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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  BE MINDFUL OF YOUR ENERGYAnother thing the hospice team taught us was to be mindful of our own energy when we were in his space. “Though he is now in the active phase of dying, just because he can’t talk to you, doesn’t mean he can’t hear you or pick up the vibes. Talk to him. Tell him you love him. But don’t bring stress here or talk about things you wouldn’t talk about in front of him.” This made me realize just how sensitive we all are to energy—especially when our own energy is diminished. We absorb vibes like little sponges. We’re impacted by feelings and moods (ours and other people’s). That’s why learning to care for and protect our energy is so valuable. When friends and family got overly emotional, Dad’s pain would increase. He’d be agitated and need more morphine when they left. I suspect it was because he took on their pain in addition to his own but was totally incapable of doing anything about it. Some folks understood when we’d asked them to be mindful of the energy they brought into the room; others didn’t (they weren’t allowed back). Dad’s coma-like state lasted five days. I sat with him and caught him up on “what was doin’,’’ just as I would when he could respond. “The next-door neighbors painted their house white; it looks really nice.” Or I’d just quietly work on a jigsaw puzzle, keeping him company. “Dad, I’m having a heck of a time finding this one piece,” I’d say. “It’s probably right in front of my eyes, but damn if I can see it.” Turns out I’d never find it. The puzzle would never be complete again, and neither would our family. At a certain point, those transitioning stop eating and drinking. I mean, I guess I knew that. I just assumed they’d be given intravenous food and fluids or something. But the only thing Dad’s body had energy to process was the completion of life. We moistened his dry throat with a small wet sponge on a lollipop stick and softened his chapped lips with olive oil. Day turned into night as Dad hung on, holding fast to life. The next morning, everything changed. His breath slowed to a raspy crawl. His moans grew fainter and fainter. His skin illuminated. My mom lit candles, and I played soft classical music. Together, we created a sanctuary for his passing. The dogs came in and out, curling up at the foot of the bed. Mom sat on one side of him, and I sat on the other. She held his heart, and I held his hand. Her breath deepened on the inhale and “whooshed” on the exhale, as if she were leading a holy meditation. My breath automatically followed. With each rise and fall, I could feel Dad relax. Instinctively, Mom knew to coach him with the sweetest encouragement.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  You got this, Kris. You got this. Hold fast. Damn, this was rough. “What about porn?” My sorrow instantly shut down. Dad looked stunned, so the doctor continued, “While you can still get around with your walker, you might want to get rid of it if you have any. This way no one else will have to deal with it after you’re gone.” Dad burst into laughter. “That won’t be a problem, Doctor.” From then on, “Dr. Porn,” as we took to calling him, was Dad’s favorite, straight-shooting visitor. At first, hospice scared me because I was a newbie and had no clue what to expect. For instance, I didn’t know that hospice was a service, not a place (though there are hospice facilities). Multiple times per week, a team of compassionate nurses and other professionals skilled at end-of-life care came to check on Dad. They monitored his vitals and adjusted his medications. They groomed and bathed him, allowing my mom more time to just be his wife. They ordered medical supplies and equipment like a hospital bed, wheelchair, and walker. They even offered grief counseling for us all and continued to provide it for over a year past his death. During the final hours, they were with us 24-7, teaching us what was happening and how to respond to it. When we freaked out because Dad’s stomach was filling up with fluid, they gently explained that this was normal. His liver was starting to shut down, which was why his legs were also so swollen. Luckily, they were able to drain his abdomen every other day, providing him relief. The nurses taught us how to use the “comfort kit” they’d made for us—a white paper bag filled with morphine and other prescriptions to help with any breakthrough pain. Comfort kits are designed to keep patients out of the hospital—the last place Dad wanted to be. According to the Hospice Foundation of America, many individuals and families could benefit from hospice care sooner than they get it, but people don’t often know how to access the services. Some are afraid to discuss it or don’t want to concede “defeat.” Some wait for a physician to suggest it, unaware that they can initiate care on their own, as long as eligibility criteria are met. A person doesn’t have to be bedridden or in their final days of life to receive care, either. When there’s a significant decline in health, and comfort is the only thing left to give, hospice is there. Here in the U.S., hospice is covered by Medicare, and in almost every state by Medicaid. It’s also covered by most private health insurance to varying degrees.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  When I called home one morning in June and Nancy answered, I could tell right away that she was in a foul mood. Mom there? Nope, Nancy said, sounding groggy. Where is she? How the hell do I know? Do you know when she’ll be back? Nope. Mary Kay’s twenty-sixth birthday was coming up, and she was throwing a party at her new apartment. I was calling to let my mother know that I was planning on staying at Mary Kay’s that night and probably for the rest of the weekend, too. What’s the matter with you? I asked Nancy. Fuck you, Nancy said and hung up. Those were the last words my sister ever spoke to me. 7 We All Have to Go Sometime [image file=Image00012.jpg] Nancy, Highland Park, Illinois, 1972. Friday, June 16, 1978, was hot and sticky in Chicago, with the threat of thunderstorms looming. Nancy had been so sweet that morning, helping Billy with the fingering for his guitar chords. She knew the therapeutic value of music and how it could help him ride out the strange waves of sadness that had begun to wash over him earlier that spring. Just as all of us had struggled in those later high school years, Billy, now seventeen, was feeling a bit lost and confused. He had no obvious reason to be unhappy. That’s what made this so unsettling. Billy had plenty of friends, and he was handsome enough to attract lots of romantic interest. Despite my parents’ earlier worries that he would turn out to be a troublemaker, Billy was blossoming into more of the kind of kid every parent would want. His grades were excellent. He made the varsity basketball team and had just been elected vice president of his senior class at New Trier East High School. Holmer nicknamed him “the Happy Jock.” Colleges from across the country were sending him mail urging him to apply. Despite this, Billy, like the rest of us, sometimes doubted himself, wondering if he was good enough. A left-hander, he was fumbling with some minor chords at the breakfast table when Nancy came downstairs from her bedroom that morning. Try it like this, Nancy said, moving one of Billy’s fingers higher up on the guitar’s neck. Her advice worked. Now, Billy’s chord sounded crisper. He wished he could stay and jam with Nancy a bit longer, but he needed to get to work stocking shelves at the grocery store. A little after noon, Billy hopped on his bike and headed off. Nancy was twenty-four years old now. Her friend Joy and the rest of her crew of wild high school friends were long gone. Most had graduated from college and were settling down. They rented apartments in the fashionable sections of Lakeview and Lincoln Park that they decorated with Pier 1 pillows and dishes from Crate & Barrel.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  As Thurman does this, the profound nature of Jesus’s relationship to the disinherited becomes even more clear. For the Jesus at the center of the faith handed down to Thurman from his grandmother and mother is one who not only stands in solidarity with the disinherited in their struggle for freedom from social oppression, but, most significantly, he is one who shares their very feelings of growing up in a society that has made “no provisions” for them and thus is living “day by day without a sense of security.” “I have faced racism time and time again, but it’s hard… when you have to see your child… upset because he knows he’s being treated different than a white child,” said a Black mother whose son was not allowed to enter a Baltimore, Maryland, restaurant for wearing an outfit similar to one that a white boy was wearing who was welcomed into the restaurant.4 As I heard this mother’s words, I thought of the ongoing conversations she would have with her son. And I thought of the conversation that is Jesus and the Disinherited. This book provides a message to Black children on how to thrive and flourish in a world that attempts to destroy their humanity from the “inside” out. It is in this way that Howard Thurman’s book is timeless—as timeless as the conversations between Black parents and their children. —THE VERY REVEREND KELLY BROWN DOUGLAS , PH D 1 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 123. 2 Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press/BkMk Press, 2002), available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47559/mother-to-son . 3 James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew,” Progressive Magazine, December 1, 1962, https://progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew . 4 Alicia Lee, “A Restaurant Denied Service to a Black Boy for His Clothes, but Video Shows a White Boy, Dressed Similarly, Was Allowed,” CNN, June 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/us/ouzo-bay-baltimore-restaurant-denies-service-to-black-boy-trnd/index.html . Foreword to the 1996 EditionA superficial encounter with the title of Howard Thurman’s classic statement, Jesus and the Disinherited, could easily lead us to anticipate a 1940s version of liberation theology, with its now familiar message that God is on the side of the oppressed, with its powerful and prophetic condemnation of the oppressors and their cruel systems of dehumanization, with its urgent calls to repentance, resistance, and hope.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Her results, published in the leading journals of sex research, showed her patients reporting stronger libidos and stronger relationships, though she was quick to note the caveats: that desire isn’t easy to measure; that people are prone to claim improvement on questionnaires given by those who treat them; that just about any method that gets someone to think of sex can increase her interest in having it. And Brotto wasn’t maintaining that she could grant her patients what they actually wished for. She had quoted to me from their files: “I want to have sex where I feel like I’m craving it.” She sighed. She couldn’t provide that, not without a semimiracle or someone new in the patient’s bed. I asked her about an irony within her DSM work: that while disorders were supposed to be abnormal, HSDD seemed to be a normal abnormality, a condition that was largely not psychiatric but created by our most common domestic arrangement. This was confirmed by all the women she met with who, she said, hadn’t stopped desiring but who had merely stopped wanting, or had trouble wanting, their partners. Yes, she agreed, there was this tangle in psychiatry’s reasoning. She dwelled for a minute on the way our dreams and promises of forever seemed inevitably at odds with our sexual beings. “There is an element of sadness,” she said, “when I think about the women I see, when I think about the couples I know, when I think about myself personally.” She let out another sigh—or something akin to a sigh, a wordless note of grieving in a lower octave. Leaning against the rail of his viewing tower, staring down at his monkeys and remembering the small cages that distorted the sexual interaction between females and males, Wallen thought that monogamy was, for women, a cultural cage—one of many cultural cages—distorting libido. He spoke about the research Brotto had mentioned: hundreds of women followed for fifteen years or longer, their relationships, biochemistry, desire relentlessly recorded. “The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women may not be accurate,” he said. Meana was sure that it wasn’t. “I have male friends who tell me about new relationships. They say they’ve never been with a woman who’s so sexual. They’re thrilled. And I’m thinking, Just wait.” Not only did monogamy not enhance female sexuality, but it was likely worse for women than men. There wasn’t enough research on the topic, she said, but she talked about a German survey of committed relationships, showing that women felt desire wane more swiftly. One reason for this, in her mind, stemmed from narcissistic need. Within the bounds of fidelity, the heat of being desired grew more and more remote, not just because the woman’s partner lost a level of interest, but, more centrally, because the woman felt that her partner was trapped, that a choice—the lust-impelled selection of her—was no longer being made.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Ana, they’re calling your flight.” Bob’s voice is anxious. “Will you visit, Mom?” “Of course, darling—soon. Love you.” “Me, too.” Her eyes are red with unshed tears as she releases me. I hate leaving her. I hug Bob and, turning, head to the gate—I don’t have time for the first-class lounge today. I will myself not to glance back. But I do…and Bob is holding my mom, and tears are streaming down her face. I can no longer hold mine back. I put my head down and proceed to the gate, keeping my eyes on the shiny white floor, blurred through my watery tears. Once on board, in the luxury of first class, I curl up in my seat and try to compose myself. It is always painful to wrench myself away from Mom. She is scatty, disorganized, but newly insightful, and she loves me. Unconditional love—what every child deserves from their parents. I frown at my wayward thoughts and, pulling out my BlackBerry, stare at it despondently. What does Christian know of love? Seems he didn’t get the unconditional love he was entitled to during his very early years. My heart twists, and my mother’s words waft like a zephyr through my mind: Yes, Ana. Hell, what do you need? A neon sign flashing on his forehead? She thinks Christian loves me, but then she’s my mother—of course she’d think that. She thinks I deserve the best of everything. I frown. It’s true, and in a moment of startling clarity, I see it. It’s very simple: I want his love. I need Christian Grey to love me. This is why I am so reticent about our relationship—because on some basic, fundamental level, I recognize within me a deep-seated compulsion to be loved and cherished. And because of his fifty shades, I am holding myself back. The BDSM is a distraction from the real issue. The sex is amazing, he’s wealthy, he’s beautiful, but this is all meaningless without his love, and the real heart-fail is that I don’t know if he’s capable of love. He doesn’t even love himself. I recall his self-loathing, her love being the only form he found acceptable. Punished—whipped, beaten, whatever their relationship entailed—he feels undeserving of love. Why does he feel like that? How can he feel like that? His words haunt me: It’s very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you’re not perfect. I close my eyes, imagining his pain, and I can’t begin to comprehend it. I shudder as I remember that I may have divulged too much. What have I confessed to Christian in my sleep? What secrets have I revealed? I stare at the BlackBerry in the vague hope that it will give me some answers. Rather unsurprisingly, it is not very forthcoming. As we haven’t taken off yet, I decide to email my Fifty Shades. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Homeward Bound Date: June 3 2011 12:53 ET To: Christian Grey Dear Mr. Grey,

• From Between Us

  Where WEIRD cultures value and foreground the autonomy of the individual, prioritizing their goals over the goals of the collective, many other cultures prioritize relationship and group goals over those of the individual. Where marriages are arranged, if love exists between partners (it often does), it follows rather than precedes marriage. It is less a matter of choice, and more of growing appreciation. But, you may ask, how can you really love someone who is not the partner of your choosing? To give this some perspective, and to show how much love by choice is a cultural product, consider that love marriages—marriages by individual choice—are likewise ridiculed by people who have grown up with the idea of arranged marriage. In one news show an Indian woman giggled at the idea of young people choosing their own spouses, based on “love”: “Physical attraction? That is not a big thing” she said. In that same show, a young Indian man explained: “My parents know me better than anyone else in the world. So they know what is the best for me. I think the same for her.” In many communities of the world—such as rural communities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and China, but also some Jewish communities that strictly abide by the Torah—the idea is that marriage partners are best selected by your family or parents. Marriage is seen not only as a marriage between two people but as a joining of two extended families. Marriage partners are the sons and daughters of other, known families, or selected from families of similar ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. When love occurs outside of marriage, it may be drenched in sadness. In the 1980s Chinese respondents who sorted emotion words on similarity understood love as “sad,” and categorized it as part of the negative rather than the positive emotion family. In the country of Filial Piety, love had the potential to break down the proper respect and deference that children owed their parents. This may be one of the reasons that romantic love was devalued; interestingly, Chinese respondents describe love using more negative features such as pain, sadness, sacrifice, and loneliness than American respondents.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I have a suspicion that all those hours making jesses and leashes weren’t just preparation games. In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one – I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tiny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of it has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on all the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here, says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave. It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother, who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold on to something that had already flown away. I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator, full of tubes, under electric light, skin patched and raw, eyes clenched shut. I was the lucky one. I was tiny, but survived. I had a twin brother. He didn’t. He died soon after he was born. I know almost nothing about what happened, only this: it was a tragedy that wasn’t ever to be spoken of. It was a time when that’s what hospitals told grieving parents to do. Move on. Forget about it. Look, you have a child! Get on with your lives. When I found out about my twin many years later, the news was surprising. But not so surprising. I’d always felt a part of me was missing; an old, simple absence. Could my obsession with birds, with falconry in particular, have been born of that first loss? Was that ghostly kestrel a grasped-at apprehension of my twin, its carefully drawn jesses a way of holding tight to something I didn’t know I’d lost, but knew had gone? I suppose it is possible.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Here we have a fact of equal historical significance, but unrelieved by the idealism of the monastic vow. Education can only train the gifts with which a child is endowed at birth. The intellectual standard of humanity can be raised only by the propagation of the capable. Our social system causes an unnatural selection of the weak for breeding, and the result is the survival of the unfittest. When the family is small, the influence of brothers and sisters on the formation of character is lacking. When the father has to work long hours and then spend additional time in travelling between his home and his work, the element of fatherhood in the home is reduced to a minimum. If the mother, too, goes out to work, the children are left to “the street,” which is an educator of rather doubtful value. If boarders and roomers are taken in to help in paying the rent, an alien and often a demoralizing element enters the family. Thus the economic situation everywhere saps family life. One family to one house is the only normal condition. When twenty families live in one tenement, twenty souls inhabit one body. That was the condition of the demoniac of Gadara, in whom dwelt a legion. He was crazy. To be a home in the fullest sense, it must be loved with the sense of proprietorship. As cities grow, home ownership declines. A semi-vagrancy from one flat to the next grows up. In the borough of Manhattan only six per cent of the homes are owned by those who live in them; in Philadelphia, a city of small houses, only twenty-two per cent own their homes. Rochester is an almost ideal city for the development of homes, and the popular assumption is that nearly everybody owns his home. Yet the census of 1900 showed that of the 33,964 homes in the city only 12,290 were owned by the tenants, and half of these were mortgaged. The condition of the home determines the condition of woman. If girls are eagerly sought in marriage, they can choose the best. If few men can afford a good home, girls must take what offers or go without. If a man can easily make a living for a family, he can afford to be indifferent to anything but the person of the woman he loves. As the economic pressure tightens and social classes grow more clearly defined, American men, too, will begin to inquire what property comes to them with their bride. We shall have love modified by the “ dot .” Our optimists treat it as a sign of progress that “so many professions are now open to women.” But it is not choice, but grim necessity, that drives woman into new ways of getting bread and clothing. The great majority of girls heartily prefer the independence and the satisfaction of the heart which are offered to a woman only in a comfortable and happy home.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I never knew when a nugget was coming, so I kept a notes doc on my phone to capture each word, typing with a mixture of inspiration and desperation, not wanting to forget even a syllable. In the beginning, he weaved these bombs into relevant conversations, which made them easier to process. But as his time grew shorter, the bombs became more frequent, more urgent, and definitely more unexpected, totally catching me off guard. Naturally, these bombs could set off a chain reaction of feelings I had been trying to quell. But the last thing I wanted was to burst into tears at the mere suggestion that I “consider a car trade-in after 50,000 miles.” I mean, maybe the guy just wanted to talk about cars. No big life lessons. No trying to squeeze in as much fatherly advice while he still could—just cars (and common sense). Next thing he knows, he’s comforting a hysterical daughter, when he is the one who needs comforting in the form of a normal conversation that has nothing to do with dying. I’d get so angry with myself for my inability to contain my emotions, especially if my waterworks were triggered by something as harmless as a TV commercial (unless it was for the ASPCA and featured a senior collie named Wags who desperately needed a home—those are impossible to survive without tears streaming down your face). One such occasion was when my parents came to our home for a visit. As I was helping Dad bring their luggage upstairs to our guest room, he paused to catch his breath and drop a wisdom bomb while he was at it. “You know, love, sometimes the golden years are for shit.” Oh sweet Jesus, here we go. “Look at this bag,” he said, pointing to a small suitcase. “You know what’s in it? Medications! This entire bag is filled with our pills. Everyone works so hard so things can be better later, but we’ve got it all backward. You have to live your life now, love. Make now your golden years. Slow down and give yourself more of the good stuff along the way. Sometimes I worry that you’re following in my footsteps and missing too many of the moments that matter.” His words hit me hard. Not only could I feel his regret, but there was a reason he was saying this to me. As one of the few people who really knew how I was wired, he was highlighting the code I hadn’t yet cracked, the one I was uncomfortable discussing, even with him. There was only one way to respond. DEAD MOUSE! That’s right. When a sudden onset of feelings triggers a tidal wave of overwhelm, sadness, or regret, one of the ways I dam them up is by conjuring awful images in my mind, stuff like eating anchovies or, say, a dead mouse in my sink. (It’s a useful technique. You’re welcome.)

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  In the book of Jubilees, the corruption of creation is due to the fal , which has repercussions for the natural world.13 One of the effects is that the normal human lifespan is shortened ( Jub. 4:30; 23:12). Most frequently, sin brings to the world corruption, disease, death, decay, suffering, and sorrow. The story of the fall of the flood in Jubilees expresses the idea that it is the fall in the superhuman or semi-divine realm that most readily explains the presence of evil in the world. Wintermute suggests that “the author of Jubilees teaches us three things about evil: (1) It is superhuman; 12 The Book of Jubilees may also be understood in the context of Jewish/Judean self-definition in and around the Maccabean Crisis. One might find it also helpful to read Jubilees in concert with later works such as 2 Bar. and 4 Ezra regarding the fall and Torah. 13 See later for more precision. 63 New Creation Motif 63 (2) but it is not caused by God; (3) therefore it comes from the angelic world, which has suffered a breach from God’s good order.” 14 Sin also brings about major disruptions in the orderly operation of the natural world. Animals’ original nature change and so they began to rebel against humans and lose the ability to speak. Jubilees 3:28 reads: “On that day the mouth of all the beasts and cattle and birds and whatever walked or moved was stopped from speaking because all of them used to speak with one another with one speech and one language (τὰ θηρία καὶ τὰ τετράποδα καὶ τὰ ἑρπετὰ … ὁμόφωνα εἶναι πρὸ τῆς παραβάσεως τοῖς πρωτοπλάστοις· διότι … ὁ ὄφις ἀνθρωπίνῃ φωνῇ ἐλάλησε τῇ Εὔᾳ).” 15 The earth itself was corrupted by the fall as a result of increasing sin. Jubilees further reads: “Behold, the land itself will be corrupted on account of all their deeds, and there will be no seed of the vine, and there will be no oil because their works are entirely faithless” ( Jub. 23:18). Cosmic irregularities occur during times of extensive sin, such as during the pre-flood era and in the last days. These cosmic changes include earthquakes, widespread crop failure, plagues, birth defects, and disturbances among animals. Some of these changes in the natural world are based on Gen. 3:16-19, which discusses the pain of women in childbearing. The curse on the ground requires hard labor to grow crops ( Jub. 3:25; 4:28) and death is the certain human fate ( Jub. 4:3). Jubilees 23:13–14 describes the increasing futility of life due to the deterioration of the world from human sin:

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There’s a complicated sky of cold-front ragged cloud under swathes of high cirrostratus, and a headwind that sends larks up like chaff as we walk through the fields. Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn’t here. It is late winter and I’m back at my mother’s house. Things are better now, I know, and I’ve been coming here more often, but each time I forget how hard it will be. The winter fields are shorn, yellowed into stalky, rabbit-grazed sward spotted with foraging rooks. I can hawk with Mabel all the way across this land until it ends in a slumpy hedge so wide it’s almost a wood, furrily iced with old-man’s-beard. Beyond it is someone else’s land; a terra incognita, holding the suppressed fascination we all have for places just beyond where we know, or are supposed to be. I stand at the top of the field, change her jesses, remove her leash, thread the swivel onto it, double back the leash, and stuff it deep into my pocket. I hold my arm high, wait for her to look about, and cast her off my fist into the gusty wind. She glides down to the far hedge and swings up into a small ash, shaking her tail. I follow her down and we start hawking proper, looking for rabbits in a tangle of broken, open woodland. This line of trees is not designed for human thoroughfare. There are elder bushes, green twigs and branches starred with lichen. There are fallen oaks, clumps of vicious brambles, screens of hazel, and ivy clambering and covering stumps and extending a hand up to the trees above to scramble into the light, so the whole place is umbrous and decorated with shiny scales of ivy leaves. The air tastes of humus and decay. Each footfall breaks twigs and has that slightly uncertain, oddly hollow quality of walking on thick woodland soil. Mabel is being extraordinary. I’ve mostly flown her in open country before. She has grasped how woodland hawking works, and is hugely attentive. More than attentive. Flying a goshawk in a scape of obstacles and broken sight-lines makes the connection between us hugely manifest. She breaks through twigs to come down to my fist when I whistle, and she follows me as I walk, moving above me like a personal angel whenever I’m out of sight. I look up and see her crouching, staring at me with round eyes, pupils dilated with excitement and attention, crayon-yellow toes gripping dead ash branches. Or floating above me, above the branches, flickering through, sending submarine ripples behind her.

• From The City of God

  When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described it, it was not "utterly wicked and profligate," as he says, but had altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of that debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best representatives. Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person of Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses the following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after quoting a line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, "Rome's severe morality and her citizens are her safeguard." "This verse," says Cicero, "seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an oracle. For neither would the citizens have availed without the morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long to maintain in vigour so grand a republic with so wide and just an empire. Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed our foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and institutions of their fathers. But our age, receiving the republic as a _chef-d'œuvre_ of another age which has already begun to grow old, has not merely neglected to restore the colours of the original, but has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general outline and most outstanding features. For what survives of that primitive morality which the poet called Rome's safeguard? It is so obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does not even know it. And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long since lost the reality."

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  This view, which I call the theory of constructed emotion, offers a very different interpretation of the events during Governor Malloy’s speech. When Malloy’s voice caught in his throat, it did not trigger a brain circuit for sadness inside me, causing a distinctive set of bodily changes. Rather, I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach. They directed me to cry, an action that would calm my nervous system. And they made the resulting sensations meaningful as an instance of sadness. In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness. Not only that, but my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness. Or in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude. If this explanation doesn’t make complete sense or even sounds counterintuitive so far, believe me, I am right there with you. After Governor Malloy’s speech, as I came back to myself, wiping my tears, I was reminded that no matter what I know about emotions as a scientist, I experience them much as the classical view conceives them. My sadness felt like an instantly recognizable wave of bodily changes and feelings that overwhelmed me as a reaction to tragedy and loss. If I were not a scientist using experiments to reveal that emotions are in fact made and not triggered, I too would trust my immediate experience. The classical view of emotion remains compelling, despite the evidence against it, precisely because it’s intuitive. The classical view also provides reassuring answers to deep, fundamental questions like: Where do you come from, evolutionarily speaking? Are you responsible for your actions when you get emotional? Do your experiences accurately reveal the world outside you?

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  As the governor spoke the last two words, “protecting students,” his voice caught in his throat ever so slightly. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have missed it. But that tiny waver devastated me. My stomach instantly knotted into a ball. My eyes flooded. The TV camera panned to the crowd where other people had started to sob too. As for Governor Malloy, he stopped speaking and was gazing downward. Emotions like Governor Malloy’s and mine seem primal—hardwired into us, reflexively deployed, shared with all our fellow humans. When triggered, they seem to unleash themselves in each of us in basically the same way. My sadness was like Governor Malloy’s sadness was like the crowd’s sadness. Humanity has understood sadness and other emotions in this way for over two thousand years. But at the same time, if humanity has learned anything from centuries of scientific discovery, it’s that things aren’t always what they appear to be. The time-honored story of emotion goes something like this: We all have emotions built-in from birth. They are distinct, recognizable phenomena inside us. When something happens in the world, whether it’s a gunshot or a flirtatious glance, our emotions come on quickly and automatically, as if someone has flipped a switch. We broadcast emotions on our faces by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other characteristic expressions that anyone can easily recognize. Our voices reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries. Our body posture betrays our feelings with every gesture and slouch. Modern science has an account that fits this story, which I call the classical view of emotion. According to this view, the waver in Governor Malloy’s voice launched a chain reaction that began in my brain. A particular set of neurons—call it the “sadness circuit”—leaped into action and caused my face and body to respond in a certain, specific way. My brow furrowed, I frowned, my shoulders stooped, and I cried. This proposed circuit also triggered physical changes inside my body, causing my heart rate and breathing to speed up, my sweat glands to activate, and my blood vessels to constrict.* This collection of movements on the inside and outside of my body are said to be like a “fingerprint” that uniquely identifies sadness, much like your own fingerprints uniquely identify you. The classical view of emotion holds that we have many such emotion circuits in our brains, and each is said to cause a distinct set of changes, that is, a fingerprint. Perhaps an annoying coworker triggers your “anger neurons,” so your blood pressure rises; you scowl, yell, and feel the heat of fury. Or an alarming news story triggers your “fear neurons,” so your heart races; you freeze and feel a flash of dread. Because we experience anger, happiness, surprise, and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being, it seems reasonable to assume that each emotion has a defining underlying pattern in the brain and body.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The various branches of the Shiah traced the divine succession differently. “Twelver Shiis,” for example, venerated twelve descendants of Ali through Husayn, until in 939 the last Imam went into hiding and disappeared from human society; since he had no descendants, the line died out. The Ismailis, known as the Seveners, believed that the seventh of these Imams had been the last. A messianic strain appeared among the Twelvers, who believed that the Twelfth or Hidden Imam would return to inaugurate a golden age. These were obviously dangerous ideas. Not only were they politically subversive, but they could easily be interpreted in a crude, simplistic way. The more extreme Shiis developed an esoteric tradition, therefore, based on a symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their piety was too abstruse for most Muslims, who regarded this incarnational idea as blasphemous, so Shiis were usually found among the more aristocratic classes and the intellectuals. Since the Iranian revolution, we have tended in the West to depict Shiism as an inherently fundamentalist sect of Islam, but that is an inaccurate assessment. Shiism became a sophisticated tradition. In fact, Shiis had much in common with those Muslims who attempted to apply rational arguments systematically to the Koran. These rationalists, known as Mutazilis, formed their own distinctive group; they also had a firm political commitment: like the Shiis, Mutazilis were highly critical of the luxury of the court and were frequently politically active against the establishment. The political question inspired a theological debate about God’s government of human affairs. Supporters of the Ummayads had rather disingenuously claimed that their un-Islamic behavior was not their fault because they had been predestined by God to be the kind of people they were. The Koran has a very strong conception of God’s absolute omnipotence and omniscience, and many texts could be used to support this view of predestination. But the Koran is equally emphatic about human responsibility: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves.” Consequently the critics of the establishment stressed free will and moral responsibility. The Mutazilis took a middle road and withdrew (i’tazahu, to stand aloof) from an extreme position. They defended free will in order to safeguard the ethical nature of humanity. Muslims who believed that God was above mere human notions of right and wrong were decrying his justice. A God who violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was God would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph. Like the Shiis, the Mutazilis declared that justice was of the essence of God: he could not wrong anybody; he could not enjoin anything contrary to reason.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Title : How Emotions Are Made Author: Barrett, Lisa Feldman [image "title page" file=image_rsrc7A8.jpg] ContentsTitle Page Contents Copyright Dedication Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints” Emotions Are Constructed The Myth of Universal Emotions The Origin of Feeling Concepts, Goals, and Words How the Brain Makes Emotions Emotions as Social Reality A New View of Human Nature Mastering Your Emotions Emotion and Illness Emotion and the Law Is a Growling Dog Angry? From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier Acknowledgments Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix D Bibliography Notes Illustration Credits Index Sample Chapter from SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN Buy the Book About the Author Connect on Social Media Footnotes First Mariner Books edition 2018 Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Feldman Barrett Illustrations by Aaron Scott All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. marinerbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barrett, Lisa Feldman, author. Title: How emotions are made : the secret life of the brain / Lisa Feldman Barrett. Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038354 (print) | LCCN 2017004323 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544133310 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544129962 (ebook) ISBN 9781328915436 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. | Emotions—Sociological aspects. | Brain. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Emotions. | PSYCHOLOGY / Neuropsychology. | SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience. Classification: LCC BF561 .B337 2017 (print) | LCC BF561 (ebook) | DDC 152.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038354 Cover design by David Drummond Cover image based on © Shutterstock Author photograph © 2017 Mark Karlsberg v8.0921 For Sophia Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old AssumptionOn December 14, 2012, the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people inside the school, including twenty children, were massacred by a lone gunman. Several weeks after this horror, I watched the governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, give his annual “State of the State” speech on television. He spoke in a strong and animated voice for the first three minutes, thanking individuals for their service. And then he began to address the Newtown tragedy: We have all walked a very long and very dark road together. What befell Newtown is not something we thought possible in any of Connecticut’s beautiful towns or cities. And yet, in the midst of one of the worst days in our history, we also saw the best of our state. Teachers and a therapist that sacrificed their lives protecting students.1

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Speaking of harmful societal ideas, there’s also a belief that we should just run out and replace what’s lost in order to be whole again, as if it were a missing Tupperware lid. While well-intentioned (no one wants to see us in pain), these practices often make grieving and healing harder to achieve—for ourselves and for our loved ones. Someone or something unique and special to us can never be substituted. Instead, a full range of pain and challenges will occur in life, no matter how healthy, conscious, resourceful, or spiritual we happen to be. In that way, acceptance grounds us and prepares us for the good times and the storms. It teaches us the bone-deep wisdom found in the Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The opposite of acceptance is resistance. Fighting against the truth: Maybe he’ll come back. Fighting with our egos: I’m not the kind of person who falls apart. Fighting against what we know we need to do, say, or feel: Maintain a stiff upper lip. And fighting with each other, instead of coming together: It’s all their fault. While I can’t change what happened (I got sick, my dad got sick and eventually passed, life changed in ways I didn’t want it to, and old traumas emerged as a result of these ruptures), I can change what I do now—how I proceed moving forward, how I grow and make the most of the precious, never-guaranteed time I have with my loved ones, with my dreams, and most importantly, with myself. For many of us, resistance is our go-to mode. We’d rather deny, avoid, or brawl than face the truth of how our lives are changing or even what we’ve been through. But as the saying goes, “What we resist persists,” keeping us stuck in pain and frozen in time. Learning to live with cancer was my first big experience with acceptance. Learning to live with loss was my second. Like it or not, I couldn’t change either situation. But I could use both of these experiences as catalysts for a more connected way of living. If you are wrestling with fire-breathing dragons like this in your own life, this next story might help you expand your perspective. HEALING VS. CURINGAt many cancer hospitals, there’s a beautiful closing ceremony and rite of passage for patients who make it to the other side of sick. The staff gather on the patient’s last day of treatment to applaud them and ring a congratulatory bell, celebrating a clean bill of health, while honoring the team effort it took to get there. At long last, the patient is able to check the coveted “survivor” box—even if just temporarily.

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

  VMulling back over it, generally the denizens of the Venus seemed a bit more colorful than those from the Capri: the extremely handsome Hispanic young man who would rush into the theater at ten after five, obviously just off from work, drop down in the first row, pull out his genitals and a serious looking pair of handcuffs, bind his scrotum up in them, their hasp ratcheting through the catch, masturbate, and then, putting himself and the whole metallic contraption back in his pants, rush from the theater equally fast (as far as I could tell, he must have kept the key at home); or the various fellows—those who did not lean suddenly forward to spill on the back of the chair before them or on the cement floor in front of the cracked red seat—who, a moment after coming, would fall asleep, pants still gaping, genitals still loose, semen glimmering on their brown or black bellies in the light from the screen; the several midgets; the countless drag queens; the dozen who, off in the darkest parts of the theater, would strip completely naked before masturbating. . . . Between the Venus and the Capri was the Eros I: Unlike the Venus and the Capri, the Eros showed gay porn films. After performing on stage, male dancers came out to walk the aisles and hustle the audience (“You want a private show—thirty-five dollars, downstairs?”)—but for me the whole thing was too mercenary, too formalized, and—like hustlers—go-go dancers in general aren’t my thing. This essay’s purpose is to present a vernacular periplum of what might be found in the Times Square gay cruising venues and the culture that grew up around them, as well as to suggest an overview of what went on in Manhattan straight pornographic theaters encouraging gay sex over those years. I believe I’ve done that, and done it honestly. But it would be untrue to leave you with the sense that I never saw any psychologically troubling events. A homeless man at least in his late seventies, possibly in his eighties, slept in a right-hand seat of the Venus’s balcony. I saw him every time I went into the theater, over more than a five-year period. Finally I realized, quite outside any of the sex or drugs, he lived there—permanently. He left the theater only for the few hours during the night it closed for cleaning. He was there three days before the door of the Venus was boarded over and chained. Three weeks later I saw him in his tweed cap and ragged jacket, wandering along the street, eyes squinting in his wrinkled face, as though the wan Eighth Avenue sun was simply and permanently too bright.

• From The City of God

  Now, if these were the days in which the Roman republic shows fairest and best, what are we to say or think of the succeeding age, when, to use the words of the same historian, "changing little by little from the fair and virtuous city it was, it became utterly wicked and dissolute?" This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of Carthage. Sallust's brief sum and sketch of this period may be read in his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He says: "And from this time the primitive manners, instead of undergoing an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were swept away as by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury and avarice, that it may justly be said that no father had a son who could either preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other men's." Sallust adds a number of particulars about the vices of Sylla, and the debased condition of the republic in general; and other writers make similar observations, though in much less striking language. However, I suppose you now see, or at least any one who gives his attention has the means of seeing, in what a sink of iniquity that city was plunged before the advent of our heavenly King. For these things happened not only before Christ had begun to teach, but before He was even born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not impute to their gods the grievous evils of those former times, more tolerable before the destruction of Carthage, but intolerable and dreadful after it, although it was the gods who by their malign craft instilled into the minds of men the conceptions from which such dreadful vices branched out on all sides, why do they impute these present calamities to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth, and forbids us to worship false and deceitful gods, and who, abominating and condemning with His divine authority those wicked and hurtful lusts of men, gradually withdraws His own people from a world that is corrupted by these vices, and is falling into ruins, to make of them an eternal city, whose glory rests not on the acclamations of vanity, but on the judgment of truth? 19. _Of the corruption which had grown upon the Roman republic before Christ abolished the worship of the gods._