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 Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  The first time I sold sex alone was different. I met a man who proposed a complex allowance system, with amounts depreciating throughout the month and returning to full value at the start of the next month. I agreed, excited to be offered what felt like a contract, signifying my sexual labor as something that existed, though the terms, I realized after, were abysmal. He bought me a book and took me to an oyster bar. I’d never had an oyster before but I swallowed one so as not to look childish. It was salty in a way that made me choke. He took me up to a hotel room he’d already checked into. It was through him that I learned about Dayuse, a website that partners with various hotels to offer discounted rates for truncated, daytime stays; their “How does it work?” copy reads, “Your hotel room for few hours during the day! Work in peace, get some rest during a layover or experience a few hours away from your usual day-to-day! 1 Dayuse, 1000 possibilities,” as though its purpose isn’t obvious, and singular. The room was downtown, adequate but sparse. He had requested that I forgo perfume, something I never wore anyway, and that I leave no visible marks on his body. We had sex, and he smoothed my hair and was gentle, and that was the part I liked the least; it was the first time I realized how much more a stranger’s affection bothers me than their lust. Affection is more particular and precious than sex. Afterward he offered me a warm, wet towel—to sponge myself off, I suppose—and he showered. When I got home I cried. It felt like release more than anything; a demarcation of myself moving from girl to prostitute. I cry at any kind of shift—age, season, move—whether good or bad. I have many more of these memories, but a lot are opaque to me, having faded into the background and existing only in the recesses of thought. Sometimes they peek through the veil if I walk on a particular block, or smell a particular scent, and then I will marvel at my younger self, throwing herself before all of these people, in all of these places, and trying desperately to understand what it all meant. There are all kinds of people who trade sex for money, and all kinds of reasons people do so—hugely varied levels of privilege involved, of choice, of coercion. The professional milieu I’ve found myself in is that of writers and artists living and working in socioeconomically stratified cities where both sex and creative industries thrive, and people who have other options choose to sell sex in order to support a certain kind of life with more free time.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The way he started to cry over a run-down petting zoo they had visited with the kids in Bridgeport; the way he had loved reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s; his bewilderment at his mother’s stroke. His smile was full of cheap sunsets and lonely Christmases. His rage had sharp angles. She’d remember all this stuff. She cheated on Benjamin with his own lost youth. And Benjamin had his perceptions of her as well. Chief among his criticisms of his wife, she knew, was her failure to make small talk at parties. In the car there was a moment to bone up. Since the market had fallen off, since the government had recently revealed that it had both lost and erased important sections of its own secretly recorded tapes, since the Arab nations had effected an oil embargo against Western nations that supported Israel, and since the U.S., therefore, would likely be rationing petroleum in the near future, current events were not an appropriate topic of conversation at the party. They were all trying to forget current events. It was late autumn, and the country club had been closed for three months, so no one had much played tennis lately. Or golf. A few, maybe, had played paddle tennis. But there was touch football and high school football and college football —which would be televised all weekend—and these were effective subjects, as were the professional sports. The Giants were again failing to live up to their promise. The Mets had been good until the series, and the Rangers were said to be excellent this year. See what you can learn from a quick glance at the second section of the Stamford Advocate? Theology was out, of course, except for the practical issues at any given parish. Was anyone doing anything about the winter clothing drive? Who was supposed to make coffee this Sunday? Complaining about sermons was also a fine thing to do. Or about the rector at a church. And then there was popular religion: Godspell was a hit. Jesus Christ Superstar was a hit. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a hit. (And the film version had just opened, featuring the songs of Neil Diamond.) Likewise, there were the P.T.A. and local property taxes and the selectmen and the cessation of town meetings. But these were topics that would go only so far. What were you to do during the long, sprawling, drunken turns, when you were pinned to the wall by a bearded man with pinkeye who wanted to discuss two-headed dildos in African art or the bisexuality of higher mammals.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  But now that I’m here, that memory is absent. That stressful feeling is gone. The sun keeps shining, the chlorine smells chemical-sweet, the lemon tree is fragrant and lovely. I can’t pick out a specific happy memory. I know we had pool noodles and I dove for quarters and my parents passed plates of food from the grill into the kitchen window, but none of those things feels particularly vivid or alive. I just have a feeling. I was happy here. That acknowledgment feels much sadder than any of the echoed memories of abuse. The kind old lady gives me a businesslike nod as I thank her on my way out—I have certainly taken my time, despite trying my best to rush. After I leave, I go for a walk in the park just across the street from my house, a forty-acre, lawn-covered expanse filled with winding walking paths and tennis courts and play structures. The cement is inlaid with patterns of leaves. A girl films herself doing TikTok dances with multiple Hula-Hoops. In the universe my teachers painted, this community suffers mainly from a parental overemphasis on mathematics and an overprotectiveness that limits exposure to teen drinking. In this universe, this community is a paragon of immigrant success, privilege, and happiness. It is a miraculous place, a place where immigrant trauma comes to disappear. It is a place where death and war and rape are vanished by good grades and white-collar jobs and clean, two-story homes with pools. And I think, Maybe it wasn’t so bad. The teachers are right after all, I think. There are so many communities in this country—Black, Indigenous, undocumented, poor—truly ravaged by their trauma, suffering from hunger, addiction, and violence on a grand scale. Compared to that, maybe I was making mountains out of molehills. We’d had the resources. Weren’t they enough? — On the way back to my rental car, I catch a glimpse of the house across the street from mine. The names come back to me clear as day, but here I’ll call them Fred and Barbara. And one last memory returns. It’s not an unfamiliar memory, but it occurs to me that this memory was the one and only time the veneer of our beautiful house was shattered. When its pretty exterior could not hold what was inside. I don’t remember where the fight began, only that at one point, my mother pulled me across the orange shag carpet by my hair. “I hate you. Stop crying,” she said when she let go. I tried to appear stronger. Instead of letting my face melt into helplessness, I pulled it into a tight frown. “Oh, now you’re mad at me?” “No, I was just trying to make my face less sad,” I protested, but she didn’t hear me because she was already shrieking over me: “HOW DARE YOU LOOK AT ME THAT WAY?”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Ripe and properly displayed, the way the men of Elena’s acquaintance liked them. Janey was not afraid of presentation, while Elena was, on the other hand, small and compact and reserved. But she was sexual and capable of abandon. The mistake Benjamin made—in assuming she was only one kind of person, a virgin bride of the Eisenhower years, a daughter of gentility—brought her as close to outrage as she came. She had read widely on the subject of personal growth. She wasn’t impervious to change. There was growth left in her. To pin her down, wriggling like a butterfly specimen, was a kind of violence. Still, when she had to be, she was a chef. She filled a saucepan from the tap, set it on the range, and immersed in it the brick of frozen peas. They were frozen into a small rectangular pool of yellow simulated butter. Then she exhumed the turkey carcass from its tomb in the fridge and set it on a cutting board. As dispassionately as any butcher, Elena aligned the hewn strips of turkey on each of three plates. Turkey the day after was the most heartbreaking protein she could imagine. In the den, the screen door opened. The announcement of bad conversation. The gales had begun to whistle around the side of the house and over the creek. As her husband slid the door closed, this howling hushed briefly. Shuffling into the kitchen, Benjamin and Wendy muttered hello like late arrivals at church. —Ten minutes, Elena said. These estimates were almost always folly. —Go dry off, Benjamin said to his daughter. The two of them, Ben and Wendy, were peeling off their footwear. The puddles extended around them in rivers across the kitchen floor, back toward the hall carpeting. They carried their drenched garments around the sink to the laundry room. Wendy stripped off her poncho and her pants and shook out her hair. In her panties, she stood dripping. It was one good thing Elena had done, she remembered; she had given birth to a great beauty. Ben followed Wendy back toward the stairs, and Elena followed Ben. They climbed the stairs in this order. Wendy commandeered the bathroom right away. There was the firm ping of the push-button lock. The hall was blue-gray and the master bedroom was blue-gray and the rug was a deeper shade of blue-gray and the curtains were a sort of blue-gray. The bedspread on the master bed was blue and red, checked. The light outside was blue-gray, and when Elena switched on a light by the bed it hardly did the trick. Benjamin had the last of his clothes off quickly. He piled them on the chair where he hung his suit pants overnight. Elena watched him from the edge of the bed. —Never guess where I found her, he said.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I remember one boy’s mother burned him with cigarette butts. Another’s locked him out of his bedroom and forced him to sleep on the couch because, she said, he was so worthless that he didn’t deserve his own space. My close friend’s mother chased her around the house slapping her and telling her she was nothing, and she once woke her daughter up by choking her. I talked about the welts on my legs, about how I’d curled into a ball when I was thrown down the stairs. We would debate the logistics of our abuse: Was it better to be whipped with something narrow like a cane or be hit by something large and solid? Was a welt more painful, long-term, than a bruise? Was it more demoralizing to be belittled or simply ignored? My other close friend’s father once got so angry that he kicked down his bedroom door in the middle of the night. Just splintered it off its hinges. Then he attacked. My friend came to school with bruises all over his body the next day, and that was the only time I considered telling. I told him I was going to call the cops. I told him this wasn’t okay. He begged me not to. “It’ll ruin my mother. She can’t divorce him,” he said. “Please, don’t. It’ll ruin our whole family.” “But she can’t help you,” I told him. “I don’t care about protecting her. I care about protecting you.” “Protecting her is protecting me,” he said. I kept silent. Like all the rest of us, I didn’t tell. Our parents knew what it was to be hungry. Our parents were refugees. There were pages of Nguyens in our yearbooks and a wave of Trans. Their parents remembered living in camps. Sometimes they spent all of their money as soon as they got it because they remembered what it was like to lose your life’s savings in a month, in a week, in a moment, when a dictator rises or a bomb falls. Our parents were alone. Many of them had brothers or sisters or parents back home whom they rarely saw, and so they had to take care of their children without the support of the large families that many of the white kids had. Some of our parents were undocumented. Even though they should have felt power and safety in numbers—in our majority minority status—they never forgot they were guests here. Our parents did not talk about loss. Sometimes, once in a long while, they might offhandedly mention soldiers or a violent father, but nobody ever said anything about what must have happened: abuse, sexual assault, the traumas of poverty and war. But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  But in this respect, Qoheleth is quite faithful to the tradition of biblical ethics. As we saw in chapter 6, on the book of Exodus, the absolute prohibitions of the Ten Commandments are relativized in practice in the “book of the covenant” (Exodus 21–24), the casuistic laws that take specific circumstances into account. There are lots of situations where killing is not only permitted but commanded. The psalmist has no qualms about “hating” God’s enemies. Where Qoheleth differs from the rest of the biblical tradition is in his lack of confidence that human beings can know the right time. In Proverbs, as we have seen, timing is what distinguishes the wise person from the fool. For Qoheleth, however, this wisdom is beyond the human grasp. According to Qoh 3:11, God has put eternity into the human heart. The meaning of this verse is controversial. The word for “eternity” (‘ olam ) is most familiar from the phrase “forever and ever” or the like. Accordingly, the NRSV translates: “a sense of past and future,” but this is far too weak. The ‘ olam is the primeval past or the distant future. The word can also mean “that which is hidden.” In Qoheleth the idea is that humanity has the desire to know the full scope of God’s plan for the world, or the full meaning of things, but cannot find it out. In accordance with the wisdom tradition, Qoheleth does not entertain the possibility of revelation, of the kind associated with Mount Sinai, but the skeptical view of the limits of wisdom also sets Qoheleth apart from Proverbs. Since humanity cannot figure it all out, what are people to do? Qoheleth reiterates the message that one should eat and drink and enjoy the life that is available. He also repeats the key observation that leads to his conclusion: “the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same . . . who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth?” (3:19-21). The traditional Hebrew belief was that the shade of human beings lived on in Sheol. Only in the apocalyptic literature (Daniel, and the noncanonical books attributed to Enoch) do we find a belief that the human spirit goes upward after death. Qoheleth is probably taking issue here with beliefs that were just beginning to emerge in his time. His appeal, however, is not to traditional belief but to personal experience. Strictly speaking, no one knows what happens after death, but the common human experience is that people do not come back.

• From The Vagina Bible (2019)

  These are DNA tests that purport to give you information about lactobacilli and other bacteria in your vagina, as well as yeast. The problem is they are untested in clinical situations. Your microbiome also changes day to day and even throughout the day. A snapshot once a day for several days does not really tell us anything. Also, if you are positive for yeast, that does not mean you have a yeast infection, and the results could lead some women to get treated when there is no need. If you find out that some of your bacteria is elevated, how will that make you feel? We do not know how to interpret all the results that might come with a microbiome test. Also, how will you feel having information that can’t or shouldn’t be acted upon? What About Cytolytic Vaginosis? A few articles of lower quality have proposed a condition that is exactly like a yeast infection—low pH, vaginal itch, irritation, and discharge. Yet no evidence of yeast exists, and an abundance of lactobacilli can be seen under the microscope. The theory is that this excessive amount of lactobacilli is causing symptoms. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the world’s experts on lactobacilli, and she said that lactobacilli have too many self-regulating mechanisms to overgrow. The studies proposing cytolytic vaginosis are also lower quality and not convincing. And in thirty years of vaginitis work, I have never identified a case. This does not mean women who are told they have cytolytic vaginosis do not have symptoms. They do; they are just caused by a different condition. Help, I Have Recurrent Vaginitis! The first step is to confirm your diagnosis. Women who have been diagnosed with chronic vaginitis are often misdiagnosed—only 37 percent of women with recurrent vaginitis have an infection (such as yeast or BV); the rest have GSM, vulvodynia (nerve pain), contact dermatitis, or skin conditions. Many women have their external vulvar condition, like lichen simplex chronicus, misdiagnosed as a vaginal condition. If you truly have a recurrent issue then it may be time for referral to a specialist, if you have not already been. BOTTOM LINE • If you believe you have vaginitis, make sure you are not mistaking vulvar symptoms for vaginal. • Up to 4 ml of vaginal discharge in twenty-four hours is normal. • A vaginal pH and amine test are essential. • If you meet strict criteria, you can consider self-treatment for yeast. • A common cause of vaginitis is GSM. CHAPTER 41 I Have a Vulvar Itch ITCH IS OFTEN TRIVIALIZED AS a minor health problem. It is not. Many women are devastated by years of itching that medicine cannot seem to answer. Some of my happiest patients are women who have had their itch and the impact it has had on their life validated and then treated.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Under Japanese occupation of Malaysia during WWII, a Communist guerrilla force grew in the jungle. With half a million members, they called themselves the Malayan National Liberation Army, or MNLA, and they wanted freedom from the oppressive rule of colonization, which at this point had rocked the country for hundreds of years—first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, then the Japanese. After the British came into power yet again, the MNLA waged an all-out war against them for twelve years. But the British never called it a war. They dubbed the conflict the “Malayan Emergency,” because calling it a war would have meant that insurers wouldn’t cover losses for their many assets—tin mines, pewter mines, limestone quarries, rubber and palm plantations. But make no mistake—thousands of soldiers and five thousand civilians died in this conflict. Britain’s success in this war was actually what persuaded America to go to war with Vietnam. Their tactics in Malaysia were used as a template for American warfare in other nearby jungles full of yellow usurpers. The MNLA was mostly composed of Chinese Malaysians, and they survived in the jungles by accepting donations from Chinese sympathizers who left food and money in trees by the forests’ edges. So the British made it illegal for Chinese citizens to aid the MNLA with food or money, then ensured compliance by forcing 400,000 Chinese people who lived near the jungles away from their homes. They resettled these Chinese in what they called “new villages,” which had curfews, barbed-wire fences, and rations so citizens would not have enough food to hand out extras to the freedom fighters. Today, the online Encyclopedia Britannica refers to new villages as “roadside relocation settlements for rural Chinese.”[6] Other sources are more direct: They call them internment camps. With their food supplies cut off, the MNLA got desperate. They approached homes and businesses near the jungles, demanding money and food and threatening to kill civilians. My grandfather worked at a lumber plantation that harvested wood in the middle of the rainforest—in other words, MNLA headquarters. The MNLA threatened the plantation, and in order to preserve their safety (and their bottom line), the plantation caved and provided them with food. But eventually, the British found out about this betrayal. Someone had to take the fall, and that unlucky bastard was my grandfather, a low-ranking employee. The British did not give him a trial. They arrested him and imprisoned him for three years. My aunts were so young when he left that they have no memories of their father before this imprisonment. Whenever I asked my eldest aunt to tell me why, exactly, her father had been in prison, she didn’t even really understand the details of the Malayan Emergency enough to say. “You might want to google it one day,” she told me. “I just know it had something to do with the communists.”

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Other refrains are repeated throughout the book: the advice that one should eat, drink, and be merry occurs seven times in all. Concern over the finality of death also runs throughout the book. Several attempts to find a more elaborate literary structure have not proven persuasive. Several analogies can be found both for Qoheleth’s pessimism and for his advice for the enjoyment of life in wisdom literature of the ancient Near East. Many of these derive from Egypt. The most important are “The Dispute of a Man with His Ba” and the “Songs of the Harpers.” In the “Dispute,” a man who has become disillusioned with life contemplates suicide. His ba, or soul, tries to convince him that life is still preferable to death. The “Harpers’ Songs” are tomb inscriptions that reflect on death and call for the enjoyment of life. Qoheleth is also reminiscent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the hero fails in his quest for everlasting life and is advised to enjoy the life that is given to him. Vanity of Vanities The first two verses of Qoheleth (1:2-3) introduce two of the basic themes of the book. The first is summed up in the famous phrase “vanity of vanities.” The Hebrew word that is traditionally translated as “vanity” here (hebel) literally means “vapor.” The Midrash, Qoheleth Rabbah, takes it to mean “like the steam from an oven.” Some commentators offer “absurd” as a modern equivalent, but while this term captures some of Qoheleth’s frustration, it does not convey the key aspect of hebel, which is transitoriness. As we shall see repeatedly in the book, what makes life “vanity” is the finality of death. Nothing lasts. The second basic theme has the form of a question: “What profit do people have from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” (1:2). The idea of “profit” comes from business and perhaps reflects the growing commercialization of Jerusalem in the Hellenistic period. The Hebrew term is yitron, “that which is left over.” The quest for a “profit” from life defines the problem that concerns Qoheleth to a great degree. Again, this problem is impermanence or transitoriness. However much people may seem to gain for a while, in the end it all dissolves like vapor. The poem in 1:2-11 expresses another aspect of Qoheleth’s view of the world: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The Hebrew Bible is often said to have a linear view of time, in contrast to the cyclic view of ancient Near Eastern myth; that is, the Bible supposedly allows for a sense of progress and direction in history. This is true of some parts of the biblical corpus. The early history of Israel is constructed as a “history of salvation,” the journey of Israel to the promised land.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  Of course, the whole story of the crucifixion, which is a fundamental image in the Christian tradition, speaks of the coming of eternity into the field of time and space, where there is dismemberment. But it also speaks of the passage from the field of time and space into the field of eternal life. So we crucify our temporal and earthly bodies, let them be torn, and through that dismemberment enter the spiritual sphere which transcends all the pains of earth. There’s a form of the crucifix known as “Christ Triumphant,” where he is not with head bowed and blood pouring from him, but with head erect and eyes open, as though having come voluntarily to the crucifixion. St. Augustine has written somewhere that Jesus went to the cross as a bride-groom to his bride. MOYERS: So there are truths for older age and truths for children. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. I remember the time Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya , illusion. After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, “Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya —I don’t get it—it doesn’t speak to me.” “Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology. MOYERS: The writer Thomas Berry says that it’s all a question of story. The story is the plot we assign to life and the universe, our basic assumptions and fundamental beliefs about how things work. He says we are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time— it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.” CAMPBELL: I’m in partial agreement with that—partial because there is an old story that is still good, and that is the story of the spiritual quest. The quest to find the inward thing that you basically are is the story that I tried to render in that little book of mine written forty-odd years ago— The Hero with a Thousand Faces . The relationship of myths to cosmology and sociology has got to wait for man to become used to the new world that he is in. The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Then she closed the door behind her and skipped through the first inches of slush on the flagstone. In the car, she and her husband were silent. In college, she had often announced her love for Benjamin to the back of his head, to the back of his tweed suit, to his retreating figure. Only to find that it was not him after all, that it was simply some look-alike. Sometimes it was even a redhead or a black man or a woman . She had so much affection for him that it spilled over everywhere. Or she called his fraternity—Darling, I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight! —and found herself connected with a brother posing as Benjamin. Oh, Elena, sweetiekins, my little lemon tart! HA! HA! HA! HA! This period of farce, culminating in the day on which Benjamin proposed—out of lack of imagination, it seemed now—was also characterized by calls she meant to place elsewhere—to Diana Olson or to Billy O’Malley, for example—but that ended up ringing at Benjamin’s fraternity house. She would get him on the phone and believe him, at first, to be someone else. It was as if she couldn’t have any other relationship, as if there were no other calls left for her to make. Back then, she had loved all of them, all those who resembled Benjamin Hood and even those who did not. So love was mistaken identity. Erich Fromm and C. S. Lewis and Paul Tillich all agreed. Love was scattered on the winds. It exceeded its targets. So maybe Benjamin was right and the adults of the seventies had good cause to misplace their affections among phantoms and strangers and memories of desire. This man driving the car picked his nose in the same way as the man she’d married, scratched his ass in the same way, and took incredibly long showers, but he was not the same man. She remembered things about him he would never know again. The way he started to cry over a run-down petting zoo they had visited with the kids in Bridgeport; the way he had loved reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s; his bewilderment at his mother’s stroke. His smile was full of cheap sunsets and lonely Christmases. His rage had sharp angles. She’d remember all this stuff. She cheated on Benjamin with his own lost youth. And Benjamin had his perceptions of her as well. Chief among his criticisms of his wife, she knew, was her failure to make small talk at parties. In the car there was a moment to bone up. Since the market had fallen off, since the government had recently revealed that it had both lost and erased important sections of its own secretly recorded tapes, since the Arab nations had effected an oil embargo against Western nations that supported Israel, and since the U.S., therefore, would likely be rationing petroleum in the near future, current events were not an appropriate topic of conversation at the party.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  MOYERS: What are we to make of what you wrote of the bittersweet story of Odysseus when you said, “The tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy in life’s beauty and excellence—the noble loveliness of fair woman, the real worth of manly men. Yet the end of the tale is ashes.” CAMPBELL: You can’t say life is useless because it ends in the grave. There’s an inspiring line in one of Pindar’s poems where he is celebrating a young man who has just won a wrestling championship at the Pythian games. Pindar writes, “Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rests upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.” That dismal saying, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”—it is not all vanity. This moment itself is no vanity, it is a triumph, a delight. This accent on the culmination of perfection in our moments of triumph is very Greek. MOYERS: Don’t many of the heroes in mythology die to the world? They suffer, they’re crucified. CAMPBELL: Many of them give their lives. But then the myth also says that out of the given life comes a new life. It may not be the hero’s life, but it’s a new life, a new way of being or becoming. MOYERS: These stories of the hero vary from culture to culture. Is the hero from the East different from the hero in our culture? CAMPBELL: It’s the degree of the illumination or action that makes them different. There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is a form of adventure from the period of prehistory when man was shaping his world out of a dangerous, unshaped wilderness. He goes about killing monsters. MOYERS: So the hero evolves over time like most other concepts and ideas? CAMPBELL: He evolves as the culture evolves. Moses is a hero figure, for example. He ascends the mountain, he meets with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and he comes back with rules for the formation of a whole new society. That’s a typical hero act—departure, fulfillment, return. MOYERS; Is Buddha a hero figure? CAMPBELL: The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ; only of course the Buddha lived five hundred years earlier. You can match those two savior figures right down the line, even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples or apostles. You can parallel, for example, Ananda and St. Peter. MOYERS: Why did you call your book The Hero with a Thousand Faces? CAMPBELL: Because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The last winter that Brandon and I were together, three couple-friends came to us with a proposal for a new tradition: What if, one night of each week, our four families got together for dinner? We’d rotate houses, each only hosting one out of four weeks. It might be a lot of work, but we’d be building a chosen family of sorts, an extended family for our kids. Once a week seemed ambitious—and potentially overwhelming for me, an introvert of long standing—but I wanted it for June. It might be good for all of us. We kept at it after the separation, adding a fifth house—Brandon’s apartment—to the rotation. I loved and hated Thursdays. One family had begun renovating a house. Another was pregnant again. These families were making steady forward progress, while mine had slipped off track. We were moving backward. You’re not seeing the whole picture here, I tried to coax; you have no idea, not really, what other people’s marriages are like. But watching my friends’ families blossom brought pain as real as a headache. I thought of a friend who, after her young business fell apart, had disappeared from our lives. We’d known each other through a lot, including the opening of Delancey. But when her own project ran aground, though we had no connection to it, she cut us off, along with most of her friends from that period of time. Brandon and I were miffed: She divorced us! Now, at the Thursday night dinner table, I could hazard a guess why: it must have been hard enough to struggle as our friend had, but to let us see her struggle would have been worse. “Theirs is a happy marriage, a joint creation of great delicacy and skill,” writes Rachel Cusk in Aftermath, a memoir of her divorce. “I have always admired it, have liked to look at it and be in its presence. . . . But things are different for me now. My admiration has become a kind of voyeurism. . . . I’m not equal any more with the people I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?”37 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I saw endings everywhere. As I read aloud to June from Mo Willems’s Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, the end of the book winked with a moral: “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.” About six weeks after Brandon moved out, I was keeping June company in the bathroom one evening when she asked what happens when we die. I don’t know, I admitted. I took a breath. Maybe anything we want can happen? We won’t have our bodies anymore, so we could probably do whatever we want, I said. Maybe we can fly like birds or swim like fish. What do you want to do? June asked. I think I might want to fly, I said.

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

  The worldly hopes of the Medicean dynasty now centred in Lorenzo de’ Medici, the son of Leo’s older brother. After the deposition of Julius’ nephew, he was invested with the duchy of Urbino. In 1518 he was married to Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a member of the royal house of France. Leo’s presents to the marital pair were valued at 300,000 ducats, among them being a bedstead of tortoise-shell inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious stones. They took up their abode at Florence, but both husband and wife died a year after the marriage, leaving behind them a daughter who, as Catherine de’ Medici, became famous in the history of France and the persecution of the Huguenots. With Lorenzo’s death, the last descendant of the male line of the house founded by Cosimo de’ Medici became extinct. In 1513 Leo admitted his nephew, Innocent Cibo, and his cousin, Julius, to the sacred college. Innocent Cibo, a young man of 21, was the son of Franceschetto Cibo, Innocent VIII.’s son, and Maddelina de’ Medici, Leo’s sister. His low morals made him altogether unfit for an ecclesiastical dignity. Julius de’ Medici, afterwards Clement VII., was the bastard son of Leo’s uncle, who was killed in the Pazzi conspiracy under Sixtus IV., 1478. The impediment of the illegitimate birth was removed by a papal decree.854 Two nephews, Giovanni Salviati and Nicolas Ridolfi, sons of two of Leo’s sisters, were also vested with the red hat, 1517. On this occasion Leo appointed no less than thirty-one cardinals. Among them were Cajetan, the learned general of the Dominicans, Aegidius of Viterbo, who had won an enviable fame by his address opening the Lateran council, and Adrian of Utrecht, Leo’s successor in the papal chair. Of the number was Alfonso of Portugal, a child of 7, but it was understood he was not to enter upon the duties of his office till he had reached the age of 14. Among the other appointees were princes entirely unworthy of any ecclesiastical office.855

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

  Such representations, however, do not warrant the conclusion that human charity was dead. St. Francis and Hugh of Lincoln kissed the hands of lepers. The Knights of St. Lazarus were intrusted by Louis IX. with the care of this class of sufferers. Houses for lepers were established in England by Lanfranc, Mathilda, queen of Henry, King Stephen at Burton, and others. Mathilda washed their feet, believing that, in so doing, she was washing the feet of Christ.2157 The oldest of the military orders and the Teutonic Knights, as well as other orders, were organized to care for the sick and distressed. On the other hand the period sets, in some respects, an example of great devotion, and has handed down to us the universities and the cathedrals, some of the most tender hymns and imposing theological systems which, if they cannot be accepted in important particulars, are yet remarkable constructions of thought and piety. And, above all, it has handed down to us a group of notable men who may well serve as a stimulus to all generations which are interested in the extension of Christ’s kingdom. But in the judgment of these very men, the period was not an ideal one either in morals or faith. If we go to preachers, like Berthold of Regensburg, we find evidence of the prevalence of vice and irreligion among all classes. If we go to popes and Schoolmen, we hear bitter complaints of the evils of the age and of human lot which would fit in with the most pessimistic philosophy of our times. Innocent III., in his Disdain of the World,—De contemptu mundi,—poured out a lamentation, lugubrious enough for the most desolate and forsaken. Anselm dilates under the same title, and Hugo of St. Victor2158 carries on the plaint in his Vanity of the World—De vanitate mundi. Walter Map wrote on the world’s misery—de mundi miseria, declaring that the world was near its destruction, that justice was exiled from society and the worship of Christ was coming to an end. Exulat justitia, cessat Christi cultus. The most famous of the longer poems of the period repeats Innocent’s title, and its author, Bernard of Cluny, is most severe upon the corruption in church and society. The poem starts in the minor key. The last times, the worst times are here, watch. Behold the Judge, supreme, is at hand with His wrath. He is here, He is here. He will terminate the evils. He will reward the just. Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus Ecce minaciter, imminet arbiter ille supremus. Imminet, imminet, et mala terminet, aequa coronet.

• From Three Women (2019)

  At playdates for Della, outdoors during the fall, Lina will stand, massaging the pain in her arms and legs. Or she will be buckling Danny into his car seat and become suddenly seized by a terrific ache. When this happens, she has to set her child down, in the seat bucket or on the driveway, and breathe through it. Lina was raised not to talk about emotions. Her parents were fluent in the language of Oh God Lina You’re Fine. Enough, Lina. Get Over It, Lina. You Have It Good Enough, Lina. When she became a mother, she got a little respect. She was staying at home with the kids, ten hours a day, five days a week. She told her mother she could use some help; maybe her mom could watch the kids so Lina could go and do some exercise instructing again at the Y. She had to couch this like a matter of extra money because money is an okay reason to do anything. Needing to put meat loaf on the table. But doing it for your brain or soul is selfish and new age and not from around here. So her mother would come to watch the kids but she was always three minutes late and Lina knew it was on purpose. So Lina in turn was always three minutes late to teach her class. And she would be flustered and the white lights in the studio would be in her eyes. Now Lina gets these pains, and she believes in her clearer moments that the pains are the heartaches of the past, of being lonely for eleven years. Of being raped. Of being lonely her whole life. She knows there are women out there whose husbands don’t want to fuck them or French-kiss them. And they will understand her. But a lot of people will tell her to shut up, to be happy with her children and her nice house. She and Ed even have a generator in case of storms. In the hotel room this night, she feels ecstatically pain-free. She will tell the discussion group later, with the confidence of someone who has nothing to lose, I’m not in any pain when I’m with that man. I feel wonderful. So you can judge me for being with Aidan, you can all judge me. But I found something to take the pain away and until you have felt my pain, you shouldn’t judge me. Women shouldn’t judge one another’s lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires. Aidan uses the towel she brought from the bathroom and wipes his semen off her stomach and stands up and tries to put her jeans on and says, Hey, Kid, these almost fit! He laughs down in his throat and she swallows her spit down. Her heart is beating so fast she thinks it’s going to run away. She thinks, Oh gosh, please don’t leave.

• From Bold Move

  What steps can I take to strengthen this prediction pathway? Yoga for the Brain The great part about developing this kind of cognitive flexibility is that once you become more comfortable changing your perspective, you start to develop the ability to deal with negative thoughts more effectively. By doing so, your brain becomes less rigid and more willing to fight confirmation bias. 5 Shifting is the opposite of avoidance. It’s like going to the gym. At first you might dread doing a dead lift: it’s intimidating, it’s a new skill, and it often leaves you sore. But in time, you learn to relish the feeling of accomplishment, and even the feeling of discomfort can have a positive connotation. In the gym and in psychology alike, discomfort often signals growth. When our brains are flexible, changing our route at will is easier, and this has positive downstream effects in other areas of our lives. 6 Higher cognitive flexibility is related to better reading skills, 7 greater resilience, 8 more creativity, 9 and a better subjective sense of the quality of one’s life. 10 Incremental Shifts The pain of my father’s abandonment is still present when I consider what happened when I was young. Yet through my grandmother’s training and starting my brain’s own Shift process, I no longer see him or the world the same way. In my adult life, I have been able to understand that my father lacked a lot of the skills that I share with you in this book. He lost his father when he was three years old, which meant he never had a model of what parenting as a family could look like. Besides, he had me at twenty-two years old, which means his own brain was not fully developed. In his adult years my father has come to understand the pain that he caused me and has even apologized. He has worked to develop his own skills, remarried, and has a happy new family—all of whom I have a relationship with. It is painful to know that, if my father had had the skills I am sharing with you, perhaps my early childhood would not have been so traumatic, but I am reassured by the fact that all of us can learn to Shift, and when we do, life changes. But it is important to note that Shifting is not a magical, bulletproof technique that always works to the fullest extent. We cannot expect to fully eradicate from our brains any trace of cognitive distortions.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He said, “Because I do. I’m sure I’d roll my eyes at the gentrification, but listen, honey, I’m old and I’ve seen a lot of shit, and I’m telling you, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. Because this isn’t Mother May I. You’re not always advancing. I know it feels that way right now, but it’s fragile. You might look back in fifty years and say, That was the last good time .” Fiona pulled her sleeves over her hands. It was so tempting to think of the fires of her twenties as being the great historical struggle of her life, all past tense. Even her work at the store, her lobbying and fundraising, always felt like aftermath. People were still dying, just more slowly, with a bit more dignity. Well, in Chicago, at least. She considered it one of her great moral failings that, deep down, she didn’t care on quite the same visceral level about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa. It didn’t stop her from donating money to those charities, but it bothered her that she didn’t feel it in her core, didn’t cry herself to sleep over it. A million people in the world had died of AIDS in the past year, and she hadn’t cried about it once. A million people! She spent a long time asking herself if she was racist, or if it was about the width of the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe it was because it wasn’t happening primarily to the gay community there, wasn’t only killing beautiful young men who reminded her of Nico and his friends. Of course all altruism was in some way selfish. And maybe, too, she only had room in her heart, in this lifetime, for one big cause, the arc of one disaster. Claire, it seemed, had certainly grown up feeling it—that her mother’s greatest love was always focused on something just over the horizon of the past. Cecily said, “That’s the difference between optimism and naivety. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven’t been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it.” Richard said, “All belief is a trick.” Serge said, “No one in France is an optimist.” Richard’s studio was L-shaped, with screens and cameras and lights at one end, desks and computers and mess at the other, and in the middle—where they all were now—a seating area, a kitchenette. The place had been decimated by the move to the museum, and loose power cords and packing peanuts littered the floor. Fiona had not come here to see the videos. She’d made it clear—this wasn’t the right time. It was two o’clock on Sunday. Tomorrow was supposed to be Richard’s vernissage , but everything was still up in the air.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair. MOYERS: But I think I would take that to the plagues of the twelfth century and the fourteenth century— CAMPBELL: Their mode of life was much more active than ours. We sit in offices. It’s significant that in our civilization the problem of the middle-aged is conspicuous. MOYERS: You’re beginning to get personal! CAMPBELL: I’m beyond middle age, so I know a little bit about this. Something that’s characteristic of our sedentary lives is that there is or may be intellectual excitement, but the body is not in it very much. So you have to engage intentionally in mechanical exercises, the daily dozen and so forth. I find it very difficult to enjoy such things, but there it is. Otherwise, your whole body says to you, “Look, you’ve forgotten me entirely. I’m becoming just a clogged stream.”

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  CHAPTER 19 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] Dissociation exists for a reason. For millennia, our brains and bodies have removed us from our pain so we can keep moving forward. A tiger just ate your wife? Bummer, but breaking down or freezing up is not an option. You better go out hunting today or your kids will starve. Your house was just destroyed in an air raid? Okay, but you have to pack up what’s left and find new shelter, now. Feelings are a privilege. And oh boy was I privileged. I no longer had my old tools of dissociation: work, booze, forgetfulness—a comfortable suit of armor that allowed me to move forward blindly. Now I had nothing but time, the excruciating expanse of leisure. And without my armor, I was raw, the elements scraping against exposed muscle. What’s behind the veil? Pain. A lot of fucking pain. — One summer evening, as the mosquitoes started to emerge from the new warmth, my friend Joanna and I went out to drinks. The bar’s backyard was generally closed after nine, but the owners let us stay out there since Joanna always has a big smile and asks nicely. Maple branches sashayed along to the dim melodies of a jazz band playing inside. While Joanna told me stories about when she lived in South America, I listened and nodded, trying to ask questions. But when there were lulls in the conversation, when she asked how I was doing, I didn’t know what to say. I had been paralyzed by shame lately—shame over my failed career and my diagnosis—but I didn’t know how to share my feelings because I still didn’t know how to not be a burden. Joanna is a midwesterner and exudes hay-fed Minnesotan warmth. She laughs easily, leans in and asks permission before gossiping, and then after she’s spilled some very mildly spiced tea, she apologizes and says, “That’s my alter ego Lit Joan talking. But what can I say? I just have to live my truth!”