tune with the various elements and with the controlling drama within which they made sense. And if that’s what it all meant for them, it can hardly have meant any less for Jesus himself. So when Jesus came into the Temple and performed another dramatic action, driving out the money changers and the dealers selling animals for sacrifice, this too would have been seen within a web of prophetic allusion and symbolism. Jeremiah, after all, had famously smashed a pot at the same place (Jer. 19), symbolizing the coming judgment. But what was Jesus intending to communicate? What did he mean by his action? Like many others, I have become convinced that Jesus’s dramatic action was a way of declaring that the Temple was under God’s judgment and would, before too long, be destroyed forever. That is certainly how the gospel writers saw it. Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow the incident with a string of discussions that all turn on the question of whether Jesus has the right to do this kind of thing, what he means by it, what sort of a revolution he has in mind, and so on, all of which lead readers into the long discourse in which Jesus solemnly declares that the Temple is to be destroyed within a generation (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). John, who describes Jesus’s action in the Temple much earlier in his gospel, has Jesus saying something cryptic about the Temple being destroyed and then rebuilt in three days—a saying that then turns up in the other gospels, in garbled form, when Jesus is on trial before the chief priests (John 2:19; Matt.

• From Wild (2012)

  By the time Paul and I decided to file our divorce papers, I’d broken in my new name enough that I wrote it without hesitation on the blank line. It was the other lines that gave me pause, the endless lines demanding signatures that would dissolve our marriage. Those were the ones I completed with far more trepidation. I didn’t exactly want to get divorced. I didn’t exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I’d never been. The day we signed our divorce papers, it was April in Minneapolis and snowing, the flakes coming down in thick swirls, enchanting the city. We sat across a table from a woman named Val who was an acquaintance of ours and also, as it happened, licensed as a notary public. We watched the snow from a wide window in her office downtown, making little jokes when we could. I’d met Val only a few times before; I knew glimmers of things about her that jumbled together in my mind. She was cute, blunt, and impossibly tiny; at least a decade older than us. Her hair was an inch long and bleached blonde except for a longer hank of it that was dyed pink and swooped down like a little wing over her eyes. Silver earrings rimmed her ears and a throng of multicolored tattoos etched her arms like sleeves. This, and yet she had an actual job in an actual office downtown with a big wide window and a notary public license to boot. We chose her to officiate our divorce because we wanted it to be easy. We wanted it to be cool. We wanted to believe that we were still gentle, good people in the world. That everything we’d said to each other six years before had been true. What was it we said? we’d asked each other a few weeks before, half drunk in my apartment, where we’d decided once and for all that we were going through with this. “Here it is,” I’d yelled after riffling through some papers and finding the wedding vows we’d written ourselves, three faded pages stapled together. We’d given them a title: The Day the Daisies Bloomed. “The Day the Daisies Bloomed!” I hooted, and we laughed so hard at ourselves, at the people we used to be. And then I set the vows back on top of the pile where I’d found them, unable to read on.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Others stories are heavy in a different way, with the sorrowful realization that Israel as a whole simply isn’t interested in Jesus’s kingdom vision, indeed is violently rejecting it, because violence has become its way of life. Then the sequence of four moves, ending with the crucial one, comes again, but this time in the form of the rejected prophets and the rejected son. The rejected prophets correspond to the seed that falls on the wrong kind of soil, while the son corresponds to the seed that produces a large harvest: “Listen to another parable,” Jesus went on. “Once upon a time there was a householder who planted a vineyard, built a wall for it, dug out a winepress in it, and built a tower. Then he rented it out to tenant farmers and went away on a journey. “When harvest time arrived, he sent his slaves to the farmers to collect his produce. The farmers seized his slaves; they beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than before, and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They’ll respect my son,” he said. “But the farmers saw the son. “‘This fellow’s the heir!’ they said among themselves. ‘Come on, let’s kill him, and then we can take over the property!’ “So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. “Now then: when the vineyard-owner returns, what will he do to those farmers?” “He’ll kill them brutally, the wretches!” they said. “And he’ll lease the vineyard to other farmers who’ll give him the produce at the right time.” “Did you never read what the Bible says?” said Jesus to them: ‘The stone the builders threw away Is now atop the corner; It’s from the Lord, all this, they say And we looked on in wonder.’ “So then let me tell you this: God’s kingdom is going to be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the goods. Anyone who falls on this stone will be smashed to pieces, and anyone it falls on will be crushed.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they knew he was talking about them. They tried to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowds, who regarded him as a prophet. (Matt. 21:33–46) The crowds understood that one all right, without any further explanation. So did the chief priests and the Pharisees, who rightly saw that the story had been told against them. “Don’t Miss It”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is the one the Bible was talking about when it says, ‘See, I’m sending my messenger ahead of you And he will clear your path before you.’ “I’m telling you the truth: John the Baptist is the greatest mother’s son there ever was. But even the least significant person in heaven’s kingdom is greater than he is. From the time of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been forcing its way in—and the men of force are trying to grab it! All the prophets and the law, you see, made their prophecies up to the time of John. In fact, if you’ll believe it, he is Elijah, the one who was to come. If you’ve got ears, then listen! “What picture shall I give you for this generation?” asked Jesus. “It’s like a bunch of children sitting in the town square, and singing songs to each other. This is how it goes: ‘You didn’t dance when we played the flute; You didn’t cry when we sang the dirge!’ “What do I mean? When John appeared, he didn’t have any normal food or drink—and people said ‘What’s gotten into him, then? Some demon?’ Then along comes the son of man, eating and drinking normally, and people say, ‘Ooh, look at him—guzzling and boozing, hanging around with tax-collectors and other riffraff.’ But, you know, wisdom is as wisdom does—and wisdom will be vindicated!” (Matt. 11:2–19) It must have broken Jesus’s heart to have to send the message back, but send it back he did. Yes, he said, the work he was doing really was the breaking in of God’s kingdom. But no, sadly, it wasn’t working out the way they would have liked. And when, days or weeks later, they brought him news that Antipas had had John beheaded on the whim of his alluring stepdaughter, I suspect that Jesus’s sorrowful reaction (Matt. 14:13) was as much about this irony—the fact that he hadn’t been able to do anything to rescue John—as about his natural sorrow at his cousin’s death, or his natural recognition that he himself might well be the next in line for the same treatment. Here again the shadow of the cross looms over the story of the kingdom. So what was Jesus doing? What sense did it make then, and what sense might it make now, to see him as in some way inaugurating “heaven’s rule,” or “God’s kingdom”? Why didn’t it mean setting John free from prison? How might what he was doing and saying be seen, by any stretch of the imagination, as putting into practice a program that said, “This is what it looks like when God’s in charge”? That’s the question that must have been on many minds and hearts in revolution-hungry Galilee. Here was someone talking about God becoming king; well, they’d had a few of those before, so what was new?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Another person I asked, a guy who worked for Boston University, said that, given time-perverter powers, he would wander through women’s locker rooms for a while; then he said, after much hemming and hawing, that he would “probably want to see people I knew.” This was after I had described a hypothetical scene in which someone is watching a rented copy of Metropolitan on his VCR and he really loves it, but he needs to piss extremely bad, and he points the remote at the machine and hits PAUSE , but finds that instead of pausing Metropolitan, Metropolitan continues and the entire rest of the world is in a freeze-frame—so that the remote-owner has however long it will take for the movie to finish playing to run outside into the suspension and pry and peep to his heart’s content. As I mentioned earlier, I have never had any success with remote-control keypads, which is exactly why I used a remote PAUSE button in the scene I offered him—it felt far enough removed from things I had actually done. I asked one or two women as well, and one of them said she would be eager to see her friends having sex. “I’d probably be grossed out, but I’d want to see it anyway.” I felt a little sad that I didn’t have this temptation in common with my respondents. One other woman, a paralegal at a small firm in a building with a statue of Edward Coke in front, gave me a long and interesting answer to my question one evening, when we were working late assembling the documents in a huge real estate sale-and-leaseback agreement. Her name was Arlette. We walked around and around a conference table, piling one copy of some ancillary agreement on top of another in a soothing rhythm, and eventually I asked her for her thoughts on what she would do with a PAUSE button that stopped life rather than videotapes. Let me try to record what she said exactly—I took a few notes at the time. “Well,” she said, “I think first I would just sit and think for a while and try to comprehend the fact that I was the only person around who was able to move. Then I’d plan out the little revengeful things I could do. I’d bring it to work, definitely. I could put some of those Dennison colored dots on Stephen Milrose’s evil face, one by one. While he is sitting there at Tuesday Conference, making his nasty little comments, shooting everyone down, ridiculing people for no reason, I’d pick a word, some harmless word that he says a lot, like for instance ‘backside.’ Every time he said that some deal or some client was going to ‘turn around and bite us in the backside,’ I’d hit the PAUSE button and stick a yellow dot on his face. I would love to do that! They would add up, too!

• From Wild (2012)

  By the time I arrived in the town of Mojave, California, on the night before I began hiking the PCT, I’d shot out of Minnesota for the last time. I’d even told my mother that, not that she could hear. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t going to be around to tend her grave anymore. Which meant that no one would. I finally had no choice but to leave her grave to go back to the weeds and blown-down tree branches and fallen pinecones. To snow and whatever the ants and deer and black bears and ground wasps wanted to do with her. I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me. The next day I left Minnesota forever. I was going to hike the PCT. It was the first week of June. I drove to Portland in my 1979 Chevy Luv pickup truck loaded with a dozen boxes filled with dehydrated food and backpacking supplies. I’d spent the previous weeks compiling them, addressing each box to myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. I left my truck and the boxes with my friend Lisa in Portland—she’d be mailing the boxes to me throughout the summer—and boarded a plane to Los Angeles, then caught a ride to Mojave with the brother of a friend. We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree. “You can stop here,” I said to the man who’d driven me from LA, gesturing to an old-style neon sign that said WHITE’S MOTEL with the word TELEVISION blazing yellow above it and VACANCY in pink beneath. By the worn look of the building, I guessed it was the cheapest place in town. Perfect for me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When you’re ready, give me a call.” This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea, and indeed, in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds, because when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me ? That was what Dr. Brentwood Smyth wanted to know, and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky with “its peculiar tint of yellow green,” at the thin clouds, the moon, and the stars: I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now even impervious to the literature that I thought I had loved. An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the postulantship when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: “Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.” I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in apologetics. “Yes, Sister, very nice.” Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. “This is a very good piece of work.” “But Mother,” I suddenly found myself saying, “it isn’t true, is it?” Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. “No, Sister,” she said wearily, “it isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., which delighted so many of my fellow students at St. Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit. Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay forever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Granny stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. The yard was hushed, the silence broken only by a bird’s anxious trill. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and we all gathered up the mats and cups and carried them into the house. Once inside, I asked Granny if she had anything left of the Old Man’s or our grandfather’s. She went into her bedroom, sorting through the contents of an old leather trunk. A few minutes later, she emerged with a rust-colored book the size of a passport, along with a few papers of different colors, stapled together and chewed at an angle along one side. “I’m afraid this is all I could find,” she said to Auma. “The rats got to the papers before I had a chance to put them away.” Auma and I sat down and set the book and papers on the low table in front of us. The binding on the red book had crumbled away, but the cover was still legible: Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register, it read, and in smaller letters, Issued under the Authority of the Registration of Domestic Servant’s Ordinance, 1928, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. On the book’s inside cover, we found a two-shilling stamp above Onyango’s left and right thumbprints. The swirls were still clear, like an imprint of coral. The box was empty where the photograph once had been. The preamble explained: The object of this Ordinance is to provide every person employed in a domestic capacity with a record of such employment, and to safeguard his or her interests as well as to protect employers against the employment of persons who have rendered themselves unsuitable for such work. The term servant was defined: cook, house servant, waiter, butler, nurse, valet, bar boy, footmen, or chauffeur, or washermen. The rules governing the carrying of such passbooks: servants found to be working without such books, or in any way injuring such books, are liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred shillings or to imprisonment not exceeding six months or to both. And then, the particulars of said Registered Servant, filled out in the elegant, unhurried script of a nameless clerk: Name: Hussein II Onyango. Native Registration Ordinance No.: Rwl A NBI 0976717. Race or Tribe: Ja’Luo. Usual Place of Residence When Not Employed: Kisumu. Sex: M. Age: 35. Height and Build: 6’0" Medium. Complexion: Dark. Nose: Flat. Mouth: Large. Hair: Curly. Teeth: Six Missing. Scars, Tribal Marks, or Other Peculiarities: None.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My tail ticked side to side while I read the fourth letter, beating out of sync with each syllable. Outside, my mother approached the holes with a butterfly net in her hand, prodding dirt-mouths with the rod of it. But my holes were not traps: They didn’t shut around squirrels or stray cats, they weren’t triggered by anything but my voice. When they heard me coming, they lolled open, begging to be fed, and I could smell the rust on their breath, the blood. Sometimes, when they were bored, they inhaled birds out of the sky, sucking in a whole flock and spitting the bones at the moon. When my mother walked through the yard, the holes grew snails inside their mouths like blisters. When she tried to rebury the holes, they grew back in the morning, camouflaged in hats of moss. I sat on the letter to hide it from her. My tail pinned it down, flattening all of Ama’s words into the same sound. When my mother came in with the butterfly net, a hole gouged in it from the time my brother tried catching a raccoon, I asked her why I’d never met my fourth aunt. Whenever my mother called her sister, they spoke only in sentence-shards. My mother looked down, tearing the net off the rod like a wig, crumpling the fabric in her hands and tossing it over my head like a veil. There were dead flies floating in the folds of the netting, wings straining light through their mesh. You look like a bride, she said, turning me toward my reflection in the window. I made your fourth aunt’s veil out of a mosquito net. When she got married, it rose and flew her away. I said that protection from malaria was very important in a marriage. She laughed, plucking the net from my head, balling it in her hands. When she released it out the window, it opened into a parachute with no body attached, a ghost we watched go. * SHE’S BEEN DIGGING HOLES IN HER YARD TOO? AREN’T YOU WORRIED SHE’LL COME UP THROUGH THE ONES YOU’VE DUG? THAT SHE’S LOOKING FOR YOU? SHE’S DIGGING A HOLE FOR YOUR AGONG. I WOULD BE WORRIED. VERY WORRIED. DOES HE HAVE LIFE INSURANCE? AND WHAT DOES SHE MEAN BY “PLOTTING”? I HOPE SHE JUST MEANS SHE’S PICKED UP GARDENING. —BENMOTHERJourney to the West (II) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Arkansas 1980 It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase and I sat all night beside you, emptying it every hour, wringing the sweat from your hair.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I should like to get Kitty back to Ginevra Road as swiftly as possible.’I hesitated, then looked at Kitty again. She raised her eyes to mine at last, very briefly, and nodded.‘All right,’ I said. I watched them leave. Walter took up his cloak, and - though it was far too large for her, and trailed upon the dusty floor - he placed it over Kitty’s slender shoulders. She clasped it tight at the throat, then let him usher her away, past the angry manager and the knot of whispering boys.By the time I reached Ginevra Road - after having gathered our boxes and bags together at Deacon’s, and delivered Flora to her own house in Lambeth - Walter had gone, our rooms were dark, and Kitty was in bed, apparently asleep. I bent over her, and stroked her head. She did not stir, and I didn’t like to wake her to perhaps more upset. Instead, I simply undressed, and lay close beside her, and placed my hand upon her heart - which beat on, very fiercely, through her dreams. The disastrous night at Deacon’s brought changes with it, and made some things a little strange. We did not sing at the hall again, but broke our contract - losing money on the deal. Kitty became choosier about the theatres we worked at; she began to question Walter, too, about the other acts that we must share the bills with. Once he booked us to appear alongside an American artist - a man called ‘Paul or Pauline?’ whose turn was to dance in and out of an ebony cabinet, dressed now as a woman, now as a man, and singing soprano and baritone by turns. I thought the act was a good one; but when Kitty saw him work, she made us cancel. She said the man was a freak, and would make us seem freakish by association ...We lost money on that deal, too. In the end I marvelled at Walter’s patience.For that was another change. I have spoken of the curious dimming of Walter’s brightness, of the subtle new distance that had grown between us, since Kitty and I had become sweethearts. Now the dimming and the distance increased. He remained kind, but his kindness was tempered by a surprising kind of stiffness; in Kitty’s presence, in particular, he grew easily flustered and self-conscious - and then jolly, with a horrible, forced kind of jolliness, as if ashamed of himself for being so awkward. His visits to Ginevra Road grew rarer. At last we saw him only to rehearse new songs, or in the company of the other artistes we sometimes took supper or drinks with.I missed him, and wondered at his change of heart - but didn’t wonder very hard, I must confess, because I thought I knew what had caused it.

• From Wild (2012)

  8 CORVIDOLOGYKennedy Meadows is called the gateway to the High Sierra, and early the next morning I walked through that gate. Doug and Tom accompanied me for the first quarter mile, but then I stopped, telling them to go on ahead because I had to get something from my pack. We embraced and wished one another well, saying goodbye forever or for fifteen minutes, we didn’t know. I leaned against a boulder to lift some of Monster’s weight from my back, watching them go. Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn’t needed to get anything from my pack; I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the world’s vastness—hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be—until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the piñon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before. I walked in the cool of the morning to the rhythm of my new white ski pole clicking against the trail, feeling the lightened-but-still-ridiculously-heavy weight of Monster shift and settle in. When I’d set off that morning, I thought that it would feel different to be on the trail, that the hiking would be easier. My pack was lighter, after all, not only thanks to Albert’s purge but because I no longer needed to carry more than a couple of bottles of water at a time, now that I’d reached a less arid stretch of the trail. But an hour and a half into the day I stopped for a break, feeling the familiar aches and pains. At the same time, I could ever so slightly feel my body toughening up, just as Greg had promised would happen.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Then comes the twist. Jesus was not simply announcing God’s judgment on his rebel people, warning like Jeremiah that Israel and its leaders had so badly misread God’s vocation that they were now rushing down a steep slope to destruction. Jesus was speaking and acting in such a way as to imply that he was to go ahead of his people, to meet the powers of destruction in person, to take their full weight on himself, so as to make a way through, a way in which God’s people could be renewed, could rediscover their vocation to be a light to the nations, could be rescued from their continuing slavery and exile. Here too we discover that this was not a new thing, a sudden idea imported at the last minute. It is implicit in that heavenly voice at the baptism. It is there in the Sermon on the Mount. It is there, in particular, as Jesus speaks about the hen sheltering the chicks under her wings; his intention was to see the danger coming and to take its full force on to himself (Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34). It is there again when he speaks of the “cup” he himself had to drink; the allusions there are all to the “cup of God’s wrath,” working through the destructive violence of the Roman Empire against what seemed to it to be rebel subjects and a rebel king (Matt. 20:22; 26:39). And it is there when, on his last bitter journey, he warns the weeping bystanders that what Rome is doing to a green tree it will do, far more, to a dry one. He is the green tree, not ready for the fire; the next generation of Jerusalemites will be the dry sticks, rebels who will court the great disaster until it comes upon them.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.” I smiled as Jane glared at herself in the mirror and threw back her long blond hair. It was indeed difficult to imagine her wilting feebly: she was built on too large a scale, was too confident for that. “Have you ever fainted before?” she asked, suddenly serious. I nodded. “It used to happen quite a lot in the convent. It’s all emotional—all in the mind. At least, that’s what the nuns said.” “Don’t tell me! I was at a convent school, remember? And I suppose you have been under a strain, giving up that lovely peaceful life.” I grimaced slightly, amazed as I always was that even people who knew nuns at first hand had such an unrealistically idyllic image of convent life. “Tell me,” Jane said abruptly, “do you feel guilty? ” I thought hard for a moment. People often asked me this, because they seemed to associate Catholicism with guilt. “No,” I said at last, “I don’t feel at all guilty. ‘Guilt’ is not the word.” One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. “I feel sad,” I went on, “a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.” “God, you are lucky!” Jane flung herself down in my armchair. “I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to Mass, Communion, or confession, because I don’t have a ‘firm purpose of amendment,’ as they say. I’m not going to stop doing it, so I haven’t truly repented. So now I’m that dreadful thing called a ‘lapsed Catholic.’ ” “Do you miss it?” I asked, and then surprised myself by adding, “Do you care?” I noticed how far I had moved in the last few months. This time last year, I could not have imagined living outside the Catholic Church, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did God really care so much about Jane’s sexual life? Was sleeping with her fiancé as bad as telling lies or being unkind, sins which didn’t debar anybody from the sacraments? Jane sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged. “In some ways, no—of course, I don’t care. I can’t believe that God—if there is a God; I must say I do wonder sometimes—is really a narrow-minded prude. And I know that lots of people right here in college just carry on going to Communion, no matter what they do. But I can’t manage that. It seems dishonest . . .” “But do you miss it?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered that she was an orphan, of sorts, and bit back my protests, and let her talk; but my silence seemed only to dampen her spirits the further.At last, when her cigarette was finished and thrown into the grate, she took a breath and said what I had been waiting for. ‘Nan, I have something to tell you - a piece of good news, and you must promise to be happy for me.’I couldn’t help myself. I had been longing to smile about it all afternoon, and now I laughed and said, ‘Oh Kitty, I know your news already!’ She seemed to frown then, so I went on quickly, ‘You mustn’t be cross with Tony, but he told me - just today.’‘Told you what?’‘That Tricky wants you to stay on, at the Palace; that you will be here till Christmas at least!’She looked at me rather strangely, then lowered her gaze and gave an awkward little laugh. ‘That’s not my news,’ she said. ‘And nobody knows it but me. Tricky does want me to stay on - but I’ve turned him down.’‘Turned him down?’ I stared at her. Still she would not catch my eye, but got to her feet, and crossed her arms over her waist.‘Do you remember the gentleman who called on me last night,’ she said, ‘ - Mr Bliss?’ I nodded. She hadn’t mentioned him today; and in all my fussing over her visit, I had forgotten to ask after him. Now she went on: ‘Mr Bliss is a manager - not a theatre manager, like Tricky, but a manager for artistes: an agent. He saw my turn and - oh, Nan!’ - she couldn’t help but be excited now - ‘he saw my turn and liked it so much, he has offered me a contract, at a music hall in London!’‘London!’ I could only echo her in disbelief. This was terrible beyond all words. Had she gone to Margate or Broadstairs, I might have visited her sometimes. If she went to London I would never see her again; she might just as well go to Africa, or to the moon.She went talking on, saying how Mr Bliss had friends at the London halls, and had promised her a season at them all; how he had said she was too good for the provincial stage; that she would find fame in the city, where all the big names worked, and all the money was... I hardly listened, but grew more and more miserable. At length I placed a hand before my eyes, and bowed my head, and she grew silent.‘You’re not happy for me, after all,’ she said quietly.‘I am,’ I said - my voice was thick - ‘but I am more unhappy, for myself.’There was a silence then, broken only by the sound of laughter and scraping chairs from the parlour below, and the shriek of gulls outside the open window.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was also aware that my full recovery depended upon my obeying certain rules. I was especially struck by Eliot’s line “I rejoice that things are as they are.” For years I had told myself that black was white and white black; that the so-called proofs of God’s existence had truly convinced me; that I might not be feeling happy, but that I really was happy because I was doing God’s will; that sewing for hours at a machine without a needle was the most profitable way of spending time. I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out toward the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself. I realized that this would not be a popular stratagem. I had noticed how frequently people rushed to put an optimistic gloss on a disaster or a difficulty, even when their interpretation seemed at obvious variance with the facts. As Eliot had said in another poem: “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” It was probably natural for us to deny pain or at least to try to push it out of sight. I could see that this could be a useful survival technique. While you were marveling at your silver lining, you could be making all kinds of unconscious adjustments so that when the storm finally broke you were in fact prepared. But I could not afford to do this. I was like a recovering alcoholic, who could not allow herself even a sip of this positive elixir, because it could awaken old destructive habits. That was why I could not go along with Dr. Piet and his theories any longer. For me, they did not reflect the way things really were. By making a habit of gazing unflinchingly at reality, however unpleasant, I too might learn to rejoice in it. So now I had a new project: to construct my own recovery by correcting the bias of my mind toward delusion, thus helping it to regain its former integrity. But I was only on the very first steps of Eliot’s winding stair; I had no idea how far I still had to go. For one thing, I was not nearly as resigned to my fate as I pretended. As the year progressed, I sometimes felt that life was leaving me behind. Everybody else seemed to be moving on. Even Charlotte had decided to break out of her tranced existence in the moated grange of the Iffley Road, waiting for the lover to show up. “I’m getting out,” she had told me one evening. “I’m going to go to London, breaking with Mike. I’ll get a job there.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Feeling the familiar sensation of utter defeat, I looked down at my lap, unable for a moment to speak. “And anyway, we’re not asking you to leave us immediately,” the head continued in bracing tones. I looked up, hopeful of a stay of execution. “Of course not, my dear, what do you take us for? At the very least, we’re obliged to give you a term’s notice, and the school year finishes in just a few days’ time.” She gave a silvery laugh. “You surely don’t imagine that we’d throw you out just like that, do you? No, listen, this is the plan I’ve worked out with the governors. Next year you will work part-time only, but on a full-time salary. You will earn exactly the same amount as you are earning now. Miss Cockburn will take over as head of department, and we’ll get somebody else in too. You can have a year with very light duties and take the time to recover your health and look around you for something fresh. Now, how does that sound?” It was a humane, even a generous settlement. I gave a watery smile to acknowledge this, but I was convinced that the words the head had spoken at the beginning of the interview were closer to the truth than this false cheer. This was indeed the “end of the road” for me. I would never get another teaching job. My dismissal on grounds of ill health would always stand in the way of employment. And what else—realistically—could I hope to do? “In any case, Miss Armstrong,” the head said in a more steely tone that startled me out of my reverie, “I don’t think that money can be much of a problem for you. You must have made a lot of money from your book.” Ah, the book. I had wondered when we would get to that. T hrough the Narrow Gate had been published six weeks earlier. Writing it had been one of the hardest things that I had ever done. It had taken three full drafts to get it right. The first had been very angry; I had poured out all the bitterness and rage that had accumulated over the past ten years, fulminating about the absurdities and cruelties of our training. June, my agent, had looked at the draft, suggested different narrative techniques to vary the tempo, but had then asked a crucial question: “If it was really as bad as that, why did you stay so long?”

• From Bold Move

  It is important to highlight that Sara wasn’t entirely wrong in her prediction of a bad reaction from her parents. When it comes to matters of sexual identity within family structures, people will react in different ways. Data from interviews with 155 LGBTQ+ individuals about their coming out experience found that parents’ emotional responses can span a wide range, either lacking, negative, mixed, or positive with accompanying silence, invalidation, ambivalence, and validation, respectively.3 When parents or loved ones respond negatively to gender and sexuality revelations, there are serious negative consequences, such as higher incidence of depression and lower self-esteem.4 So sometimes there are hints of truth in even unhelpful predictions. In Cases of Discrimination, Shift Doesn’t Cut ItNot every situation can be solved with a new perspective. For example, let me tell you about what Marcus, an African American client of mine, faced firsthand when he got accepted to a prestigious advanced degree at Harvard. He was coming to Harvard from Georgetown Law and had been looking forward to arriving in Boston to start this new chapter of his life. Because he was proactive, he had spoken to the dean of this school within the Harvard system a few times and had decided to come to Boston to meet him in person. Marcus arrived at this prestigious office, announced to the secretary that he was there to meet with the dean, and sat waiting. When the dean came out of his office, Marcus described to me that the dean scanned the room, looked at his executive secretary, and asked, “Where did Marcus go?” In Marcus’s words, “the secretary got whiter than a ghost” and pointed to him. The dean, without a thought (so I hope), told Marcus, “Oh, I thought you looked different,” which affirmed all of Marcus’s beliefs about being Black, being different, not fitting in, and being discriminated against in an institution like Harvard. As Marcus and I discussed this scenario, my grandmother’s questions failed both of us because there doesn’t appear to be any other way to interpret this situation beyond prejudice. Yet, for Marcus, this awful and painful experience had triggered his core view of himself—“I am insufficient”—which in turn triggered sadness and led him to consider dropping out of his program. In situations in which we are dealing with discrimination, sexism, homophobia, or microaggressions, it is important to face the reality of the situation. When we’re talking about discrimination, it can be challenging to consider a broader or heterodox perspective on the topic, because injustice and inequality are facts in this world. Yet, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias can also appear, even in such sensitive topics, and at times this might affirm our own unhelpful core belief.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “I couldn’t make religion work for me,” I explained. “I really tried. I tried to pray, to meditate, but I never got anywhere. Oh yes, I know the ritual was wonderful—I remember how much it meant to you—but don’t you see? That was just an aesthetic response. The real test is when you try to find God on your own, without props, without beautiful music, singing, and spectacle—when there is just you on your knees. And I could never do that.” “Have you lost your faith, then?” Jane asked sharply. “I don’t know that I ever had any faith, not true faith. I wanted to believe it all; I wanted to have an encounter with God. But I never did. God was never a reality for me, never a genuine presence in my life as he was for the other sisters.” “And what about now?” Jane went on. “I mean, suicide’s a mortal sin, right? Are you feeling guilty?” “No,” I said slowly. “No. Of course, I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I’m not feeling guilty because I’ve offended God. No. I just don’t believe that God is there.” “Join the club.” Jane smiled dourly. “If there is a God, he’s doing a spectacularly bad job of running the world, that’s all I can say. But anyway”—she seemed mentally to shake herself back into a more positive frame of mind—“I really think you should reconsider this mad idea of going back to the convent. And I think you’re wrong about the Harts. I’m certain they would have you back. They’re awfully fond of you, in their own way, you know—though they’d rather die than admit it. Jenifer rang up the hospital this morning to find out how you were.” “That was kind.” I was touched, but determined. “No. I just can’t roll up tomorrow at Manor Place as though nothing had happened. I just can’t.” As it turned out, Jane need not have worried. When I rang up Cherwell Edge and spoke to the superior, she at first sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me. She had replaced Mother Praeterita, with whom I had clashed so stridently during my last year in the religious life, and was a kindly woman, whom I had known distantly in Sussex. But when I told her my story, she retreated at once. What I had done was truly terrible; she would have to take advice, and pray about it, but she really didn’t think that the community could accept this responsibility.