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 Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Two subjects upon which it was fruitless to question Justine too closely: her age, her origins. Nobody — possibly not even, I believe, Nessim himself — knew all about her with any certainty. Even the city’s oracle Mnemjian seemed for once at loss, though he was knowledgeable about her recent love affairs. Yet the violet eyes narrowed as he spoke of her and hesitantly he volunteered the information that she came from the dense Attarine Quarter, and had been born of a poor Jewish family which had since emigrated to Salonika. The diaries are not very helpful either since they lack clues — names, dates, places — and consist for the most part of wild flights of fancy punctuated by bitter little anecdotes and sharp line-drawings of people whose identity is masked by a letter of the alphabet. The French she writes in is not very correct, but spirited and highly-flavoured; and carries the matchless quality of that husky speaking-voice. Look: ‘Clea speaking of her childhood: thinking of mine, passionately thinking. The childhood of my race, my time.… Blows first in the hovel behind the Stadium; the clock-mender’s shop. I see myself now caught in the passionate concentration of watching a lover’s sleeping face as I so often saw him bent over a broken timepiece with the harsh light pouring down noiselessly over him. Blows and curses, and printed everywhere on the red mud walls (like the blows struck by conscience) the imprint of blue hands, fingers outstretched, that guarded us against the evil eye. With these blows we grew up, aching heads, flinching eyes. A house with an earthen floor alive with rats, dim with wicks floating upon oil. The old money-lender drunk and snoring, drawing in with every breath the compost-odours, soil, excrement, the droppings of bats; gutters choked with leaves and breadcrumbs softened by piss; yellow wreaths of jasmine, heady, meretricious. And then add screams in the night behind other shutters in that crooked street: the bey beating his wives because he was impotent. The old herb-woman selling herself every night on the flat ground among the razed houses — a sulky mysterious whining. The soft pelm noise of bare black feet passing on the baked mud street, late at night. Our room bulging with darkness and pestilence, and we Europeans in such disharmony with the fearful animal health of the blacks around us. The copulations of boabs shaking the house like a palm-tree. Black tigers with gleaming teeth. And everywhere the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers. Such things as children see and store up to fortify or disorient their lives. A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive. They hack through the white flesh — the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off. Finally there is the head still alive, the eyes open, looking round. Not a scream of protest, not a struggle. The animal submits like a palm-tree. But for days afterwards the mud street is soaked in its blood and our bare feet are printed by the moisture.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was all as familiar to me as the lines on my own face, and — like one’s face when viewed in a glass - both fascinating and rather dull. No matter how hard I studied it, how fiercely I thought, I shall not gaze at you again for months and months, it looked just as it always did; and at last I turned my eyes away, and walked sadly home.But it was the same there: nothing that I gazed at or touched was as special as I thought it should be, or changed by my going in any way. Nothing, that is, except the faces of my family; and these were so grave, or so falsely merry and stiff, that I could hardly bear to look at them at all.So I was almost glad, at last, when it was time to say farewell. Father wouldn’t let me take the little train to Canterbury, but said I must be driven, and hired a gig from the ostler at the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, to take me there himself. I kissed Mother, and Alice, and let my brother hand me to my seat at Father’s side and place my luggage at my feet. There was little enough of it: an old leather suitcase with a strap about it, that held my clothes; a cap-box for my hats; and a little black tin trunk for everything else. The trunk was a good-bye gift from Davy. He had bought it new, and had my initials painted on the lid in swooning yellow capitals; and inside it he had pasted a map of Kent, with Whitstable marked on it with an arrow - to remind me, he said, where home was, in case I should forget.We did not talk much, Father and I, on the drive to Canterbury. At the station we found the train already in and steaming, and Kitty, her own bags and baskets at her side, frowning over her watch. It wasn’t like my anxious dreams at all: she gave a great wave when she saw us, and a smile.‘I thought you might have changed your mind,’ she cried, ‘at the very last moment.’ And I shook my head - in wonder that she could still think such a thing, after all I’d said!Father was very kind. He greeted Kitty graciously and, when he kissed me good-bye he kissed her, too, and wished her happiness and luck.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  In a large number of cults, children are instructed to address their parents by first names and address the cult leader as "Mother" or "Father." The parental role is thus reduced to that of a sibling to his or her own children.' Such neglectful and often harmful behaviors are found in many groups. For instance, in one psychotherapy cult, members wanting to have children had to get permission from their therapists, who were in essence their leadership. At birth, the children were separated from their parents to prevent so-called contamination by their "neurotic tendencies." Newborns and children were given to other members to raise, and parents had limited visitation rights. At seven and under, children were sent to boarding schools to further separate them from their parents 6 Growing up in the confines of a cult, where members are required to demonstrate excessive adulation of the leader, many children experience treatment from their parents, the leader, and perhaps others that raises great cause for concern. Tim Guest, whose mother was a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, spent much of his childhood in the late 1970s and'8os in one or another of Bhagwan's communes in England, Oregon, India, and Germany. In his autobiography, My Life in Orange, Tim touchingly describes how a child might view parental cultic involvements. Here he is remembering one of Bhagwan's many lectures to his devotees, called sannyasins. Typically these lectures were pronounced from Bhagwan's unique throne-a bright red leather dental chair from which he pontificated more often than not under the influence of nitrous oxide inhalations drawn from a canister attached to the chair. "To enquire into love," [Bhagwan] says, "is the greatest exploration, the greatest enquiry. Everything else falls short, even atomic energy. You can be a scientist of the caliber of Albert Einstein, but you don't know what real enquiry is unless you love. And not only love, but love plus awareness ... or in scientific terms, love as levitation, against gravity." Amidst all the gentle veneration, this single sudden exclamation stands out. "Levitate!" he urges us. "Arise! Leave gravitation for the graves!" That was what Bhagwan's sannyasins wanted. In his communes around the world, sannyasins gathered together to abandon weight, to surrender themselves to levity. Or rather, that's what the adults were hoping for. The children of Bhagwan's communes needed other things. We needed comfort. We needed a place to stash our Legos. We needed our home. Shorter as we were, closer to the earth, we couldn't, or wouldn't, escape gravity. We felt things we weren't supposed to feel. We never seemed to make it off the ground.? Apparently the "love plus awareness" that Bhagwan preached to his followers (and that he primarily benefited from) lacked any understanding of what the children in their midst were experiencing, or needed. The single-mindedness of cult life is the spoiled milk cult parents offer their children; it nourishes not nearly enough and often leaves a bad taste.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Justine at this time … coming from nowhere, she had performed one trick regarded as clever by the provincials of Alexandria. She had married Arnauti, a foreigner, only to earn the contempt of society by letting him in the end divorce and abandon her. Of the fate of the child, few people knew or cared. She was not ‘in society’ as the saying goes.… For a time poverty forced her to do a little modelling at so many piastres an hour for the art-students of the Atelier. Clea, who knew her only by hearsay, passed through the long gallery one day when she was posing and, struck by the dark Alexandrian beauty of her face, engaged her for a portrait. That was how those long conversations grew up in the silences of the painter; for Clea liked her subjects to talk freely, provided they stayed still. It gave a submarine life to their features, and filled their looks with unconscious interpretations of thought — the true beauty in otherwise dead flesh. Clea’s generous innocence — it needed something like that to see the emptiness in which Justine lived with her particular sorrows — factual illustrations merely of a mind at odds with itself: for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints. The gesture itself was simply a clumsy attempt to appropriate the mystery of true experience, true suffering — as by touching a holy man the supplicant hopes for a transference of the grace he lacks. The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another — to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine’s ageless; her innocence was as defenceless as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine’s sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  And further to render down this sad relationship which had caused me so much pain — I saw that pain itself was the only food of memory: for pleasure ends in itself — all they had bequeathed me was a fund of permanent health — life-giving detachment. I was like a dry-cell battery. Uncommitted, I was free to circulate in the world of men and women like a guardian of the true rights of love — which is not passion, nor habit (they only qualify it) but which is the divine trespass of an immortal among mortals — Aphrodite-in-arms. Beleaguered thus, I was nevertheless defined and realized in myself by the very quality which (of course) hurt me most: selflessness. This is what Justine loved in me — not my personality. Women are sexual robbers, and it was this treasure of detachment she hoped to steal from me — the jewel growing in the toad’s head. It was the signature of this detachment she saw written across my life with all its haphazardness, discordance, disorderliness. My value was not in anything I achieved or anything I owned. Justine loved me because I presented to her something which was indestructible — a person already formed who could not be broken. She was haunted by the feeling that even while I was loving her I was wishing at the same time only to die! This she found unendurable. And Melissa? She lacked of course the insight of Justine into my case. She only knew that my strength supported her where she was at her weakest — in her dealings with the world. She treasured every sign of my human weakness — disorderly habits, incapacity over money affairs, and so on. She loved my weaknesses because there she felt of use to me; Justine brushed all this aside as unworthy of her interest. She had detected another kind of strength. I interested her only in this one particular which I could not offer her as a gift nor she steal from me. This is what is meant by possesion — to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other’s personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless?

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The spring sea was enticingly warm after a day’s sunshine and as Balthazar entered the boat the whim seized me to swim out with him to the vessel which lay not two hundred yards away from the shore. This I did and hovered to watch him climb the rail, and to watch the boat drawn up. ‘Don’t get caught in the screw’ he called, and ‘Go back before the engines start’ — ‘I will’ — ‘But wait — before you go —’ He ducked back into a stateroom to reappear and drop something into the water beside me. It fell with a soft splash. ‘A rose from Alexandria’ he said, ‘from the city which has everything but happiness to offer its lovers.’ He chuckled. ‘Give it to the child.’ ‘Balthazar, good-bye!’ ‘Write to me — if you dare!’ Caught like a spider between the cross mesh of lights, and turning towards those yellow pools which still lay between the dark shore and myself, I waved and he waved back. I put the precious rose between my teeth and dog-paddled back to my clothes on the pebble beach, talking to myself. And there, lying upon the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine — as I had called it. It was cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript. It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared — a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer. Must I now learn to see it all with new eyes, to accustom myself to the truths which Balthazar has added? It is impossible to describe with what emotion I read his words — sometimes so detailed and sometimes so briefly curt — as for example in the list he had headed ‘Some Fallacies and Misapprehensions’ where he said coldly: ‘Number 4. That Justine “loved” you. She “loved”, if anyone, Pursewarden. “What does that mean”? She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all — supreme logic of love!’ In my mind’s eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert’s edge. The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms — moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’‘Oh yes.’‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’ She nodded, not much impressed: she had heard all this before, in letters.‘Just make sure it’s not so long before you come home again. It is very nice to get your parcels; it was very nice to get those gifts; but we would rather have you, than a hairbrush or a pair of boots.’ I looked away, abashed; I still felt foolish when I thought about the presents. Even so, I didn’t think she needed to be quite so rusty about it, quite so hard.Having made the decision to leave sooner, I grew impatient. I packed my bags that night, and rose, next morning, even earlier than Alice. At seven, when the breakfast things were cleared away, I was ready to go. I embraced them all, but my parting was not so sad, nor so sweet, as it had been the first time I had left them; and I had no premonition of anything to come, to make it sadder. Davy was kind, and made me promise I would come home for his wedding, and said I might bring Kitty if I liked, which made me love him all the more. Mother smiled, but her smile was tight; Alice was so chill that, in the end, I turned my back on her. Only Father hugged me to him as if really loath to get me go; and when he said that he would miss me, I knew he meant it.No one could be spared, this time, to walk me to the station, so I made my own way there. I didn’t look at Whitstable, or the sea, as my train pulled away from it; I certainly did not think, I shan’t see you again, for years and years - and if I had, I am ashamed to say it would not much have troubled me. I thought only of Kitty. It was still only half-past seven; she wouldn’t rise, I knew, till ten, and I planned to surprise her - to let myself into our rooms at Stamford Hill, and creep into her bed. The train rolled on, through Faversham and Rochester.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Job 38:8–11 In other words, if you think the ocean is impressive, imagine the power of the one who created the ocean! Now that’s perspective! When we go to God in prayer, He doesn’t usually put us on blast quite as intensely as He did Job and his friends. For one thing, we (hopefully) don’t spend so much time eloquently mouthing off about stuff we don’t really understand. What God does for us, and what prayer does for us, is provide perspective. At those lunchtime prayer meetings at my high school, I remember watching kids leave the room with a completely different posture than when they had come in. They would tell us later how those fifteen minutes changed their outlook on what they were going through. They gained perspective. I remember wandering the San Gabriel hills of LA, feeling both small and loved at the same time. That’s perspective. FROM DESPAIR TO DESTINY Life (and traffic) have a way of skewing our perspective. Difficult, overwhelming circumstances can cause our emotions and thoughts to spiral out of control. I’m not saying those feelings and thoughts are not real. They absolutely are. But they are not the whole picture. And they aren’t designed to make our decisions for us. Which of these things have you felt lately? Or maybe even right now? LonelyFrustratedBitterBetrayedDiscouragedAnxiousOverwhelmedConfusedGuiltyUselessRejectedIgnoredHurtAbandonedUsedLostHopelessPowerlessThose feelings, if left unchecked, will affect your actions and decisions. You might find yourself doing or saying things that you later regret—things that don’t align with who you are, what you value, what you believe, or how you want to live. Again, the feelings are valid. Don’t ignore them. But don’t define yourself by them either. Don’t let them tell you who you are. They are feelings, and feelings never give the whole picture. They come and go, they rise and fall, they make a lot of noise and then fade into the background. There is a reason the book of Psalms is so emotionally charged. It’s an ancient record of the heartfelt cries of people just like us. They turned their pain and anxiety into prayers, poetry, and songs. Their words resonate with us today, across the barriers of language, culture, and time, because their experiences are intensely human . They are our experiences too. Many of the psalms were written by David, a famous warrior, king, and musician in the Bible. One time, before David was king, he was living with a band of several hundred followers in the wilderness. While he and his men were away from the camp, marauders swooped in, kidnapped their families, and stole their livestock and goods. When David and his men returned, they were shattered. The Bible says, “David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep” (1 Samuel 30:4).

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Lara opens her bag and hands me a small puppet. It is a girl wearing a red dress. Our Little Red Riding Hood. She surprises me again. “Do you remember?” she asks, and she suddenly sounds like the little girl she used to be. “Of course I do. I never forgot,” I say. We look at each other. I like her as much as I did all those years ago, and I wonder what has made her look for me now. “I came to see you because I need your help.” She answers the question I haven’t yet asked out loud. We start where we stopped years before. Lara tells me about her family’s move back then to the West Coast. It was sudden; she didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. “In retrospect maybe we were running away,” she says. “Running away from the unhappiness my family lived in. But the unhappiness followed us and in fact only got worse.” The tension between Lara’s parents, Hanna and Jed, became intolerable, and four years later, they got divorced. Jed lost his job and had to move to work in Denver. Hanna grew even more depressed and was hospitalized. Lara found herself alone, and at the age of fourteen she had to move yet again, this time to live with her grandmother Masha. Lara talks and I feel sad and worried. How was it for her to move again, to separate from both her parents? To live with her grandmother, whom she used to have mixed feelings about? “At that point things actually got better,” she continues. “My grandmother was wonderful and my life with her was so much easier. I realized why my mother loved her so much. She supported me and understood how hard this new living situation was for me. She was caring and gave me everything I needed. Once a week we traveled together to visit my mother in the hospital, and once a month we visited my father. At some point, after my mother was discharged, I made the decision to stay and live with my grandmother permanently.” I listen to Lara and remember the way Hanna used to talk about her mother, defend her, describe how in spite of the fact that she believed her mother was responsible for the break in their family, she loved her and could never fully blame her. When Jed expected Hanna to cut her mother out of their life, she refused. Now Lara expresses the same feelings about her grandmother. Something has changed since her grandmother was our bad wolf. “My grandmother grew up in Russia with eight siblings,” Lara tells me. “She is the youngest and the only one who is educated.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She greets me with a shy smile, and I notice the dimple on her right cheek. She takes off her high heels and stays barefoot, sitting crossed legged on the couch. Eve is beautiful, and in some moments, when looking at me with the eyes of a young girl, she seems lost. I wonder if Eve’s mother eventually picked her up, and I try to imagine how Eve felt waiting there for her, hiding her fear that her mother might never come. I ask, but Eve is silent. She doesn’t remember. In our sessions, she often becomes dissociative, gazing out the window as if she is with me but also not with me. Something about her is breathtaking, but at times she seems flat. Eve is frequently distant; she is careful about expressing intense emotion, and she lapses into long silences. I look at her and wonder if I, too, am assigned to be her driver, a grown-up in her life, someone who will be there on time, take control, and drive her to where she needs to be. I sit quietly, aware that it might take a while for her to look at me or say anything. “I was with him again last night,” she opens the session, referring to her lover, Josh, whom she sees a few times a week. Around 8 p.m. when his colleagues leave, he opens Line, the Japanese app they use to text each other, and sends her a message to come to his office. Eve explains to me that they needed a safe way to communicate. “When Josh first suggested we use this app, I thought he said ‘Lying’ instead of ‘Line,’ and I said to myself, ‘What a strangely inappropriate name for an app.’” She laughs and then adds sarcastically, “I think there should be a network for cheaters, maybe a chat room where they share information and give each other advice, like the groups they have for new mothers. Someone should have made a business out of it, don’t you think? Millions of people are lost and confused, not sure how to survive adultery.” She smiles but seems sadder than ever . She doesn’t look at me. “Josh and I bought a membership to SoulCycle as an alibi for meeting each other in the evenings. It’s a good excuse to come home sweaty and go right into the shower.” She pauses and adds, “Washing his smell off my body always makes me sad. I would rather go to sleep with it.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I’m blessed to be part of the incredible community of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. I’m especially grateful to my dear colleagues, students, and friends who have read and commented on early versions of these chapters: Dr. Jessica Benjamin, Dr. Carina Grossmark, Dr. Jonathon Slavin, Karen Tocatly, Dr. Velleda Ceccoli, Nina Smilow, Dr. Yael Kapeliuk, Colette Linnihan, Dr. Noga Ariel-Galor, Dr. Lauren Levine, Kristin Long, Avital Woods, Dr. Merav Roth, Dr. Robert Grossmark, Dr. Yifat Eitan-Persico, Ivri Lider, Orly Vilnai, Anat Binur, Limor Laniado-Tiroche, Jamie Ryerson, and Amy Gross. To Dr. Roberto Colangeli for sharing with me his work on epigenetics and psychoanalysis. To Dr. Judith Alpert for her help on the chapter on sexual abuse. To Dr. Beatrice Beebe for her inspiration and edits of the chapter on babies. To Ezra Miller for their helpful guidance on gender binary. A special thank you to Dr. Melanie Suchet for her generous ongoing love and support. To Dr. Steve Kuchuck for his invaluable contribution to this book and for years of friendship and creative collaboration. I couldn’t do it without your talent, wit, and loyalty. About ten years ago, aiming to investigate psychoanalytic “ghosts,” I joined a group of psychoanalysts in New York City who were analyzing the many ways in which ghosts appear in our practices. I would like to thank Adriene Harris and the group: Margery Kalb, Susan Klebanoff, Heather Ferguson, Michael Feldman, and Arthur Fox. Many thanks to Emma Sweeney, who held my hand and believed in this book before it was born. Thank you for your insightful advice and deep care. Thanks also to Margaret Sutherland Brown at Folio. A special thank-you to my wonderful agent Gail Ross. I’m deeply grateful to Sally Arteseros for her remarkably keen eye and endless dedication. I’m so lucky to have you be part of this creation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have Tracy Behar as my editor and publisher. Thank you for your brilliant work and for believing in this book and in me. Thank you for your close reading, deep attention, thoughtful guidance, and unique ability to respond not only to the words on the page, but also to the words that need to be there. To the extraordinary group at Little, Brown Spark: Ian Straus, Betsy Uhrig, Laura Mamelok, Lucy Kim, Jessica Chun, Juliana Horbachevsky, and Lauren Ortiz. To SallyAnne McCartin of McCartin Daniels PR. To Bob Miller, who is my rock and my sanctuary. Thank you for joining me on a constant search for emotional truths, for always being there to catch me, for reading every word I write with curiosity and breathtaking intelligence. Thank you for sharing with me your gifted mind and soul and for loving me the way you do.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Being poor was also a deep bond. For the most part our excursions were the simple excursions that all provincials make in a sea-side town. The little tin tram bore us with the clicking of its wheels to the sand-beaches of Sidi Bishr, or we spent Shem El Nessim in the gardens of Nouzha, camped on the grass under the oleanders among some dozens of humble Egyptian families. The inconvenience of crowds brought us both distraction and great intimacy. By the rotting canal watching the children dive for coins in the ooze, or eating a fragment of water-melon from a stall we wandered among the other idlers of the city, anonymously happy. The very names of the tram stops echoed the poetry of these journeys: Chatby, Camp de César, Laurens, Mazarita, Glymenopoulos, Sidi Bishr.… Then there was the other side: coming back late at night to find her asleep with her red slippers kicked off and the little hashish-pipe beside her on the pillow … I would know that one of her depressions had set in. At such times there was nothing to be done with her; she would become pale, melancholy, exhausted-looking, and would be unable to rouse herself from her lethargy for days at a time. She talked much to herself, and would spend hours listening to the radio and yawning, or going negligently through a bundle of old film magazines. At such times when the cafard of the city seized her I was at my wits’ end to devise a means of rousing her. She would lie with far-seeing eyes like a sibyl, stroking my face and repeating over and over again: ‘If you knew how I have lived you would leave me. I am not the woman for you, for any man. I am exhausted. Your kindness is wasted.’ If I protested that it was not kindness but love she might say with a grimace: ‘If it were love you would poison me rather than let me go on like this.’ Then she would begin to cough with her uncollapsed lung and, unable to bear the sound, I would go for a walk in the dark Arab-smudged street, or visit the British Council library to consult reference books: and here, where the general impression of British culture suggested parsimony, indigence, intellectual strap-hanging — here I would pass the evening alone, glad of the studious rustle and babble around me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  There is so much pain buried inside her, sadness that she is used to covering up with irritation and anger. She doesn’t want anyone to know that just like her mother, she secretly mourns. She doesn’t want her daughter to have to experience her grief, the way she carried her mother’s grief. She knows what a burden that was on her, and she is worried that her daughter will have to live that legacy. “I told Art about our session,” Alice says when she walks into my office the following week. “We had a long conversation about breastfeeding and hormones, and it’s like I had another session with him after my session with you.” She adds with a smile, “Victory. We made a decision.” Alice pulls a bottle of water from her bag. She places it on the table. “Do you notice how anxious I am?” she asks. “I want everything in place before our baby is born. And I made the decision that I won’t take hormones. One thing is crossed off my list and it’s a relief, so thank you.” “Tell me more,” I ask. “How did you make that decision?” “Suddenly, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. I told Art that I realized my wish to breastfeed was based on the fear that I wouldn’t be able to love the baby without those hormones. I told him how upsetting it was for me to realize that I doubt myself as a woman, and that under the surface this was about my feelings that my father didn’t love me. Art knows the whole story, and a lot has changed between my father and me since I met him. I think he helped me to see my father as a full person. You will appreciate this,” she says playfully. “I think I fell in love with Art when I realized how afraid he was of losing his daughter, Lili, in his divorce. Isn’t that a good psychological link?” she asks with a smile. “He was the father I never had, and I betrayed my mother for the first time when I fell in love with him,” she says. I ask her to explain. “It was as if my mother and I had a secret contract that we were the family. Even when I got married the first time, my marriage was similar to hers—not a big love but what she thought a woman should do. I was married, but I was still hers. We planned that if I had a baby I’d move to live closer to her, and she would help me raise my child. It was like she was my partner. But then I met Art, and it was a double betrayal.” Alice looks at me to see if I can put it all together. “A betrayal because you actually fell in love with him and he became your partner instead of her,” I say. “But what else? Why double?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Florence Banner of Bethnal Green, however, was only grave, and weary. Her hair was limp, and her dresses were dark, or the colour of rust or dust or ashes; and when she smiled, you found you were surprised by it, and flinched. For her temper, I discovered, was fickle. She was kind as an angel to the undeserving poor of Bethnal Green; but at home she was sometimes depressed, and very often cross - I would see her brother and her friends tiptoeing about her chair, so as not to rouse her: I thought their patience quite astonishing. She might be gay as you like, for days at a time; but then she would come home from a walk, or wake one morning, as if from troubled dreams, dispirited. Strangest of all, to my mind, was her behaviour towards Cyril: for though I knew she loved him as her own, she would sometimes seem to turn her eyes from him, or push his grasping hands away, as if she hated him; then at other times she would seize him and cover him with kisses until he squealed. I had been at Quilter Street for several months when the talk, one evening, turned to birthdays; and I realised with a little start of surprise that Cyril’s must have passed and gone uncelebrated. When I asked Ralph about it he answered that, just as I’d thought, it had passed in July, but they had not thought it worthwhile to mark it. I said, laughing, ‘Oh, do socialists not keep birthdays, then?’ and he had smiled; Florence, however, had risen without a word, and left the room. I wondered again about what story there might be behind the baby; but Florence offered no clue to it, and I did not pry. I thought, if I did, that it might prompt her to ask me again about the gent who had supposedly kept me in luxury, then blacked my eye: she had never referred to him after that first night. I was glad she hadn’t. She was so good and honest, after all- I should have hated to have had to lie to her. Indeed, I should have hated to have had to abuse her, in any way. When she worked so hard and grew so weary, it made me pace about the room and wring my hands, and want to shake her. It was not her job at the girls’ home that so exhausted her, it was the endless guild and union work - the piles of lists and ledgers she would place upon the supper-table, when the supper-things had been cleared off it, and squint at, all night long, until her eyes were red, and creased as currants.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  My father is an accountant, and his office was on the second floor of a brownstone in town, about an hour from where we lived.” Alice closes her eyes again as she continues talking. “My mother needed a goodbye ceremony. She explained to me that we had to move on with our lives, and that in order to do so we needed to have a healing ritual that would allow us to let go. She didn’t cry but I remember that she looked so sad. When we walked into his office, my mother stood right in front of his desk. She said out loud that she wished him the best in his new life, and then she took off her wedding ring and placed it on his desk. She collected the framed pictures of our family and put them in her bag. Then she pulled from her bag a small sculpture of a bird that we used to have in our living room. It was a gift he gave her before they got married. She put it on the shelf next to his desk. On his chair, she left their wedding album along with some of his stamp collection albums, which he had forgotten to pack. “Before we left, my mom said that she had one last thing to do. She stood in the corner, holding a few cards, and I recognized his handwriting on them. I think they were birthday or anniversary cards he had given her through the years. She whispered some things that I couldn’t hear and then spread them out on the floor. “When we got back to the car my mother asked how I was feeling. She said that we were free now and that this healing ceremony had already made her feel much better. I remember saying that it made me feel better too, but I was lying. That night I couldn’t sleep. I cried but I didn’t know why. “Art was the first person I ever told this story to. I remember his silence on the phone. And then I realized that he was crying. I asked him why he was so emotional, and he said he was not sure if it was because this was just a very sad story or if he was identifying too much with my father and felt his sadness at losing me. I was so touched by that answer and by how kind he was in his attempt to hear my story and not mix it with his own. It felt like he was the first person who ever considered my feelings.” Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the first time I thought that maybe my father was sad.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Those truths, although not consciously known to us, shape our lives. I discuss how one can become frozen from the loss of a sibling, I introduce the idea of “unwelcome” babies and their death wish as adults, and I analyze a soldier’s trauma and masculine vulnerability as revealed in the therapeutic relationship. Part III searches for the secrets we keep from ourselves, the realities that are too threatening to know or that we can’t fully process. These are stories of motherhood, of loyalties and lies, physical abuse, friendship and painful loss, demonstrating how often something is, in fact, known to us even as it is kept in a hidden place in our minds. The secrets we keep from ourselves are meant to protect us by distorting reality and to help us hold unpleasant information far from our consciousness. In order to do that, we use our defense mechanisms: we idealize those we don’t want to feel ambivalent about, identify with the parent who abused us, split the world into good and bad in order to organize the world as safe and predictable. We project into the other what we don’t want to feel or what makes us too anxious to know about ourselves. It is the emotional defense mechanism of repression that trivializes our memories and strips them of meaning. Repression protects us by splitting a memory from its emotional significance. In those cases, the trauma is held in the mind as an event that is “not a big deal,” “nothing important.” The disconnect between ideas and feelings allows us to protect ourselves from feeling something too devastating but also keeps the trauma isolated and unprocessed. Our defenses are important for our mental health. They manage our emotional pain and design our perception of ourselves and of the world around us. Their protective function, however, also limits our ability to examine our lives and live them to the fullest. Those experiences that were too painful for us to entirely grasp and process are the ones that are passed down to the next generation. It is those traumas that are unspeakable and too painful for the mind to digest that become our own inheritance and impact our offspring, and their offspring, in ways they cannot understand or control. Most of the personal stories that I tell here are accounts of buried traumas from the past that were held silently between people, life events that were not fully conveyed but still were known by others in cryptic ways. It is the stories that have never been told, the sounds that have often been muted, that leave us undone. I invite you to come with me to break the silence, to trace and discover the ghosts that limit our freedom, the emotional inheritance that prevents us from following our dreams, from creating, loving, and living to our full potential. 3 SEX, SUICIDE, AND THE RIDDLE OF GRIEF “ I’m cursed,” Leonardo whispers, looking straight into my eyes. “Do you know what I mean?”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice closes her eyes again as she continues talking. “My mother needed a goodbye ceremony. She explained to me that we had to move on with our lives, and that in order to do so we needed to have a healing ritual that would allow us to let go. She didn’t cry but I remember that she looked so sad. When we walked into his office, my mother stood right in front of his desk. She said out loud that she wished him the best in his new life, and then she took off her wedding ring and placed it on his desk. She collected the framed pictures of our family and put them in her bag. Then she pulled from her bag a small sculpture of a bird that we used to have in our living room. It was a gift he gave her before they got married. She put it on the shelf next to his desk. On his chair, she left their wedding album along with some of his stamp collection albums, which he had forgotten to pack. “Before we left, my mom said that she had one last thing to do. She stood in the corner, holding a few cards, and I recognized his handwriting on them. I think they were birthday or anniversary cards he had given her through the years. She whispered some things that I couldn’t hear and then spread them out on the floor. “When we got back to the car my mother asked how I was feeling. She said that we were free now and that this healing ceremony had already made her feel much better. I remember saying that it made me feel better too, but I was lying. That night I couldn’t sleep. I cried but I didn’t know why. “Art was the first person I ever told this story to. I remember his silence on the phone. And then I realized that he was crying. I asked him why he was so emotional, and he said he was not sure if it was because this was just a very sad story or if he was identifying too much with my father and felt his sadness at losing me. I was so touched by that answer and by how kind he was in his attempt to hear my story and not mix it with his own. It felt like he was the first person who ever considered my feelings.” Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the first time I thought that maybe my father was sad. That maybe he had lost something too.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Melissa still writes the spirited nonchalant letters which I have such difficulty in answering save by whining retorts about my circumstances or my improvidence. Once I leave the city it will be easier. A new road will open. I will write to her with absolute frankness, telling her all I feel — even those things which I believe her forever incapable of understanding properly. ‘I shall return in the spring’ Nessim is saying to the Baron Thibault ‘and take up my summer quarters at Abousir. I am determined to slack off for about two years. I’ve been working too hard at business and it isn’t worth it.’ Despite the haunted pallor of his face one cannot help seeing in him a new repose, a relaxation of the will; the heart may be distracted, but the nerves are at last at rest. He is weak, as a convalescent is weak; but he is no longer ill. We talk and joke quietly for a while; it is clear that our friendship will repair itself sooner or later — for we now have a common fund of unhappiness upon which to draw. ‘Justine’ I say, and he draws in his breath slightly, as if one had run a small thorn under his fingernail, ‘writes from Palestine.’ He nods quickly and motions me with a small gesture. ‘I know. We have traced her. There is no need to … I’m writing to her. She can stay away as long as she wishes. Come back in her own good time.’ It would be foolish to deprive him of the hope and the consolation it must give him, but I know now that she will never return on the old terms. Every phrase of her letter to me made this clear. It is not us she had abandoned so much but a way of life which threatened her reason — the city, love, the sum of all that we had shared. What had she written to him, I wondered, as I recalled the short sobbing breath he had drawn as he leaned against the whitewashed wall? * * * * *

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt. It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period. Or perhaps it is not so strange — for compared to the city life I had lived my new life was dull and uneventful. I remember the back-breaking sweat of school work: walks in the flat rich fields with their bumper crops feeding upon dead men’s bones: the black silt-fed Nile moving corpulently through the Delta to the sea: the bilharzia-ridden peasantry whose patience and nobility shone through their rags like patents of dispossessed royalty: village patriarchs intoning: the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels, blind-folded against monotony — how small can a world become? Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. The fathers of the school were kindly and left me alone in my spare time, sensing perhaps my distaste for the cloth, for the apparatus of the Holy Office. The children of course were a torment — but then what teacher of sensibility does not echo in his heart the terrible words of Tolstoy: ‘Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning’? Unreal as all correspondence seemed, I kept up a desultory contact with Melissa whose letters arrived punctually. Clea wrote once or twice, and surprisingly enough old Scobie who appeared to be rather annoyed that he should miss me as much as he obviously did. His letters were full of fantastic animadversion against Jews (who were always referred to jeeringly as ‘snipcocks’) and, surprisingly enough, to passive pederasts (whom he labelled ‘Herms’, i.e. Hermaphrodites). I was not surprised to learn that the Secret Service had gravelled him, and he was now able to spend most of the day in bed with what he called a ‘bottle of wallop’ at his elbow. But he was lonely, hence his correspondence. These letters were useful to me. My feeling of unreality had grown to such a pitch that at times I distrusted my own memory, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been such a town as Alexandria. Letters were a lifeline attaching me to an existence in which the greater part of myself was no longer engaged.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Whitstable, when I drew into it later that morning, seemed very changed - very small and grey, and with a sea that was wider, and a sky that was lower and less blue, than I remembered. I leaned from the carriage window to gaze at it all, and so saw Father and Davy, at the station, a moment or two before they saw me. Even they looked different - I felt a rush of aching love and strange regret, to think it - Father a little older, a little shrunken, somehow; Davy slightly stouter, and redder in the face. When they saw me, stepping from the train on to the platform, they came running. ‘Nance! My dearest girl ... !’ This was Father. We embraced - awkwardly, for I had all my parcels with me, and a hat upon my head with a veil around it. One of the parcels fell to the ground and he bent to retrieve it, then hurried to help me with the others. Davy, meanwhile, took my hand, then kissed my cheek through the mesh of my veil. ‘Just look at you,’ he said. ‘All dressed up to the ninety-nines ! Quite the lady, ain’t she, Pa?’ His cheek grew redder than ever. Father straightened, and looked me over, then gave a wide smile that seemed to pull, somewhat, at the corners of his eyes. ‘Very smart,’ he said. ‘Your mother won’t know you, hardly.’ I did indeed, I suppose, look a little dressy, but I had not thought about it until that moment. All my clothes were good ones, these days, for I had long ago got rid of those girlish hand-me-downs with which I’d first left home. I had only wanted, that morning, to look nice. Now I felt self-conscious. The self-consciousness did not diminish as I walked, on Father’s arm, the little distance to our oyster-shop. The house, I thought, was shabbier than ever. The weather-boards above the shop showed more wood, now, than blue paint; and the sign - Astley’s Oysters, the Best in Kent - hung on one hinge, and was cracked where the rainwater had soaked it. The stairs we climbed were dark and narrow, the room into which I finally emerged smaller and more cramped than I could have believed possible. Worst of all the street, the stairs, the room, the people in it, all reeked of fish! It was a stink that was as familiar to me as the scent of my own armpit; but I was startled, now, to think that I had ever lived in it and thought it ordinary. My surprise, I hope, was lost in the general bustle of my arrival. I had expected Mother and Alice to be waiting for me; they were - but so were half-a-dozen other people, each one of whom exclaimed when I appeared, and stepped forward (except for Alice) to embrace me.