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 The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions, necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life. No matter how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor, the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be realized, and the life will be pro tanto cold and dry. This is perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not have too strong a visualizing power. He is less likely to have his trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions. It will be remembered that Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power. If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled professional and domestic life. I say this because I occasionally have a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much more acute than is its present wont. Charcot's patient, whose case is given above on p. 58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional feeling after his optical images were gone. His mother's death, which in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold; largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of the family at home.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  EMOTION FOLLOWS UPON THE BODILY EXPRESSION IN THE COARSER EMOTIONS AT LEAST. Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry. Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth. To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do excite bodily changes by a preorganized mechanism, or the farther fact that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate. The various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral expression of any one of them. We may catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather 'hollow.'

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "My ability to form mental images seems, from what I have studied of other people's images, to be defective, and somewhat peculiar. The process by which I seem to remember any particular event is not by x series of distinct images, but a sort of panorama, the faintest impressions of which are perceptible through a thick fog.—I cannot shut my eyes and get a distinct image of anyone, although I used to be able to a few years ago, and the faculty seems to have gradually slipped away.—In my most vivid dreams, where the events appear like the most real facts, I am often troubled with dimness of sight which causes the images to appear indistinct.—To come to the question of the breakfast-table, there is nothing definite about it. Everything is vague. I cannot say what I see. I could not possibly count the chairs, but I happen to know that there are ten. I see nothing in detail.—The chief thing is in general impression that I cannot tell exactly what I do see. The coloring is about the same, as far as I can recall it, only very much washed out. Perhaps the only color I can see at all distinctly is that of the tablecloth, and I could probably see the color of the wall-paper if I could remember what color it was." A person whose visual imagination is strong finds it hard to understand how those who are without the faculty can think at all. Some people undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name,[61] and instead of seeing their breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know what was on it. This knowing and remembering takes place undoubtedly by means of verbal images, as was explained already in Chapter IX, pp. 265-6. The study of Aphasia (see p. 54) has of late years shown how unexpectedly great are the differences between individuals in respect of imagination. And at the same time the discrepancies between lesion and symptom in different cases of the disease have been largely cleared up. In some individuals the habitual 'thought-stuff,' if one may so call it, is visual; in others it is auditory, articulatory, or motor; in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The same local cerebral injury must needs work different practical results in persons who differ in this way. In one it will throw a much used brain-tract out of gear; in the other it may affect an unimportant region. A particularly instructive case was published by Charcot in 1883.[62] The patient was

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Thus it is that events lived through only once, and in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs. If a man in his boyhood once talked with Napoleon, any mention of great men or historical events, battles or thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in the ocean, will be apt to draw to his lips the incidents of that one memorable interview. If the word tooth now suddenly appears on the page before the reader's eye, there are fifty chances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awaken any image, it will be an image of some operation of dentistry in which he has been the sufferer. Daily he has touched his teeth and masticated with them; this very morning he brushed them, chewed his breakfast and picked them; but the rarer and remoter associations arise more promptly because they were so much more intense.[481] A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood. The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic or African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read at another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indomitable power and pluck of man. Few novels so overflow with joyous animal spirits as 'The Three Guardsmen' of Dumas. Yet it may awaken in the mind of a reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the writer can personally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness of the cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis make themselves guilty.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A long night's sleep will make it see things twice as brightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will make it see them later in the day.[222] We feel things differently according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter, and above all things differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad. To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain . But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, must correspond a change of equal amount in the feeling which the brain subserves. All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure and single and not combined into 'things.' Even then we should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so; and that whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never descend twice into the same stream. But if the assumption of 'simple ideas of sensation' recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought! For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim context.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  149 The memory was then tested on day three. For one of the groups, the conditioning procedure was such that the CS presentation during the retrieval trial on day two produced extinction learning, as judged by the absence of the conditioned response the third day. For the other, CS presentation during the retrieval trial on day two did not produce extinction, because the conditioned responses were strongly expressed the next day. The key issue is what happened to the conditioned responses in these two groups on day three when protein synthesis was blocked on day two. For the group that normally extinguished on day two, strong conditioned responses were expressed on day three (protein synthesis inhibition on day two thus blocked the consolidation of extinction memory, and the conditioned response acquired on day one persisted on day three). For the other group, however, conditioned responses were not expressed on day three (protein synthesis inhibition on day two thus blocked reconsolidation and thus prevented the expression of conditioned responses on day three). Thus, whether protein synthesis blockade on a given exposure to a CS disrupts extinction consolidation or instead disrupts reconsolidation of the original threat memory depends on the dominance of extinction versus reconsolidation processes during retrieval; these compete to determine how a memory is expressed. 150 This is Dudai’s theory of the dominant trace. 151 From a therapeutic point of view, this interaction between extinction and reconsolidation could complicate potential treatments, especially because the same drugs affect both extinction and reconsolidation. 152 It might be necessary, though tricky, to coordinate drug delivery in relation to the timing of exposure in order to target the exact memory process and achieve the intended therapeutic effect rather than an unintended consequence. Reconsolidation Without Drugs Many important findings are discovered accidentally, as was the case with one of Marie Monfils’s studies in my laboratory 153 ( Figure 11.6 ). For reasons unrelated to the conditions of the actual experiment, she inserted a short break between the first and second trial of an extinction procedure. When she then tested for spontaneous recovery and renewal, she found that they did not occur. This led to much discussion in the laboratory, and the idea arose that inserting a gap between the first and second trials may have led the brain to effectively treat the first trial as a reconsolidation trial. 154 In other words, it made the threat memory vulnerable to change for the next four to six hours, so that doing extinction during that time period changed the stimulus from a predictor of danger to a predictor of safety. Indeed, if the space between the first trial and second trial was between ten minutes and about four hours, the threat memory never returned.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  Very briefly, if the experimenter says “Mhm,” or “Good,” or nods his head after certain types of words or statements, those classes of words tend to increase because of being reinforced. It has been shown that using such procedures one can bring about increases in such diverse verbal categories as plural nouns, hostile words, statements of opinion. The person is completely unaware that he is being influenced in any way by these reinforcers. The implication is that by such selective reinforcement we could bring it about that the other person in the relationship would be using whatever kinds of words and making whatever kinds of statements we had decided to reinforce. Following still further the principles of operant conditioning as developed by Skinner and his group, Lindsley (12) has shown that a chronic schizophrenic can be placed in a “helping relationship” with a machine. The machine, somewhat like a vending machine, can be set to reward a variety of types of behaviors. Initially it simply rewards—with candy, a cigarette, or the display of a picture—the lever-pressing behavior of the patient. But it is possible to set it so that many pulls on the lever may supply a hungry kitten—visible in a separate enclosure—with a drop of milk. In this case the satisfaction is an altruistic one. Plans are being developed to reward similar social or altruistic behavior directed toward another patient, placed in the next room. The only limit to the kinds of behavior which might be rewarded lies in the degree of mechanical ingenuity of the experimenter. Lindsley reports that in some patients there has been marked clinical improvement. Personally I cannot help but be impressed by the description of one patient who had gone from a deteriorated chronic state to being given free grounds privileges, this change being quite clearly associated with his interaction with the machine. Then the experimenter decided to study experimental extinction, which, put in more personal terms, means that no matter how many thousands of times the lever was pressed, no reward of any kind was forthcoming. The patient gradually regressed, grew untidy, uncommunicative, and his grounds privilege had to be revoked. This (to me) pathetic incident would seem to indicate that even in a relationship to a machine, trustworthiness is important if the relationship is to be helpful. Still another interesting study of a manufactured relationship is being carried on by Harlow and his associates (10), this time with monkeys. Infant monkeys, removed from their mothers almost immediately after birth, are, in one phase of the experiment, presented with two objects. One might be termed the “hard mother,” a sloping cylinder of wire netting with a nipple from which the baby may feed. The other is a “soft mother,” a similar cylinder made of foam rubber and terry cloth.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  He isn’t going to come forward. Maybe this is not only vengeance; maybe it is just wanting to tell the truth as it really happened. Maybe it is also about trying to find some meaning in the suffering. Well. Whatever. Here is a poem by Sharon Olds, called “I Go Back to May 1937,” that I pass out to every class: I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges , I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air , they are about to graduate, they are about to get married , they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody . I want to go up to them and say Stop , don’t do it—she’ s the wrong woman , he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do , you are going to do bad things to children , you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of , you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it , her hungry pretty blank face turning to me , her pitiful beautiful untouched body , his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me , his pitiful beautiful untouched body , but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it . I know that if you write a novel about your marriage, and your spouse is a public figure—a politician, say, or a therapist—and you say really awful inflammatory things about this person, all of which may be true, including the part about his wearing the little French maid’s outfit when you made love and that awful business with the Brylcreem, you will get a visit from your publisher’s lawyer, who will be very anxious and unamused. The problem is that the publishing house will be liable for millions of dollars in damages if this spouse of yours can convince a jury that he or she has been libeled.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of identity can be decisively cast. Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel. There is no other identity than this in the 'stream' of subjective consciousness which we described in the last chapter. Its parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit in these two ways; and if either way of knitting disappears, the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine day unable to recall any of his past experiences, so that he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls the facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sure once happened; or if, without this loss of memory, his bodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, each organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought becoming aware of itself in a different way; he feels, and he says, that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me, gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the older time. Such cases are not rare in mental pathology; but, as we still have some reasoning to do, we had better give no concrete account of them until the end of the chapter. This description of personal identity will be recognized by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed by the empirical school. Associationists in England and France, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self as an aggregate of which each part, as to its being, is a separate fact. So far so good, then; thus much is true whatever farther things may be true; and it is to the imperishable glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiable thing. But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum of passing things is all, these writers have neglected certain more subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to which we next must turn. Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Jesse is unable to pin down what sparks off a particular kind. She has a number of different orgasms, and I refer to some of them in other parts of the book. Here’s how she defines a couple of the more unusual (and difficult) kinds: I occasionally have disappearing orgasms: the whole buildup feels like it’ll be a normal orgasm and then it’s over without any release, no fireworks at the top. It may be that those are one-contraction orgasms versus what normally might be dozens, though I don’t think I’m aware of the contractions as discrete events until the main part’s over, and I’m having aftershocks. Maybe it’s just that my body is not able to maintain and accumulate enough charge at those times and that’s why they disappear. Sometimes I have crying orgasms, like the sweetest liquid emotional pain wells up to my chest and throat, and crying and coming are the same thing—they’re indistinguishable. Jean rarely comes without using a vibrator on her clitoris, but she relates that she has three distinct kinds of orgasms (although she also said she wasn’t sure that they all qualified as such): One is from using my vibrator directly on my clitoris, although I may often have something inside me as well. These are like going over a mountain, or riding a wave. Then there are ones that I have when someone is sucking on some part of me, such as my fingers, or my toes maybe, or my dildo if I’m wearing one, and there is some clitoral stimulation as well. Those feel like a shooting outward. I get this rushing feeling in my body. The end of the orgasm isn’t the same as the first one I described. It’s more like a dissipation than a complete release, leaving some tension behind. The third kind usually happens if I’ve been doing a lot of foreplay, and I have a strong emotional bond with my lover. These are electrical and they go through my head, taking my head off. Maluma only relates to one kind of orgasm, which occurs as a result of penetration alone, or from clitoral stimulation, or from making love to someone else. There’s a building up and a letting go at the same time, right around my clitoris. It builds and builds, and then I get the “it’s gonna happen” feeling. I get tingleys in my clitoris, and then bigger feelings that go into my belly, and then those feelings rise up and go downward at the same time. The really good orgasms rise up through my heart and out of the top of my head. It’s like I am the wave, not someone riding it. I used to only have two or three at a time, but now I have five or six.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Our friends Natalie and Michael threw June a birthday party. They had a son whose birthday fell a month before hers, and for the past two years, we’d teamed up to throw a single party for both of them, halfway between the dates. This year Natalie and Michael did it all. They had a backyard barbecue one weekend afternoon in mid-August, with a tent full of balloons and a plastic kiddie pool. I don’t remember much except how hot it was outside. I remember watching Natalie and Michael, thinking how easy they made it look, thinking, Their son will grow up with both of his biological parents under the same roof. A friend was in town from New Orleans that weekend, someone Brandon knew better than I did. This friend was a photographer, and he took a picture of Brandon and June at the birthday party. In it they were laughing, their cheeks flushed with heat. I noticed that our friend did not take a picture of me. I spent most of the afternoon sitting by myself in Natalie and Michael’s dining room, trying not to notice anything at all. 20Nora had a nephew and two nieces. They were her brother’s children, and they lived on the East Coast. She told me about them on our first date, said she loved kids. She wanted to know: What was June like? What were her favorite toys? What did June know about where I was, on nights like these? Nora was eager to meet her and appropriately nervous. She deferred to my sense of timing, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t know what to do. I needed time to figure it out. Nora met June a couple of weeks after Brandon moved out. She came over for dinner, and I made soup. Nora had brought June a hamburger stuffie the size of a hatbox, and June was thrilled. Nora watched us quietly. I explained to June that Nora was a new friend, but that night she didn’t seem like a friend, or like my girlfriend. It seemed like she’d never met a child before, like she’d showed up for dinner at the wrong house. We were all terrified. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I was a mother, but I felt like a virgin—an identity with notable precedent, but not what I was going for. I wished I were more like Athena, fully formed from the get-go. My life had so many complications: that was the word that came to me. My life was ungainly, unwieldy. Surely it was impossible to love. If I could barely handle it, how on earth could Nora? Nora told me she felt like a homewrecker. Am I? she asked. No, no—you’re absolutely not, I said. I’m leaving my marriage for me, I said. No one is responsible but me.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A pathologist, dying of pneumonia, wheezing her death rattle before heading down to be autopsied—her final trip to the pathology lab, where she had spent so many years of her life. A man who’d had a minor neurosurgical procedure to treat lightning bolts of pain that were shooting through his face: a tiny drop of liquid cement had been placed on the suspected nerve to keep a vein from pressing on it. A week later, he developed massive headaches. Nearly every test was run, but no diagnosis was ever identified. Dozens of cases of head trauma: suicides, gunshots, bar fights, motorcycle accidents, car crashes. A moose attack. At moments, the weight of it all became palpable. It was in the air, the stress and misery. Normally, you breathed it in, without noticing it. But some days, like a humid muggy day, it had a suffocating weight of its own. Some days, this is how it felt when I was in the hospital: trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the families of the dying pouring down. — In the second year of training, you’re the first to arrive in an emergency. Some patients you can’t save. Others you can: the first time I rushed a comatose patient from the ER to the OR, drained the blood from his skull, and then watched him wake up, start talking to his family, and complain about the incision on his head, I got lost in a euphoric daze, promenading around the hospital at two A.M. until I had no sense of where I was. It took me forty-five minutes to find my way back out. The schedule took a toll. As residents, we were working as much as one hundred hours a week; though regulations officially capped our hours at eighty-eight, there was always more work to be done. My eyes watered, my head throbbed, I downed energy drinks at two A.M. At work, I could keep it together, but as soon as I walked out of the hospital, the exhaustion would hit me. I staggered through the parking lot, often napping in my car before driving the fifteen minutes home to bed. Not all residents could stand the pressure. One was simply unable to accept blame or responsibility. He was a talented surgeon, but he could not admit when he’d made a mistake. I sat with him one day in the lounge as he begged me to help him save his career. “All you have to do,” I said, “is look me in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry. What happened was my fault, and I won’t let it happen again.’ ” “But it was the nurse who—” “No. You have to be able to say it and mean it. Try again.” “But—” “No. Say it.” This went on for an hour before I knew he was doomed.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He was stalled on that walkway, on that flower bed, stretching out his fat, puffy palm toward the front door. No closer. The sound of radio static coming from the ambulance. Wind rollicking in sugar-coated trees. Reflections. The sound of icicles giving up their form, returning to rivers. The restless movement of water. Wood smoke drifted on the wind and scorched a sad spot in Hood’s heart. Even on this mission, he couldn’t ignore it. The past was so past it hurt—afternoons in duck blinds with his father, northern New England and its bittersweet citizenry. He missed the past and he could have been kinder. He was only ten steps from the front door now; his movements frozen to a crawl. The front of the house: white, orderly, colonial. A flagpole (unflagged), an array of carefully tended shrubs garlanded in ice. Two-car garage. Imitation gaslight beside the front step. Columns. Behind, the hill. Below, the Silvermine River. At last, when it seemed a whole day would come and go before Hood reached the Williamses’ door, when it seemed inside to Elena Hood and to the Williamses and to Wendy Hood that the ambulance had pulled into the driveway for a coffee break, or for a morning bird-watching excursion, when it seemed to Janey Williams that she had opened and closed the door a dozen times and each time had found a different day, a different tragedy—a day in which the ambulance drivers were simply asking directions, on their way to some coronary event; a day in which it was just a red station wagon with a flat tire, not an ambulance; a day in which the loss belonged instead to the Hoods and Ben was simply looking for Elena and Wendy—after all these alternatives, the knock came at the door. The door opening, and then the knock. It was all backward. —Janey. Uh. You and Jim had better come out here for a moment. I’m afraid there’s something.… You’d better come on out here. I … you need to talk to these men. Listen, I— Then the splash page. The procession was like pipers, like some medieval crew schooled in gymnastics—Janey and Jim Williams launched themselves desperately out into the snow, dressed only in what clothes they wore in the house; followed by little Sandy Williams, who carefully jumped into each of the foot holes his parents depressed in the walkway in front of him, balancing, nearly falling over; followed by Elena, arms folded, shoulders hunched, lips pursed, not knowing why she followed exactly; and then Wendy, snow-blinded by the reflection of light and the sound of water running everywhere; followed by Benjamin Hood himself, now relieved of his responsibility but anguished, knowing. Hood in his galoshes. The ambulance driver waited for them, slouched against the car. At the same moment, a police car slowed and parked on Valley Road. Two officers emerged and listlessly ambled toward the column of observers.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  DepressionCertain medications for depression flattened out my sex drive so that my lover had to do with no sex for months at a time while I wore my gray flannel bunny nightgown around the house and then slept in it. A far cry from my collection of very sexy lacy lingerie. Nothing kills an otherwise healthy sex life like depression. Depression can severely diminish libido. It’s hard to muster much interest in sex when you’re barely getting through the day. Even more frustrating is that some medications available to treat depression often reduce sexual desire and functioning. Not all women experience sexual side effects while on antidepressants. Some notice no change whatsoever. For many, just not being depressed kick-starts their libido enough to overcome the effects of antidepressants. But for the huge number of women who do experience sexual side effects, they’re a real problem. It’s disheartening to finally come alive again—only to feel robbed of one’s capacity for erotic pleasure. You certainly cannot fault yourself for grieving over the loss of sexual pleasure. It’s difficult to create a mood of openness and curiosity when you’ve just been through a major depression—but that is what’s called for. If ever there was a time for self-exploration, this is it. Antidepressants can affect your sexual response in a number of ways. You might not be able to reach orgasm. You get really turned on, but can’t quite get over the edge, no matter how many vibrators you wear out. You might have disappointing orgasms—barely a ripple compared to what you used to enjoy. Your sensation may be muted. One woman described it as being touched though velvet. Finally, you may have no interest in sex whatsoever, even though your depression has lifted. Quite often, anorgasmia (inability to reach orgasm) passes after a few weeks on an antidepressant. A temporary bout of anorgasmia may have an odd benefit. If you were previously goal-oriented in your approach toward orgasm (wham bam come), you probably have never experienced a sexual plateau stretching on indefinitely: I’ve never been as turned on in my life as when I first went on Zoloft. Even though not being able to come was freaking me out, I was stunned by how wet and open I could get. I could practically fit my whole hand inside me. Of course, after a month or more of arousal-without-orgasm, you may not be so impressed. An antidepressant can interfere with your ability to feel sensation. You might touch yourself in your usual way and feel nothing. All systems are go—you engorge, you get wet, your muscles contract—but you don’t feel it. You can have an orgasm so muted and distant that it feels like it’s happening to someone else. This is not your imagination. Some neurotransmitters, like dopamine, facilitate sexual function while others, like serotonin, reduce it.

• From The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  If compared with the “fullness” of the Catholic universe, Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction to “essentials” at the expense of a vast wealth of religious contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of Protestantism, but to a considerable degree the same may be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican Reformations. Our statement, of course, is merely descriptive—we are not interested in whatever theological justifications there may be either for the Catholic pleroma or for the evangelical sparseness of Protestantism. If we look at these two religious constellations more carefully, though, Protestantism may be described in terms of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary. The sacramental apparatus is reduced to a minimum and, even there, divested of its more numinous qualities. The miracle of the mass disappears altogether. Less routine miracles, if not denied altogether, lose all real significance for the religious life. The immense network of intercession that unites the Catholic in this world with the saints and, indeed, with all departed souls disappears as well. Protestantism ceased praying for the dead. At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from the three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred—mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase “disenchantment of the world” (17). The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces. Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically “fallen” humanity that, ipso facto, is devoid of sacred qualities. Between them lies an altogether “natural” universe, God’s creation to be sure, but in itself bereft of numinosity. In other words, the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of “closedness” to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes very lonely indeed.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  4.12). John contrasts the brethren and the ‘strangers’ (III John 5). But the passage which gives the word its tone and meaning in Christian thought is the passage in Hebrews where the patriarchs were said to be ‘strangers’ and pilgrims all their lives (Heb: 11.13). Even so, the Christian is a xenos , a stranger in this world. In the ancient world the ‘stranger’ had an uncomfortable time. In the papyri a man writes that he was despised by everyone ‘because I am a xenos , a stranger’. Another writes home to tell his people: ‘Do not be anxious about me because I am away from home, for I am personally acquainted with these places and I am no xenos , stranger, here.’ Another writes: ‘It is better for you to be in your own homes, whatever they may be like, than to be epixenēs , in a strange land.’ In the ancient world clubs in which the members met to have a common meal were very common; and those who sat down were divided into sundeipnoi , fellow-members, and xenoi , outsiders, who are guests only on sufferance and by courtesy. A mercenary soldier who was serving in a foreign army was xenos , a stranger (Xenophon, Anabasis , 1.1.10). In Sparta the ‘stranger’ was automatically regarded as a ‘barbarian’. Xenos and barbaros meant one and the same thing (Herodotus, 9.11). Here then we have the truth that in this world the Christian is always a stranger; in this world he is never at home; he can never regard this world as his permanent residence. And just because of that he will always be liable to be misunderstood; he will always be liable to be looked upon as a strange character, who follows queer ways which are not the ways of other people. So long as the world is the world, the Christian must remain a stranger in it, because his citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3.20). The second word which describes the Christian’s position in the world is the word parepidēmos . In classical Greek parepidēmos was the word of a person who had settled temporarily in a place without making it a permanent place of residence. In the NT it is used of the patriarchs, who never had a settled residence, but who were strangers and ‘pilgrims’ (Heb. 11.13). Peter uses it to describe the Christians who lived in Asia Minor; they were ‘strangers’ scattered throughout the country; they were exiles from home (I Pet. 1.1). His appeal to his people is that they should abstain from fleshly lusts which attack the soul, because they are strangers and pilgrims (I Pet. 2.11) .

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Even though their ideal was of a love without domination, it was part of the myth that Sartre was Beauvoir’s first man. After Georges de Beauvoir confronted them about their more or less open sexual liaison, Sartre, the more bourgeois, proposed marriage, and Beauvoir told him “not to be silly.” She had emerged from her age of awkwardness as a severe beauty with high cheekbones and a regal forehead who wore her dark hair plaited and rolled—an old-fashioned duenna’s coif rather piquantly at odds with her appetites and behavior. Both sexes attracted her, and Sartre was never the most compelling of her lovers, but they recognized that each possessed something uniquely necessary to the other. As he put it one afternoon, walking in the Tuileries, “You and I together are as one” (on ne fait qu’un). He categorized their union as an “essential” love that only death could sunder, although in time, he said, they would naturally both have “contingent” loves—freely enjoyed and fraternally confessed in a spirit of “authenticity.” (She often recruited, and shared, his girls, some of whom were her students, and her first novel, She Came to Stay, in 1943, was based on one of their ménages à trois.) “At every level,” Beauvoir reflected, years later, of the pain she had suffered and inflicted, “we failed to face the weight of reality, priding ourselves on what we called our ‘radical freedom.’ ” But they also failed to fault themselves for the contingent casualties—the inessential others—who were sacrificed to their experiment. And the burden of free love, Beauvoir would discover, was grossly unequal for a woman and for a man.

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

  The controversy has two acts, each with several scenes: first, between Luther and Zwingli; secondly, between the Lutherans and Philippists and Calvinists. At last Luther’s theory triumphed in the Lutheran, Calvin’s theory in the Reformed churches. The Protestant denominations which have arisen since the Reformation on English and American soil,—Independents, Baptists, Methodists, etc.,—have adopted the Reformed view. Luther’s theory is strictly confined to the church which bears his name. But, as the Melanchthonian and moderate Lutherans approach very nearly the Calvinistic view, so there are Calvinists, and especially Anglicans, who approach the Lutheran view more nearly than the Zwinglian. The fierce antagonism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has given way on both sides to a more dispassionate and charitable temper. This is a real progress. We shall first trace the external history of this controversy, and then present the different theories with the arguments. § 104. Luther’s Theory before the Controversy. Luther rejected, in his work on the "Babylonish Captivity of the Church" (1520), the doctrine of the mass, transubstantiation, and the withdrawal of the cup, as strongholds of the Papal tyranny. From this position he never receded. In the same work he clearly intimated his own view, which he had learned from Pierre d’Ailly, Cardinal of Cambray (Cameracensis),825 in these words: — Formerly, when I was imbibing the scholastic theology, the Cardinal of Cambray gave me occasion for reflection, by arguing most acutely, in the Fourth Book of the Sentences, that it would be much more probable, and that fewer superfluous miracles would have to be introduced, if real bread and real wine, and not only their accidents, were understood to be upon the altar, unless the Church had determined the contrary. Afterwards, when I saw what the church was, which had thus determined,—namely, the Thomistic, that is, the Aristotelian Church,—I became bolder; and, whereas I had been before in great straits of doubt, I now at length established my conscience in the former opinion: namely, that there were real bread and real wine, in which were the real flesh and real blood of Christ in no other manner and in no less degree than the other party assert them to be under the accidents.826... Why should not Christ be able to include his body within the substance of bread, as well as within the accidents? Fire and iron, two different substances, are so mingled in red-hot iron that every part of it is both fire and iron. Why may not the glorious body of Christ much more be in every part of the substance of the bread? ... I rejoice greatly, that, at least among the common people, there remains a simple faith in this sacrament. They neither understand nor argue whether there are accidents in it or substance, but believe, with simple faith, that the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in it, leaving to these men of leisure the task of arguing as to what it contains."

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

  The eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century present a sad and disheartening spectacle of human passion and violence, and inflicted great injury to the progress of the Reformation by preventing united action, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy; but they were overruled for the clearer development and statement of truth, like the equally violent Trinitarian, Christological, and other controversies in the ancient church. It is a humiliating fact, that the feast of union and communion of believers with Christ and with each other, wherein they engage in the highest act of worship, and make the nearest approach to heaven, should have become the innocent occasion of bitter contests among brethren professing the same faith and the same devotion to Christ and his gospel. The person of Christ and the supper of Christ have stirred up the deepest passions of love and hatred. Fortunately, the practical benefit of the sacrament depends upon God’s promise, and simple and childlike faith in Christ, and not upon any scholastic theory, any more than the benefit of the Sacred Scriptures depends upon a critical knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. The eucharist was twice the subject of controversy in the Middle Ages,—first in the ninth, and then in the eleventh, century. The question in both cases turned on a grossly realistic and a spiritual conception of the sacramental presence and fruition of Christ’s body and blood; and the result was the triumph of the Roman dogma of transubstantiation, as advocated by Paschasius Radbertus against Ratramnus, and by Lanfranc against Berengar, and as finally sanctioned by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and the Council of Trent in 1551.824 The Greek and Latin churches are substantially agreed on the doctrine of the communion and the mass, but divide on the ritual question of the use of leavened or unleavened bread. The withdrawal of the cup from the laity caused the bloody Hussite wars. The eucharistic controversies of the Protestants assumed a different form. Transubstantiation was discarded by both parties. The question was not, whether the elements as to their substance are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but whether Christ was corporally or only spiritually (though no less really) present with the natural elements; and whether he was partaken of by all communicants through the mouth, or only by the worthy communicants through faith.

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

  Why this one should be sadder than the others, I’m not sure. But it strikes me that way. When, after a near-dozen-year reign as the largest and most successful of the West Side hustling bars, the Haymarket closed in ’81, Joey (mother Polish, father Irish and Italian) was twenty-four and a two-hundred/three-hundred-dollar-a-night hustling success, with more drugs and watches and diamond rings and coke than he knew what to do with. There was a whole lot of talk about revamping Times Square—tearing everything down on Forty-second Street, building these big office towers in place of the theaters. And the whole neighborhood was shutting down and being bought up by land speculators. The high-class hustling business was all heading over to the East Side, where Rounds would shortly begin its legendary reign on Lexington Avenue. But some grow more dependent than others on familiar institutions. Joey had worked out of the Haymarket since he was seventeen and there with false I.D. His clients were all West Siders. His drug connections were all West Siders. The Haymarket had made him the success he was. Besides, his mother lived on the East Side, and he wanted to stay away from her. So while the business moved east, he remained. He had friends he could crash with—now on this couch, now on that—when it got rough. He’d always been a good guy. So, a few times he’d paid for his crash space with sex. (“They say the first time you do that, you ain’t a hustler no more. You’re just a faggot. Well, who the hell wants to be a hustler all his life?”) In preparation for the longer and longer delayed architectural renovation, the drugstore shut, the comic book shop moved, the dry cleaners closed—and two years later saw Joey living on the street. But he was still a good-looking guy, an enthusiastic raconteur, with hands as big as Kevin’s (although, unlike Kevin, Joey was not a nailbiter), dark hair, pleasant smile—but with enough sense not to dwell too much on the glory days now two, now three, now four years in the past. When I first saw him one evening as I was walking with a friend past Trix, he was standing in front of the bar talking to some other hustlers, one hand deep in the hip pocket of his jeans, playing with himself while he joked and chatted. Playing with his dick in his pants was what he was doing when I saw him a day later, standing alone by the doorway just down from the firehouse—and I started a conversation: “Do you always stand around pulling on yourself like that?” I asked, thinking I was being daring (breaking a level, as therapist/client-speak would have put it in those days).