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 Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Except when there is abuse in the home, there is no “good divorce” from a child’s point of view. It’s all loss—of income, security, time with fathers, and often time with mothers as well. Children of divorce are more likely to live in poverty, take up smoking, get pregnant as teenagers, fall behind in math, get physically sick, get divorced themselves, and even die young.70 It is no surprise, then, that divorce takes a toll on children’s mental health. Consider youth suicide. A 2001 paper published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, by David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Karen E. Norberg, found that the rate of teen suicides tripled between 1950 and 1990, and the authors found that depression, suicide attempts, and suicide completions were all closely linked with divorce and family structure. Teens who live with a single parent were twice as likely to attempt suicide as those in two-parent families. “[T]he relationship with one’s parents is a very strong determinant of teenage depression,” the report said. “Individuals who never knew their fathers are particularly likely to be depressed, even more so than those who know their father but whose father is not home. Note that these coefficients were about the same in the regressions for attempting suicide.”71 As the divorce rate rises, the teen suicide rate rises with it.72 Some apologists for the “family is love” paradigm have noted that throughout history, children have commonly lived with stepparents. It used to be death that disrupted families, they say, and now it’s divorce. So what’s all the fuss about? Divorce is far harder on children than parental death. Death is recognized as a tragedy, and usually draws survivors closer. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead explains, a parental death elicits help from friends and relatives, including grandparents. Money may be forthcoming from Social Security or life insurance. The surviving parent and child are united in their bereavement and think back on the late parent with affection. The memory of the lost parent can even be a spur to the child to try to live in such a manner as would make the late parent proud.73 After divorce, the custodial parent and child have markedly different feelings about the missing parent, and as Whitehead notes, the nonresidential parent “who remains remote or absent can be a source of continued torment [to the child] in a way that a parent who dies is not.”74 Paternal grandparents may be less likely to pitch in with grandchildren who are living with an ex-wife.75 And children may feel guilty about longing for a father who is such a source of pain to their mother.

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Many divorced fathers lose regular contact with their children. Reporting information from the National Survey of Children, Whitehead reports that “close to half of all children had not seen their nonresidential parent (overwhelmingly the father) in the past year, and only one in six had weekly contact or better.”76 Other studies have found that ten years after a divorce, nearly two-thirds of the children had not seen their fathers for a year.77 These children can be left with psychic scars. Lots of them, perhaps even the majority, bounce back without lifelong wounds. But a large number (more boys than girls) never do. Yet fathers are not always or even usually to blame. Mothers sometimes restrict a father’s access to his children to gain more financial support or to punish him. This strategy commonly causes fathers to withhold, or further withhold, child support payments, and the cycle of bitterness intensifies. Everyone loses—but no one more than the children. Even when children of divorce reach college, family breakup continues to haunt them. A 2010 study found that college students with divorced parents received only about a third of the financial contributions that students with married parents received. It wasn’t just a matter of single parents having less money. Even students whose parents had remarried and had comparable incomes to the married parents received only half the financial support.78 There’s a fraying of attachments. Children of divorce also experience more emotional strains in college than students from intact families. They are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and poor grades than their peers. Controlling for demographics, ACT scores, and other factors, the children of divorce had a significantly lower first-year retention rate, were less likely to graduate, and had more financial problems than others.79 Responding to an article in the New York Times about the impact of divorce on college students, a commenter called “Amy” described a common predicament: Coming from divorced and remarried parents I found myself with no assistance with planning, support for, or financial assistance for college upon graduation from high school. One reason for this was due to the anger between my divorced parents. My father felt as if he no longer had to pay “that woman” child support when I turned 18 and was done. My mother, possibly because of her new husband, would not help either. Her new husband had two children of his own. Their paternal grandparents funded their college from what I understand.80 In the 1970s, when feminists were promoting the “courage to divorce,” therapists, clergy, and others advised that stepfamilies would solve the problems of single parenthood. An unhappy wife would leave her unsuitable mate and find a better one. A “blended” family would slip seamlessly into the slot and provide children with the stability, male role models, and financial security they would need.

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  But in the intervening years, we’ve learned that it isn’t so simple to put families back together. In fact, stepfamilies turn out to be no better for children than single-parent ones. Children in stepfamilies actually do worse in some crucial respects, such as school performance, than children whose mothers do not remarry.81 Fathers who form new relationships and have children with a new partner become more estranged from the children of their first wife or partner. Mothers who welcome new boyfriends or husbands can become less attentive to their children from the first relationship. Children who live in stepfamilies are more likely to report feeling “sad or blue,” to wish for more time with their mothers, and to miss out on having parents participate in school or other activities.82 Some mothers with new lovers or husbands are discreet about their sex lives and careful to consider their children’s feelings of exclusion and loss. But some become preoccupied with their own romantic lives and neglect their children. “Compared with the affectional environment in households with married parents,” Whitehead cautions, “who have usually settled into a more sedate sex life, the climate in these post–nuclear family households may be overheated and eroticized.”83 In the premodern world, when women commonly died in childbirth, fathers remarried, obliging their children to contend with stepmothers, who probably favored their biological children over their husband’s children by a previous wife. Stories of “wicked stepmothers” thus had real resonance for children. But in our time, the wicked stepfather is the more likely threat to enter a child’s world. This is not to suggest that most live-in boyfriends or stepfathers abuse children. Few do, thank God, but when a woman lives in a home with a man who is not the father of her children, those children are at increased risk of both physical and sexual abuse. A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that children who live in households with unrelated adults are fifty times more likely to die from inflicted injuries than those living with their biological parents.84 Children in a household with their mother and her boyfriend are about eleven times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Also, they are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents.85

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Again, the African American community was the warning light. Over the past fifty years, the percentage of black families headed by married couples declined from 78 percent to 34 percent.91 It’s hard to prove causation, but this rise in single parenting was accompanied by a steep rise in crime, drug abuse, indiscipline in schools, and unemployment. As then–presidential candidate Barack Obama noted in a Father’s Day speech in 2008, “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are…missing…from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weakening because of it.”92 After crunching the numbers, Sara McLanahan and Cynthia Harper concluded that growing up in a single-parent home is more predictive of involvement with the criminal justice system than any other factor including race and income.93 Look at what works and what doesn’t. The poverty rate among married black couples today is 8 percent, or half the national rate of 16 percent. Among black single mothers, 46 percent live in poverty.94 The ratios are similar for whites. The poverty rate for married white couples is 3.1 percent,95 and for single white parents, it’s 22 percent.96 Many on the left, transfixed by America’s original sins of slavery and racism—and I would be the last to deny that those sins were/are real—cannot think clearly about anything that can be construed as criticism of black behavior. And a few on the right point to black family structure with a trace of smugness as if it explains everything that goes wrong in the lives of American blacks. Yet neither side of the family structure wars has assimilated the new reality: Americans of every color and ethnicity have a problem with family structure; blacks just happen to have been the first ones out the matrimonial door. If Americans of all backgrounds had heeded Moynihan’s advice in 1965 and rushed to shore up fatherhood and marriage, many of the self-inflicted wounds we now suffer might have been avoided. Instead, we chose the opposite route. The white rate of out-of-wedlock births rose from 3.1 percent in 1965 to 29.4 percent in 2013. For Hispanics, the rate increased from 26 percent in 1980 to 53.5 percent in 2013. And for blacks, as noted, the 2013 rate was 72.2 percent, compared with 24 percent in 1965.97 Isabel Sawhill, of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, has concluded that virtually the entire increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s can be attributed to family breakdown.98 In fact, as Kay Hymowitz described it, we have evolved a caste system. At the top are the college graduates, nine out of ten of whom get married before becoming pregnant. At the bottom are poor women of all races and backgrounds who routinely have babies before they marry (if they ever marry).99

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Scholars have begun to study the things conducive to success beyond socioeconomic status and race. Richard V. Reeves, also of the Brookings Institution, studies the noncognitive traits associated with life success. These include “perseverance, industriousness, grit, resilience, curiosity, application, self-control, future orientation, self-discipline, impulse control, and delay of gratification.” He found that these traits track closely with the mother’s level of education and whether or not a child has parents who are continuously married. Having married parents was shown to predict these character traits even more than being born to well-off parents.100 So in other words, if you were a birth mother choosing a family to place your baby with, you’d be better advised to choose a married couple of moderate means rather than a wealthy unmarried couple. James Heckman of the University of Chicago explains how unmarried, uneducated mothers often fail to cultivate these crucial traits in their children: “[They] talk less to their children and are less likely to read to them daily. Exposure to this type of parenting leads to substantial differences in the verbal skills of disadvantaged children when they start school. Disadvantaged mothers encourage their children less and tend to adopt harsher parenting styles. Disadvantaged parents tend to be less engaged with their children’s school work. The environments provided by teenage mothers are particularly adverse.”101 For many women, the link between marriage and childbearing no longer applies. In a 2009 Washington Post story, one unmarried mother explained why she hadn’t married the father of her three-year-old: “He’s a good dad and a good person, but he’s just not right for me.” Another offered, “I didn’t want to pick the wrong person just to have a kid, so I just decided to go ahead and do it and work on the relationship later.”102 Our culture has clearly not discouraged these women from single parenting. No one told them they might be handicapping their children. Nor did anyone advise the second woman she might be lucky enough to find a man who would be a good stepfather, but the child’s biological dad has a running start in caring about that particular baby. That’s just the way we’re designed. Though some single-parent families do well, the children in many American households are subjected to more stress than children can usually bear. American adults with some college or less have become promiscuous not just about sex but about children. Kids are dragged from one unstable home to another, living first with their own unmarried parents, then with Mom and her new boyfriend, then with Grandma for a few months, then with yet another new boyfriend or husband of their mother’s. Along the way, they may acquire half-siblings, or be forced to live with stepsiblings and other adults to whom they are not related (the boyfriend’s family) but to whom they must nonetheless adjust.

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  As sociologist Andrew Cherlin notes in The Marriage-Go-Round, Americans now hold the dubious distinction of leading the world in chaotic adult relationships. American young adults are quicker to form unions and faster to end them than are adults in any other country. Forty percent of American children will see their parents’ arrangement, either marriage or living together, dissolve by the time they reach the age of fifteen. And even more damaging, 47 percent will see a new partner enter their home within three years of their parents’ separation.103 Among cohabiting couples, the breakup rate is 55 percent after five years, the highest among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. The next highest rate is in Spain, at 42 percent.104 In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance describes growing up in just such a household in Ohio. Many times in his early life, his home was so turbulent that he was kept awake all night by terrifying fights between his mother and her latest live-in boyfriend, and he could not concentrate in school at all. For a while, he and his older sister lived by themselves while his mother underwent (another) stint in rehab. They concealed this embarrassing situation as best they could, but they were children—alone. Vance quotes one of his teachers, who did her best with kids who came from anarchic homes like his, as saying, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”105 Lost MenNow that the Supreme Court has made same-sex marriage the law of the land, I devoutly hope marriage will do for same-sex couples what it has done for heterosexual couples. There just hasn’t been enough time to measure if that will be so. I also hope that children raised by same-sex couples will get all the benefits of mother-and-father unions. Still, same-sex marriage has arrived at a moment when heterosexual marriage is in a rickety state. The social science world continues to debate whether less-educated men remain single because their low earning prospects make them less desirable or whether failing to marry makes them less likely to work hard and get ahead. This same debate raged in the 1980s regarding the African American community. William Julius Wilson famously argued that black women were having children out of wedlock because of fewer marriageable black men. The men were jobless, Wilson argued, due to deindustrialization.

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

  BEDE. (non occ.) After our Lord had departed to the other side of Jordan, it happened that Lazarus fell sick: A certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany.In some copies the copulative conjunction precedes, to mark the connection with the words preceding. (ἢν δέ τις, now a certain man.) Lazarus signifies helped. Of all the dead which our Lord raised, he was most helped, for he had lain dead four days, when our Lord raised him to life. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix. 1) The resurrection of Lazarus is more spoken of than any of our Lord’s miracles. But if we bear in mind who He was who wrought this miracle, we shall feel not so much of wonder, as of delight. He who made the man, raised the man; and it is a greater thing to create a man, than to revive him. Lazarus was sick at Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. The place was near Jerusalem. ALCUIN. And as there were many women of this name, He distinguishes her by her well-known act: It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. CHRYSOSTOM. (Greg. Hom. lxii. 1) First we are to observe that this was not the harlot mentioned in Luke, but an honest woman, who treated our Lord with marked reverence. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. ii. lxxix.) John here confirms the passage in Luke (Luke 7:38), where this is said to have taken place in the house of one Simon a Pharisee: Mary had done this act therefore on a former occasion. That she did it again at Bethany is not mentioned in the narrative of Luke, but is in the other three Gospels. AUGUSTINE. (de Verb. Dom. s. lii) A cruel sickness had seized Lazarus; a wasting fever was eating away the body of the wretched man day by day: his two sisters sat sorrowful at his bedside, grieving for the sick youth continually. They sent to Jesus: Therefore his sisters sent unto Him, saying, Lord, behold he whom Thou lovest is sick. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix. 5) They did not say, Come and heal; they dared not say, Speak the word there, and it shall be done here; but only, Behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick. As if to say, It is enough that Thou know it, Thou art not one to love and then to desert whom Thou lovest. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxii. 1) They hope to excite Christ’s pity by these words, Whom as yet they thought to be a man only. Like the centurion and nobleman, they sent, not went, to Christ; partly from their great faith in Him, for they knew Him intimately, partly because their sorrow kept them at home.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  As we have seen, the majority of Christian converts of the first four centuries regarded the proclamation of moral freedom, grounded in Genesis 1–3, as effectively synonymous with “the gospel.” As Justin interpreted Jesus’ message, it celebrated not only Christian freedom from domination by sexual passion, and from such passions as greed and hatred, but also from external domination by the Roman state. Clement of Alexandria praised Christian freedom to choose even death rather than yield to the oppressive weight of Roman social custom. Bishop Methodius, writing years later in Asia Minor, envisioned the whole of human history, ever since Eden, as a progressive evolution of human freedom, which culminates in the greatest freedom of all—the life of voluntary renunciation.68 Gregory of Nyssa spoke for the whole tradition when he said, “The soul directly reveals its royal and excellent quality in that … it is governed and ruled autonomously by its own will.”69 Most orthodox Christians agreed with many of their Jewish contemporaries that Adam’s fatal misuse of this freedom was so momentous that his transgression brought pain, labor, and death into an originally perfect world. Yet Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement also agreed that Adam’s transgression did not encroach upon our own individual freedom: even now, they said, every person is free to choose good or evil, just as Adam was. These same church leaders unanimously denounced the gnostics for denying what the orthodox considered to be humanity’s essential, God-given attribute, free will. For Irenaeus, the story of Adam and Eve proclaimed “the ancient law of human liberty.”70 Most other Christians also agreed with their Jewish contemporaries that the point of the creation story was that God bestowed upon every person the gift of moral freedom. Certain Christians, from Paul through Augustine, may have noted what this implied socially: that slavery is not a natural condition, as Aristotle had taught, but an artificial and sinful human invention.71 (Yet neither Paul nor Augustine advocated abolishing slavery; instead, both, like the Stoic philosophers, urged slaves to use their moral freedom to overcome the hardships of servitude.)72 For Clement of Alexandria, moral freedom is our glory; that we are made in the image of God really means that we have what he calls autexousia, a term often translated as “free will,” but, more accurately, “the power to constitute one’s own being.”73 But gnostic Christians qualified—and some denied—this optimistic message of freedom. Certain radical gnostics ridiculed the orthodox claim that human beings have free will or, for that matter, any power to constitute their own destiny. The Reality of the Rulers depicted Adam, prototype of humanity, as a kind of victim, morally and physically crippled from the start. Betrayed and deceived by the forces of evil, created as a by-product of their desires and jealousies, Adam was helplessly caught within a battle of spiritual forces and could only hope that the powers above would defeat his tormentors and release their human prisoner from his cosmic confinement.

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

  But in Janet's work there seems to be an underlying theory of emotion — and also of behaviour in general — which would reintroduce finality without mentioning it. In his general expositions concerning psychasthenia or affectivity he insists, as we have said, upon the automatic character of the diversion, but in many of his descriptions he gives us to understand that the patient falls back upon the inferior behaviour in order not to maintain the superior behaviour. Here, it is the patient himself who proclaims his defeat even before he engages in the struggle, and the emotional behaviour supervenes to mask his inability to pursue the line of adapted behaviour. Let us return to the example we were citing above: the patient who comes to see Janet wants to entrust him with the secret of her troubles and a minute description of her obsessions. But she cannot: this is social behaviour that is too difficult for her. Then she bursts into tears. But is she weeping because she can say nothing? Is her sobbing a vain effort to do so, a diffuse upheaval that represents the decomposition of the behaviour she has found too difficult? Or rather, is she not crying precisely in order not to say anything? Between these two interpretations the difference may seem small at first sight: by both hypotheses a course of behaviour proves impossible to maintain, and according to either there is a replacement of this behaviour by diffuse manifestations. Besides, Janet passes freely from the one to the other; that is what makes his theory ambiguous. For in reality there is an abyss of difference between the two interpretations. The former is, in effect, purely mechanistic and — as we have seen — is at bottom fairly close to James's views. The latter, on the other hand, really introduces something new: it alone truly deserves the name of a psychological theory of the emotions; it alone treats emotion as a way of behaving. For, indeed, if we are here reintroducing finality, we can well conceive that emotional behaviour is not a disorder at all; that it is an organized pattern of means directed to an end. And these means are summoned up in order to mask, replace or reject a line of conduct that one cannot or will not pursue. At the same time, the explanation of the diversity of emotions becomes easy: they represent, each one of them, a different way of eluding a difficulty, a particular way of escape, a special trick.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  Soon after the first expressive writing study was submitted, Jamie teamed up with Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a clinical psychologist, and her husband, Ronald Glaser, an immunologist, both with the Ohio State University College of Medicine. In the mid-1980s, they were leaders of a new field called psychoneuroimmunology—the mind–body exploration of how mental states and strong emotions might influence the immune system. Together they were blazing a trail by showing that overwhelming experiences such as divorce, major exams in college, and even strong feelings of loneliness adversely affected immune function. They had recently published an article showing that relaxation therapy among the elderly could improve the action of the immune system. The work by Jan and Ron was groundbreaking because it relied on techniques that directly measured the action of T-lymphocytes, natural killer cells, and other immune markers in the blood. It made good sense for Jan, Ron, and Jamie to work together—so they set out to see if expressive writing could directly influence these direct measures of how the immune system was functioning. The experiment that they designed together was similar to the first confession study. Fifty students wrote for 20 minutes a day for four consecutive days about one of two topics. Half wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings concerning a trauma. The remaining 25 students were expected to write about superficial topics. The major difference was that all the students consented to have their blood drawn the day before writing, after the last writing session, and again six weeks later. As before, the experimental volunteers poured out their hearts in their writing. The tragedies they disclosed were comparable to those in the first experiment. Instances of rape, child abuse, suicide attempts, death, and intense family conflict were common. Again, those who wrote about traumas initially reported feeling sadder and more upset each day of writing, relative to those who wrote about superficial topics. Collecting the blood and measuring immune function was a novel experience that added to the frenzy. As soon as the blood was drawn, it was driven to the airport to make the last flight to Jan and Ron’s lab in Columbus, Ohio. Once the blood samples arrived, the people in the immunology lab worked around the clock in an assembly-line manner. The procedure involved separating the blood cells and placing a predetermined number of white cells in small petri dishes. Each dish contained differing amounts of various foreign substances, called mitogens. The dishes were then incubated for two days to allow the white blood cells time to divide and proliferate in the presence of the mitogens.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

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

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  That a group of college students had experienced so many horrors and, at the same time, had so readily revealed them was remarkable. The grim irony is that, by and large, these were 18-year-old kids attending an upper-middle-class college with above-average high school grades and good College Board scores. These were the people who were portrayed as growing up in the bubble of financial security and suburban tranquility. What must it portend for those brought up in more hostile environments? The results of the study were fascinating, but also a bit unexpected. Compared to people in the control group, we found that people who wrote about traumatic experience evidenced: • Immediate increases in feelings of sadness and anxiety after writing. Students likened it to the feelings that they had after watching a sad movie. Writing about emotional topics does not produce some kind of immediate release or euphoria. • Long-term drops in visits to the student health center for illness. Those who wrote about emotional upheavals had half the number of illness-related visits to the health center in the six months after the study than people in the control condition. • Greater sense of value and meaning as a result of writing. Not only did people express this in questionnaires afterward, but students would sometimes stop Jamie on campus and thank him for letting them be in the experiment. The overall pattern of results was exciting. But for every question that the experiment had answered, a dozen more questions appeared. Perhaps the most basic issue concerned the trustworthiness of these findings. Were the effects real? Does writing about traumas really affect physical health? Perhaps the experiment had just affected people’s decisions to visit the student health center. Or even worse, maybe the findings were simply due to chance. Every now and then, for example, you can toss a coin ten times and come up with heads every time. Additional studies needed to be conducted. Freewriting As a useful practice exercise, and one that can enhance creativity and foster your capacity for expression, find a quiet time and place to practice writing. For this exercise, write whatever comes into your mind for 10 to 20 minutes. Try to write the entire time without stopping. Don’t worry about style or grammar; the important thing is to keep writing continuously for the entire session. Just let yourself write, a sort of limbering-up exercise. We will return to more structured expressive writing later in the book. EXPLORING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM: WRITING ABOUT TRAUMAS IS BETTER THAN WE THOUGHT

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Hamlet’s personal realization that Ophelia’s beauty is not an indicator of her honesty follows the same course as Fisher’s two-stage model of evolution by mate choice. Hamlet begins his relationship with Ophelia in a rosy state of Wallacean contentment, in which her beauty is an honest indicator of the inner quality of her soul and her commitment to him. Yet this inherently unstable relationship cannot endure, just as Fisher proposed that correlation between display traits and quality would be eroded by the emerging advantages of attraction—the power of beauty. In defense of Ophelia, however, she is not acting with sexual autonomy. She has shunned and lied to Hamlet under the coercive instructions of her father. (I haven’t focused a lot on the sexual coercion of offspring by parents, but this is a great example from literature.) In the final act when Ophelia goes mad, she finally expresses some of her true, autonomous sexual desires. She sings a bawdy(!) tale of her own Valentine’s Day deflowering by a deceptive rogue (perhaps Hamlet?). She then imagines herself as Hamlet’s queen, addresses her wise counselors and fine courtiers, and orders the servants to bring around her carriage. In her madness, Ophelia can finally reveal her real desires and fantasy. Constrained in life from realizing her sexual self because of her father’s coercion, Ophelia is only liberated and self-realized through madness and death. This is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s cautionary tale about the social risks of the pursuit of female sexual autonomy in Elizabethan society. Indeed, Ophelia’s demise is the second tragedy of Hamlet. “The fox knows many things”: Berlin (1953). dominated, indeed hijacked, by adaptationist Hedgehogs: See David Hull’s Science as a Process (1988) and Ron Amundson’s The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought (2005). the painful history of political and ethical abuse: For an authoritative social history of eugenics, see Kevles (1985).

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Love is handing your heart to someone and taking the risk that they will hand it back because they don’t want it. That’s why it’s such a crushing ache on the inside. We gave away a part of ourselves and it wasn’t wanted. Love is a giving away of power. When we love, we give the other person the power in the relationship. They can do what they choose. They can do what they like with our love. They can reject it, they can accept it, they can step toward us in gratitude and appreciation. Love is a giving away. When we love, we put ourselves out there, we expose ourselves, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship. So if you were God—which I realize is an odd way to begin a sentence—but if you were God, the all-powerful creator of the universe, and you wanted to move toward people, you wanted to express your love for the world in a new way, how would you do it? If you showed up in your power and control and might, you would scare people off. This is what happens at the giving of the Ten Commandments.8 The first two commandments are in the first person: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image . . . for I, the Lord . . .” But starting with the third commandment, someone else is talking: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord . . .” The rabbis believed that this is because God was speaking directly to the people in the first two commands, but they couldn’t handle it. As it says in the text, “They trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’ ”9 So, the rabbis reasoned, the switch in person is because Moses gave them the remaining eight commandments. Just God speaking is too much to bear. If you’re God and you want to express ultimate love to your creation, if you want to move toward them in a definitive way, you have a problem, because just showing up overwhelms people. You wouldn’t come as you are. You wouldn’t come in strength. You wouldn’t come in your pure, raw essence. You’d scare everybody away. The last thing people would perceive is love. So how would you express your love in an ultimate way? How do you connect with people in a manner that wouldn’t scare them off but would compel them to want to come closer, to draw nearer?

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “On Monday,” I replied, and her dear eyes grew sombre and her lips quivered. “You’ll write?” she asked, “please do, Frank! No matter what happens I shall never forget you: you’ve helped me, encouraged me more than I can say. Did I tell you, I’ve got a place in Crew’s bookstore? When I said I had learned to love books from you, he was glad and said ‘if you get to know them as well as he did, or half as well, you’ll be invaluable’; so you see, I am following in your footsteps, as you are following in Smith’s.” “If you knew how glad I am that I’ve really helped and not hurt you, Rose?” I said sadly, for Lily’s accusing voice was still in my ears. “You couldn’t hurt anyone,” she exclaimed, almost as if she divined my remorse, “you are so gentle and kind and understanding.” Her words were balm to me and she walked with me to the bridge where I told her she would hear from me on the morrow. I wanted to know what she would think of the books and cape. The last thing I saw of her was her hand raised as if in benediction. I kept the Sunday morning for Sommerfeld and my friend Will Thompson and the rest of the day for Sophy. Sommerfeld came to the office before nine and told me the firm owed me three thousand dollars: I didn’t wish to take it; could not believe he had meant to go halves with me but he insisted and paid me. “I don’t agree with your sudden determination,” he said, “perhaps because it was sudden; but I’ve no doubt you’ll do well at anything you take up. Let me hear from you now and again and if you ever need a friend, you know where to find me!” As we shook hands I realised that parting could be as painful as the tearing asunder of flesh. Will Thompson, I found, was eager to take over the hoardings and my position in Liberty Hall; he had brought his father with him and after much bargaining I conveyed everything I could, over to him for three thousand five hundred dollars, and so after four year’s work I had just the money I had had in Chicago four years earlier! I dined in the Eldridge House and then went back to the office to meet Sophy who was destined to surprise me more even than Lily or Rose: “I’m coming with you,” she announced coolly, “if you’re not ashamed to have me along; you goin’ Frisco,—so far anyway—” she pleaded divining my surprise and unwillingness. “Of course, I’ll be delighted,” I said, “but—” I simply could not refuse her. She gurgled with joy and drew out her purse: “I’ve four hundred dollars”, she said proudly, “and that’ll take this child a long way.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  We studied our fingernails. I noticed a long scuff across the toe of my right boot.“I know there are others out there who have stories of how Brother Randall’s testimony blessed and changed your lives. I invite you to come on up.”Pam’s husband walked up the prayer ramp and took the microphone. “Randall taught me a lot, and some of it was about what not to do. I remember the time he convinced me we could make extra money by charging people who came to the tent twenty-five cents to park. The money was nothing compared to the whipping Brother Terrell gave us. Randall also taught me the rules of fasting; if you can get it through a straw, it ain’t cheatin’.”Only the family laughed. We were not here to testify for Brother Randall. We were here to say good-bye, or hello, depending on how things went, to the boy Randall. My sisters approached the front of the church next. There were those who thought it wrong that these girls, women now, never publicly acknowledged by Brother Terrell, should speak in his church, but this was not their day. Without rehashing or explaining anything, my sister Carol said Randall was the first to welcome them into the family and had treated them as sisters from the beginning. Lisa spoke of how Randall loved to fish and how he had taken them fishing with his daughter. Laura recounted the time Randall took them to their first circus.When the family remembrances were finished, someone introduced Brother Terrell. The door at the back of the platform opened, and a small, silver-haired man with hunched shoulders stepped forward. He looked like an old man, not the fiery prophet I remembered. He wandered aimlessly about, crying into the microphone. He walked down the prayer ramp and peered into the casket. Family members cast worried looks at one another. He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket and wiped at his eyes. He tried to speak and sobbed instead. At another funeral someone would have led the grieving father away. But this was Brother Terrell, and no one was going to lead him anywhere. After a few minutes, he pulled himself together and began to speak. His speech was slow and halting as he recalled the many times death had tried to take Randall from him. He said no matter where he was in the world, he had always sensed when his son was sick. He talked about the times he had called Randall and urged him to fight the most recent death sentence the doctors had given him. He talked about calling his son from Haiti, India, and Africa and praying for him, and how Randall always got better. He paused in front of the open casket where his son lay.The crowd called out encouragement. “Help him, Jesus.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was knowing he could do nothing about Beth’s decision, or even offer his support. It had been days since Ed had talked to her, and it was driving him crazy. She was in her house, sad and alone, trying to figure out impossible life crap and probably feeling terrible, which made him feel terrible. He couldn’t take much more of that. * * * Grading freshman work was miserable under the best of circumstances. When Beth herself was miserable, it was all she could do to get through the short answer tests without screaming. But she had to grade, or she’d get behind. Grading also gave her something to do besides check her email, where she knew she would see another message from Aaron. He’d called, he’d written. Her house was in full bloom, fresh flowers on every available surface. She had at least two pounds of chocolates sitting, uneaten, on her kitchen counter. But that wasn’t the problem. What she didn’t see was the problem. No emails from Ed. No calls, no texts. Damn him, he was doing exactly what he’d said he was going to. But if Aaron cared enough to violate her request for time to think, why didn’t Ed? She knew that was ridiculous and unfair, which was why she had left all the emails unanswered and refused to eat the chocolates. The reason why classical conditioning and operant conditioning are different is because classical conditiong works on ur reflexes and operant conditiong is stuff u can control consiously. Beth wasn’t even sure how to grade some of this stuff. She had standards, but if she failed every student who slipped into text-speak or misspelled a word, her entire class would have to repeat the semester. And she really didn’t want to see most of them again. Skinner used rats for his experiments because he read that book about moving your cheese and figured working with actual rats would be a good place to start learning about human motivation. Furthermore, building mazes for rats requires far fewer materials than building human-sized mazes. Lastly, some humans are lactose intolerant and not positively reinforced by cheese, making rats the smarter choice. And some of the smarter ones weren’t even pretending to try. That was the most depressing thing of all, the wasted potential. This kid was clearly somewhat intelligent, but hadn’t even managed to grasp the difference between positive reinforcement and reward. ??? I forgot this test was supposed to be 2day. Sorry. :-( No, really, the most depressing thing of all was when potential seemed but a distant dream.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Throughout the ancien régime the cultural domain is the most accessible to women who try to assert themselves. Yet none reached the summits of a Dante or a Shakespeare; this can be explained by the general mediocrity of their condition. Culture has never been the privilege of any but the feminine elite, never of the masses; and masculine geniuses often come from the masses; even privileged women encountered obstacles that barred their access to the heights. Nothing stopped the ascent of a Saint Teresa, a Catherine of Russia, but a thousand circumstances conspired against the woman writer. In her small book A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf enjoyed inventing the destiny of Shakespeare’s supposed sister; while he learned a little Latin, grammar, and logic in school, she was closed up at home in total ignorance; while he poached, ran around in the countryside, and slept with local women, she was mending kitchen towels under her parents’ watchful eyes; if, like him, she bravely left to seek her fortune in London, she could not become an actress earning her living freely: either she would be brought back to her family and married off by force; or seduced, abandoned, and dishonored, she would commit suicide out of despair. She could also be imagined as a happy prostitute, a Moll Flanders, as Daniel Defoe portrayed her: but she would never have run a theater and written plays. In England, Virginia Woolf notes, women writers always engender hostility. Dr. Johnson compared them to “a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Artists care about what people think more than anyone else; women narrowly depend on it: it is easy to imagine how much strength it takes for a woman artist simply to dare to carry on regardless; she often succumbs in the fight. At the end of the seventeenth century, Lady Winchilsea, a childless noblewoman, attempts the feat of writing; some passages of her work show she had a sensitive and poetic nature; but she was consumed by hatred, anger, and fear: Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed, The fault by no virtue can be redeemed.*

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The same technology, which drew the fangs of nature’s enmity of man, also created a society in which the intensity and extent of social cohesion has been greatly increased, and in which power is so unevenly distributed, that justice has become a more difficult achievement. Perhaps it is man’s sorry fate, suffering from ills which have their source in the inadequacies of both nature and human society, that the tools by which he eliminates the former should become the means of increasing the latter. That, at least, has been his fate up to the present hour; and it may be that there will be no salvation for the human spirit from the more and more painful burdens of social injustice until the ominous tendency in human history has resulted in perfect tragedy. Human nature is not wanting in certain endowments for the solution of the problem of human society. Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellowmen; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own. With the higher mammals man shares concern for his offspring; and the long infancy of the child created the basis for an organic social group in the earliest period of human history. Gradually intelligence, imagination, and the necessities of social conflict increased the size of this group. Natural impulse was refined and extended until a less obvious type of consanguinity than an immediate family relationship could be made the basis of social solidarity. Since those early days the units of human cooperation have constantly grown in size, and the areas of significant relationships between the units have likewise increased. Nevertheless conflict between the national units remains as a permanent rather than a passing characteristic of their relations to each other; and each national unit finds it increasingly difficult to maintain either peace or justice within its common life. While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves. Though educators ever since the eighteenth century have given themselves to the fond illusion that justice through voluntary co-operation waited only upon a more universal or a more adequate educational enterprise, there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure or powerful, and the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so fully developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium which is the social utopia, either explicit or implicit, of all intellectual or religious moralists.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  I have a picture of June at Dino’s from around that time, before the bar and the booths were built. A square of white light falls from the high windows, and June sits on the floor where it lands, perched on the edge of a two-by-four, with the doll she calls Big Baby. She’s wearing a pair of grape-purple Puma high-tops with Velcro straps, and she’s looking somewhere above the camera, eyebrows a little up, mouth pursed, like she’s about to say something. She looks like a doll herself. The photo was taken by a friend who’d been visiting town with her husband. A few weeks later, my friend called with unexpected news: she and her husband had separated. When I look at the photo now, in one of the albums I keep for June, it too seems like a picture of a marriage that’s ending. 9We went to see family for Christmas, and when we got home, rather than thrill as I usually did at being back in our own bed, I felt like I had disappeared en route. Everything and everyone seemed far away. It had been seven months since jury duty, and I had never lost count. I felt worse, not better. To hide from the shame—or was it to escape everything else? To give in to the fantasies?—I tunneled under, sunk even further into my head. I told no one what I was thinking. A friend was having a big birthday at the end of January, and he invited a bunch of us to a rental cabin in the snow. Brandon took the weekend off, and to celebrate the occasion, we bought new winter gloves, hats, and snow pants. For June, I brought along a brand-new copy of Candy Land, my favorite board game as a child. I had grand visions of us playing it, visions that evaporated as soon as I set it up, when I remembered it’s an instant nap for anyone over age ten and June was enraged that it had rules. Instead, we rented cross-country skis. The first afternoon, even June made it a few yards. Then a friend took her back to the cabin, and the two of us got to ski on our own for a while, on a path through the woods. I hadn’t been on skis since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the smooth and efficient swish of polyethylene through groomed tracks. We’d needed this, to move together through the cold winter air. Our noses ran, and we licked our lips and wiped them on our sleeves. In the cabin, the heat vent was too close to the bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched my husband and our child, these people I called mine, sweat sticking their twin hair to their twin faces. I put on my headlamp and boots and shuffled to the outhouse. Orion glittered above the tree line.