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 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  There are as many different styles, intensities, and timbres to sex as there are people. The variety of nuance and attitude blends into the variety of techniques and actions employed, which finally segues, as seamlessly, into the variety of sexual objects the range of humankind desires. Certainly one of the necessary places where socializing and sexualizing actually touch for, dare I call it, health or just contentment: We do a little better when we sexualize our own manner of having sex—learn to find our own way of having sex sexy. Call it a healthy narcissism, if you like. This alone allows us to relax with our own sexuality. Paradoxically, this also allows us to vary it and accommodate it, as far as we wish, to other people. I don’t see how this can be accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners and a fair amount of communication with them, at that, about what their sexual reactions to us are. (However supportive, the response of a single partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially social process, involving a social response.) When Lacan says, “One desires the desire of the other,” self-confidence is, generally speaking, the aspect of it desired. That sexual self-confidence (though it’s not what’s usually meant by the words) is what Joey had; and it was very attractive. I was the one, though, who, after a month or so, missed our assigned Thursday meeting. Hustlers are just not my particular thing. (Somebody could probably expand that into a five-hundred-page psychoanalytic study as to why. But while I’ve liked any number of hustlers as people, it’s down among my secondary or even tertiary preferred forms of sex.) When I ran into Joey on the street, he was all professional concern: “I was worried about you, man. I mean, I was hoping that nothing had happened to you or anything. The money I could always get from somebody.” I made my excuses—then, responsibly, suggested we put off our next meeting. (One of the good things about hustlers is that usually they tend not to take such things personally.) And we were just passing friends north of the Deuce. Oh, we had a couple more encounters. The last, most pleasant, messiest (on my part) and loudest (on his) was in a doorway on Forty-eighth Street, one night when I’d had a couple too many. Afterwards Joey put me on an uptown bus, then tramped off over the icy street into the December dark. It was only five bucks that night. In ’86 or ’87 one February evening at (the Eighth Avenue) Cats, a black drag queen with exquisite crimson nails and a red-blond wig frowned at me over her drink, then asked, “Are you Chip?” “That’s right.” “Did you know a kid out here named Joey? They used to call him Joey-Who-Needs-a-Bath?” “Sure.” “He used to talk about you, a lot. I thought, because of the beard—and the glasses—you might be him. You know he died two weeks back.”

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  In the summer of 1962, we moved from Wilmette to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Holmer would oversee the New York side of the business while his partner stayed to supervise operations in Chicago. My mother, pregnant for the seventh time, was sad to leave her friends in Chicago, but she had resolved to support her husband as best she could. “She really didn’t want to go,” Linda Fischer, one of our old babysitters, told me when I tracked her down years later. “But she didn’t have any choice.” In this era of the new frontier, young bucks like Holmer were stepping out of their comfort zones, taking bold chances. Handsome President Jack Kennedy, with his enchanting wife and their two appealing young children, promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Even the sky was no longer the limit. My mother had every reason to believe that the move to the East Coast would lead to greater fortune. Few people could light up a room like my father. Charming Billy, quick with a quip, would look into your eyes and make you feel like the rest of the world had just melted away. Everything about him exuded confidence, from the way he talked out of the side of his mouth, like he was letting you in on a secret, to the way he walked, with a swagger, his shoulders thrown back, chest puffed out. The Holmer of that era seemed to all the world like he held the keys to the kingdom in his back pocket, and, if you were lucky, he’d let you in, too. His go-go can-do spirit intoxicated nearly everyone he met, particularly his customers. My parents rented a pretty country house on a ravine in New Canaan. Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, lived across the street, and Eileen Heckart, the Academy Award–winning actress, lived down the block. She and my mother had become so chummy that my mother kept a picture of the two of them on her bedroom mirror. We all loved the adventure of frolicking in the woods of Connecticut, climbing the old stone fences and scaling boulders. My mother bought me a little red cape and matching cap, and I would wait for the bus to take me to kindergarten in front of the Silvermine Tavern, a roadhouse built two hundred years earlier to serve Revolutionary War soldiers. We were near enough to New York City that our parents could take us on weekend adventures to the top of the Empire State Building or on the Staten Island ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. But by early spring, this grand adventure was beginning to lose its luster. Holmer had become convinced that his business partner back in Chicago was cutting him out of his rightful share of the magazine’s profits. By July, he quit his job and filed a lawsuit.

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  Active sadness can take many forms; but the one cited by Janet (of the psychasthenic who throws a fit of nerves because she does not want to make her confession) may be characterized as a refusal. It exemplifies above all a negative behaviour intended to deny the urgency of certain problems and to replace them by others. The patient wants to move Janet's feelings. This means that she wants to change his attitude of impassible expectancy into one of affectionate concern. She wants this and she makes use of her body to bring it about. At the same time, by putting herself into such a state that the confession would be impossible, she is renouncing that act as beyond her power. Now, and for as long as she is in tears and shaken with her sobbing, all possibility of speaking is taken from her. Here, then, the potentiality is not eliminated, the confession remains 'to be made'. But it has retreated beyond the reach of the patient, who can no longer will to make it, but only hope to do so one day. The patient has thus freed herself from the painful feeling that the act was in her power, that she was free to do it or not. The emotional crisis here is an abandonment of responsibility, by means of a magical exaggeration of the difficulty of the world. The world retains its differentiated structure, but it appears unjust and hostile, because it is demanding too much of us; that is, more than it is humanly possible to do. In this case, then, the emotion of sadness is a magical play-acting of impotence: the patient is like one of those domestic servants who, having admitted burglars to their master's house, get them to bind them hand and foot, as a clear demonstration that they could not have prevented the theft. Here, however, the patient ties herself up in a number of tenuous bonds. It might be said, perhaps, that the painful sense of liberty of which the patient wants to rid herself is necessarily of a reflective nature. But this we do not believe; and one has only to watch oneself to see what really happens. It is the object which presents itself as demanding to be freely created; the confession which presents itself as the deed which both ought to and can be done.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  At first, I worried that girls wouldn’t discuss such a personal subject with me. I needn’t have. Wherever I went, I had more volunteers than I could handle. They were not just eager, they were hungry to talk. No adult had ever before inquired about their experience of sexuality: what they did, why they did it, how it felt, what they hoped for, what they regretted, what was fun. Often in interviews, I barely asked a question. The girls would just start talking, and before we knew it, hours had gone by. They told me how they felt about masturbation, about oral sex (both giving and receiving), about orgasm. They talked about toeing that line between virgin and slut. They told me about boys who were aggressive and boys who were caring; boys who abused them and boys who restored their faith in love. They admitted their attraction to other girls and their fears of parental rejection. They talked about the complicated terrain of the hookup culture, in which casual encounters precede (and may or may not lead to) emotional connection; now commonplace on college campuses, it was rapidly drifting down to high school. Fully half the girls had experienced something along a spectrum of coercion to rape. Those stories were agonizing; equally upsetting, only two had previously told another adult what had happened. Even in consensual encounters, much of what the girls described was painful to hear. Perhaps that seems like nothing new, but that in itself is worth exploring. When so much has changed for girls in the public realm, why hasn’t more—much more—changed in the private one? Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal? Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  To keep these unceasing streams of wayfaring paupers from becoming a government charge, they are parcelled out by the authorities among the poor and helpless peasantry, good care being taken that they are not loaded upon the landlords, merchants or priests. The wickedness of this course is fully intelligible only to those who have some conception of the indescribable poverty and misery of Russian peasants. Stripped of almost all by taxation and by landlord oppression and by priest and constable extortion, many of them have scarcely food and room enough for themselves and cattle, scarcely clothes enough to cover their nakedness, no money with which to buy the absolutely necessary farming-implements, or to keep their wretched hovels from toppling over their heads. And yet, notwithstanding their appalling misery, Tolstoy saw their hearts go out in pity to these wandering paupers, and religiously dividing their crust with those yet more unfortunate than they, not knowing how soon they themselves might be in a similarly wretched plight. Second part described peasant misery. The second part of the article bears the sub-title "Living and Dying ." Upon entering the village accompanied by his physician, the count was entreated for aid by a woman. Upon inquiry he learned that her husband had been drafted into the army, and that the family was starving. Upon asking the village authority why the law had been violated in taking from a family its sole supporter, he was told that the husband's brother was quite capable of supporting the family. Next he met a little orphan girl twelve years old, who was the head of a family of five children. Her father had been killed in a mine; her mother had dropped dead from exhaustion, a few weeks after; poor but kind-hearted neighbors kept their eyes on the children, whilst the oldest went about begging the means for their support. In another hovel he found a man in his death-throes with pneumonia. The room was damp and cold; there was no fuel for the stove; no food, no medicine, no mattress, no pillow, for the dying man. Contrasted with extravagance in his own family. Saddened by what he had seen and heard the count drove home. In front of his house he saw a carpeted sleigh, drawn by magnificent horses, driven by a coachman attired in heavy fur-coat and cap. It was the conveyance of the count's son, who had come on a visit to his father. There were ten at the table, who partook of a dinner of four courses, spiced by two kinds of wine. Two butlers were in attendance, and costly flowers were on the table. "Whence came these orchids?" asked the son, to which the mother replied that they had come all the way from St.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  The same principle, of course, applies to human-built machines, as illustrated in a story about that genius of cost-efficient automobile manufacture, Henry Ford. One day, Ford sent some of his employees to car junkyards, with instructions to examine the condition of the remaining parts in Model T Fords that had been junked. The employees brought back the apparently disappointing news that almost all components showed signs of wear. The sole exceptions were the kingpins, which remained virtually unworn. To the employees’ surprise, Ford, instead of expressing pride in his well-made kingpins, declared that the kingpins were overbuilt, and that in the future they should be made more cheaply. Ford’s conclusion may violate our ideal of pride in workmanship, but it made economic sense: he had indeed been wasting money on long-lasting kingpins that outlasted the cars in which they were installed. The design of our bodies, which evolved through natural selection, fits Henry Ford’s kingpin principle, with only one exception. Virtually every part of the human body wears out around the same time. The kingpin principle even fits men’s reproductive tract, which undergoes no abrupt shutdown but does gradually accumulate a variety of problems, such as prostate hypertrophy and decreasing sperm count, to different degrees in different men. The kingpin principle also fits the bodies of animals. Animals caught in the wild show few signs of age-related deterioration because a wild animal is likely to die from a predator or accident when its body becomes significantly impaired. In zoos and laboratory cages, however, animals exhibit gradual age-related deterioration in every body part just as we do. That sad message applies to the female as well as the male reproductive tract of animals. Female rhesus macaques run out of functional eggs around age thirty; fertilization of eggs in aged rabbits becomes less reliable; an increasing fraction of eggs are abnormal in aging hamsters, mice, and rabbits; fertilized embryos are increasingly unviable in aged hamsters and rabbits; and aging of the uterus itself leads to increasing embryonic mortality in hamsters, mice, and rabbits. Thus, the female reproductive tract of animals is a microcosm of the whole body in that everything that could go wrong with age may in fact go wrong—at different ages in different individuals.

• From Three Women (2019)

  When Sloane was at home, when she wasn’t at skating camp or riding school or summer camp, Sloane learned of her mother’s past in bits and pieces. She always left a conversation with Dyan wanting to know more about who her mother was. She wanted to know, especially, about the simple things. The first food Dyan had learned to cook at her own mother’s hip. Her favorite dolls and games. Her childhood fears and the first time she’d liked a boy. But Dyan was largely quiet about everything that predated her marriage to Sloane’s father. She never explicitly said she would not answer Sloane’s questions, but she was artful in deflecting them. There was always, for example, something that needed to go into the oven. When pressed, Dyan liked to recall, with a sort of far-off fondness, that her father had an airplane, a two-seater, and on sunny days when she was a little girl he would swoop out of the clouds and down into the family ranch. The weight and wind of the plane would just about blow the roof off and scatter the grasses and the hair of all the girls and their mother. Sloane was in the ninth grade when she, without much fanfare, lost her virginity to a boy who lived down the road. At fifteen she was old for her grade, so in a lot of ways she felt overdue. Luke was eighteen and one of the bad boys. Not terribly bad, but a good-bad, as if Emilio Estevez’s and Judd Nelson’s characters in Breakfast Club merged into one reckless, thick-browed rower. He was on the varsity football team, smoked pot, and had been arrested a number of times. Sloane and Luke were not technically dating. They’d hung out at other people’s houses. They’d drunk beer together and made out. The night it happened, Sloane sneaked out of the house, climbing out her window and down a drainpipe. When he opened the door, she didn’t feel incredibly in love or even lustful. He said his parents were in bed and wouldn’t hear them. He didn’t ask her to be quiet walking down the hall. The kitchen and the living room were messy, which made her sad, somehow. That some people went to bed without zipping their house up. But his room was boyish and clean-smelling. She told Luke she was a virgin in case he had to know. She’d always heard girls in movies telling the guy before they did it, so she figured: just in case there is something he does differently, if you’re a virgin. A method of easing it in, perhaps. Luke nodded and lowered her onto his bed. The sheets were light brown. So was the bedspread. A quiet, metrical thumping ensued. She looked at the ceiling, she looked at his hair. She watched him concentrating. There were moments she felt sorry for him and moments she felt angry at him and moments she didn’t feel anything at all.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Lib. 83. Quæst. q. 80.) How too do they answer innumerable objections from the Gospel Scriptures, in which the Lord speaks so many things manifestly contrary to them? as is that, My soul is sorrowful even unto death, (Matt. 26:38.) and, I have power to lay down My life; (John 10:18.) and many more things of the like kind. Should they say that He spoke thus in parables, we have at hand proofs from the Evangelists themselves, who in relating His actions, bear witness as to the reality of His body, so of His soul, by mention of passions which cannot be without a soul; as when they say, Jesus wondered, was angry, and others of like kind. AUGUSTINE. (de Hæres. 55.) The Apollinarians also as the Arians affirmed that Christ had taken the human flesh without the soul. But overthrown on this point by the weight of Scripture proof, they then said that that part which is the rational soul of man was wanting to the soul of Christ, and that its place was filled by the Word itself. But if it be so, then we must believe that the Word of God took on Him the nature of some brute with a human shape and appearance. But even concerning the nature of Christ’s body, there are some who have so far swerved from the right faith, as to say, that the flesh and the Word were of one and the same substance, most perversely insisting on that expression, The Word was made flesh; which they interpret that some portion of the Word was changed into flesh, not that He took to Him flesh of the flesh of the Virgind. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. (Ep. ad Joan. Antioch. tom. 6. Ep. 107.) We account those persons mad who have suspected that so much as the shadow of change could take place in the nature of the Divine Word; it abides what it ever was, neither is nor can be changed.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  There was Kevin, twenty-one and dark, dark black, who, when I first met him (also in the Cameo) wore striped engineer’s overalls and a train engineer’s cap. His big hands, his full mouth, and his general masculine gentleness (Kevin lifted weights years before the buffed and pumped-up nineties) made him an exemplar of male beauty that still, in memory, remains powerful for me. Like Pietro, he was another regular in from Brooklyn. On the third time we made it, he told me, “I won’t go with just anyone. Only special people—like you. Because you’re nice.” He wanted to be a musician, though I was unclear what instruments, if any, he played. By 1985 though, this teak-colored, muscle-bound little powerhouse (he wasn’t much taller than Tommy) was scooting all around the Port Authority, doing dope deals up at Gate 335, passing bags back in the underpass across from Hombres (“’Cause the police are just through the aluminum doors twenty feet away—and that’s the last place they think you be doin’ it!”). When he would run into me in the theater now, it was, “Lemme hold two dollars, man, so I can run down to the bathroom and get somethin’. Then I’ll be back!” and he would—about every three minutes, with the identical plea, as many times as you’d supply the two bucks. In ’88 or ’89, the last time I saw him, I was on my way to the Habana-San Juan Dry Cleaners, recently moved around the corner across from the post office on Eighty-third Street. Really, it was like the heaviest-handed Concluding Moral Resolution from some Dreiser or Dos Passos novel. Kevin was coming along, picking through the garbage cans . . . The power was gone. The gentleness was still there, though. After our wistful three minutes of conversation (he was homeless, he was dirty and ragged, he wasn’t doing too good, but . . . well, maybe things would get better), he shambled off with it to somewhere . . . I haven’t seen him since.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  When my grandmother was seventy-five she experienced a cerebral hemorrhage, fell unconscious to the sidewalk not far from her house in Sacramento, was taken to Sutter Hospital, and died there that night. This was “the situation” for my grandmother. When my mother was seventy-five she was diagnosed with breast cancer, did two cycles of chemotherapy, could not tolerate the third or fourth, nonetheless lived until she was two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday (when she did die it was of congestive heart failure, not cancer) but was never again exactly as she had been. Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments. When she came to visit me in New York for example she pronounced St. James’ Episcopal Church, the steeple and slate roof of which constitute the entire view from my living room windows, “the single ugliest church I have ever seen.” When, on her own coast and at her own suggestion, I took her to see the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she fled to the car, pleading vertigo from the movement of the water. I recognize now that she was feeling frail. I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now. Invisible on the street. The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene. Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door. Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party. “Estrogen actually made me feel better,” she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it. Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better. This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us. And yet: And still: Despite all evidence: Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have: Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply: Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity: Despite all that: Nonetheless: That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me. 27Something happened to me early in the summer. Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  Thus, as a woman gets older, she is likely to have accumulated more children; she has also been caring for them longer, so she is putting a bigger investment at risk with each successive pregnancy. But her chances of dying in or after childbirth, and the chances that the fetus or infant will die or be damaged, also increase. In effect, the older mother is taking on more risk for less potential gain. That’s one set of factors that would tend to favor human female menopause and that would paradoxically result in a woman ending up with more surviving children by giving birth to fewer children. Natual selection has not programmed menopause into men because of three more cruel facts: men never die in childbirth and rarely die while copulating, and they are less likely than mothers to exhaust themselves caring for infants. A hypothetically nonmenopausal old woman who died in childbirth, or while caring for an infant, would thereby be throwing away even more than her investment in her previous children. That is because a woman’s children eventually begin producing children of their own, and those children count as part of the woman’s prior investment. Especially in traditional societies, a woman’s survival is important not only to her children but also to her grandchildren. That extended role of postmenopausal women has been explored by Kristen Hawkes, the anthropologist whose research on men’s roles I discussed in chapter 5. Hawkes and her colleagues studied foraging by women of different ages among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. The women who devoted the most time to gathering food (especially roots, honey, and fruit) were postmenopausal women. Those hardworking Hadza grandmothers put in an impressive seven hours per day, compared to a mere three hours for teenagers and new brides and four and a half hours for married women with young children. As one might expect, foraging returns (measured in pounds of food gathered per hour) increased with age and experience, so that mature women achieved higher returns than teenagers, but, interestingly, the grandmothers’ returns were still as high as those of women in their prime. The combination of more foraging hours and an unchanged foraging efficiency meant that the postmenopausal grandmothers brought in more food per day than any of the younger groups of women, even though their large harvests were greatly in excess of what was required to meet their own personal needs and they no longer had dependent young children to feed.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The result is that many modern Christian writers offer detached and disengaged rationalisations of the existence of suffering in the world, rather than showing how it is possible to live meaningfully in the presence of suffering. The philosopher James K. A. Smith argues that many philosophers have ‘bought into the spectatorish “world picture” of the new modern order’, which makes us think we are ‘positioned to see everything’ and hence can – and should – ‘expect an answer to whatever puzzles us, including the problem of evil.’45 As Stephen Wykstra cautions, drawing on his principle of ‘Reasonable Epistemic Access’, we need to be sceptical of those who declare that we can take a ‘God’s eye’ view of the world, being able to see everything in its totality and grasp its full significance.46 C. S. Lewis made this point in his Problem of Pain (1940), in which he wrestled with the questions raised by the human experience of pain and suffering. Lewis here suggests that we cannot see things clearly from our human perspective and will always see things darkly and incompletely. Drawing on an analogy that would have been familiar to his British readers at this time during the Second World War, Lewis suggests that the life of faith is like walking around during the Blackout – the periods of enforced darkness, devoid of any artificial light, designed to prevent German bombers from having visual sight of their ground targets. Lewis used this analogy to suggest that we don’t see everything clearly. There isn’t enough light. But ‘the blackout is not quite complete. There are chinks.’47 For Lewis, we must learn to live and work with the partial apprehension of a complex and ambivalent world, in which pain does not fit easily with some core Christian themes – yet does not contradict them either. This, then, is the context within which discussion of God and suffering is now set in western culture. Yet this is a recent (and, in my view, reversible) development, which is increasingly being subjected to criticism on account of – to mention only a few concerns – its intellectual over-reach; its under-evidenced notions of God, goodness and human freedom; and its abstract and impersonal framing of issues that might be suitable for a college seminar room, but fails to connect with the deeper questions of everyday life. With these points in mind, we turn to reflect on the challenges that suffering causes for belief in God in the contemporary world, focusing on C. S. Lewis’s reflections following the death of his wife from cancer.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The third tale, “Southern Comfort,” examines the consolation obtained by transforming another into a comforting icon as well as the restrictive effects of that process upon both the transformed and the transformer. Set in an acute, rapid turnover, hospital therapy group, the story describes the radical modifications required to adapt a group to the demands of contemporary managed care treatment. Leaders of such groups must change their values, must settle for less, must strive to offer something in brief, more impersonal contacts. This is not an easy transition for therapists accustomed to more ambitious goals and more intimate caring relationships; many fall prey, as I did in this tale, to the professional hazard of grandiose rescue fantasies. (For more information about leading such acute inpatient groups see my text: Inpatient Group Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1983).) “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” my longest and most complex tale, is an undistorted account of treatment (aside from omission of prosaic details and for disguised identity) containing a myriad of psychotherapy themes. The therapist as student and, conversely, the patient as teacher, a theme introduced in “Travels with Paula,” is more fully developed in this story. Twenty-five years ago during a sabbatical year at a clinic in London, I studied with an eminent group therapist who told the saddest psychotherapy story I’ve ever heard. He described a group meeting to me in which the members (most of them in the group for ten years!) reviewed the progress of their group and concluded that every single group member had undergone considerable change—save the therapist who, ten years later, was exactly the same. The therapist then turned to me, eyes sparkling, and said, tapping his forefinger on the desk for emphasis, “That, my boy, is good technique!” I’ve always viewed this tale of the immutable therapist as a sad story because it portrays such a fundamental misunderstanding—namely that therapists are mechanics tinkering with the apparatus of the mind but remaining outside of the field or, alternatively, are inert chemical catalysts, enabling the process of change while untouched personally by the reaction. These highly misleading metaphors ignore the vast numbers of inquiries into the process of therapeutic change that support the axiom—and axiom is not too strong a term—that it is the relationship that heals. Therapeutic change ensues from a genuine, authentic engagement, and that, by definition, implies mutuality. Therapists facilitate change in the patient and, in the process, are themselves changed. Good therapists are perpetual students on a never-ending voyage of self-discovery and, as they feel more secure in their own skins and are able to relinquish the garb of authority, they will welcome as a blessing a deeply intelligent, sensitive, and challenging patient like Irene.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  There was no intermediate realm for him between reality and ideas. When we entered the whorehouse on the Quai Voltaire, after he had flung himself on the divan and rung for girls and for drinks, he was still paddling up the river with Kurtz, and only when the girls had flopped on the bed beside him and stuffed his mouth with kisses did he cease his divagations. Then, as if he had suddenly realized where he was, he turned to the old mother who ran the place and gave her an eloquent spiel about his two friends who had come down from Paris expressly to see the joint. There were about half a dozen girls in the room, all naked and all beautiful to look at, I must say. They hopped about like birds while the three of us tried to maintain a conversation with the grandmother. Finally the latter excused herself and told us to make ourselves at home. I was altogether taken in by her, so sweet and amiable she was, so thoroughly gentle and maternal. And what manners! If she had been a little younger I would have made overtures to her. Certainly you would not have thought that we were in a “den of vice,” as it is called. Anyway we stayed there an hour or so, and as I was the only one in condition to enjoy the privileges of the house, Collins and Fillmore remained downstairs chattering with the girls. When I returned I found the two of them stretched out on the bed; the girls had formed a semicircle about the bed and were singing with the most angelic voices the chorus of Roses in Picardy . We were sentimentally depressed when we left the house—Fillmore particularly. Collins swiftly steered us to a rough joint which was packed with drunken sailors on shore leave and there we sat awhile enjoying the homosexual rout that was in full swing. When we sallied out we had to pass through the red-light district where there were more grandmothers with shawls about their necks sitting on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding pleasantly to the passers-by. All such good-looking, kindly souls, as if they were keeping guard over a nursery. Little groups of sailors came swinging along and pushed their way noisily inside the gaudy joints. Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under the city. We piddled along at the edge of the basin where everything was jumbled and tangled; you had the impression that all these ships, these trawlers and yachts and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a violent storm. In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had happened that it seemed as if we had been in Le Havre a month or more. We were planning to leave early Monday morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job. We spent Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Christianity and the Problem of Suffering: Setting the SceneSuffering is a universal human experience, framed in different ways by a variety of worldviews. Most consider suffering not as an intellectual riddle that we can hope or need to solve; it is rather something that has to be endured, raising the issue of how we can cope with both its pain and the deeper existential distress that it so often causes.39 This insight was characteristic of classic Greek philosophy and literature, which were much more concerned with cultivating the art of right living than their modern counterparts.40 Greek tragedy thus shunned simplistic intellectual resolutions of complex questions, focusing instead on narrating how people learned to deal with suffering. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum highlights the educative role of suffering in Greek tragedy, in that it helps us to grasp what it means to be human through an explicit ‘acknowledgement of difficult human realities’.41 Whether suffering is seen as an intellectual problem or not depends on the specific theoretical lens through which it is interpreted. For reasons that we shall explore, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational explanation has led to a new emphasis on explaining or rationalising suffering, and particularly on demonstrating the consistency of a philosophical worldview that affirms both the goodness of God on the one hand, and the reality of suffering on the other. As Charles Taylor has argued, this seems to have created the expectation that every aspect of the universe is completely accessible to human reason, so that we are able to comprehend everything rationally. Yet the problem goes much deeper than our unattainable longing to see things with total clarity; we seem to think that a meaningful life is about the evasion of pain. We feel we are entitled to avoid suffering and see its existence as an intellectual scandal. Yet this is an inadequate modern response to an age-old problem. More reliable alternatives are available, as the psychologist Robert Emmons points out: ‘The good life’ is not one that is achieved through momentary pleasures or defensive illusions, but through meeting suffering head on and transforming it into opportunities for meaning, wisdom, and growth, with the ultimate objective being the development of the person into a fully functioning mature being. On this formula for happiness, age-old wisdom and modern science are in agreement.

• From My People (2022)

  But I knew that words like that would not have comforted my grandmother, who knew and loved every inch of the town and all the memories it held. I drove fast through Leverton, but a red traffic light brought me to a screeching halt in front of the courthouse. On the steps sat men whose posture and expression were all the same. They looked neither forward nor backward, and not even the sound of the screaming automobile tires stirred them from their poses. I was well out of town before I looked at my grandmother, so silent and so old. I wanted to speak to her, but I did not want to intrude upon her thoughts, whatever and wherever they were. The day became quite warm. We stopped for gas and a Coke at a small filling station next to a wide field with grazing sheep—a rare sight in that area. I handed my grandmother her Coke, and she wrapped her white linen handkerchief around it because the ice-cold bottle chilled her thin hands. She looked out abstractedly at the sheep, but I was not sure whether she really saw them or not. When we got home, we had a late lunch, and my grandmother went to take a nap—a luxury she had never allowed herself until recently. I took this time to tell my mother what had happened on our trip, sparing her none of the exhausting details of my own feelings. She didn’t seem surprised, and I found her reassuringly sympathetic as I told her of my anguish over not having interceded at the City Building. “At any rate,” she said, “you’ve satisfied your grandmother by taking her down there, and now that’s all behind.” Later, when the day reached evening, I went out for an early edition of the Sunday paper. The governor was in the headlines. He had said that the students’ manifesto had not been written by students in the Georgia school system—or even adults in this country, for that matter. I had just gone back into the house and settled myself in the den along with my mother when I heard my grandmother coming down the hall to join us. Her steps were hard and sure, and when she entered the room she looked rested. “I’ve slept quite a long while,” she said to us. “Longer than I intended. Guess I’ll have to do it next week.” “Do what?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “I had planned to ask you to take me to Leverton to see about a bill the city sent me yesterday. But it’s too late today. The City Building is surely already closed. Maybe next week. Early on Saturday morning we’ll go.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Well too did He say, not eternal life, but treasure, saying, And thou shalt have treasure in heaven; for since the question was concerning wealth, and the renouncing of all things, He shews that He returns more things than He has bidden us leave, in proportion as heaven is greater than earth. THEOPHYLACT. But because there are many poor who are not humble, but are drunkards or have some other vice, for this reason He says, And come, follow me. BEDE. (ubi sup) For he follows the Lord, who imitates Him, and walks in His footsteps. It goes on: And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) And the Evangelist adds the cause of his grief, saying, For he had great possessions. The feelings of those who have little and those who have much are not the same, for the increase of acquired wealth lights up a greater flame of covetousness. There follows: And Jesus looked round about, and said unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. THEOPHYLACT. He says not here, that riches are bad, but that those are bad who only have them to watch them carefully; for He teaches us not to have them, that is, not to keep or preserve them, but to use them in necessary things. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) But the Lord said this to His disciples, who were poor and possessed nothing, in order to teach them not to blush at their poverty, and as it were to make an excuse to them, and give them a reason, why He had not allowed them to possess any thing. It goes on: And the disciples were astonished at his words; for it is plain, since they themselves were poor, that they were anxious for the salvation of others. BEDE. But there is a great difference between having riches, and loving them; wherefore also Solomon says not, He that hath silver, but, He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied, with silver. (Eccl. 5:10) Therefore the Lord unfolds the words of His former saying to His astonished disciples, as follows: But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard it is for them that trust in their riches to enter the kingdom of God. Where we must observe that He says not, how impossible, but how hard; for what is impossible cannot in any way come to pass, what is difficult can be compassed, though with labour. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Or else, after saying difficult, He then shews that it is impossible, and that not simply, but with a certain vehemence; and he shews this by an example, saying, It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  32 Under the right prenatal conditions: Bridget R. Mueller and Tracy L. Bale (2008). “Sex-specific programming of offspring emotionality after stress early in pregnancy.” Journal of Neuroscience 28(36): 9055–65. See also work by Frances A. Champagne (2009). “Epigenetic influences of social experiences across the lifespan.” Developmental Psychobiology 52(4): 299–311. See also Elysia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Feizal Waffarn, and Curt A. Sandman (2011). “Prenatal maternal stress programs infant stress regulation.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 52(2): 119–29. 33 it coordinates biological synchrony as well: Ruth Feldman, Ilanit Gordon, and Orna Zagoory-Sharon (2010). “The cross-generational transmission of oxytocin in humans.” Hormones and Behavior 58: 669–76. 33 developmental problems can persist for decades: Lucy Le Mare, Karyn Audet, and Karen Kurytnik (2007). “A longitudinal study of service use in families of children adopted from Romanian orphanages.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 31(3): 242–51. 33 estimated to affect 10–12 percent of postpartum moms: Vivian K. Burt and Kira Stein (2002). “Epidemiology of depression throughout the female life cycle.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 63(7): 9–15. 34 a disorder of the positive emotional system: Aaron S. Heller, Tom Johnstone, Alexander J. Shackman, Sharee N. Light, Michael J. Peterson, Gregory G. Kolden, Ned H. Kalin, and Richard J. Davidson (2009). “Reduced capacity to sustain positive emotion in major depression reflects diminished maintenance of fronto-striatal brain activation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106(52): 22445–50. 34 less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability: Adena J. Zlochower and Jeffrey F. Cohn (1996). “Vocal timing in face-to-face interaction of clinically depressed and nondepressed mothers and their 4-month-old infants.” Infant Behavior and Development 19(3): 371–74. 34 When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity: Ruth Feldman (2007). “Parent-infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing: Physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 48(3/4): 329–54. 34 long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond: Lynne Murray, Adriane Arteche, Pasco Fearon, Sarah Halligan, Tim Croudace, and Peter Cooper (2010). “The effects of maternal postnatal depression and child sex on academic performance at age 16 years: A developmental approach.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51(10): 1150–59. 34 skills vital to developing supportive social relationships: Feldman (2007). 35 Couples who regularly make time to do new and exciting things together … have better quality marriages: Arthur Aron, Christina C. Norman, Elaine N. Aron, Colin McKenna, and Richard E. Heyman (2000). “Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78(2): 273–84. Chapter 3 39 The soul must always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience: Emily Dickinson (1960). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas Johnson. Boston: Little Brown. 40 the social engagement system: Stephen W. Porges (2003). “Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1008: 31–47.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I looked at him hard. Sometimes - I couldn’t help it - I wondered if the other guy was in there somewhere. Some people will know what I mean. There were moments when he looked more knowing than he should. In those moments I almost … I almost wanted him back. My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. My father was an artist. My father loved art, and nature, and the life of the mind. He gave me those things. He was talking about the story “The Chronology of Water” I’d written. In it, there is a father who abuses his children and then loses his memory. A father whose daughter pulls him out of the sea. A swimmer’s story. “I like it. It’s a very good story.” “Thank you,” I said, knowing not to say more. “Not very flattering of me though.” I smiled and looked down and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fair enough. You know, I won a prize for that story. I got to go to New York.” “Isn’t that something,” he said, and whistled, and looked out at the trees. That’s the only thing we ever said to each other about anything that had happened. A father. A daughter. Recollected. I have an image of him from that time. He appears in a film short Andy made based on the same short story. My father agreed to let us film him for it. In the segment in which he appears, the film is black and white. You cannot tell from looking at him that he has lost his wits or memory. You cannot tell from looking at the square jaw and broad shoulders and intense stare that he abused his wife and daughters. You cannot tell he was an award winning architect, and before that, he had the tender hands of an artist. You cannot tell he is anything but a man who looks intense on film. I’m in the film too. In the segment in which I appear, the film is black and white. I am walking out into the ocean of the Oregon Coast. In November. I walk in waist high, and then I dive into the oncoming waves, and I swim. How I swim. My father died less than two years after my mother. His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that’s not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet.

• From My People (2022)

  Nor would they dare question the city fathers if, when the Negroes couldn’t pay, their land was taken from them. It was obvious that the city wanted the land, possibly to expand the main cemetery for whites only, or possibly to make pleasanter backyards or convenient driveways for the people, the sheriff included, who owned newly built houses on the other side. At any rate, it was clear that the city wanted to do away with the graves behind the hedge border. I was about to suggest that my grandmother come away with me and get a lawyer when I realized what the city of Leverton had to offer in that line—homegrown lawyers and magistrates, loyal to their constituents and to the people with whom they’d grown up. In addition to that, my grandmother had only the word of Mr. John Robert Henry, and, besides, she was not really up to any complicated legal involvement. I remained silent, knowing that if I interfered my grandmother would be upset. Yet how could I not explain that everything my friends, whom she had watched grow up—the ones she prayed for when they went on Freedom Rides, the ones she worried over when they marched on picket lines, the ones who daily faced the screaming, hostile crowds in front of stores with segregated lunch counters, the same people she recognized on television and in the newspapers as my friends—everything they stood for was being compromised as I stood there silent. I watched my grandmother as she stood for a few minutes with her fingertips tensely planted on the edge of the counter. Finally, she turned to me and said, “I guess we’d better go.” Without looking at my grandmother, the clerk handed the bill back to her and said, “All right, Frankie, it’s up to you.” As we turned to leave, my grandmother accidentally dropped her handbag on the floor. I stooped to pick it up, and she walked on. When I got to the door, she was having difficulty getting it open. I took her by the arm and helped her outside. From the narrow porch of the building, we could see the cemetery. The smell of freshly cut grass traveled easily through the soft morning air. We got back in the car, and I turned it around and headed for the road that led to Mr. Will’s house. “No, let’s not go there today,” my grandmother said. “I’m a little tired, and, besides, I think I’d like to go home.” I could think of nothing to say that would not have been an angry denunciation of the city and everything in it.