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 Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Monnica’s other son, Navigius, was with her at the end—it was to him she confided her resignation of any hope to be buried with her husband in Africa (T 9.27). Part of the inscription over her tomb was found in 1945 by some boys playing by a church in Ostia. Godsend broke down at the death of his grandmother, but Augustine mastered his sorrow for his mother with Christian hope for her soul’s future life. The passage stands in clear contrast with his earlier hysteria over the death of Amicus. With the winter season now cutting off his return to Carthage, Augustine had no reason to stay in Ostia. He probably had influential Christian hosts there, but he would need libraries, better to be found in Rome, since he meant to keep up the furious pace of his writing. 6. Rome: 387–388 WHEN AUGUSTINE STAYED in Rome before, he was feted by Manichean and pagan notables, cultivating and being cultivated by Symmachus. This time he no doubt met Rome’s Christian community. Pope Damasus had died, and his protégé Jerome had been driven out of town. Siricius, the new pope, had just been working with Ambrose to prevent a heresy trial of Priscillian by the usurper Maximus, so Milan ties would have brought Augustine to the pope’s attention. Augustine was now the man who gave up a court orator’s post to be baptized by Ambrose. But Augustine tells us nothing about his stay in Rome, whose glamour had dimmed with the renunciation of Virgil’s world. Though he was often urged to return to Roman councils after he became a bishop in Africa, his dealings with the papacy would always be formal but distant. Deprived of his large cast of characters from Cassiciacum, Augustine had to content himself with one interlocutor in his Roman dialogues, but this man, Evodius, was a curious and persistent questioner. He had belonged to the large network of imperial secret police, but he abandoned that life to follow Augustine from Milan to Africa (Mandouze 366–73). Augustine finished one dialogue (How to Measure the Soul) and began another (Freedom of Choice) in Rome, and wrote a treatise, Catholic and Manichean Moral Systems. He could have left Rome when spring opened the sea lanes, but he may have lingered, once he got into his work rhythms, until the onset of autumn threatened to close off the sea again. Reluctantly he went aboard a boat for the second and last time, going home. III AFRICA (388–430) 1. Thagaste: 388–390

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  162 Lecture 22: The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity position by decree in 533 and secured the approval of Pope John II in 534. o In the affair of the Three Chapters, Justinian sought to appease the monophysite party by condemning, in 543, three 4 th -century writers as guilty of Nestorianism. The West and Pope Vigilius at first refused to accept this condemnation, but through isolation and privation, Justinian pressured the pope to do so. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned the Three Chapters and, by implication, Vigilius, though it continued to declare communion with Rome. o These incidents reveal a growing chasm between the western (Chalcedonian) and eastern (monophysite) churches. We shall see how the rift will grow ever greater until a final schism occurs in the 11 th century. • Justinian’s strong patronage of Christianity had as its dark side the active suppression of other religious traditions. o His Codex proscribed paganism, even in private life, and the remnants of pagan observance were actively suppressed. o The civil rights of Jews were further restricted, and religious privileges were threatened. Adding insult to injury, Justinian wanted Jews to read Torah in the Greek Septuagint translation rather than in Hebrew! o Against the Samaritans, Justinian leveled severe edicts because they resisted conversion to Christianity, and many Manichaeans were persecuted and killed during his reign. • Such interventions reveal a situation that would later be termed caesaropapism, in which the state exercises total authority over the church. o The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 declared that the church could affirm nothing contrary to the emperor’s will. 163 o The other side of the coin was that the emperor was the supreme benefactor of the church, enacting its decisions (when it agreed with him) and, as the Codex indicates, providing legal support for ecclesiastical policies. Mixed Results of Justinian’s Reign • As remarkable as the reign of Justinian was, the results of his efforts were mixed. • Certainly, his goal of restoration fell short: The expanded empire shrank back in size after brief success in the west. Further, the policies of Justinian set some bad precedents. o The system of taxation was efficient but also oppressive and, ultimately, not a real economic plan; as conquests failed and crops were poor, the resources of the empire were steadily drained over time. o The increased use of mercenaries in the imperial army made the empire reliant on others and was incredibly expensive, another drain on the imperial treasury. o Finally, the policy of pacifying enemies through tribute was shortsighted: It won temporary relief but could not be a permanent solution. • Even more devastating was the blow struck at the empire and Justinian himself by the “Plague of Justinian,” a health disaster that was unparalleled until the Black Death hit Europe in the 14 th

• From The Girls (2016)

  Life didn’t accumulate as I’d once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child’s. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge. There were moments of forgetting. The summer I had visited Jessamine in Seattle after she had her first child—when I saw her waiting at the curb with her hair tucked into her coat, the years unknit themselves and I felt, for a moment, the sweet and blameless girl I had once been. The year with the man from Oregon, our shared kitchen hung with houseplants and Indian blankets on the seats of our car, covering the rips. We ate cold pita with peanut butter and walked in the wet green. Camping in the hills around Hot Springs Canyon, far down the coast, near a group who knew all the words to The People’s Song Book. A sun-hot rock where we lay, drying from the lake, our bodies leaving behind a conjoined blur. But the absence opened up again. I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognizable as a friend. And then I wasn’t. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction, the prison Bible groups and prime-time interviews and a mail-in college degree. I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. —It was Helen, in the end, who ended up talking. She was only eighteen, still desirous of attention—I’m surprised they stayed out of jail as long as they did. Helen had been picked up in Bakersfield for using a stolen credit card. Just a week in a county jail and they would have let her go, but she couldn’t help bragging to her cellmate. The coin-operated television in the common room showing a bulletin of the ongoing murder investigation. “The house is way bigger than it looks in those pictures,” Helen said, according to her cellmate. I can see Helen: nonchalant, thrusting her chin forward. Her cellmate must have ignored her at first. Rolling her eyes at the girlish bluster. But then Helen kept going, and suddenly the woman was listening closely, calculating reward money, a reduced sentence. Urging the girl to tell her more, to keep talking. Helen was probably flattered by the attention, unspooling the whole mess. Maybe even exaggerating, drawing out the haunted spaces between words, as in the incantation of a ghost story at a sleepover. We all want to be seen.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  [image file=image_rsrc1KJ.jpg] 6 The Tragic Love of Two EnemiesTHE LORD OF THE PROVINCE ETJIGO WAS called Jibudayu Mashikura. One day his chief minister, Gyobu Tokuzawa, summoned his master's first page, Senpatji Akanashi, who was in the vestibule with the other pages, whispering: 'I have something to say to you, Akanashi. Come with me.'And, leading him to a secret place behind the trees in the garden, he said to him: 'My master has ordered me to choose someone very Strong to kill his courtier Shingokeï Dizaki, and I can think of no one better fitted than you for this mission. Go then to Shingokefs house and kill him. I am sure that my master has an excellent reason for having him destroyed.' Senpatji asked: 'What is the offence which Shingokeï must expiate? 'But the minister himself did not know. Then Senpatji said to him: '1 have confidence in your word, yet I should like to hear this order from my master's own lips.'So the minister brought Senpatji before the Lord, who, as Senpatji kneeled before him, said: 'Senpatji, you must kill Shingokei, as my minister has told you.' Senpatji returned to his house very sad at having to kill Shingokei, who was one of his best friends. Nevertheless he went to that man's house and, after a short conversation, killed him, saying: 'It is at the command of my master.'Shingokei's slaves tried to seize the murderer; but Senpatji calmed them by saying: 'I have acted on my master's order, and you must obey him.' The Lord confiscated all Shingokei's property and his wealth. His widow was inconsolable. She was the daughter of a retired samurai of the neighbouring Province, and had married Shingokei the year before with customary rites, for Shingokei and her father were old friends. They loved each other tenderly, and her husband's death Stunned her. She wished to die with him and follow him into the other world; but she was pregnant, and could not kill herself because of the child she carried in her womb. So she left the Province, bitterly bewailing her husband's and her own sad destiny. After a long solitary journey full of hardship she came to another very remote Province in the mountains, and decided to live there. Some time after, quite alone and without assistance, she gave birth to a son. She took infinite care of the child, working with her needle to gain a livelihood; for in all the village there was not a single woman who could sew. The two lived thus together in poverty in that place.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? You’re stupid.’ ‘I won’t argue with you, old sophist,’ replied Matthew Levi. ‘You also cannot argue with me, for the reason I’ve already mentioned: you’re stupid,’ Woland replied and asked: ‘Well, make it short, don’t weary me, why have you appeared?’ ‘He sent me.’ ‘What did he tell you to say, slave?’ ‘I’m not a slave,’ Matthew Levi replied, growing ever angrier, ‘I’m his disciple.’ ‘You and I speak different languages, as usual,’ responded Woland, ‘but the things we speak of don’t change for all that. And so? . . .’ ‘He has read the master’s work,’ said Matthew Levi, ‘and asks you to take the master with you and reward him with peace. Is that hard for you to do, spirit of evil?’ ‘Nothing is hard for me to do,’ answered Woland, ‘you know that very well.’ He paused and added: ‘But why don’t you take him with you into the light?’ ‘He does not deserve the light, he deserves peace,’ Levi said in a sorrowful voice. ‘Tell him it will be done,’ Woland replied and added, his eye flashing: ‘And leave me immediately.’ ‘He asks that she who loved him and suffered because of him also be taken with him,’ Levi addressed Woland pleadingly for the first time. ‘We would never have thought of it without you. Go.’ Matthew Levi disappeared after that, and Woland called Azazello and ordered him: ‘Fly to them and arrange it all.’ Azazello left the terrace, and Woland remained alone. But his solitude did not last. Over the flags of the terrace came the sound of footsteps and animated voices, and before Woland stood Koroviev and Behemoth. But now the fat fellow had no primus with him, but was loaded with other things. Thus, under his arm he had a small landscape in a gold frame, from one hand hung a half-burnt cook’s smock, and in the other he held a whole salmon with skin and tail. Koroviev and Behemoth reeked of fire, Behemoth’s mug was all sooty and his cap was badly burnt. ‘Greetings, Messire!’ cried the irrepressible pair, and Behemoth waved the salmon. ‘A fine sight,’ said Woland. ‘Imagine, Messire!’ Behemoth cried excitedly and joyfully, ‘I was taken for a looter!’ ‘Judging by the things you’ve brought,’ Woland replied, glancing at the landscape, ‘you are a looter!’ ‘Believe me, Messire . . .’ Behemoth began in a soulful voice. ‘No, I don’t,’ Woland replied curtly. ‘Messire, I swear, I made heroic efforts to save everything I could, and this is all I was able to rescue.’ ‘You’d better tell me, why did Griboedov’s catch fire?’ asked Woland.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The papal policy had met with complete but blighting success and, after the thirteenth century, heresy in Southern France was almost like a noiseless underground stream. Languedoc at the opening of the wars had been one of the most prosperous and cultured parts of Europe. At their close its villages and vineyards were in ruins, its industries shattered, its population impoverished and decimated. The country that had given promise of leading Europe in a renaissance of intellectual culture fell behind her neighbors in the race of progress. Protestant generations, that have been since sitting in judgment upon the barbarous measures, conceived and pushed by the papacy, have wondered whether another movement, stirred by the power of the Gospel, will not yet arise in the old domain that responded to the religious dissent and received the warm blood of the Albigenses, the Waldenses, and of Peter de Bruys and his followers. The Stedinger. While the wars against the Albigenses were going on, another people, the Stedinger, living in the vicinity of Bremen and Oldenburg, were also being reduced by a papal crusade. They represented the spirit of national independence rather than doctrinal dissent and had shown an unwillingness to pay tithes to the archbishop of Bremen. When a husband put a priest to death for an indignity to his wife, the archbishop Hartwig II. announced penalty after penalty but in vain. Under his successor, Gerhard (1219–1258), the refractory peasants were reduced to submission. A synod of Bremen, in 1230, pronounced them heretics, and Gregory IX., accepting the decision, called upon a number of German bishops to join in preaching and prosecuting a crusade. The same indulgence was offered to the crusaders in the North as to those who went on the Church’s business to Palestine. The first campaign in 1233 was unsuccessful, but a second carried all the horrors of war into the eastern section of the Stedingers’ territory. In 1231 another army led by a number of princes completely defeated this brave people at Altenesch. Their lands were divided between the archbishop of Bremen and the count of Oldenburg. § 86. The Inquisition. Its Origin and Purpose.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Then, seeing that I was an old friend of her Jo-Jo—that was how she called him—she ran downstairs and brought back a couple of bottles of white wine. I was to stay and have dinner with her—she insisted on it. As she drank she became by turns gay and maudlin. I didn’t have to ask her any questions—she went on like a self-winding machine. The thing that worried her principally was—would he get his job back when he was released from the hospital? She said her parents were well off, but they were displeased with her. They didn’t approve of her wild ways. They didn’t approve of him particularly—he had no manners, and he was an American. She begged me to assure her that he would get his job back, which I did without hesitancy. And then she begged me to know if she could believe what he said—that he was going to marry her. Because now, with a child under her belt, and a dose of clap besides, she was in no position to strike a match—with a Frenchman anyway. That was clear, wasn’t it? Of course, I assured her. It was all clear as hell to me—except how in Christ’s name Fillmore had ever fallen for her. However, one thing at a time. It was my duty now to comfort her, and so I just filled her up with a lot of baloney, told her everything would turn out all right and that I would stand godfather to the child, etc. Then suddenly it struck me as strange that she should have the child at all—especially as it was likely to be born blind. I told her that as tactfully as I could. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “I want a child by him.” “Even if it’s blind?” I asked. “Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ça!” she groaned. “Ne dites pas ça!” Just the same, I felt it was my duty to say it. She got hysterical and began to weep like a walrus, poured out more wine. In a few moments she was laughing boisterously. She was laughing to think how they used to fight when they got in bed. “He liked me to fight with him,” she said. “He was a brute.” As we sat down to eat, a friend of hers walked in—a little tart who lived at the end of the hall. Ginette immediately sent me down to get some more wine. When I came back they had evidently had a good talk. Her friend, Yvette, worked in the police department. A sort of stool pigeon, as far as I could gather. At least that was what she was trying to make me believe. It was fairly obvious that she was just a little whore. But she had an obsession about the police and their doings. Throughout the meal they were urging me to accompany them to a bal musette .

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  I soon found out that it was not just my father who was given to black and chaotic moods. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, it became clear that my energies and enthusiasms could be exhausting to the people around me, and after long weeks of flying high and sleeping little, my thinking would take a downward turn toward the really dark and brooding side of life. My two closest friends, both males—attractive, sardonic, and intense—were a bit inclined to the darker side as well, and we became an occasionally troubled trio, although we managed to navigate the more normal and fun-loving side of high school as well. Indeed, all of us were in various school leadership positions and very active in sports and other extracurricular activities. While living at school in these lighter lands, we wove our outside lives together in close friendship, laughter, deadly seriousness, drinking, smoking, playing truth games through the night, and engaging in passionate discussions about where our lives were going, the hows and whys of death, listening to Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann, and vigorously debating the melancholic and existential readings—Hesse, Byron, Melville, and Hardy—we had set for ourselves. We all came by our black chaos honestly: two of us, we were to discover later, had manic-depressive illness in our immediate families; the other’s mother had shot herself through the heart. We experienced together the beginnings of the pain that we each would know, later, alone. In my case, later proved rather sooner than I might have wished.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  sat upon his dromedary on an oriel turret to the left of the station facade, a monument to the world of the animals and native peoples of the African continent, alone against the Flemish sky. When I entered the great hall of the Centraal Station with its dome arching sixty meters high above it, my first thought, perhaps triggered by my visit to the zoo and the sight of the dromedary, was that this magnificent although then severely dilapidated foyer ought to have cages for lions and leopards let into its marble niches, and aquaria for sharks, octopuses, and crocodiles, just as some zoos, conversely, have little railway trains in which you can, so to speak, travel to the farthest corners of the earth. It was probably because of ideas like these, occurring to me almost of their own accord there in Antwerp, that the waiting room which, I know, has now been turned into a staff canteen struck me as another Nocturama, a curious confusion which may of course have been the result of the sun’s sinking behind the city rooftops just as I entered the room. The gleam of gold and silver on the huge, half-obscured mirrors on the wall facing the windows was not yet entirely extinguished before a subterranean twilight filled the waiting room, where a few travelers sat far apart, silent and motionless. Like the creatures in the Nocturama, which had included a strikingly large number of dwarf species—tiny fennec foxes, spring-hares, hamsters—the railway passengers seemed to me somehow miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the ceiling or because of the gathering dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the passing thought, nonsensical in itself, that they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and that because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo. One of the people waiting in the Salle des pas perdus was Austerlitz, a man who then, in 1967, appeared almost youthful, with fair, curiously wavy hair of a kind I had seen elsewhere only on the German hero Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen film. That day in Antwerp, as on all our later meetings, Austerlitz wore heavy walking boots and workman’s trousers made of faded blue calico, together with a tailor-made but long outdated suit jacket. Apart from these externals he also differed from the other travelers in being the only one who was not staring apathetically into space, but instead was occupied in making notes and sketches obviously relating to the room where we were both sitting—a magnificent hall more suitable, to my mind, for a state ceremony than as a place to wait for the next connection to Paris or Oostende—for when he was not actually writing something down his glance often dwelt on the row of windows, the fluted pilasters, and other structural details of the waiting room. Once Austerlitz took a camera out of his rucksack, an old Ensign with telescopic bellows, and took several pictures of the mirrors, which were now quite dark, but

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  during the night too, to powder herself with a kind of cheap talc from a large container standing on the little table beside her bed. Gwendolyn used such quantities of this powder, fine as dust and slightly greasy, that the linoleum floor around her bed, and soon the whole room and the corridors of the upper story as well, were covered with a white layer, slightly sticky because of the damp air. I only recently remembered this white pall over the manse, said Austerlitz, when I was reading the reminiscences of his childhood and youth by a Russian writer who describes a similar mania for powder in his grandmother, a lady who, although she spent most of her time lying on a sofa nourishing herself almost exclusively on wine gums and almond milk, enjoyed an iron constitution and always slept with her window wide open, so that once, after a night of stormy weather, she woke up in the moming under a blanket of snow without coming to the slightest harm. However, it was different in the manse. The sickroom windows were kept closed, and the white powder which had settled on everything, grain by grain, and through which visible paths had now been trodden, was not at all like glittering snow. Rather, it resembled the ectoplasm that, as Evan had once told me, clairvoyants can produce from their mouths in great bubbles which then fall to the ground, where they soon dry and fall to dust. No, it was not newly fallen snow wafting around the manse; what filled it was something unpleasant, and I did not know where it came from, only much later and in another book finding for it the completely incomprehensible but to me, said Austerlitz, immediately enlightening term “arsanical horror.” It was during the coldest winter in human memory that I came home for the second time from the school in Oswestry, and found Gwendolyn barely alive. There was a coal fire smoldering on the hearth of her sickroom. The yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals and never entirely dispersed up the chimney mingled with the smell of carbolic pervading the whole house. I stood for hours at the window, studying the wonderful formations of icy mountain ranges two or three inches high formed above the crossbars by water running down the panes. Now and then solitary figures emerged from the snowy landscape outside. Wrapped in dark scarves and shawls, umbrellas open to keep off the flurry of snowflakes, they stumbled up the hill. I heard them knocking the snow off their boots down in the porch before they slowly climbed the stairs, escorted by the neighbor’s daughter who was now keeping house for the minister. With a certain hesitancy, and as if they had to bend underneath something, they stepped over the threshold and put whatever they had brought—a jar of pickled red cabbage, a can of corned beef, a bottle of rhubarb wine—down on the chest of drawers. Gwendolyn took no notice of these visitors, and the visitors themselves dared not look at her. They usually stood at the window with me for a little while,

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one’s own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy. That I owed my life to pills was not, however, obvious to me for a long time; my lack of judgment about the necessity to take lithium proved to be an exceedingly costly one. Missing Saturn [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind’s rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet. I remember singing “Fly Me to the Moons” as I swept past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly funny. I saw and experienced that which had been only dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration. Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word “real.” But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty, and I don’t see Saturn’s image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. Even though I was a clinician and a scientist, and even though I could read the research literature and see the inevitable, bleak consequences of not taking lithium, I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed. Why was I so unwilling? Why did it take having to go through more episodes of mania, followed by long suicidal depressions, before I would take lithium in a medically sensible way?

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  That night, waiting for my moody, intense Englishman to appear—needlepointing, watching the snow fall, listening to Chopin and Elgar—I suddenly was aware of how clear and poignant the music seemed, how intensely, beautifully melancholic it was to watch the snow and wait for him. I was feeling more beauty, but more real sadness as well. When he arrived—elegant, just in from a formal dinner party, black tie, white silk evening scarf draped, askew, around his neck, a bottle of champagne in his hand—I put on Schubert’s posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its haunting, beautiful eroticism absolutely filled me with emotion and made me weep. I wept for the poignancy of all the intensity I had lost without knowing it, and I wept for the pleasure of experiencing it again. To this day, I cannot hear that piece of music without feeling surrounded by the beautiful sadness of that evening, the love I was privileged to know, and the recollection of the precarious balance that exists between sanity and a subtle, dreadful muffling of the senses. Once, after several days completely to ourselves and with no contact at all with the outside world, he brought me an anthology of writings about love. He had tagged one short entry that captured the essence not only of those intense, glorious days but of the entire year as well: Thank you for a lovely weekend. They tell me it rained. Love Watching Madness [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] I dreaded leaving England. My moods had held at a more even keel for longer than I could remember; my heart was newly alive; and my mind was in a glorious state, having loped, grazed, and mulled its less medicated self through Oxford and St. George’s. It was increasingly hard to imagine giving up the gentle pace of days I had set for myself in London, and harder still to think of losing the passion and close understanding that had filled my nights. England had laid to rest most of my incessant wondering about the what-ifs and whys and what-might-have-beens; it also had laid to rest, in a very different way, my relentless warrings with lithium, most of which had been nothing but a futile battle against the givens of my own mind. These warrings had cost me dearly in time lost, and, feeling myself again, I was unwilling to risk losing any more time than I already had. Life had become worth not losing.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Sasha was frantic. Hurrying over to consult the back of the pizza box. “Preheat to four fifty,” she droned. “I did that. I don’t understand.” “What time did you put it in?” Zav asked. Sasha’s eyes moved to the clock. “The clock’s frozen, idiot,” Julian said. He grabbed the box and stuffed it in the garbage. Sasha looked like she might cry. “Whatever,” he said with disgust. Picking at the burnt shell of cheese, then rubbing his fingers clean. I thought of the professor’s dog. The poor animal, limping in circles. Vascular system slushy with poison. All the other things Sasha had probably not told me. “I can make something else,” I said. “There’s some pasta in the cabinet.” I tried to catch Sasha’s eye. Willing some combination of warning and sympathy to pass from me to her. But Sasha was unreachable, stung by her failure. The room got quiet. Zav fussing the joint between his fingers, waiting to see what would happen. “There’s a lot of beef, I guess,” Julian said finally, his anger slipping from sight. “No big thing.” He rubbed Sasha’s back, roughly, I thought, though the movement seemed to comfort her, returning her to the world. When he kissed her, she closed her eyes. — We drank a bottle of Dan’s wine at dinner, the sediment settling in the cracks of Julian’s teeth. Beer after that. Alcohol cut the fat on our breath. I didn’t know what time it was. The windows black, the squeeze of wind through the eaves. Sasha was corralling wet pieces of the wine label into a meticulous pile. I could feel her glance at me from time to time, Julian’s hand working the back of her neck. He and Zav maintained a constant patter all through dinner, Sasha and I fading into a silence familiar from adolescence: the effort to break through Zav and Julian’s alliance wasn’t worth the return. It was simpler to watch them, to watch Sasha, who acted like just sitting there was enough. “ ’Cause you’re a good guy,” Zav kept saying. “You’re a good guy, Julian, and that’s why I don’t make you pay up front with me. You know I have to

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Gradually the Haldol began to take effect. The screaming stopped, and the frantic straining against his restraints died down. He was both less frightened and less frightening; after a while he said to me, in a slowed and slurred voice, “Don’t leave me, Dr. Jamison. Please, please don’t leave me.” I assured him I would stay with him until he got to the ward. I knew that I was the one constant throughout all of his hospitalizations, court appearances, family meetings, and black depressions. As his psychotherapist for years, I had been privy to his dreams and fears, hopeful and then ruined relationships, grandiose and then shattered plans for the future. I had seen his remarkable resilience, personal courage, and wit; I liked and respected him enormously. But I also had been increasingly frustrated by his repeated refusals to take medication. I could, from my own experience, understand his concerns about taking lithium, but only up to a point; past that point, I was finding it very difficult to watch him go through such predictable, painful, and unnecessary recurrences of his illness. No amount of psychotherapy, education, persuasion, or coercion worked; no contracts worked out by the medical and nursing staff worked; family therapy didn’t help; no tallying up of the hospitalizations, broken relationships, financial disasters, lost jobs, imprisonments, squanderings of a good, creative, and educated mind worked. Nothing I or anyone else could think of worked. Over the years, I asked several of my colleagues to see him in consultation, but they, like me, could find no way to reach him, no chink in the tightly riveted armor of his resistance. I spent hours talking to my own psychiatrist about him, in part to seek his clinical advice, and in part to make sure that my own history of stopping and starting lithium was not playing some sort of unconscious, unacknowledged role. His attacks of mania and depression became more frequent and severe. No breakthrough ever came; no happy ending ever materialized. There was simply nothing that medicine or psychology could bring to bear that would make him take his medication long enough to stay well. Lithium worked, but he would not take it; our relationship worked, but not well enough. He had a terrible disease and it eventually cost him his life—as it does tens of thousands of people every year. There were limits on what any of us could do for him, and it tore me apart inside. We all move uneasily within our restraints.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (b) There is the danger of what the Revised Standard Version calls ‘a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit’. The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 29:18; and there it describes the person who follows strange gods and encourages others to do so, and who thereby becomes a destructive influence on the life of the community. The writer to the Hebrews is warning against those who are a corrupting influence. There are always those who think that Christian standards are unnecessarily strict and fussy; there are always those who do not see why they should not accept the world’s standards of life and conduct. This was especially so in the early Church. It was a little island of Christianity surrounded by a sea of paganism; its members were, at most, only one generation away from paganism. It was easy to lapse into the old standards. This is a warning against the infection of the world, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, spread within the Christian society. (c) There is the danger of falling into immorality or lapsing into an unhallowed life. The word used for unhallowed is bebēlos. It has an interesting background that sheds light on its meaning. It was used for ground that was profane as distinct from ground that was consecrated. The ancient world had its religions into which only the initiated could come. Bebēlos was used for the person who was uninitiated and uninterested as opposed to the person who was devout. It was applied to people like Antiochus Epiphanes who were determined to wipe out all true religion; it was applied to Jews who had given up their beliefs and had forsaken God. B. F. Westcott sums up this word by saying that it describes someone whose mind recognizes nothing higher than earth, for whom there is nothing sacred, who has no reverence for the unseen. An unhallowed life is a life without any awareness of or interest in God. In its thoughts, aims and pleasures, it is completely earthbound. We must always take care that we do not drift into a frame of mind and heart which has no horizon beyond this world. To sum it all up, the writer to the Hebrews cites the example of Esau. He really puts two stories together – Genesis 25:28– 34 and Genesis 27:1–39. In the first, Esau came in from the field ravenously hungry and sold his birthright to Jacob for a share of the food which he was preparing. The second story tells how Jacob subtly robbed Esau of his birthright by impersonating him when Isaac was old and blind, and so gained the blessing which belonged to Esau as the elder of the two sons. It was when Esau sought the blessing that Jacob had shrewdly obtained and learned he could not get it that he lifted up his voice and wept (Genesis 27:38).

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (2) His second answer goes back to the Hebrew sacrificial system and to Leviticus 17:11: ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you on the altar for making atonement for your lives; for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement.’ ‘Without the shedding of blood there can be no atonement for sin,’ was actually a well-known Jewish principle. So, the writer to the Hebrews goes back to the inauguration of the first covenant under Moses, the occasion when the people accepted the law as the condition of their special relationship with God. We are told how sacrifice was made and how Moses ‘took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he dashed against the altar’ (Exodus 24:6). After the book of the law had been read and the people had signified their acceptance of it, Moses ‘took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words”’ (Exodus 24:8). It is true that the memory of the writer to the Hebrews, in citing that passage, is not strictly accurate. He introduces calves and goats and scarlet and hyssop which come from the ritual of the Day of Atonement, and he talks about the sprinkling of the tabernacle, which at that time had not yet been built; but the reason is that these things are so much in his mind. His basic idea is that there can be no cleansing and no confirmation of any covenant without the shedding of blood. Why that should be so, he does not need to know. Scripture says it is so, and that is enough for him. The probable reason is that, for the Jews, blood is life, and life is the most precious thing in the world; and people must offer that most precious thing to God. All that goes back to a ritual which is only of historical interest. But, behind it, there is an eternal principle – forgiveness is a costly thing. Human forgiveness is costly. A son or a daughter may go wrong and a father or a mother may forgive; but that forgiveness brings tears, whiteness to the hair, lines to the face, a cutting anguish and then a long, dull ache to the heart. It does not cost nothing. Divine forgiveness is costly. God is love – but he is also holiness. He, least of all, can break the great moral laws on which the universe is built. Sin must have its punishment, or the very structure of life disintegrates. And God alone can pay the terrible price that is necessary before we can be forgiven.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  When you have been there, it makes all the difference. And there is no part of human experience of which God cannot say: ‘I have been there.’ When we have a sad and sorry tale to tell, when life has drenched us with tears, we do not go to a God who is incapable of understanding what has happened; we go to a God who has been there. That is why – if we may put it in this way – God finds it easy to forgive. (c) It makes God able to help . He knows our problems because he has come through them. The best person to give you advice and help on a journey is someone who has already travelled that way. God can help because he knows it all. Jesus is the perfect high priest because he is perfectly God, and perfectly one with us. Because he has known our life, he can give us sympathy, mercy and power. He brought God to men and women, and he can bring them to God. THE REFUSAL TO GROW UP Hebrews 5:11–14 The story which has been laid upon me to tell you about this matter is a long story, difficult to tell and difficult to grasp, for your ears have become dull. For, indeed, at a stage when you ought to be teachers because of the length of time that has passed since you first heard the gospel, you still need someone to tell you the simple elements of the very beginning of the message of God. You have sunk into a state when you need milk and not solid food; for when anyone is at the stage of participating in milk feeding, he does not really know what Christian righteousness is, for he is only a child. For solid food is for those who have reached maturity, those who, through the development of the right kind of habit, have reached a stage when their perceptions are trained to distinguish between good and evil. H ERE, the writer to the Hebrews deals with the difficulties which confront him in attempting to get across an adequate conception of Christianity to his hearers. He is confronted with two difficulties. First, the Christian faith in all its fullness is by no means an easy thing to grasp, nor can it be learned in a day. Second, the hearing of his hearers is dull. The word he uses (nōthros) is full of meaning. It means slow-moving in mind, sluggish in understanding, dull of hearing, stupidly forgetful. It can be used of the numbed limbs of an animal which is ill. It can be used of a person who has the imperceptive nature of a stone. Now, this has something to say to everyone whose business it is to preach and to teach; in fact, it has something to say to everyone whose business it is to think, and that means that it has something to say to everyone.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I wanted to conserve it too, so I looked up a cheap hotel over a bakery on the Rue du Château, just off the Rue de Vanves, a place that Eugene had pointed out to me once. A few yards away was the bridge that spans the Montparnasse tracks. A familiar quarter. I could have had a room for a hundred francs a month, a room without any conveniences to be sure—without even a window—and perhaps I would have taken it, just to be sure of a place to flop for a while, had it not been for the fact that in order to reach this room I would have been obliged to first pass through the room of a blind man. The thought of passing his bed every night had a most depressing effect upon me. I decided to look elsewhere. I went over to the Rue Cels, just behind the cemetery, and I looked at a sort of rat trap there with balconies running around the courtyard. There were birdcages suspended from the balcony too, all along the lower tier. A cheerful sight perhaps, but to me it seemed like the public ward in a hospital. The proprietor didn’t seem to have all his wits either. I decided to wait for the night, to have a good look around, and then choose some attractive little joint in a quiet side street. At dinnertime I spent fifteen francs for a meal, just about twice the amount I had planned to allot myself. That made me so wretched that I wouldn’t allow myself to sit down for a coffee, even despite the fact that it had begun to drizzle. No, I would walk about a bit and then go quietly to bed, at a reasonable hour. I was already miserable, trying to husband my resources this way. I had never in my life done it; it wasn’t in my nature. Finally it began to come down in bucketsful. I was glad. That would give me the excuse I needed to duck somewhere and stretch my legs out. It was still too early to go to bed. I began to quicken my pace, heading back toward the Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly a woman comes up to me and stops me, right in the pouring rain. She wants to know what time it is. I told her I didn’t have a watch. And then she bursts out, just like this: “Oh, my good sir, do you speak English by chance?” I nod my head. It’s coming down in torrents now. “Perhaps, my dear good man, you would be so kind as to take me to a café. It is raining so and I haven’t the money to sit down anywhere.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child’s. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge. There were moments of forgetting. The summer I had visited Jessamine in Seattle after she had her first child—when I saw her waiting at the curb with her hair tucked into her coat, the years unknit themselves and I felt, for a moment, the sweet and blameless girl I had once been. The year with the man from Oregon, our shared kitchen hung with houseplants and Indian blankets on the seats of our car, covering the rips. We ate cold pita with peanut butter and walked in the wet green. Camping in the hills around Hot Springs Canyon, far down the coast, near a group who knew all the words to The People’s Song Book. A sun- hot rock where we lay, drying from the lake, our bodies leaving behind a conjoined blur. But the absence opened up again. I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognizable as a friend. And then I wasn’t. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction, the prison Bible groups and prime-time interviews and a mail-in college degree. I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. — It was Helen, in the end, who ended up talking. She was only eighteen, still desirous of attention—I’m surprised they stayed out of jail as long as they did. Helen had been picked up in Bakersfield for using a stolen credit card. Just a week in a county jail and they would have let her go, but she couldn’t help bragging to her cellmate. The coin-operated television in the common room showing a bulletin of the ongoing murder investigation. “The house is way bigger than it looks in those pictures,” Helen said, according to her cellmate. I can see Helen: nonchalant, thrusting her chin forward. Her cellmate must have ignored her at first. Rolling her eyes at

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  'On the eighteenth of May I Stayed talking to Kanya Osasawara late in the evening, and you were very angry about it. But, as I explained to you then, I had gone to him with my companions Magosaburo and Tomoya Matsubara for our singing lesson. Kanya is too young to have a love affair with me. Magosaburo is my own age. You know Tomoya well. Even if we were to meet every evening, there could be no scandal or amorous association between us. But you always suspected me, and have made frequent insinuations concerning that affair, which have caused me much suffering. Even to-day I cannot forget my sorrow at your unreasonable suspicion. 'Often, after our meetings, you could have accompanied me nearly home; but you always turned back at the house of Sodayon Murase. Only twice during all our long love have you come the full way with me, as far as my house. I am sure that, if I had really been your true love, you would have borne me company at least beyond the field where the tigers and wolves can be heard howling. 'I have many other things with which to reproach you, but am feeling infinitely sad. And even now I cannot help loving you. I do nothing but weep for my unhappy passion. I beg you to pray, only just once, for the safety of my soul after my death. This world is vain and uncertain; its contents are but a dream! I will finish my farewell letter with a poem: 'Tie morning flowers were born in their beauty. But the wind rose and carried them away Even before night. 'I have Still much to write, but evening is drawing near, and I must cease. To my dear Gonkuro from his Jinnosuke. May 26th, in the seventh year of Kuanbun(a.d. 1667),' He sealed the letter and gave it to his servant, Dengoro, saying: 'Take this letter to Gonkuro this evening when it is dark.'And, as soon as twilight came, he went to the place fixed for the duel. He dressed himself sumptuously, for he thought that it would be his very last costuming. His under-garments were of white silk, and his over-garment was purple with cherry blossoms embroidered on the hips. His emblem was the Jinko, * and his sleeves were long, as they were worn by pages. He carried two swords of Tadoyoshi Hizen in a grey girdle. The pine-tree-field of the god Teujin was two miles from the town. Jinnosuke sat down on a moss-covered Stone opposite a big camphor tree, and waited for his antagonist. As the darkness grew and the shapes of things became dim, Gonkuro arrived out of breath, crying: 'Are you there, Jinnosuke? 'Jinnosuke answered coldly: 'No one so base is a friend of mine.'Gonkuro began to weep, and said: 'I do not try to excuse myself. I shall tell you all my heart when we are in another world, Jinnosuke. Only then will you know me.'