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.

Page 192 of 212 · 20 per page

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

  Still having the simplicity to believe that a soul enchained by indebtedness ought to be eternally beholden to me, I judge it safe to enjoy the sweet pleasure of sharing my tears with him who has just shed some in my arms: I instruct him of my numerous reverses, he listens with interest, and when I have concluded with the latest catastrophe that has befallen me, the recital provides him with a glimpse of my poverty. "How happy I am," he exclaims, "to be able at least to acknowledge all you have just done for me; my name is Roland," the adventurer continues, "I am the owner of an exceedingly fine chateau in the mountains fifteen leagues hence, I that this proposal cause your delicacy no alarm, I am going to explain immediately in what way you will be of service to me. I am unwedded, but I have a sister I love passionately: she has dedicated herself to sharing my solitude; I need someone to wait upon her; we have recently lost the person who held that office until now, I offer her post to you." I thanked my protector and took the liberty to ask him how it chanced that a man such as he exposed himself to the dangers of journeying alone, and, as had just occurred, to being molested by bandits. "A stout, youthful, and vigorous fellow, for several years," said Roland, "I have been in the habit of traveling this way between the place where I reside and Vienne. My health and pocketbook benefit from walking. It is not that I need avoid the expense of a coach, for I am wealthy, and you will soon see proof of it if you are good enough to return home with me; but thriftiness never hurts. men who insulted me a short while ago, they are two would-be gentlemen of this canton from whom I won a hundred louis last week in a gaming house at Vienne; I was content to accept their word of honor, then I met them today, asked for what they owe me, and you witnessed in what coin they paid me." Together with this man I was deploring the double misfortune of which he was the victim when he proposed we continue our way.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I had spoken to my father a few times on the phone. It had seemed painful for him, too. He’d asked me oddly formal questions, like a distant uncle who knew me only as a series of secondhand facts: Evie is fourteen, Evie is short. The silences between us would’ve been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse—I could hear how happy he was to be gone. I sat on a bench alone, napkins spread across my knees, and ate my hamburger. It was the first meat I’d had in a long time. My mother, Jean, had stopped eating meat in the four months since the divorce. She’d stopped doing a lot of things. Gone was the mother who’d made sure I bought new underwear every season, the mother who’d rolled my white bobby socks as sweetly as eggs. Who’d sewn my dolls pajamas that matched mine, down to the exact pearly buttons. She was ready to attend to her own life with the eagerness of a schoolgirl at a difficult math problem. Any spare moment, she stretched. Going up on her toes to work her calves. She lit incense that came wrapped in aluminum foil and made my eyes water. She started drinking a new tea, made from some aromatic bark, and shuffled around the house sipping it, touching her throat absently as if recovering from a long illness. The ailment was vague, but the cure was specific. Her new friends suggested massage. They suggested the briny waters of sensory deprivation tanks. They suggested E-meters, Gestalt, eating only high-mineral foods that had been planted during a full moon. I couldn’t believe my mother took their advice, but she listened to everyone. Eager for an aim, a plan, believing the answer could come from any direction at any time, if only she tried hard enough. She searched until there was only searching left. The astrologer in Alameda who made her cry, talking about the inauspicious shadow cast by her rising sign. The therapies that involved throwing herself around a padded room filled with strangers and whirling until she hit something. She came home with foggy tinges under the skin, bruises that deepened to a vivid meat. I saw her touch the bruises with something like fondness. When she looked up and saw me watching, she blushed. Her hair was newly bleached, stinking of chemicals and artificial roses. “Do you like it?” she said, grazing the sheared ends with her fingers. I nodded, though the color made her skin look washed by jaundice. She kept changing, day by day. Little things. She bought handcrafted earrings from women in her encounter group, came back swinging primitive bits of wood from her ears, enameled bracelets the color of after-dinner mints jittery on her wrists. She started lining her eyes with an eyeliner pencil she held over a lighter flame.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In 2003, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to express the church’s concerns over its treatment in Germany. Cruise had access to practically anyone in the world. That same year, Cruise and Davis lobbied Rod Paige, the secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, to endorse Hubbard’s study tech educational methods. Paige had been impressed. For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program. One day Cruise flew his little red-and-white-striped Pitts Special biplane, designed for aerobatics, to Hemet, along with his Scientologist chief of staff, Michael Doven. Miscavige and Rathbun picked them up and drove them to Gold Base. Rathbun was in the backseat and recalls Cruise boasting to COB about his talks with the secretary. “ Bush may be an idiot,” Miscavige observed, “but I wouldn’t mind his being our Constantine.” Cruise agreed. “If fucking Arnold can be governor, I could be president.” Miscavige responded, “Well, absolutely, Tom.”2 IN 2001, Haggis was fired from Family Law , the show he had created. His career, which for so long seemed to be a limitless staircase toward fame and fortune, now took a plunge. He began working at home. Within a week, he started writing a movie script called Million Dollar Baby , based on a series of short stories by F. X. Toole. He spent a year working on it, drawing upon some of his own painful memories. He identified with the character of a sour old boxing coach, Frankie Dunn. Like Haggis, Frankie is estranged from his daughter. His letters to her are returned. He turns to religion, going to Mass every day and seeking a forgiveness that he doesn’t really believe in. Into the coach’s dismal life comes another young woman, Maggie Fitzgerald, an aspiring boxer from a white trash background. All of the loss and longing he feels for his daughter is apparent in his mentoring of this gritty young fighter, who has more faith in him than he has in himself. But Maggie is paralyzed when her neck is broken in a fight. In a climactic moment, she begs Frankie to pull the plug and let her die. Haggis faced a similar choice in real life with his best friend, who was brain-dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he recalled. “Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.” Haggis dreamed of directing the movie himself. But as much as studios admired the writing, the story was so dark nobody wanted to get near it. Haggis began borrowing money to stay afloat. He turned down another TV series because he realized that his heart hadn’t been in television for years. One of his abandoned TV projects still haunted him.

• From Between Us

  My crying in the moment did not fit that logic but instead appealed to others’ understanding and help, which my colleagues in the meeting clearly resisted. I ceded some responsibility for my well-being to my colleagues. I was dancing the tango when everybody else was dancing the waltz. This is only one person’s experience—mine—but it would not surprise me if many women in a male professional environments have had to learn to feel, express, and manage emotions to be acceptable and effective in these latter environments, pretty much like people in minoritized positions acculturating to majority emotions. The relational goals governing these contexts are different. It may equally be true that female gender roles for emotions are still rewarding and acceptable at home, even if they are not in traditionally male professional environments. If they are, then many women would be switching emotional cultures in their everyday lives, just like people in minoritized positions switch emotions when moving from majority to heritage cultural contexts. Context-switching may not be exclusive to women and minorities either. Perhaps everyone who moves across different spheres of life will have cultivated (slightly) different emotional understandings, expressions, and management strategies for these different contexts. The close relationship expert Margaret Clark gives the following example: Imagine you are dining out with your romantic partner. You spill your wine all over the table and your partner harshly ridicules you for having done so. You’re likely to feel hurt, perhaps angry, perhaps both. But what if the person who ridiculed you is a total stranger sitting at a nearby table? You’re very unlikely to feel hurt; you may feel angry, or you may just think the stranger is a jerk and brush him off as irrelevant. Our point is that the emotions you experience (or do not experience) in the face of identical ridicule will almost certainly differ if the ridicule comes from a close partner compared to coming from a stranger. Why would this be? Your hurt feelings, says Clark, are instrumental in the mending the relationship. They not only communicate to your partner that the relationship is not going well, but also that you are interested in them repairing it. Ideally your hurt feelings elicit your partner’s guilt, and a desire to repair the relationship. Anger is different, in that it “cedes no control to the other person.” Anger does not ask the other person to mend the relationship (though it may be used to steer a relationship in a desired direction also). Spilling wine in a restaurant is obviously a particular cultural environment to begin with. But within this narrow niche, your emotions will differ by type of relationship. In a close relationship you would be after relational repair, but when the ridicule comes from the nearby table, you would likely stand your ground, or just ignore it.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “Hope you get what you came for.” Sonny hosed down Joaquin and gave him a thorough shampoo, followed by a blow dry and a light buzz with a beard trimmer to even out the pelt. Normally, Joaquin liked primping for a show, he was quite the vain creature, but Sonny felt him trembling. “Settle down, buddy,” he whispered as Joaquin’s ear bent toward him. “You’ll have a whole new harem. One day you’re gonna thank me.” The auctioneer stood on a podium over the sawdust arena, spitting out numbers in a cascade of sixteenth notes as the ring manager paraded an emaciated steer in front of a couple dozen ranchers, who were more likely to be sellers than buyers. The animal and the audience shared a sleepy acceptance regarding their destiny, accounting for the submerged quality of the proceedings. Too many folks like Sonny had made the mistake of waiting for rain that never came. Now they were unloading their herds in a hurry, capsizing the market. The land wasn’t the only thing that had dried up; money had moved on, followed by hope. West Texas waged eternal war on optimists. Powdery motes swam in the air. Sonny spotted Doris at the top of the bleachers, so he hiked himself up the stairs. She had lines in her face that would do the Marlboro Man proud. Used to being the object of gossip just short of scandal, Doris surrounded herself with a harsh sense of humor like an electric fence, which kept the critics at a respectful distance. She ran the café in Alpine. She was a character. She was also Sonny’s mother. “What are you doing here?” Doris asked as Sonny sat down. “I might ask the same of you.” “I just came to ogle the boys,” Doris said, flicking the ash off her cigarette. “Look at the ass on that one.” Sonny didn’t respond to that. It could be a joke or she could be dead serious. “You got any stock left?” Doris asked. “We’re hanging on to the calves. Hope for better next year.” “Ed put down three heifers,” Doris said. “Right out in the field. Too weak to get in the trailer.” “Really, Mom, why are you here?” “I’m seeing Bud Schotz,” she said, indicating the auctioneer, Joe Frank’s dad. Buddy Holly glasses and a jaw like a doorknob. “Is that really true?” “We’re an item,” she declared. “We’ve been seen together.” “Well, I guess that’s good news.” “You guess right. He’s a man of means, and, you know, still functioning below the belt buckle.” “Mom, stop.” “Tender little ears you got.” Sonny had a kid sister, Marlene, who had long since packed up and moved off to Bangor, Maine, which if you look at the map is about the farthest point in the continental United States from Presidio County. So the parenting duties, in the sense of taking care of Doris, not the other way around, rested entirely on Sonny.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Pretend they’re oysters on the half shell. She swallowed, fighting her gag reflex the whole way, and then sagged against Beth’s side. Her jaw throbbed. It was starting to swell. “I feel like shit,” she mumbled, tearing up. “I want ice cream. I wanna sleep in a bed .” “I know,” said Beth, “but we’re gonna crash in a derelict car tonight and tomorrow I’m pulling your tooth out with hand tools, so you probably shouldn’t eat anything else because you’ll just puke it up on me. Anyway we only have expired power bars and jerky. Oh, and balls.” Fran closed her eyes. “Can you not crack jokes right now?” A moment of brittle silence. “Sure,” said Beth, with forced good humor. “Sorry.” Most of the time, Fran thought later as she lay drowsing on the mildew-smelling car floor with her head pillowed on the duffel, things were good between them. Most of the time they worked well together, Beth the high school track-and-field star slash dropout and Fran the premed fuckup hunting their way up and down the East Coast in search of testicles to eat and kidney lobes to process in Indi’s lab so they could sell nice clean hormones to the menopausal cis ladies in Manchester and Seabrook and sometimes Concord and Nashua if the roads were open. Sometimes, though, it felt like high school had never ended, like their terrible fight had happened yesterday instead of eight years ago, and Fran would wish, and hate herself for wishing, that she had two hours of highway driving and a mute button between her life and Bethany Crick. “You remember prize drawers?” Beth asked, her tone light. Conversational. It was just after dawn and she was on her knees astride Fran’s lap. She had a pair of rough-jawed pliers in her hand. “Stickers. Rubber finger puppets. Those pocket mazes with the little ball bearings?” Fran grunted her assent, oddly soothed at being asked an inane question while her mouth was full of fingers and metal. It made it seem more like she was twenty again and in a real dentist’s office getting quizzed about her biochem major by a fifty-year-old man with a waxed mustache as he checked her molars for cavities. In reality she sat with her back to the rusted-out car where they’d slept, her head pillowed on Beth’s smelly sweatshirt, waiting for the other girl to rip her tooth out. At least the heat had broken sometime in the night. It was cool and breezy today, the wind blowing the salt smell of the nearby tidal marshes inland. “I was all about the prize drawer when I was a kid,” said Beth. “When we had insurance I used to beg to go to the dentist just so I could get a shot at it.” She squinted, peering into Fran’s wide-open mouth. “We didn’t have a lot of money and I was obsessed with toys.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Tom De Vocht, who worked on the construction for years, said that the building remained unfinished for so long because no one knew what super power was. Under Miscavige’s leadership, the church has aggressively launched a program called Ideal Orgs, which aims to replicate the grandeur of Hubbard’s Saint Hill Manor. A number of the Ideal Orgs have been shuttered—including Boston and New Haven—because the local Scientology communities were unable to support them. Other notable churches and missions are now boarded up or unloaded—including one in Santa Monica that Paul and Deborah Haggis raised money to establish. THE INTENSITY OF the pressure on Sea Org members to raise money for the church—while working for next to nothing—can be understood in part through the account of Daniel Montalvo. His parents joined the Sea Org when he was five, and the very next year he signed his own billion-year contract. He says that he began working full-time in the organization when he was eleven and recalls that, along with other Sea Org members, including children, his days stretched from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night. Part of his work was shoveling up asbestos that had been removed during the renovation of the Fort Harrison Hotel. He says no protective gear was provided, not even a mask. He rarely saw his parents. While he was at Flag Base in 2005, when he was fourteen, he guarded the door while Tom Cruise was in session. The sight of children working at a Sea Org facility would not have been unusual. They were separated from their parents and out of school. According to Florida child labor laws, minors who are fourteen and fifteen years old are prohibited from working during school hours, and may work only up to fifteen hours a week. Daniel said that he was allowed schooling only one day a week, on Saturday. When Daniel was fifteen, he was assigned to work on the renovation of Scientology’s publications building in Los Angeles, operating scissors lifts and other heavy equipment. According to California child labor laws, fifteen-year-old children are allowed to work only three hours per day outside of school, except on weekends—no more than eighteen hours per week total. Sixteen is the minimum age for children to work in any manufacturing establishment using power-driven hoisting apparatus, such as the scissors lift. Daniel graduated to work at the church’s auditing complex nearby, called the American Saint Hill Organization; then from six in the evening until three in the morning he volunteered at Bridge Publications. He was paid thirty-six dollars a week. Daniel’s work at Bridge Publications was sufficiently impressive that he was posted full-time in the manufacturing division there the following year. The church had issued a new edition of Hubbard’s books and lectures called The Basics , which was being aggressively marketed to Scientologists.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Maybe she could have made movies or something, too. That would have been cool.” “Well, she wasn’t shy about the idea of writing books. She was shy about the kind of books she wanted to write.” “What kind of books did she want to write?” I asked. “You’re going to laugh.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” Jeez, we had both turned into seven-year-olds. “Just tell me,” I said. It was weird that a teacher was telling me things I didn’t know about my sister. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know about her. “She wanted to write romance novels.” Of course, I giggled at that idea. “Hey,” Mr. P said. “You weren’t supposed to laugh.” “I didn’t laugh.” “Yes, you laughed.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” “Maybe I laughed a little.” “A little laugh is still a laugh.” And then I laughed for real. A big laugh. “Romance novels,” I said. “Those things are just sort of silly, aren’t they?” “Lots of people—mostly women—love them,” Mr. P said. “They buy millions of them. There are lots of writers who make millions by writing romance novels.” “What kind of romances?” I asked. “She never really said, but she did like to read the Indian ones. You know the ones I’m talking about?” Yes, I did know. Those romances always featured a love affair between a virginal white schoolteacher or preacher’s wife and a half-breed Indian warrior. The covers were hilarious: “You know,” I said, “I don’t think I ever saw my sister reading one of those things.” “She kept them hidden,” Mr. P said. Well, that is a big difference between my sister and me. I hide the magazines filled with photos of naked women; my sister hides her tender romance novels that tell stories about naked women (and men). I want the pictures; my sister wants the words. “I don’t remember her ever writing anything,” I said. “Oh, she loved to write short stories. Little romantic stories. She wouldn’t let anybody read them. But she’d always be scribbling in her notebook.” “Wow,” I said. That was all I could say. I mean, my sister had become a humanoid underground dweller. There wasn’t much romance in that. Or maybe there was. Maybe my sister read romances all day. Maybe she was trapped in those romances. “I really thought she was going to be a writer,” Mr. P said. “She kept writing in her book. And she kept working up the courage to show it to somebody. And then she just stopped.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “You don’t have any idea?” “No, not really.” Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go? That had to be it, right? Something bad had happened to her, right? I mean, she lived in the fricking basement. People just don’t live and hide in basements if they’re happy.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  [image "The cover of ‘Savage Summer’ depicts a muscular man and a woman in a close, intimate embrace, conveying passion and romance. Prominently displayed are the alternative titles: ‘Apache Heat,’ ‘Lummi Lust,’ and “Yakama Yearning.’" file=image_rsrc4RZ.jpg] “You know,” I said, “I don’t think I ever saw my sister reading one of those things.” “She kept them hidden,” Mr. P said. Well, that is a big difference between my sister and me. I hide the magazines filled with photos of naked women; my sister hides her tender romance novels that tell stories about naked women (and men). I want the pictures; my sister wants the words. “I don’t remember her ever writing anything,” I said. “Oh, she loved to write short stories. Little romantic stories. She wouldn’t let anybody read them. But she’d always be scribbling in her notebook.” “Wow,” I said. That was all I could say. I mean, my sister had become a humanoid underground dweller. There wasn’t much romance in that. Or maybe there was. Maybe my sister read romances all day. Maybe she was trapped in those romances. “I really thought she was going to be a writer,” Mr. P said. “She kept writing in her book. And she kept working up the courage to show it to somebody. And then she just stopped.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “You don’t have any idea?” “No, not really.” Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go? That had to be it, right? Something bad had happened to her, right? I mean, she lived in the fricking basement. People just don’t live and hide in basements if they’re happy. Of course, my sister isn’t much different from my dad in that regard. Whenever my father isn’t off on a drinking binge, he spends most of his time in his bedroom, alone, watching TV. He mostly watches basketball. He never minds if I go in there and watch games with him. But we never talk much. We just sit there quietly and watch the games. My dad doesn’t even cheer for his favorite teams or players. He doesn’t react much to the games at all. I suppose he is depressed. I suppose my sister is depressed. I suppose the whole family is depressed. But I still want to know exactly why my sister gave up on her dream of writing romance novels. I mean, yeah, it is kind of a silly dream. What kind of Indian writes romance novels? But it is still pretty cool. I love the thought of reading my sister’s books. I love the thought of walking into a bookstore and seeing her name on the cover of a big and beautiful novel. Spokane River Heat by Mary Runs Away. That would be very cool. “She could still write a book,” I said. “There’s always time to change your life.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Read an excerpt from MR. TEXAS By Lawrence Wright Available from Alfred A. Knopf October 2023 [image "1" file=Image00030.jpg] A long cloud of dust trailed the black sedan racing down a caliche road toward the Walter Dunne spread. The horizon was dark and the mesquite trees bent in the north wind, waving at Mexico. A few idle pump jacks were rusting amid the creosote bushes. A slight rise lay just ahead, revealing a low-slung adobe wall encompassing the graveyard. The land was hard, dry, used up. The people who lived in these parts were also hard. Their ancestors settled on giant claims back when there was grass enough for cattle, but generation after generation had seen it wither away. Those who remained on the land were marooned by history. There were no cities within hundreds of miles. The remaining towns were little more than hamlets with half the buildings evacuated like old movie sets. An occasional gas station marked the intersection of county roads, but it was likely abandoned so long ago that the company it represented was extinct as well. You could go for days without seeing another human being, or even hearing your own voice until you had reason to speak. Airliners streaked across the high sky, and from that distant vantage passengers enjoying their cocktails might look down and think, Jeez, what a huge, empty, totally worthless country. And they’d go back to their crossword. You could almost hear the shades snapping shut as they jetted by. The service was already under way when L. D. Sparks parked his Lincoln at the end of a line of pickups and slipped into the crowd of mourners—a respectable turnout, befitting the prominence of the decedent. Some men were in suits but most wore dress jeans and shirts with pearl snap buttons, the women in somber dresses, purchased from catalogs, that reached to their Sunday boots. Their faces were lean and leathery and strongly formed, marked by the sun, faces you rarely saw in the soft suburbs, more like old family photographs, ancestral in nature, plain and unprettified and not to be trifled with. It was the hands that you finally noticed, chapped and red and laced with veins like braided rope, palms as hard as oak, some men could barely make a fist, and when you shook it was like grasping a brick. They were scarred from accidents and animal bites, knuckles broken by obstreperous equipment, some were missing digits. You couldn’t live in these parts without getting hurt. Compared to a lot of folks, Walter Dunne passed into the next world with enviable ease, his heart having failed to keep the beat. The tent over the grave bucked and billowed in the wind. Anywhere else you’d think it was about to rain, but there was no water in the approaching storm, a blue norther, bringing nothing but cold and trouble.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  YVONNE GILLHAM HAD fallen ill. She complained of headaches and was losing weight. She wanted desperately to go to Flag, where she could get the upper-level auditing she thought could cure her, but she was told there wasn’t money for that. Instead, she was sent on a mission to Mexico with her husband, Heber Jentzsch, an actor and musician who later became president of the church, a largely ceremonial post. They had married five years earlier. On her fiftieth birthday, October 20, 1977, while still in Mexico, Yvonne suffered a stroke. Jentzsch sent her back to Los Angeles, while he completed the tour. After that, her daughter Janis, one of Hubbard’s original Messengers, received a beautiful suitcase from her. Inside there was a letter, but it made no sense. Janis tried to find out what was wrong, but no one would say. Her sister, Terri, went to the Sea Org berthing and found Yvonne lying in her room unattended. Finally, she was sent to a hospital, where doctors found a tumor in her brain, which had caused the stroke in the first place. It would have been operable if she had come to them sooner, the doctors said. Desperate to get Gillham the auditing she still thought she needed, Taylor went to the financial banking officer and begged her for the funds to send her friend to Flag. “If she wants to go to Flag, she can take the fucking Greyhound,” the officer responded. “You’re Yvonne’s assassin!” Taylor shouted. When Hubbard found out Yvonne Gillham was dying, he sent her a telex asking if she wanted to keep her body or move on to the next cycle. She decided it would be quicker just to let go, but she still wanted the auditing. Hubbard agreed to let her travel to Clearwater, to do an “end of cycle on her hats”—meaning that she would brief her successor at the Celebrity Centre before she died. Hana Eltringham was stationed at Flag, and she was shocked at the sight of her dear friend. Yvonne was dizzy and frequently lost her balance, and her thoughts trailed away. She refused to take pain medication because it would interfere with her auditing. She tearfully blamed herself for the terrible “overt” of dying and deserting Hubbard. She was desperate to see her children, to say good-bye, but they were kept away. Hubbard designated Catherine Harrington, one of Yvonne’s closest friends, to talk to her about the celebrities in her care—who was a reliable speaker, who was good at recruiting other celebrities. Yvonne talked about various people—some television actors, a Mexican pop singer, the producer Don Simpson, Karen Black, Chick Corea, and Paul Haggis, among others—but she was particularly worried about Travolta. “Please help him. He’s especially sensitive,” she said. She advised Harrington to deal with the celebrities the same way she treated Hubbard—very delicately, and with an open mind. Gillham died in January 1978.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The second principle is “Too Steep a Gradient,” which Hubbard describes as the difficulty a student encounters when he makes a leap he’s not prepared for. “It is a sort of a confusion or a reelingness that goes with this one,” Hubbard writes. His solution is to go back to the point where the student fully understands the subject, then break the material into bite-size pieces. The “Undefined Word”—the third and most important principle— occurs when the student tries to absorb material while bypassing the definition of the words employed. “THE ONLY REASON A PERSON GIVES UP A STUDY OR BECOMES CONFUSED OR UNABLE TO LEARN IS BECAUSE HE HAS GONE PAST A WORD THAT WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD,” Hubbard emphasizes in one of his chiding technical bulletins. “WORDS SOMETIMES HAVE DIFFERENT OR MORE THAN ONE MEANING.” A misunderstood word “gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed out feeling,” Hubbard writes. “A not-there feeling and a sort of an hysteria will follow in the back of that.” The solution is to have a large dictionary at hand, preferably one with lots of pictures in it. All Scientology texts contain glossaries for specialized Scientology terms. The need to understand the meaning of words, Hubbard writes, “is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education and don’t neglect it.” These last two principles are fundamental to the induction of Scientology itself. Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on. Lauren loved her teacher at Delphi, but the Hubbard method placed the responsibility of learning almost entirely on the student. For Lauren, her parents’ tumultuous divorce was a crushing distraction. It seemed to her that no one was paying attention to her, either at home or at school. She was illiterate until she was eleven. She couldn’t read or write her own name. Second-generation Scientologists are typically far more at home with the language and culture of the church than their parents are. And yet they may find themselves a little lost when trying to deal with an uncomprehending society. The first time Alissa noticed that she was doing something different from most people was when she performed a Contact Assist.

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

  The Greek church poetry begins properly with the anonymous but universally accepted and truly immortal Gloria in Excelsis of the third century.446 The poems of Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), and Synesius of Cyrene (d. about 414), who used the ordinary classical measures, are not adapted and were not intended for public worship.447 The first hymnist of the Byzantine period, is Anatolius patriarch of Constantinople (d. about 458). He struck out the new path of harmonious prose, and may be compared to Venantius Fortunatus in the West.448 We now proceed to the classical period of Greek church poetry. In the front rank of Greek hymnists stands St. John Of Damascus, surnamed Mansur (d. in extreme old age about 780). He is the greatest systematic theologian of the Eastern church and chief champion of image-worship against iconoclasm under the reigns of Leo the Isaurian (717–741), and Constantinus Copronymus (741–775). He spent a part of his life in the convent of Mar Sâba (or St. Sabas) in the desolate valley of the Kedron, between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.449 He was thought to have been especially inspired by the Virgin Mary, the patron of that Convent, to consecrate his muse to the praise of Christ. He wrote a great part of the Octoechus, which contains the Sunday services of the Eastern church. His canon for Easter Day is called "the golden Canon" or "the queen of Canons," and is sung at midnight before Easter, beginning with the shout of joy, "Christ is risen," and the response, "Christ is risen indeed." His memory is celebrated December 4.450 Next to him, and as melodist even above him in the estimation of the Byzantine writers, is St. Cosmas Of Jerusalem, called the Melodist. He is, as Neale says, "the most learned of the Greek poets, and the Oriental Adam of St. Victor." Cosmas and John of Damascus were foster-brothers, friends and fellow-monks at Mar Sâba, and corrected each other’s compositions. Cosmas was against his will consecrated bishop of Maiuma near Gaza in Southern Palestine, by John, patriarch of Jerusalem. He died about 760 and is commemorated on the 14th of October. The stichos prefixed to his life says: "Where perfect sweetness dwells, is Cosmas gone; But his sweet lays to cheer the church live on."451 The third rank is occupied by St. Theophanes, surnamed the Branded,452 one of the most fruitful poets. He attended the second Council of Nicaea (787). During the reign of Leo the Arminian (813) he suffered imprisonment, banishment and mutilation for his devotion to the Icons, and died about 820. His "Chronography" is one of the chief sources for the history of the image-controversy.453 The following specimen from Adam’s lament of his fall is interesting: "Adam sat right against the Eastern gate, By many a storm of sad remembrance tost: O me! so ruined by the serpent’s hate! O me! so glorious once, and now so lost! So mad that bitter lot to choose! Beguil’d of all I had to lose!

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

  Page 904 line 7. Add to Lit. on Gregory of Nyssa: Böhringer: Kirchengesch. in Biogr., new ed., vol. viii. 1876. G Herrmann: Greg. Nyss. Sententiae de salute adipiscenda. Halle, 1875. . T. Bergades: De universo et de anima hominis doctrina Gregor. Nyss. Leipz., 1876. W. Möller, in Herzog,2 v. 396–404. E. Venables, in Smith and Wace, ii. 761–768. A. Paumier, in Lichtenberger, 723–725. On his doctrine of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, see especially Baur and Dorner. On his doctrine of the apokatastasis and relation to Origen, see Möller, G. Herrmann, and Bergades. l.c. Farrar: "Lives of the Fathers," (1889), ii. 56–83. Page 909, line 4. Add to Lit. on Gregory of Nazianzus: A. Grenier: La vie et les poésies de saint Grégoire de Nazianze. Paris, 1858. Böhringer: K. G. in Biogr., new ed., vol. viii. 1876. Abbé A. Benoît: Vie de saint Grégoire de Nazianze. Paris, 1877. J. R. Newman: Church of the Fathers, pp. 116–145, 551. Dabas: La femme au quatrième siècle dans les poésies de Grég. de Naz. Bordeaux, 1868. H. W. Watkins, in Smith and Wace, ii. 741–761. W. Gass, in Herzog,2 v. 392–396. A. Paumier, in Lichtenberger, v., 716–722. On his christology, see Neander, Baur and especially Dorner. His views on future punishment have been discussed by Farrar, and Pusey (see vol. ii. 612). Farrar:: "Lives of the Fathers," i. 491–582. Page 920, line 22. Add: In one of his plaintive songs from his religious retreat, after lamenting the factions of the church, the loss of youth, health, strength, parents, and friends, and his gloomy and homeless condition, Gregory thus gives touching expression to his faith in Christ as the last and only comforter: "Thy will be done, O Lord! That day shall spring, When at thy word, this clay shall reappear. No death I dread, but that which sin will bring; No fire or flood without thy wrath I fear; For Thou, O Christ, my King, art fatherland to me. My wealth, and might, and rest; my all I find in Thee." 1 1 Pro;" eJauton, in Daniel’s Thesaurus Hymnol., iii., 11: Criste; a[nax, su; dev moi pavtrh, sqevno", o[lbo", a{panta, Soi; d j a[r j ajnayuvxaimi bivon kai; khvde j ajmeivya". Page 924. After line 2, add to Lit. on Cyril of Jerusalem: J. H. Newman: Preface to the Oxford transl. of Cyril in the "Library of the Fathers"(1839). E. Venables, in Smith and Wace, i. 760–763. C. Burk, in Herzog,2 iii. 416–418. Page 933, line 4 from below. Add to Lit. on Chrysostom:

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

  Night was closing: it was almost beyond my power to move; I was scarcely able to stand erect; I cast my eyes upon the thicket where four years earlier I had slept a night when I had been in circumstances almost as unhappy! I dragged myself along as best I could, and having reached the very same spot, tormented by my still bleeding wounds, overwhelmed by my mind's anxieties and the sorrows of my heart, I passed the cruelest night imaginable. By dawn, thanks to my youth and my vigorous temperament, some of my strength was restored; greatly terrified by the proximity of that baneful chateau, I started away from it without delay; I left the forest, and resolved at any price to gain the first habitation which might catch my eye, I entered the town of Saint-Marcel, about five leagues distant from Paris; I demanded the address of a surgeon, one was given me; I presented myself and besought him to dress my wounds; I told him that, in connection with some affair at whose source lay love, I had fled my mother's house, quit Paris, and during the night had been overtaken in the forest by bandits who in revenge for my resistance to their desires, had set their dogs upon me. Rodin, as this artist was called, examined me with the greatest attention, found nothing dangerous about my injuries; had I come to him directly, he said, he would have been able to guarantee that in the space of a fortnight he would have me as fresh and whole as I had been before my adventure; however, the night passed in the open and my worry had infected my wounds, and I could not expect to be well in less than a month. Rodin found space in his own house to lodge me, took all possible care of me, and on the thirtieth day there no longer existed upon my body a single vestige of Monsieur de Bressac's cruelties. As soon as I was fit to take a little air, my first concern was to find in the town some girl sufficiently adroit and intelligent to go to the Marquise's chateau and find out what had taken place there since my departure. This apparently very dangerous inquisitiveness would without the slightest doubt have been exceedingly misplaced; but here it was not a question of mere Curiosity. What I had earned while with the Marquise remained in my room; I had scarcely six louis about me, and I possessed above forty at the chateau.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  David Koresh created such a community in the Branch Davidian compound that he established near Waco and aptly called Ranch Apocalypse. In 1993, I was asked to write about the siege that was then under way. I decided not to, because there were more reporters on the scene than Branch Davidians; however, I had been unsettled by the sight of the twenty-one children that Koresh sent out of the compound shortly before the fatal inferno. Those children left behind their parents and the only life they had known. They were ripped out of the community of faith, placed in government vans, and ushered through a curtain of federal agents and reporters onto the stage of an alien world and who knows what future. I thought there must be other children who had experienced similar traumas; what had become of them? There is a strangely contorted mound in a cemetery in Oakland, California, close by the naval hospital where Hubbard spent his last months in uniform. Under an undistinguished headstone rest four hundred bodies out of the more than nine hundred followers of Jim Jones who perished in Jonestown in 1978. The caskets had been stacked on top of one another on the side of a bulldozed hillside, then the earth was filled in, grass was planted, and the tragedy of Jonestown was buried in the national memory as one more inexplicable religious calamity. The members of the Peoples Temple, as Jones called his movement, had been drawn to his Pentecostal healing services, his social activism, and his racial egalitarianism. Charisma and madness were inextricably woven into the fabric of his personality, along with an insatiable sexual appetite that accompanied Jones’s terror of abandonment. In his search for a secure religious community, Jones had repeatedly uprooted his congregation. Finally, in May 1977, the entire movement disappeared, virtually overnight. Without warning, leaving jobs and homes and family members who were not a part of the Peoples Temple, they were spirited away to a jungle encampment in Guyana, South America, which Jones billed as a socialist paradise. There he began to school them in suicide. I learned that not everyone had died in Jonestown. Among the survivors were Jones’s three sons: Stephan, Tim, and Jim Junior. They had been away from the camp playing basketball against the Guyanese national team in the capital city of Georgetown. These haunted young men had never before told their stories. One of the privileges of being a journalist is to be trusted to hear such memories in all their emotional complexity. One night I went to dinner with Tim Jones and his wife, Lorna. Tim was physically powerful, able to press a hundred pounds with either arm, but he couldn’t fly on an airplane because of his panic attacks. He wanted his wife to come along because he had never given her a full account, and he wanted to be in a public place so he wouldn’t cry.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Former church members say that significant church resources were used to contain the scandal, and that David forced his father to join the Sea Org. Because David’s mother, Loretta, refused to sign up for that, she and Ron agreed to divorce. She continued in Scientology, rising to the summit as an OT VIII. She worked as an accountant for the law firm of Greta Van Susteren, the television commentator, and her husband, John Coale, both Scientologists, who maintain a mansion on Clearwater Beach. Loretta was a heavy smoker who suffered from emphysema and obesity—scarcely the image of an Operating Thetan—but her self-deprecating, sometimes goofy sense of humor made her popular among the staff and upper-level Scientologists—“the court jester of the Scientology country club,” as Rathbun called her. Loretta’s regal position as the leader’s mother allowed her to give rein to gossipy stories about Dave’s childhood, which she told in a thick Philly accent. Miscavige complained that his mother was trying to destroy him. He ordered Rathbun to run a security check on her, using the E-Meter. When Loretta realized what he was up to, she burst out laughing. Miscavige sent his personal trainer to help his mother get in shape, and he had church members monitoring her diet, but her chronic health problems overtook her. “ She was sick for a long time,” her granddaughter, Jenna Miscavige Hill, recalled. “She was not happy with the turn the church took.” Sometimes Loretta would burst into tears. “I would try to help her the only way I knew how,” Hill said. “She was an amazing grandma.” (Loretta Miscavige died in 2005.) THE LEVEL OF ABUSE at the Gold Base was increasing year by year as—unpoliced by outside forces—other senior executives began emulating their leader. Rinder, De Vocht, and Rathbun all admit to striking other staff members. Even some of the women became physically aggressive, slapping underlings when they didn’t perform up to standard. Debbie Cook, the former leader of Flag Base, says that although Miscavige never struck her, he ordered his Communicator to do so. Another time, she said, he told his Communicator to break Cook’s finger. She bent Cook’s finger but failed to actually break it. Miscavige can be charming and kind, especially to Sea Org members who need emotional or medical assistance. He has a glittering smile and a commanding voice. And yet former Scientologists who were close to him recall that his constant profanity and bursts of unprovoked violence kept everyone off balance. Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org executive who had worked with Paul Haggis on the rejected Dianetics campaign, says he was beaten by Miscavige on five occasions, the first time in 2002. He had just written an infomercial for the church. Miscavige summoned him to a meeting, where about forty members were seated on one side of a long conference table; Miscavige routinely sits by himself on the other side. He began a tirade about the shortcomings of the infomercial.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The kind of cold, dead hatred Fran had seen all her life hiding behind different eyes. In others, something like loss. It’s just gone. Indi’s house, our work. All of it. The duffel that held their testicle harvest, still on ice, was stuffed under the bench seat. Their whole lives fit under a seat in a van. She looked back at Indi, who was slack-faced with car sickness, and Robbie, drumming absently on his thighs as he stared out the window at the greenery of the deep woods. They hit a bump and Indi closed her eyes, moaning softly. Robbie didn’t seem to notice. Why did I try so hard to make him come with us? She watched the dappled light flow over his profile. He’d taken off his hat and his thick auburn hair was matted and cowlicked. She wanted so badly to run her fingers through it. I don’t even know where we’re going, really. I don’t even know him . In the front of the van, the driver, a tall redhead in jeans and a Bruins windbreaker, downshifted as they hit a washed-out stretch of road, the van’s tires throwing up sheets of water. The skinny-fat thirtysomething slouched in the passenger seat in mirrored sunglasses and a wifebeater stained yellow under her armpits, strawberry-blond hair up in a loose bun, said “Slow down” in a tone of voice that left no room for argument. The driver did, muttering an apology, and they rattled on for a few minutes between thinning trees and then, without warning, out into a clear-cut stretch of bare earth dotted with stumps like rotten teeth. The field sloped up maybe a quarter of a mile toward a low granite ridge, above which it rose steeply through scrub pines and beech trees to a summit of bare rock. Set into the granite’s sheer face was a massive concrete bulkhead, and set into the bulkhead was a rusted steel blast door twelve or thirteen feet high and about twice as wide. “Oh, what the fuck,” Beth whispered, craning her neck to squint over the driver’s shoulder as they crested a low rise. Fran saw it a second later. There was a camp at the base of the cliff face, a sprawl of sagging tents and shacks made of particle board and canvas and sheets of corrugated metal. People milled through it, alone and in listless clumps, turning now toward the van as it came up the track. Fran saw laundry strung on sagging lines and people roasting corn and squirrels over open fires. Their dull eyes followed the van as, slowing, they drove through the tangle of bodies and canvas. A few people stood up from around their cookfires. There’s a place for you, if you want it, Indi had said.

• From Between Us

  And did I justify not including the emotional behaviors (e.g., crying, laughing) that my respondents in all cultural groups considered important emotions? No, not really. In retrospect, I realize that I was blindfolded by my own culturally informed ideas of what emotions were, and by a scientific consensus that originated in that same culture. I decided that my focus would be on emotions as phenomena which happen “inside” the person, and in doing so, I focused on emotion categories that coincided, to a large extent, with scholarly definitions of emotions as they exist in Western (mostly U.S.) science. In retrospect, I could have learned much more, had I been more aware of my own cultural assumptions. There was more that I missed. Many of the Turkish participants in my word-listing study did list emotions proper—the phenomena that happen inside the person—but the emotions that were high up in their list barely overlapped with the basic emotions as psychology knew them. The emotions listed by most of the Turkish respondents were “love” (sevgi/sevmek) and “hate” (nefret); also prevalent were, in descending order of frequency, “pitying” (acımak), “desire/longing” (hasret), “sexual love” (aşk), and “sadness” (üzüntü). The most frequent emotion words looked nothing like the list of emotions that were recognized in the face: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness. They showed only slightly more overlap (i.e., love) with the emotion concepts found to be basic by research on emotion concepts. Despite the differences in what Turkish, and to some extent Dutch-majority and Surinamese-Dutch participants, considered to be emotions, in the next steps of my research I focused on five emotion concepts that had translations in each culture, that had maximal overlap with the basic emotions that Ekman and Friesen proposed, and that emerged as the best instance of emotions: anger, sadness, happiness, and love. I added shame, which was a basic-level category of emotions (i.e., a pile) in China. At the time, I attributed the absence of shame from the lists in other languages to its taboo status. Anger, sadness, happiness, love, and shame became the foci of my subsequent research. I had some good reasons to focus on these emotions. First, the proposition that these were some universally important categories seemed reasonable enough: they were close to the ones established by other studies that asked laypeople in the United States, and even China, what the best instances of “emotion” were. Second, in including these concepts, my research findings could be tied to the existing emotion literature, which allowed for direct comparison and contrast with existing findings—another big advantage.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know, and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets supine. Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without interruption, and finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult enough to understand his English when he’s under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer… no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he manages to get out clearly. Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to pretend that he is going blind.