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 While You Were Out (2023)

  We kept waiting for her to return, but she never did. The youngest two of her four children would come to our house for dinner every once in a while, and my mother would sometimes take them shopping to buy new clothes. Eventually, the woman and her husband divorced, and he married his secretary. But for years, the woman and my mother would talk on the phone on Sunday afternoons when the telephone rates were lowest. Sometimes, I stood outside my parents’ bedroom door and listened, fascinated by their friendship. They’d formed a kind of secret sorority, stronger, more intense than the crew at the beach discussing winter vacation spots and where to get the best leg of lamb, though there was some of that light banter. My mother would fill her in on news of the block: romantic misadventures of the spinster sisters who lived across the street, decorating updates, the medical reports of various kids’ broken bones and burst appendixes. But then my mother’s tone would soften, and there would be long silences while the woman talked. Yes, I know, my mother would say in her most comforting voice. Oh, yes. I know. There were other unexplained absences. A high school girl on the next block left suddenly to live with her aunt in Texas. She came home several months later looking puffy and sad. Years later, I learned she’d had a baby that she gave up for adoption. The odd man who lived a few doors down with his elderly blind mother would disappear and reappear mysteriously, too. We never knew why he still lived at home. Steer clear of that guy, Holmer used to warn my brothers. Sure enough, years later, the man was convicted of having sex with underage boys on a boat that he kept at the Wilmette harbor, called The Slow Poke . The world beyond Greenwood Avenue seemed equally harsh and unforgiving. Each week, the mailman delivered our copies of Time and Newsweek magazines with increasingly gruesome photos: bleeding U.S. soldiers trudging through rice paddies, Vietcong bodies stacked up like cordwood, sobbing children, one naked, her mouth wide open as she ran down the road to escape the napalm bomb that destroyed her village. The evening newscasts showed daily tallies of soldiers killed. Not all the casualties were on foreign soil or even part of the official count. Michael, the boy that Billy claimed to be that day at the beach, had an older sister whose husband came home from Vietnam addicted to heroin. A few years later, they found him dead in a gas station bathroom on the west side of Chicago. On an early spring afternoon in April 1968, my friend’s older brother stood off to the side watching us play basketball. Did you girls hear the news? he asked. The night before, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis.

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

  I have always wondered how parents come to abuse their kids. After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning. What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children? Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: Watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers. At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions. Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping. Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with their mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/intrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most powerful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise. Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults. Dissociation: Knowing and Not KnowingLyons-Ruth was particularly interested in the phenomenon of dissociation, which is manifested in feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world and in seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down. She found a “striking and unexpected” relationship between maternal disengagement and misattunement during the first two years of life and dissociative symptoms in early adulthood. Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to know and to see.”[36] Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves—their interests, preferences, and goals. Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal. But if your caregivers ignore your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing.[37]

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  108.“I stamped on it with both feet until there was nothing left” : Ibid., p. 170.Early drafts of It’s Not the End of the World show Blume : Box 110 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 29, 2022.“I have discovered something important about my mother and father” : Judy Blume, It’s Not the End of the World, p. 180.And eventually, Jackson suggested that Bill’s second marriage plot : Box 110 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed April 29, 2022.“All you care about is yourself!” : Judy Blume, It’s Not the End of the World , p. 115.Chapter Six The Fourth Dimension“In my heart, I was out there marching” : Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0 . “a theory of patriarchy” : Kate Millett, The Second Sex (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970), p. 24.“Women who are employed have two jobs” : Ibid., p. 41.During the 1960 race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy : Weidt, Presenting Judy Blume , p. 119.“Daddy and I just don’t enjoy being together” : Judy Blume, It’s Not the End of the World (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Bradbury Press, 1972), p. 85.“I had you when I was just twenty” : Ibid., p. 102.“The children need you at home, Ellie” : Ibid., p. 112.“It was like the bacteria, the bad bacteria was coming out” : Judy Blume at the Arlington Public Library event on October 22, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDBcovfFjM .“My mother had many, many talents and much to offer” : Lee, Judy Blume’s Story , p. 78.“the hero, the cowgirl, the detective” : V.C. Chickering, “A Judy Blume Interview from the Bust Archives,” Bust , February 12, 2015, originally published in the 1997 Spring/Summer issue. Accessed online: https://bust.com/tbt-a-very-special-judy-blume-exclusive-from-our-bust-vault/ .“She had a Roadster with a rumble seat” : Ibid.Judy has said Dr. O was based on her father : Judy Blume in conversation with Samantha Bee at an event at the 92nd Street Y on June 2, 2015. Accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7svP4zqCc0 .“After that, she’d reinvented herself” : Judy Blume, In the Unlikely Event (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), p. 385.“in the feminine mystique, which defines woman solely” : Betty Freidan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Norton, 1976). I worked from the 1991 reprint from Dell Books, p. 38.“Women who work because of a commitment [to their vocation]” : Ibid., p. 42.She endorses “a new kind of city living” : Ibid., p. 53.“You never grew up! You’re still Ruth’s baby!” : Judy Blume, It’s Not the End of the World , p.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I played with G.I. Joe action figures and built forts in the empty lot next to our home and caroused in the woods on the edge of our neighborhood because my brothers were my playmates. Most of the time, my brothers were my best friends besides the ones I found in books. The three of us got along well, except when we bickered, and oh, we could bicker, particularly my brother Joel and me. We bickered about everything and nothing and then we made up and made trouble. The baby, Michael Jr., was so much younger that he was, generally, a willing accomplice to our shenanigans. When he wasn’t our accomplice, he was the target of petty cruelties, like when we sent him down the basement stairs in a laundry basket or tormented him with a plastic spider or, worst of all, ignored his plaintive desire to play with us. Somehow, through it all, he adored us, and Joel and I basked in the glow of his adoration. These pictures from the photo albums of my childhood are artifacts of a time when I was happy and whole. They are evidence that, once, I was pretty and sometimes sweet. Beneath what you see now, there is still a pretty girl who loves pretty-girl things. In these pictures, I get older. I smile less. I am still pretty. When I am twelve, I stop wearing skirts or most jewelry or doing anything with my hair, instead wearing it back in a tight bun or ponytail. I am still pretty. A few years after that, I will cut most of my hair off and start wearing oversized men’s clothing. I am less pretty. In these pictures I stare at the camera. I look hollow. I am hollow. 11I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “Something terrible happened.” Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body so I need to tell you what happened to my body. I was young and I took my body for granted and then I learned about the terrible things that could happen to a girl body and everything changed. Something terrible happened, and I wish I could leave it at that because as a writer who is also a woman, I don’t want to be defined by the worst thing that has happened to me. I don’t want my personality to be consumed in that way. I don’t want my work to be consumed or defined by this terrible something. At the same time, I don’t want to be silent. I can’t be silent. I don’t want to pretend nothing terrible has ever happened to me. I don’t want to carry all the secrets I carried, alone, for too many years. I cannot do these things anymore.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Seventeen Book IX—The New Man Scope: One center of this book is Augustine’s baptism, which marks the end of the process of his conversion and, thus, the end of the biographical part of the Confessions. But Augustine also has to deal with the very real question of what to do with his life now that he has formally become a Christian. This book deals with his decision to abandon his life as a teacher of rhetoric in favor of a life of leisure and contemplation. In this lecture, we will deal with his new “career choice,” seen both in itself and in terms of his later life as a Christian bishop. We will also follow Augustine as he recounts the deaths of several friends who have become close to him, as well as the death of his son. Given that the pattern of Christian baptism, as a rite of initiation, is seen by Augustine as a pattern of death and rebirth, it seems clear that Augustine wants us to view these deaths, as well as the climactic death of his mother, which also takes place in this book, in terms of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. We will discuss what Augustine says about his son, in what amounts to a kind of eulogy for him, and explore some of the questions that are left unanswered in Augustine’s discussion of his son. Outline I. Augustine’s conversion leads toward his baptism. His official reception into the Christian community through this rite of Christian initiation is, in a real sense, the goal of his lengthy journey, which ends in his turning toward God. A. Baptism as a rite of the Christian Church is extremely rich in significance and symbolism. B. Saint Paul, for example, talks about baptism in terms of a pattern of death and resurrection. 1. Christ’s death and resurrection, according to Paul, is that pattern that all Christians must follow. 2. Our immersion in the waters of baptism recreates precisely that pattern. 52 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  II. In Book IX of the Confessions, Augustine relates the death of several people of great importance in his life. A. In this book, for example, he recounts the death of his son. B. He also relates the death of his friends Nebridius and Verecundus. C. Finally, he recounts—at considerable length—the death of his mother, Monica. III. It seems clear that he wants us to understand these deaths and his reaction to them in terms of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. IV. In this book, we are given more details about Augustine’s son. A. He talks about his son’s baptism. B. He talks about a book they wrote together, as a dialogue, even though his son was only 16 years old at the time. C. He asserts that he has no anxiety for his son because of the kind of life he led. V. Now that Augustine is a baptized Christian, he must deal with the very real question of what to do with his life. A. He is concerned that he live a life that is appropriate to a Christian. B. He understands that there may be some problems in leading the life of a teacher of rhetoric. C. Like Victorinus in Book VIII, Augustine gives up the teaching of rhetoric as inappropriate to his new life. 1. Augustine uses a lung problem as his opportunity to “retire” from the teaching of rhetoric. 2. He takes advantage of the generosity of his friend Verecundus, who makes his country estate at Cassiciacum available to Augustine. VI. The period of contemplation and leisure that Augustine and his friends enjoy at Cassiciacum must surely be contrasted with his later busy life as a bishop. A. He enters a quasi-monastic atmosphere that reflects earlier periods of his life. B. The decision to put marriage aside probably derived from a desire to dedicate himself to other aspects of life. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 53 C. He is, in a sense, “wasting time with God” during this contemplative period, developing ideas he will later write about at length. Suggested Readings: Cooper, chapter 9. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, chapter 13. Stock, chapter 3. Questions to Consider: 1. How does Augustine’s account of the death of his son, Adeodatus, in Book IX differ from his account of the death of his unnamed friend in Book IV? 2. What can we infer about Augustine as a father from what he tells us about his son in this book? 54 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  For the first time, I began to see that we couldn’t just buy everything we wanted on a whim. Old habits are hard to break. Holmer started hiding his new suits under their bed, and I began signing Nancy’s name on the charge slips for my new hauls. From what I could tell by listening outside my parents’ bedroom door, Holmer’s business was not going well. After he sued his former business partner, he got a job as the national sales manager for the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, where his name appeared on the masthead. That was great for a while, until he got fired, for what I do not know. Before long, he landed another job, overseeing publications for the American College of Chest Physicians. But he got fired from that job, too, and then he developed a bleeding ulcer. Was it his erratic behavior? His drinking? Both? Whatever the cause, as Holmer approached his midforties, the trajectory of his career was heading in the wrong direction. He had once been such a high roller that he had his own room at the Waldorf Astoria. His cousins came to him for loans. Now he was the one scrambling to pay bills, sharing an office next to the copy machine. One of his cousins hired him to work at his Michigan Avenue advertising agency, a gesture that we suspected was an act of charity, confirmed after one of his kids loudly and derisively announced to Danny on the St. Francis playground, “Our dad had to give your dad a job.” Now we were quitting the Michigan Shores Club. No more swim lessons. No more cheeseburgers and fries at the Chatterbox, the little diner inside the club. I tried sneaking in anyway one day after school and ordered a chocolate milkshake. A charge to number sixty-three, please, I told the waitress, looking around nervously. Brain freeze be damned, I sucked down the ice cream drink as fast as I could before she discovered what a little grifter I was. THE CROWD CLAPPED AND cheered, but I wept as Mary Kay and her Regina Dominican High School classmates promenaded down the aisle in their white caps and gowns that evening in June 1970. She’s graduating, not dying, my mother leaned over and whispered to me. It felt like something was being lost forever in that existential moment. Our cozy family life—crazy to many from the outside looking in but comfortable and familiar to me—was about to end. Our oldest sister would be heading off to St. Louis for college in late August. The ten of us would never live together again. If I had my way, I would have preserved us all in amber at that sweet spot of 1970 with the jazz of our family life thumping throughout the house: moppy-headed high school boys in their shiny Camaros and Corvettes racing up the street to pick up my glamorous older sisters, Mungo Jerry blaring from their car stereos.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  There is broad agreement that the incessant sexualization of women in media hurts girls. Even a brief exposure—to two thirty-second advertising spots embedded in a four-minute reel—has been found to undermine body image, erode self-esteem, and trigger self-objectification. Yet, rarely do we discuss how those one-dimensional images of women influence boys’ perceptions of female peers: the truth is, it affects them profoundly. One clue as to how can be found in a 2000 study by researchers from the University of Massachusetts. They edited together scenes from the R-rated movies Showgirls and 9½ Weeks that were judged as degrading to women, depicting them as objects to be exploited or manipulated sexually. None contained violence—they included scenes of a striptease, of a blindfolded woman—but they emphasized male dominance as well as female submission and availability. They also portrayed male, but not female, sexual satisfaction. Half the college-age participants watched those clips, and the other half, the control group, watched a cartoon from an animation festival. Afterward, both groups read a magazine account of either acquaintance or stranger rape. While there was little difference in their response to the stranger scenario, the men who watched the degrading videos were more than twice as likely as the control group to agree with the statement that the victim enjoyed the acquaintance rape and secretly “got what she wanted.” The effect held steady regardless of the men’s attitudes toward gender roles or sexually explicit material. Such sexualized images, again and again, appear to “spill over” and affect men’s perceptions of all women. In another experiment, men who had been shown objectified images of women were asked to rate the competence and intelligence of a female researcher for an unrelated task; they gave her lower marks than men who’d been shown neutral images. From the earliest ages, children are subject to messages that present women primarily as objects for male use, as rewards for victory, wealth, and fame; messages that disregard women’s perspective and inaccurately represent their gratification. Parents of little girls may surround their daughters with books and movies and images of complex female characters in an effort to offset all that, but rarely do parents of boys do the same: the distorted depiction of women in media is seen as a problem for girls alone. Yet little boys watch professional sports, where the sole women on the field are cheerleaders. Female characters in family-friendly, G-rated films are depicted in revealing clothing at about the same rate as in R-rated films. That, of course, is when women or girls are present at all. Despite their rising visibility in franchises such as The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games, and Star Wars, by 2018 only 31 percent of top-grossing Hollywood films featured female protagonists—a record high!—and women comprised just 35 percent of all speaking roles, a figure that has held steady over the ten years researchers have tracked it.

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

  In essence, our study confirmed the dual memory system that Janet and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière had described more than a hundred years earlier: Traumatic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography. Perhaps the most important finding in our study was that remembering the trauma with all its associated affects, does not, as Breuer and Freud claimed back in 1893, necessarily resolve it. Our research did not support the idea that language can substitute for action. Most of our study participants could tell a coherent story and also experience the pain associated with those stories, but they kept being haunted by unbearable images and physical sensations. Research in contemporary exposure treatment, a staple of cognitive behavioral therapy, has similarly disappointing results: The majority of patients treated with that method continue to have serious PTSD symptoms three months after the end of treatment.[27] As we will see, finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks or improve concentration, stimulate vital involvement in your life or reduce hypersensitivity to disappointments and perceived injuries. Listening to SurvivorsNobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality and cultivate the courage to listen to the testimonies of survivors. In his book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Lawrence Langer writes about his work in the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University: “Listening to accounts of Holocaust experience, we unearth a mosaic of evidence that constantly vanishes into bottomless layers of incompletion.[28] We wrestle with the beginnings of a permanently unfinished tale, full of incomplete intervals, faced by the spectacle of a faltering witness often reduced to a distressed silence by the overwhelming solicitations of deep memory.” As one of his witnesses says: “If you were not there, it’s difficult to describe and say how it was. How men function under such stress is one thing, and then how you communicate and express that to somebody who never knew that such a degree of brutality exists seems like a fantasy.”

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  C. He poses the question: Does the life of happiness exist, therefore, in memory? 1. This kind of memory is not the same as remembering the city of Carthage after we have seen it. 2. This kind of memory is not memory of a corporeal object. VI. Augustine reflects on the passions and memory. A. He considers the fact that he can write about remembered emotions, such as sadness and fear, without reliving the pain of the time in which they occurred. B. With the faculty of memory, events can mean more to us later then they did at the outset. C. At a different level, every event before Augustine’s conversion exists in a new light after he becomes a Christian. VII. In his discussion of memory, Augustine gives a catalogue of sense impressions. A. He warns of unrestrained curiosity as a characteristic that may lead one astray. B. He struggles, for example, over the question of whether music is a distraction. VIII. Memory, intellect, and will are key elements in the Augustinian world. A. These three qualities neatly reflect the religious symbol of the Trinity. B. Augustine compares memory to God the Father; intellect, to God the Son; and will, to the Holy Spirit. IX. Memory is part of mind. A. The mind is unable to totally grasp itself. B. How can we use the mind to find out about the mind? C. We will never be able to fully plumb the depths of the mind. Suggested Readings: See readings for Lecture Nineteen. Dixon, chapter 8. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 63 Questions to Consider: 1. Why is a discussion of memory appropriate in Book X of the Confessions? 2. Why is memory ultimately not something that can ever fully be explained, according to Augustine? 3. According to Augustine, what makes memory such a fascinating subject? 4. What are some of the major paradoxes that Augustine associates with memory? 64 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From The City of God

  Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13) fault, and thus not the Creator’s fault. Indeed, the Creator is trying to help us out of it. He tried to take with true moral seriousness than the idea that we have a past, that we can track the whole course of human history as it vectors into a single human soul. So his work contributed directly and intentionally to the deepening power of the notion of original sin for later Western Christian thought. His diagnostic zombification of the human condition is often condemned by those who find it too despairing or world-denying. These things are true. But in his context, these things were anything but world-denying. There were real world-deniers in his world; you knew them since they said the solution to our problems is to flee the world and flee the body. Augustine didn’t say that. And his proposed prescription to deal with this diagnosis was anything but escapist. He proposed not escape but affirmation, more vigorous plunging into created reality, not denying our created status at all. Even today, it might be considered not so world-denying if we understand what he’s saying. In teaching us to see ourselves as radically flawed in this way, but still suffering from those flaws, still feeling the pain, Augustine has tried to teach us something of the contingency of his doctrine of sin. Those who think of him as pessimistic have not, from an Augustinian perspective, properly grappled with the evidence, both around us and within us, of human corruption. We ourselves are far from done with human corruption. We’ll turn to it again in the next lecture. 327

• From Christian Saints

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Margaret returned to her father, but he was unwilling to have her in the house. The family’s business relationships and their other children’s future prospects would have been materially affected by what the neighbors saw as Margaret’s public disgrace. Margaret, bereft, sat beneath a fig tree in her father’s yard and wept. While the devil tempted her with an easy life as a concubine to more wealthy men, Margaret experienced an epiphany from God that directed her to go to Cortona and “surrender yourself to the obedience of my Friars Minor.” Margaret’s Penitent Life and Good Works Margaret entered Cortona in 1272 as a single mother without resources or shelter. Her early days in the city would not have been easy. Nor was her transition to the penitent life, despite her growing mysticism and personal connection with the divine. The Friars Minor were not convinced by her conversion. They were reluctant to become responsible for penitents like Margaret. Those who imitated religious clothing but still lived a secular life risked being mistaken for corrupt friars, bringing the order into disrepute. The Franciscan It took Margaret 3 years of ascetic living order had a and good works to win the Franciscans’ long history of grudging permission to even wear the discomfort with clothing of a penitent. During that time, she depended on two wealthy patronesses ministering to who granted Margaret and her son a small women. They room in a house they owned and arranged for her to work as a midwife. feared the scandal and gossip Margaret was filled with self-reproach for her former sinfulness and began to deny that closeness herself basic needs and comforts such as between male and adequate food and shelter. This denial seems to have extended even to her son, as female religious she often neglected him during this period. might provoke. 66

• From Banned Books

  7. Allen Ginsberg’s Alarming “Howl” Ginsberg entered Columbia University in 1943 intending to major in prelaw but switched to English . By that time, he already knew that he was gay and destined not to conform to the tweedy strictures of 1950s academia . It was a gift of fate for Ginsberg to find his crew at Columbia . Gay men and women were closeted . It’s impossible to imagine Ginsberg—who, in his prime, the scholar Fran Polek tells us, was known for taking off his clothes at poetry readings “to prove, as he put it, his purity of spirit”—finding his place as a professor, which is what he initially hoped to be . Similarly, the kind of poetry Ginsberg was destined to write would have been mocked by an academic establishment enamored with the intellectual poetry of T . S . Eliot and the formal rigors of Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Arnold . However, even the company of like-minded friends couldn’t save Ginsberg from the demon of depression . In 1949, the 23-year-old Ginsberg entered the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he spent eight months . While there, he met a man named Carl Solomon, with whom he shared a commitment to left-wing politics and passion for literature . Eventually, Ginsberg would dedicate his greatest poem to Solomon . The years before that poem was completed were filled with travel and a conversion to Buddhism . When Ginsberg arrived in San Francisco in 1954, “Dharma Bums” Kerouac and Cassady were already there . The Beat movement was about to erupt . THE BEAT MOVEMENT If you tried to envision an artistic movement in the 1950s that was tailor- made to offend the sensibilities of Middle America and catch the eye of censors, it would be the Beat movement . Alienated from conventional society and horrified by the apocalyptic realities of the atomic age, the Beats embraced alienation and a personal form of artistic protest . The Beats copied the vocabulary and the look of jazz musicians—“hipsters .” Indeed, they extolled the powers of jazz music, along with drugs, sex, and travel, to summon up mystic visions and doorways into a more authentic self . Their name, the Beats, has been accounted for in a variety of ways: beat as in weary, beat as in musical notation, beat as in beautiful . Note that the Beat movement was almost entirely male in its aesthetic, its codes of behavior, and its artists . There were women involved, such as Diane di Prima, Edie Parker, Carolyn Cassady, and Hettie Jones . However, most were allowed into Beat 54

• From Banned Books

  8. Holden Caulfield’s Subversive Voice PUBLICATION OF THE CATCHER IN THE RYE A couple of sections of Catcher were published in serial form in 1945 and 1946 . However, the finished novel was turned down—not only by Harcourt Brace, the publishing house that had solicited it, but also by The New Yorker, which had published six of Salinger’s stories . The editor at Harcourt Brace who passed on Catcher, Eugene Reynal, did so because he said he couldn’t determine whether Holden was supposed to be crazy or not . That confusion, unfortunately, has been shared by some dangerously unstable readers of the novel who’ve identified with Holden’s absolutist worldview . For instance, Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, had a copy of the novel on his person . Chapman reportedly came to regard Lennon as a “phony” because his lavish lifestyle was at odds with the counterculture messages of his songs . As the astute critic Ron Rosenbaum has observed in several essays he’s written about Catcher, readers like Chapman make the elementary mistake of forgetting that Holden’s own thinking on the subject of phonies is suspect . Apparently in imitation of Chapman, John Hinkley Jr ., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, also had a copy of Catcher in his hotel room . In 1989, actress Rebecca Shaeffer was murdered by Robert John Bardo, who had a copy of Catcher on his person when he committed the crime . After its rejection by Harcourt Brace, The Catcher in the Rye was picked up by Little, Brown and Company and published in July 1951 . To date, it has sold more than 65 million copies and has been anointed as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century . In the 2003 BBC survey called “The Big Read,” in which people voted on the best-loved novel of all time, it came in at number 15 . Salinger left New York and moved to the remote town of Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953, the same year that his collection, Nine Stories, came out . From there on in, his reputation as a recluse defined him . Salinger’s reclusiveness also helped make Catcher more than merely a novel but almost a guide for life . Salinger was regarded as what someone like Holden—with his loathing of “phonies”—would have become in middle and old age . 62

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In the world of history and humans, though, saints come and go. One generation’s paragon may be another’s pervert, or fashion may simply shift, as cloistered virgins see their stock drop in value while more worldly figures engage the imagination of later generations. The monopoly on sainthood once carefully managed by churches, moreover, has given way once more to pluralistic and polymorphous bandying of the term, with (to be sure) less claim of assurance of eternity. And so saints die, in more ways than one. In a sense, the only good saint was a dead one, because people believed, and Christianity had reinforced this belief, that only a happy ending made a life happy or blessed. Whether good cheer or good works are in question, the ride to the finish line is often enough bumpy and unreliable. But the saint who fades from memory, the saint whose reputation is rewritten to his disadvantage after death, or the saint who turns out not to have existed at all—such saints are only too well known. In an age when traditional churchly structures crumble and when the place of Christianity in the cultural landscape changes dramatically, more saints than ever fade from view. Augustine of Hippo has long been secure in his claim to the title of saint, too secure. His relics are still in Pavia, whatever we may think of them. Numerous religious communities of men or women following his rule, including some bearing his name, continue to do business around the world, though with fewer numbers than in decades past. Churches in his name are common, though mainly now in older neighborhoods. One such church in Philadelphia, one of the oldest in the city, lost its steeple to a lightning bolt a few years ago. In another age, that omen would have been observed with some concern; now it is a question for historic preservationists. Augustine has always lived more in his books than otherwise. Jaroslav Pelikan, whose command of the history of Christian doctrine knows no rival, has said, “There has, quite literally, been no century of the sixteen centuries since the conversion of Augustine in which he has not been a major intellectual, spiritual, and cultural force.” Edward Gibbon played it both ways: “Augustine possessed a strong, capacious, argumentative mind. He boldly sounded the dark abyss of grace, predestination, free-will, and original sin.” And again Gibbon (on City of God): “His learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments too often his own.” Nietzsche read him and laughed at the pear-theft story, but Heidegger read him with great care and lectured on him to monks.

• From American Swing (2008)

  AND I REALLY FEEL THAT SOME OF THE TIMES THAT HE SAID HE WAS WORKING, HE WASN'T WORKING. WHEN HE FIRST MARRIED GLORIA, I DON'T THINK ANY OF US THOUGHT THAT IT WOULDN'T LAST BECAUSE WE DIDN'T KNOW ANYBODY WHO HAD SEPARATED OR DIVORCED. I THOUGHT HE WAS CHEATING ON ME. Danny Levenson: MY DAD AND MY MOM GOT DIVORCED WHEN I WAS SIX. SO MY DAD REALLY WASN'T AROUND A LOT. MY PARENTS SEPARATED WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG. SO MY FIRST RECOLLECTION ACTUALLY IS WHEN MY DAD USED TO WORK AT McDONALD'S AND HE BROUGHT ME THE HAMBURGLAR-- IT WAS A LITTLE STUFFED HAMBURGLAR. SO THAT'S WHAT I USED TO SLEEP WITH-- I USED TO SLEEP WITH A LITTLE HAMBURGLAR. ALL I CAN REMEMBER IS THROUGH THOSE YEARS, MY MOTHER YELLING AT MY FATHER ON THE PHONE, "THEY'RE WAITING FOR YOU. YOU DIDN'T SHOW UP. YOU SAID YOU WERE COMING." AND OF COURSE EVERY BUSINESS THAT LARRY WAS IN WAS ON THE WEEKENDS. SO THE TIMES WHEN FATHERS WOULD BE WITH THEIR CHILDREN, LARRY WAS EITHER OFF SELLING SODAS ON THE BEACH OR PREPARING FOR SWINGERS PARTIES, WHEREVER THEY MIGHT BE HELD. I WAS VERY SURPRISED WHEN LARRY WAS INVOLVED IN THAT KIND OF LIFESTYLE. I REALLY DIDN'T THINK THAT IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WOULD BE HIS THING TO DO. BUT MAYBE I JUST DIDN'T KNOW HIM THAT WELL. ♪ WHAT'S OUR FAVORITE EVENING GAME? ♪ ♪ NIGHT BASEBALL? ♪ ♪ OH, BABY, YOU'RE ALL WET ♪ ♪ LET'S SWAP PARTNERS IS THE NAME ♪ ♪ SUBURBAN ROULETTE... ♪ YOU KNOW WHAT I DON'T LIKE TO SEE IS THIS THING ABOUT YOU HAVE TO BE MONOGAMOUS. I SAY NOBODY'S MONOGAMOUS. AND IF YOU MAKE SOMEBODY SAY THAT YOU'RE FUCKING MONOGAMOUS AND YOU'RE GONNA BE LEGITIMATE, "I MARRIED HER. I'M NEVER GONNA FUCK," I'M A LIAR. THE SWINGING MOVEMENT WAS VERY SMALL AND VERY SECRET. WE ALL HAVE JOBS AND WE ALL PAY MORTGAGES. JUST BECAUSE WE CONSIDER OURSELVES SWINGERS, WE'RE NOT FREAKS OF NATURE. ♪ I LOVE YOUR SISTER ♪ ♪ TOMORROW NIGHT... ♪ AT A SWING PARTY, YOU CAN GO, YOU CAN FIND-- MEET OTHER PEOPLE THAT MAYBE CAN MEET SOME OF YOUR SEXUAL NEEDS THAT MAYBE YOUR SPOUSE CAN'T. AND YET YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO OUT AND CHEAT. SWINGING IS A SITUATION WHERE A MAN AND A WOMAN, PART OF THEIR SEX LIFE IS TO FIND OTHER COUPLES OR OTHER PEOPLE THAT HAVE SIMILAR INTERESTS, THAT THEY LIKE SOCIALLY, THEY LIKE TO BE WITH, BUT IN PARTICULAR THEY WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH. ♪ SUBURBAN ROULETTE... ♪ ♪ SUBURBAN ROULETTE! ♪ THE MEETING AREA WAS USUALLY A BAR THAT THEY TOOK OVER FOR FRIDAY, SATURDAY NIGHT. I WORKED AS A WAITRESS AND SOME GUYS USED TO COME IN AND THEY BROUGHT IN "SCREW" MAGAZINE AND I BROUGHT IT HOME AND I SHOWED IT TO CHARLIE. - AND THAT'S ALL IT TOOK. - AND THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF ADS IN IT.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  We are already down one loud and buoyant family member, and her departure will take us from what was just recently five inhabitants to three. The night before she is to leave, Hudson surprises me by packing Daisy’s astounding volume of belongings into the car trunk while I’m in the pool with Georgia. This help was a peace offering, and I stand dripping in my bathing suit while he proudly shows me that he got every last pillow and bin of food shoved in there. I have not had time to see #3 or #4, but both men still text me most days to say hi – a pleasant surprise given how sure I was that #3 had decided I came with too much baggage. After a period of lying low, we seem to have found our way back to the easy repartee we had established so quickly early on, and of course I am determined to stay in touch with #4, hoping for a repeat opportunity of mind-blowing sex. All that I want to share with Michael right now I share with them instead, expressing concern with how all of her belongings will be transported to her room and how I am terrible at goodbyes even when it’s just a normal “See you later!” I recall the first time Michael and I drove Daisy to sleepaway camp when she was just eight years old. I started crying as we drove up the dirt road to the camp and he sternly reprimanded me, “Get it together, Laura. You can cry all you want after we drop her but for now it’s your job to send her off, not fall apart.” I knew that he was right, and it wasn’t until I gave her a hug and quickly walked away with my head down that I realized Michael was not walking next to me. Glancing behind me, I saw him on his knees in the grass, eye level with Daisy, saying “OK, just one more hug” many times more than once. I walked back and gently took hold of his elbow, saying, “It’s time to leave now, Michael.” I had felt like a confident parent then, doing my part to gracefully separate from my oldest child; I was both moved and annoyed by his inability to do the same. Here I am eleven years later, ready to repeat the scene and launch this child into the world, but now I need to be brave without any support as I am very much alone. Texting #3 and #4 about this monumental event is wholly inadequate – they don’t know her, they hardly even know me. #3 has told me sweetly that he could show up in the parking lot with a school hat on and pretend he’s part of a move-in committee, and #4 has said that he’s going to wrap me in a long hug and keep me there a while the next time he sees me.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “We called them the A’s or the T’s or the J’s or whatever,” he explained on Canadian television. Nineteen seventy-six, for example, was the era of the J’s: between June and October of that year, Oler’s wives gave birth to Jared, Jeanette, Julia, and Jennifer. Dalmon Oler acquired his second wife, Memory Blackmore, just a year after arriving in Bountiful. She was the oldest daughter of Ray Blackmore, and her marriage to Debbie’s dad gave Debbie her first inkling that plural marriage wasn’t always as wonderful as she had been told. “Mother Mem” was insecure and terribly jealous, and she beat Debbie when her birth mother wasn’t present. When Debbie was six, her birth mother died, and Mem grew even more violent in her treatment of Debbie, who, even as a young girl, was proving to be intelligent and willful and disinclined to defer blindly to authority. Debbie tended to ask questions and to think for herself—qualities not regarded as attributes in the Fundamentalist Church. Until 1986, when Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership of the UEP, the prophet was LeRoy Johnson, a plainspoken farmer known to his followers as “Uncle Roy.” Many of Johnson’s sermons were variations on the theme “The path to heaven is through total obedience.” Today, Uncle Roy’s legacy is visible throughout Bountiful, where the community motto—“Keep Sweet, No Matter What”—is posted on walls and refrigerator doors in every home. Mormonism is a patriarchal religion, rooted firmly in the traditions of the Old Testament. Dissent isn’t tolerated. Questioning the edicts of religious authorities is viewed as a subversive act that undermines faith. As the eminent LDS first counselor N. Eldon Tanner famously declared in the official church magazine, Ensign, in August 1979, “When the prophet speaks, the debate is over.” Men, and only men, are admitted to the priesthood and given positions of ecclesiastical authority, including that of prophet. And only prophets may receive the revelations that determine how the faithful are to conduct their lives, right down to the design of the sacred undergarments individuals are supposed to wear at all times. All of this holds true in both the mainstream LDS Church and in the Fundamentalist Church, although the fundamentalists take these rigid notions—of obedience, of control, of distinct and unbending roles for men and women—to a much greater extreme. The primary responsibility of women in FLDS communities (even more than in the mainline Mormon culture) is to serve their husbands, conceive as many babies as possible, and raise those children to become obedient members of the religion. More than a few women born into the FLDS Church have found this to be problematic. Debbie Palmer is one of them. Tracing a mazelike series of lines with her index finger, Debbie attempts to demystify an incredibly complicated schematic diagram that at first glance appears to map out the intricacies of some massive engineering project—a nuclear power plant, perhaps. Upon closer examination, the diagram turns out to be her family tree.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  For the most part the members of this genealogical tree look like withered leaves: the women are frail and they have a startled, frightened look in their eyes: the men have a keen, intelligent look, like educated chimpanzees. They are all there, about ninety of them, with their white bullocks, their dung cakes, their skinny legs, their old-fashioned spectacles; in the background, now and then, one catches a glimpse of the parched soil, of a crumbling pediment, of an idol with crooked arms, a sort of human centipede. There is something so fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery that one is reminded inevitably of the great spawn of temples which stretch from the Himalayas to the tip of Ceylon, a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the myriad ramifications of design seems to have exhausted the very soil of India itself. Looking at the seething hive of figures which swarm the façades of the temples one is overwhelmed by the potency of these dark, handsome peoples who mingled their mysterious streams in a sexual embrace that has lasted thirty centuries or more. These frail men and women with piercing eyes who stare out of the photographs seem like the emaciated shadows of those virile, massive figures who incarnated themselves in stone and fresco from one end of India to the other in order that the heroic myths of the races who here intermingled should remain forever entwined in the hearts of their countrymen. When I look at only a fragment of these spacious dreams of stone, these toppling, sluggish edifices studded with gems, coagulated with human sperm, I am overwhelmed by the dazzling splendor of those imaginative flights which enabled half a billion people of diverse origins to thus incarnate the most fugitive expressions of their longing. It is a strange, inexplicable medley of feelings which assails me now as Nanantatee prattles on about the sister who died in childbirth. There she is on the wall, a frail, timid thing of twelve or thirteen clinging to the arm of a dotard. At ten years of age she was given in wedlock to this old roué who had already buried five wives. She had seven children, only one of whom survived her. She was given to the aged gorilla in order to keep the pearls in the family. As she was passing away, so Nanantatee puts it, she whispered to the doctor: “I am tired of this fucking. … I don’t want to fuck any more, doctor.” As he relates this to me he scratches his head solemnly with his withered arm. “The fucking business is bad, Endree,” he says. “But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it. It is the best word there is, Endree… say it now… OOMAHARUMOOMA!” “OOMARABOO.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He thought about her day and night; he wrote her name into the stories he composed for English class; he dedicated songs to her on his radio show. This had gone on for days. For two years now, he had spent virtually every afternoon with Davenport and Frost and Brendan Gilford. Out in the woods getting high. He breathed the same room freshener they breathed (Ozium); he had borrowed their records and loaned them his own. They all knew how to play the same Emerson, Lake and Palmer song on guitar. They knew the same jokes and disliked the same masters. They all volunteered for dish duty at the same time. But he knew it was coming to an end, that the loose association that other people called the Cult was just something you had at one time in your life. In September, when Davenport had declared himself King of the Cult at his birthday party—he was on bounds at the time, unable to receive visitors in his room, for breaking curfew—the whole thing began to sour. And it had just been a joke anyway. A joke to make feeling like a loser tolerable. Soon everybody was giving themselves titles. It was just like the Fantastic Four. It was all relationships and politics and power. The Conrail riders observed an unnatural calm. They were stretched out across the three-seaters with their luggage strewn carelessly around them. Paul always left things behind: watches, magazines, umbrellas. He borrowed articles and lost them. So he clutched F.F . #141, like it was a religious scroll or high-court decision, along with the November issue of Creem . And when the train rumbled down into the tunnel at 97th Street, and into the terminal, and when it disgorged its passengers with a sigh of hydraulic brakes, he was grateful to be a lone traveler, unencumbered with possessions or obligations. Grand Central Terminal was deserted. The Kodak sign featured a happy, white family celebrating around a Christmas tree. As Paul had been instructed to do since he was a little boy, he found a spot against the wall and looked up at the stars on the ceiling. Sunk in dust and grime, the hulking simplicity of the constellations moved him. They were the imaginative work of another time. They were the superheroes of the past. On the floor of the terminal, in the vast open spaces—bereft of the usual commuters—a platoon of men with blank faces and the cheapest spectacles sold books and records about meditation to the unsuspecting. Paul moved through them like a warrior. Libbets Casey. Paul’s destination. Deep in that stronghold of the silent majority, the Upper East Side. Her dad didn’t have a job. He didn’t need one. At an office in midtown, which he paid for himself, he occasionally wielded a gold letter opener and moved around lunch appointments and tennis dates with other professional board members and consultants. Libbets wouldn’t have to work either.