Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  a radiance that almost everyone who met him in this period could feel. Understand: The story of Anton Chekhov is really a paradigm for what we all face in life. We carry with us traumas and hurts from early childhood. In our social life, as we get older, we accumulate disappointments and slights. We too are often haunted by a sense of worthlessness, of not really deserving the good things in life. We all have moments of great doubt about ourselves. These emotions can lead to obsessive thoughts that dominate our minds. They make us curtail what we experience as a way to manage our anxiety and disappointments. They make us turn to alcohol or any kind of habit to numb the pain. Without realizing it, we assume a negative and fearful attitude toward life. This becomes our self-imposed prison. But this is not how it has to be. The freedom that Chekhov experienced came from a choice, a different way of looking at the world, a change in attitude. We can all follow such a path. This freedom essentially comes from adopting a generous spirit— toward others and toward ourselves. By accepting people, by understanding and if possible even loving them for their human nature, we can liberate our minds from obsessive and petty emotions. We can stop reacting to everything people do and say. We can have some distance and stop ourselves from taking everything personally. Mental space is freed up for higher pursuits. When we feel generous toward others, they feel drawn to us and want to match our spirit. When we feel generous toward ourselves, we no longer feel the need to bow and scrape and play the game of false humility while secretly resenting our lack of success. Through our work and through getting what we need on our own, without depending on others, we can stand tall and realize our potential as humans. We can stop reproducing the negative emotions around us. Once we feel the exhilarating power from this new attitude, we will want to take it as far as possible. Years later, in a letter to a friend, Chekhov tried to summarize his experience in Taganrog, referring to himself in the third person: “Write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how one fine morning he awakes to find that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.” The greatest discovery of my generation is the fact that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. —Wil iam James Keys to Human Nature We humans like to imagine that we have an objective knowledge of the world. We take it for granted that what we perceive on a daily basis is reality—this reality being more or less the same for everybody. But this is an illusion. No two people see or experience

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Danton’s gambit had worked—the people had spoken and the National Assembly voted to end the monarchy, stripping the king and his family of any powers and protections that had remained. In one blow, Danton had put an end to the longest-lasting and most powerful monarchy in Europe. The king and his family were shuttled to the Temple, a medieval priory that would serve as their private prison as the new government decided their fate. Danton was now named minister of justice, and he was the de facto leader of the new Republic of France. — At the Temple, Louis found himself separated from his family, awaiting trial for treason in December. He was now to be known as Louis Capet (the family name of the founder of the French tenth- century kingship that would end with Louis), a commoner with no privileges. Mostly alone, he had time to reflect on the traumas of the past three and a half years. If only the French people had kept their faith in him, he would have found a way to solve all of the problems. He was still certain that godless demagogues and outside agitators had spoiled the people’s natural love for him. The revolutionaries had recently discovered a stash of papers that Louis had hidden in a safe in a wall in the Tuileries, and among them were letters that revealed how deeply he had conspired with foreign powers to overturn the revolution. He was certain now to be sentenced to death, and he prepared himself for this. For his trial in front of the assembly, Louis Capet wore a simple coat, the kind any middle-class citizen would sport. He now had a beard. He looked sad and exhausted, and hardly like a king. But whatever sympathy his judges had had for him quickly vanished as prosecutors read out the many charges against him, including how he had conspired to overturn the revolution. A month later the private citizen Capet was sentenced to die at the guillotine, Danton himself casting one of the deciding votes. Louis was determined to show a brave face. On the morning of January 21, a cold and windy day, he was transported to the Place de la Révolution, where an enormous crowd had gathered to witness the execution. They watched in stunned amazement as the former king had his hands tied and his hair cut like any ordinary criminal. He climbed the stairs to the guillotine, and before kneeling at the block, he cried out, “People, I die innocent! I pardon those who sentenced me. I pray God my blood does not fall again over France.” As the blade fell, he emitted a horrifying cry. The executioner held up the king’s head for all to see. After a few cries of “Vive la nation,” a deathly silence fell over the crowd.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  many ways to brooklyn (1990) Emily and I end it after I’ve been sober for a year. I can’t give her a reason not to go to graduate school in California without me. It’s been ten years since we found out who we were. She’s ready to start a family. I’m ready to curl up in a ball for a few more years. That summer I live on the boat and by August Lou says that I have to stop working at Pine Street. Even though I’ve sworn that I’d outlast my father, that I’d be damned if I let him drive me from my job, I quit. Or, more accurately, I just never return when summer ends. For the next ten years I will not set foot in Pine Street. Instead, I go back to school, finish my undergraduate degree, get my diploma. Lou tells me this is a good idea. If Lou had told me to spend a year building sandcastles I would have moved into a sandbox. One day, that first winter away from Pine Street, I see my father poking through a trashbarrel—something I’d never seen him do before. This will go on forever, I think, he will die outside like this. But within a year he qualifies for an apartment. The same program as Russell. One of the forms he’d filled out made it through the channels. Unbeknownst to me some strings had been pulled by those I once worked with. Lauretta. Tommy. Hilary. After five years on the streets my father’s delusions have become more acute, his toes have been nearly frostbitten off and the damage from alcohol has moved into its next demented phase. But he has made it off the streets alive. I move to New York a year later, to Brooklyn, to begin graduate school. To study poetry. Before I leave Boston I stop by and visit Russell every month or so. Russell has some problems adjusting to life inside—he can’t figure out how to use the newfangled faucet in the shower, so he washes himself in the sink. He complains softly that the shower’s broken, and I show him again how to work it. I give up trying to explain how to change channels on his television—it seems enough for him to plug it in to turn it on, unplug it to turn it off. His walls were stark when he’d moved in, so I gave him a crewelwork sunflower wallhanging that my grandmother had made years before. In the early winter dark I remember her spreading it out on her lap, a ball of bright yellow yarn unspooling at her feet, batted around by the latest kitten, Dark Shadows on tv. And then she would fold it up, go into the kitchen and return with her glass of ice and whiskey. Jasper, of the expensive shoes, of the vintage suits, of the playing-at-being-homeless, appears in Brooklyn a few months after me.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  184The History of Christianity II ✳It’s impossible to know for sure how much African religious tradition slaves retained from pre-slavery days. But slave owners complained about their slaves’ “devil worship.” ✳Rebecca and Martin summoned slaves to church and asked them to repent for listening to the devil. Therefore, historians can guess that at least some slave communities had preserved pre- slavery traditions. õThe third theme is that from the perspective of 18 th -century slave owners, Christianity was a dangerous message. Early on in the history of the Western colonies, the planters were ambivalent at best about about their slaves hearing the gospel. The Church of England had a presence in the West Indies, but it was perceived as the church for white plantation owners, not for black people. ✳In the early years of the American republic, the evangelical missionaries who were most eager to preach to slaves—Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelicals like Rebecca—were very critical of slavery. They were the last people that plantation owners wanted around. ✳But successful missionaries are usually pragmatists. They make compromises with the sinful world in order to get a chance to spread their message. This marks a shift that goes beyond the remarkable story of Rebecca. ✳She died in 1780, but had she lived to see how evangelical missionaries would adjust their message just a couple generations later, she likely would have been horrified. Most missionaries reversed their criticisms of slavery. They started to emphasize that Christianity did not mean overturning social order, and preached that a good Christian slave would accept his lot in life.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Thanks, Obama Right before the breakup, Barack Obama visits Iowa City. He comes to talk about student debt, and you are a student and you have so many kinds of debt, so you go. Your heart feels like a picked-off scab hot with infection. You get there late and are shuffled into an overflow room, where his speech will be viewable on a screen. You’re mad at yourself for being late, sad to be shunted off into another room. It feels, like so many things these days, a sign. Then, just before the speech starts, Obama comes into the room where you’re stewing. The bleachers are crowded but there is room on the top step, a place where you’re definitely not supposed to be standing because there is nothing behind it but air. Your strongest friends pull themselves up and help you follow. You look out over the crowd and see the president—your president—walking before the crowd. You’ve never seen him up close before. He waves and smiles and begins to speak, and the air in front of you glints with smartphone screens. You close your eyes. You can feel the metal of the bleacher step bending minutely below your feet like a tuning fork, and you think I am more than six feet from the ground . It would be so easy to die; a brief moment of faintness; a temporary abandonment of your body’s rigor. A man in front of you has a shirt on. “Obama ’08: He’s ready to go!” Yes , you think. Yes , she is . I know . The day you break up for the last and final time is the day Obama announces, publicly, that he supports marriage equality. It is a Wednesday in May 2012. Your little brother’s twenty-third birthday. Joe Biden had, unscripted, bumbled into a public statement of support a few days before. “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama says in that sweet, thoughtful, politician-y way that irritates the hell out of you and also makes you want to hug him . The first time you voted for him, in 2008, you woke up to the simultaneous news that he’d won, and that California had rejected the possibility of you marrying a woman. It was a sweet-sour morning; through the fog of a hangover, you watched his victory speech with your roommate. “I’m sorry about Prop 8,” she said softly. You shrugged. You celebrated him despite his position on gays marrying because he was the best thing possible at that moment; imperfect in a way that affected you but was generally good for the world. You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty. Years later, so sad and shattered, you laugh at his statement because you can’t think of what else to do. “Great timing,” you say to your laptop screen. “Thanks, dude.” You figure it out: you take a Xanax and sleep on and off for days.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  But as we will explore in section III, there are broader lessons from her experience having to do with identity. Sasha Cohen had much in common with many others in this book, including the climbers trying to reach the summit of Everest, like the late Doug Hansen: so much already devoted to the endeavor, the emphasis on an all-or-nothing goal, and a feeling that coming close was a failure that had to be addressed by trying again. In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful. SECTION IIIIdentity and Other ImpedimentsCHAPTER 7You Own What You’ve Bought and What You’ve Thought: Endowment and Status Quo BiasIn 2006, Andrew Wilkinson founded MetaLab, a company that designs and builds mobile apps for tech companies. It was instantly profitable and grew quickly. Its client list includes Apple, Google, Disney, Walmart, and famously successful start-ups like Slack. Over the years, he used some of those profits to start more than twenty companies. In addition, one of those, Tiny, founded in 2014, has invested in and bought dozens of internet businesses. Because of Wilkinson’s reputation for doing fast deals, being a hands-off buyer, and holding for the long term, he’s been called “Warren Buffett for startups.” Wilkinson’s entrepreneurial spirit was apparent from an early age. While attending high school in the early 2000s, he started a tech news website called MacTeens.com, along with some friends. He worked hard at the project, even snagging an interview with Steve Jobs. The site was so successful that, between managing staff, negotiating ad deals, and creating content, it became a full-time job. The project took so much time that he barely graduated. After briefly studying journalism in college, he dropped out and started MetaLab. In 2009, finding that he wanted a way for his team to share to-do lists, he decided to build his own to-do list tool. The idea became a software product called Flow, which he funded and pursued until 2021. The market for SaaS tools, like Google Docs and Slack (which hired MetaLab in 2013 to design its interface), has exploded since then, but at the time he conceived of this idea, the market was nascent. He was early to the space, correctly foreseeing the potential market size for this type of product. MetaLab had become successful enough that he had the resources to bootstrap Flow, to fund the company on his own rather than seek outside investors such as venture capital firms. After nine months of work with two developers from MetaLab, Wilkinson succeeded in producing a beta version of the to-do list tool. He described his immediate pride in the product: “It was actually really cool.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  There were personal stories too. Like the time she told of how you were born, of the white American serviceman deployed on a navy destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. How Lan met him wearing her purple áo dài, the split sides billowing behind her under the bar lights as she walked. How, by then, she had already left her first husband from an arranged marriage. How, as a young woman living in a wartime city for the first time with no family, it was her body, her purple dress, that kept her alive. As she spoke, my hand slowed, then stilled. I was engrossed in the film playing across the apartment walls. I had forgotten myself into her story, had lost my way, willingly, until she reached back and swatted my thigh. “Hey, don’t you sleep on me now!” But I wasn’t asleep. I was standing next to her as her purple dress swayed in the smoky bar, the glasses clinking under the scent of motor oil and cigars, of vodka and gunsmoke from the soldiers’ uniforms. “Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us. — And then there was the school bus. That morning, like all mornings, no one sat next to me. I pressed myself against the window and filled my vision with the outside, mauve with early dark: the Motel 6, the Kline’s Laundromat, not yet opened, a beige and hoodless Toyota stranded in a front yard with a tire swing half tilted in dirt. As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine. All around me the boys jostled each other. I felt the wind from their quick-jerked limbs behind my neck, their swooping arms and fists displacing the air. Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them. That’s when I saw a spark in the middle of a parking lot outside. It wasn’t until I heard their voices behind me that I realized the spark came from inside my head. That someone had shoved my face into the glass. “Speak English,” said the boy with a yellow bowl cut, his jowls flushed and rippling. The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Fried chicken and a mother and father. From outside, the rhythmic thump and scrape of a game of jacks being played on the front stoop. Linda and her best friend, Pattyann. In the living room is the sound of a thumb being sucked. My mother has brought out Petie, a stuffed dog with a missing tongue, to sit with me. We’re on the sofa, being quiet and waiting. My mother peeks her head out of the kitchen and then summons my father. “She’s back to sucking her t-h-u-m,” she says. “B,” my father tells her. “What?” she says. “There’s a b on it,” he explains. “What did I say?” she asks. “’T-h-u-m,’” he says. “Either way,” she answers. She’s wiping her hands on a dish towel and he’s holding a spatula. They’re looking at me. Two thumps, a scrape, and Linda tells Pattyann she’s a cheater. I use my foot to move Petie down to the floor where he belongs. They consider me and I consider them. My mother is the first to fold. “Jesus H.,” she says, disappearing into the kitchen. My father brings a pencil and a piece of paper over to the coffee table. We’re going to draw pictures. I climb down off the couch and stand watching. “You don’t want to step on Petie, do you?” he asks me. Petie is underneath my feet. I take the thumb out of my mouth and nod, then put it back in. He draws a triangle with a beak. “That’s a bird,” he says, and offers me the pencil. I can draw pretty hard as long as the pencil doesn’t break. When I’m done the whole paper is covered with a picture, and the bird is nowhere in sight. My father licks one finger and rubs the extra pencil marks off the coffee table. “Jo-Jo made a gorgeous picture,” he calls to my mother. He considers it carefully, turning the paper sideways and then back. “Is it a house?” he asks me. “Is it a dog? Is it Mommy?” No, no, and no. My mother comes in and stands over us. She looks at the picture and then at me. “Hal?” she asks. I take my thumb out just long enough to nod. “This is truly unbelievable,” my mother says. She’s sitting in the rocking chair with her shoes off, smoking. My father is walking back and forth across the living room, singing. Each time he gets to the fringe on the rug he turns around and walks to the other fringe. The song is one he made up, called “Bye Oh Baby,” and usually I hum along but not tonight. I can’t actually cry anymore but I can still make the crying noise. He’s patting me on the back and I’m patting him on the back. We’re walking the floor with each other. “She’s a sandbag,” he tells my mother as we go past. “Tell me about it,” she answers. Linda appears suddenly, squinting in the light.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  CHAPTER 3Unmasking the Biblical Justification of Racism and ClassismHe was a young African man from Zimbabwe named John, a new immigrant to the United States. I met John in a Bible class I was teaching at a predominantly African and African American church in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, where my family and I chose to worship. I was doing a series on how the Bible has been used to justify race, class, and gender oppression. I challenged my fellow congregants to read the Bible from their particular social location, using their cultural symbols to understand the mysteries of God and hear the voice of God's Spirit. After the class, John approached me. He was perplexed at my insistence that he should attempt to understand God through his own culture. He said that when he became a Christian, the missionary told him that he now had to adopt a “Christian” name. At first I did not understand what he meant. But the more we talked, I began to realize that John was not his birth name. Becoming a Christian meant that he had to disassociate with his “pagan” African past, including his birth name. I asked him what his real name was. He replied, “Ruvimbo.” I then told him that Ruvimbo is indeed his Christian name and John is his pagan name. I could see the confusion in his eyes—after all, I was challenging the worldview he was taught by those responsible for his Christianization. Besides, he had already legally changed his name to John. As the months went by, whenever I saw him, I made it a point to call him Ruvimbo. One day, he was in a crowd of friends, all from different African nations yet all having European names. “Hello, Ruvimbo, how are you doing?” I asked. He replied that he was fine. All of his friends looked at me in shock. One of them then said to Ruvimbo, “How weird to hear your African name being used in church.” I walked away saddened. The imposition of the European way of seeing oneself has created a false consciousness that has been so legitimized and normalized in these young African minds that to see or refer to themselves as African has become “weird.” They have learned to see themselves through the eyes of those who would have them believe that being African is mutually exclusive to being Christian. Those at the margins of society have been taught to believe that to be Christian means to become Eurocentric, not just in name but, more important, in thought. The clear implication is that the Bible can be understood only through a Eurocentric culture. What is called “objective” biblical interpretation is, in fact, subjective, a product of the social location of the interpreter. If the interpreter is a Euroamerican male with economic privilege, then the Eurocentric viewpoint becomes the obvious way of reading the Bible.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Prisoner’s Dilemma Many years later, you stick a memory card into your SLR and find dozens of naked photos of the woman in the Dream House. You jerk involuntarily when the first image comes onto the preview screen. You remember the afternoon so clearly: how the soft, indirect natural light filtered into the room; how she was naked and pale and lounging, and how her cunt was flushed maroon with blood. (It was either just before fucking or just afterward.) You got down between her knees and took dozens of photos, loving the ombre of her, from white to pink to purple. The memory is not sexual; it is distant and removed, as if you are watching a movie about someone else. You sit there for a while, thinking about the photos. You could keep them, but there is no reason to, good or bad. You have no desire for blackmail or the kind of revenge they could make possible; you do not find them erotic anymore. (How quickly your desire curdled when you saw her for what she was, like the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson pulls away from a sexy woman to find a decomposing creature in her place.) They are simply a memory, and as you overwrite the data card, erasing them forever, you feel an irrational twinge of loss. Dream House as Parallel Universe You occasionally find yourself idly thinking about how it could have gone right. Or, maybe gone isn’t the best word, because it suggests that nothing was under anyone’s control; the outcome is merely fate, or chaos theory. But assuming she’d been normal, assuming she hadn’t homed in on your soft spots, assuming she’d not been shot through with that dark, smoky core of poison, what would have happened? Any number of things. Maybe you and she and Val would have stayed a threesome, a polyamory success story. Maybe you wouldn’t have stayed together but you would have remained dear friends, a trio growing old parallel to each other. Or maybe it would have been messy and sad. Sometimes you wish you’d had the chance to find out.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  He also recognized in “Big Muddy” that those decisions to persist have a self-reinforcing quality: “Due to a need to justify prior behavior, a decision maker may increase his commitment in the face of negative consequences, and this higher level of commitment may, in turn, lead to further negative consequences.” Staw’s findings also begin to peel back the curtain on what was going on with his father. Given that Harold Staw’s California stores had been losing for a long time and things were getting worse and worse, it is something of a head-scratcher that he turned down the buyout offer from Fred Meyer Inc. But his son’s work gives us a glimpse into the why of it all. Harold Staw’s accumulating losses, as he continued bailing out his failing California stores, escalated his commitment to the point where he turned down opportunities to exit short of near-total ruin. Mental AccountingThere’s a saying among top poker players that poker is one long game. It’s a reminder that the particular hand they’re playing is not the last hand they’ll ever play or that any particular day that they’re playing is not the last day they’ll ever play. A poker player will play thousands upon thousands of hands over their lifetime, so in the grand scheme of things whether or not they lose one single hand of poker matters very little. What matters is that they’re maximizing their expected value over all those days and all those hands. That’s what they mean by one long game. This mantra is meant to help expert players overcome the sunk cost fallacy, expressed in poker as wanting to protect the money you’ve already invested in a single hand by not folding, or not wanting to quit a game when you’re in the losses. Of course, what applies to poker applies to life as well. We all need this kind of reminder because of a quirk in our mental accounting. When we start something, whether it’s putting money into the pot in a hand of poker, or starting a relationship or a job, or buying a stock, we open up a mental account. When we exit that thing, whether it’s folding a hand, or leaving a relationship or job, or selling the stock, we close that mental account. It turns out that we just don’t like to close mental accounts in the losses. If we’re losing in a hand of poker, we don’t want to fold because that means we have to realize the loss of the money we put in the pot. If we’re losing in a poker game, we don’t want to quit because it means that we have to leave with less money than we started with. If we’re in a relationship or a job, we don’t want to walk away because we’ll feel like we will have wasted or lost all the time and effort that we put in. Of course, that’s irrational.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  performed so flawlessly that she still earned silver, adding to her long list of accomplishments. Maybe, if she hadn’t suffered that fall, she would have retired from competition, having won the gold. She already had a bad back and recently suffered through a hip injury. By the next Olympic Games, she would be twenty-five, the same age as Michelle Kwan in her 2006 Olympic attempt, which ended with her inability to compete due to three separate injuries. Instead, in April 2006, just two months after the Olympics, she announced she would return and try for a spot on the 2010 team. She took a break from competition but not from figure skating. She spent 2006–2009 in a similarly demanding skating environment. A reward for a successful career in American figure skating is the chance to perform in professional exhibitions and touring in Champions on Ice and Stars on Ice, and Cohen reaped that reward, headlining from 2007 to 2009. Sasha Cohen was unhappy with touring. It was lucrative work but, as she described it, “it wasn’t the life that I wanted to live. I didn’t want to be hanging out in the bowels of an arena and doing the same thing over and over, like Groundhog Day.” That leaves one to wonder, if she was so miserable, why didn’t she quit? Cohen has wondered this herself, coming to no clear answer. She just couldn’t bring herself to retire, which she considered “too permanent and too final. It would end an identity. . . . I think I had to get to the point that I was so unhappy that I wasn’t functional.” She felt obligated to try to make the Olympic team one more time. Skating was her identity, and persevering was her identity. To do otherwise, “it would be weak, or I’d be giving up because it was hard if I didn’t make the effort.” In May 2009, she began training to return to competition. After withdrawing from two Grand Prix events due to tendinitis in her right calf (another in the inevitable accumulation of physical setbacks from fifteen years of commitment to such demanding work), she

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I tried to check out that particular memory with my mother when I grew up. I asked her if she remembered a night when I cried and cried, and couldn’t be consoled, and they kept coming in and going back out and nothing they did could help me. “I don’t remember any that weren’t like that,” she said, smoking the same cigarette she’d been smoking for thirty years. So. Here’s a recent memory, from two nights ago. I was riding through upstate New York on a dark blue highway, no particular destination. It was cloudy, the air was springy and cool, the dashboard looked like the control panel of a spaceship. Piano music on the tape deck, a charming guy in the driver’s seat. I thought to myself, not for the first time in this life, Everything is perfect; all those things that I always think are so bad really aren’t bad at all . Then I noticed that out my window the clouds had parted, the clear night sky was suddenly visible, and the moon — a garish yellow disk against a dark wall — seemed to be looking at me funny. In the Current [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] T he family vacation. Heat, flies , sand, and dirt. My mother sweeps and complains, my father forever baits hooks and untangles lines. My younger brother has brought along his imaginary friend, Charcoal, and my older sister has brought along a real-life majorette by the name of Nan. My brother continually practices all-star wrestling moves on poor Charcoal. “I got him in a figure-four leg lock!” he will call from the ground, propped up on one elbow, his legs twisted together. My sister and Nan wear leg makeup, white lipstick, and say things about me in French. A river runs in front of our cabin, the color of bourbon, foamy at the banks, full of water moccasins and doomed fish. I am ten. The only thing to do is sit on the dock and read, drink watered-down Pepsi, and squint. No swimming allowed. One afternoon three teenagers get caught in the current while I watch. They come sweeping downstream, hollering and gurgling while I stand on the bank, forbidden to step into the water, and stare at them. They are waving their arms. I am embarrassed because teenagers are yelling at me. Within five seconds men are throwing off their shoes and diving from the dock; my own dad gets hold of one girl and swims her back in. Black hair plastered to her neck, she throws up on the mud about eight times before they carry her back to wherever she came from. One teenager is unconscious when they drag him out and a guy pushes on his chest until a low fountain of water springs up out of his mouth and nose. That kid eventually walks away on his own, but he’s crying.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  This is all to say, his motivations are not unexplainable. They are, in fact, aggravatingly practical—driven by greed, augmented by a desire for control, shot through with a cat’s instinct for toying with its prey. A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it. Dream House as CycleCukor was known to torment his actresses to get “real” performances out of them. One biographer wrote that Cukor “seemed almost to revel in taking [Judy] Garland to the brink for scenes where she had to bare her emotions…. [He would remind her] of her own joyless childhood … and career low points, her marital failures … and chronic insecurity.” The makeup artist from A Star Is Born said, “He knew how to hurt a woman, and he used it several times to get them into a mood for a crying scene.” While shooting an iconic scene in which Garland’s character, actress Esther Blodgett, dissolves into hysterics in front of a studio head, “Cukor had Garland so worked up beforehand that she was sick, was physically throwing up,” the biographer wrote. “[But while] he might have been rough on Garland … it was for a purpose.” In that scene, Esther is in her dressing room between takes. She’s wearing an absurd straw boater, heavy eye makeup, a cherry-red cardigan that matches her lipstick. Overly large freckles are drawn on her cheeks. Around her the room is full of reflections: crystal, mirrors, chrome; pink-and-silver cellophane around a bouquet of white flowers. When Oliver Niles asks after her husband—an alcoholic on an intense downward spiral—the cheeriness falls from her face like a person slipping into sleep. She gets up and fusses around a bit before sitting again to talk. She shakes, stammers, gasps shallowly and sharply between words, tilts her head back to catch her tears. Her eyes dart around, never settling on any one place except, occasionally, somewhere behind the camera. She sobs with abandon. Her hand goes to her mouth, as if she has just realized something she does not want to admit. She rubs her hands roughly over her cheeks, wiping away her freckles. “No matter how much you love somebody,” she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, “how do you live out the days?” The scene is unnerving, devastating, wildly effective. Were it not for my moral unease about the details of its creation, it would be difficult to argue with the results: a character who, like Gaslight’s Paula, truly seems on the verge of an acute nervous breakdown (and, unlike Gaslight, with the actress not too far behind). Once they’d finished shooting and Cukor had gotten what he wanted, “gentleness and humor took over.” He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Judy, Marjorie Main couldn’t have done that any better.”

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  photogenic For the next two years I will visit my father every few months, always with a video camera as a buffer. I will bring the tapes home and watch him, again and again. He writes me a letter after my first visit, says I can ask him anything about my mother, anytime, that his memory is 100% photogenic . “Photogenic”—his word, not mine. I imagine he tells me this to establish himself as a reliable narrator, someone I can ask about any aspect of his life, any minutiae, and he will conjure it, build that thing before me with words. This is what my father means, it seems, by photogenic . He does eventually talk about my mother. He tells me the story of asking her out on a date for the first time when she was working in the coffee shop, how he finessed a car. She was beautiful, for chrissakes . He tells how Ray called him when she died. I guess your brother found her—Jesus Christ, that’s awful. Jesus Christ . The next time I see him he says that he’s figured something out. The reason someone commits suicide , he tells me, is because they don’t like themselves—self-hatred—I think it’s a very reasonable explanation . Scotty, his buddy from Portsmouth, had a similar insight, though it was about my father— I always felt your father didn’t like himself a lot, that he had a self-destructive side wider than most. That he carried around a sense of failure. You kids were an important part of his life, he would read to me the letters he wrote you, yet it always seemed like he was punishing himself for his failures as a father. Eventually he made a business of being a failure—if he was close to success he would sabotage it. The one role he held on to was that of being a great undiscovered writer—it allowed him to lash out in anger, it became his job to straighten the world out, to point to exactly how he’d been mistreated. The art world allowed him to get away with extravagant and excessive behavior, it encouraged it. His life became a raging performance piece, scripted by Jonathan Flynn. This allowed him to stay in control of something in his life. It became all presentation . One winter morning my father found me outside my gate in the Combat Zone as I was coming off the night shift on the Van— I’m not going to die out here , he hissed. I’m not your poor sensitive mother. I’m a survivor .

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

  On the contrary, It is written (Prov. 17:22): “A joyful mind maketh age flourishing: a sorrowful spirit drieth up the bones”: and (Prov. 25:20): “As a moth doth by a garment, and a worm by the wood: so the sadness of a man consumeth the heart”: and (Ecclus. 38:19): “Of sadness cometh death.” I answer that, Of all the soul’s passions, sorrow is most harmful to the body. The reason of this is because sorrow is repugnant to man’s life in respect of the species of its movement, and not merely in respect of its measure or quantity, as is the case with the other passions of the soul. For man’s life consists in a certain movement, which flows from the heart to the other parts of the body: and this movement is befitting to human nature according to a certain fixed measure. Consequently if this movement goes beyond the right measure, it will be repugnant to man’s life in respect of the measure of quantity; but not in respect of its specific character: whereas if this movement be hindered in its progress, it will be repugnant to life in respect of its species. Now it must be noted that, in all the passions of the soul, the bodily transmutation which is their material element, is in conformity with and in proportion to the appetitive movement, which is the formal element: just as in everything matter is proportionate to form. Consequently those passions that imply a movement of the appetite in pursuit of something, are not repugnant to the vital movement as regards its species, but they may be repugnant thereto as regards its measure: such are love, joy, desire and the like; wherefore these passions conduce to the well-being of the body; though, if they be excessive, they may be harmful to it. On the other hand, those passions which denote in the appetite a movement of flight or contraction, are repugnant to the vital movement, not only as regards its measure, but also as regards its species; wherefore they are simply harmful: such are fear and despair, and above all sorrow which depresses the soul by reason of a present evil, which makes a stronger impression than future evil. Reply to Objection 1: Since the soul naturally moves the body, the spiritual movement of the soul is naturally the cause of bodily transmutation. Nor is there any parallel with spiritual images, because they are not naturally ordained to move such other bodies as are not naturally moved by the soul. Reply to Objection 2: Other passions imply a bodily transmutation which is specifically in conformity with the vital movement: whereas sorrow implies a transmutation that is repugnant thereto, as stated above.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  At a sold-out show in Sacramento in June 2004, he walked offstage after audience members continually shouted the catchphrase from his most popular sketch. When he returned to the stage, he lectured the audience and admitted, “The show is ruining my life.” In May 2005, Chappelle left production of season 3 of Chappelle’s Show . He walked away from his huge contract (and negotiations for an even greater fortune). The entertainment world threw a collective fit at Chappelle’s decision, because people couldn’t understand why somebody who was at the top of their game, whose show was a juggernaut and who was being offered such a lucrative deal, would leave. Quitting in that situation seemed so confounding that a narrative caught on that squared this widespread bafflement: Something must be wrong with Chappelle. The show was falling apart. He disappeared. He had a drug problem. He checked himself into a mental health facility. None of this was true. Dave Chappelle quit because he was able to travel to the future where he could see two things. First, he was unhappy in that future. Chappelle knew that continuing with the show would affect the quality of his life in an increasingly negative way. Second, he could see the shark. He sensed that he was close to crossing the line between his audience laughing with him and laughing at him. The show was going to go downhill, and his growing unhappiness would contribute to that. As Chappelle put it in an interview two weeks later, “I want to make sure I’m dancing and not shuffling.” Near the end of the ninety-minute interview, he asked, “Is that enough to prove I’m not smoking crack or hanging out in a mental institution?” This same kind of disappointment bubbled up when Phoebe Waller-Bridge announced in 2019 that she was ending Fleabag . In its two seasons (six episodes in 2016 and six in 2019), the show earned massive worldwide acclaim. After the second season, the show won six Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. Despite Waller-Bridge’s explanation that ending the series was consistent with the arc of the title character, fans, feeling abandoned, have been begging incessantly for a season 3. Over the history of TV, a handful of other shows have quit on top, including I Love Lucy and Seinfeld . Typically, the public sentiment was that those shows should have kept going. Generally, whether it’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Jerry Seinfeld, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, or Dave Chappelle, people feel the creators are quitting too soon if they haven’t yet jumped the shark. Dave Chappelle relocated with his family to the small Ohio town where he grew up. He returned to performing, slowly and occasionally, but on his own terms. In 2013, he began touring again. In 2016, he agreed to a deal with Netflix, paying him $20 million per stand-up special.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  down by the constant anxieties about money and the subterranean existence. His father drank even more and held some odd jobs that were quite a step down from owning a business. He continued to beat his children. Anton’s younger siblings were no longer in school (the family could not afford it) and felt completely useless. Mikhail in particular was even more depressed than ever. Alexander had gotten work as a writer for magazines, but he felt he deserved much better and started to drink heavily. He blamed his problems on his father for following him to Moscow and haunting his every move. Nikolai, the artist, slept till late, worked sporadically, and spent most of his time at the local tavern. The entire family was spiraling downward at an alarming rate, and the neighborhood they lived in only made it worse. The father and Alexander had recently moved out. Anton decided he needed to do the opposite—move into the cramped room and become the catalyst for change. He would not preach or criticize but rather set the proper example. What mattered was keeping the family together and elevating their spirits. To his overwhelmed mother and sister he announced that he would take charge of the housework. Seeing Anton cleaning and ironing, his brothers now agreed to share in these duties. He scrimped and saved from his own medical school scholarship and got more money from his father and Alexander. With this money he put Mikhail, Ivan, and Maria back into school. He managed to find his father a better job. Using his father’s money and his own savings, he was able to move the entire family to a much larger apartment with a view. He worked to improve all aspects of their lives. He got his brothers and sister to read books he had chosen, and well into the night they would discuss and argue the latest findings in science and philosophical questions. Slowly they all bonded on a much deeper level, and they began to refer to him as Papa Antosha, the leader of the family. The complaining and self-pitying attitude he had first encountered had mostly disappeared. His two younger brothers now talked excitedly about their future careers. Anton’s greatest project was to reform Alexander, whom he considered the most gifted yet troubled member of the family. Once Alexander came home completely drunk, began to insult the mother and sister, and threatened to smash Anton’s face in. The family had become resigned to these tirades, but Anton would not tolerate this. He told Alexander the next day that if he ever yelled at another family member, he would lock him out and disavow him as a brother. He was to treat his mother and sister with respect and not blame the father for his turning to drink and womanizing. He must have some dignity—dress well and take care of himself. That was the new family code. Alexander apologized and his behavior improved, but it was a

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Just like folding a hand is the only way to guarantee losing that hand, quitting a game when you’re losing is the only way to guarantee that you won’t get those chips back in that game. That all makes quitting when you are losing difficult. Are expert poker pros perfect at these decisions? No. In fact, sometimes they are far from perfect. But they are better at making quitting decisions than their opponents, which is all you need in order to win. When you think about it, almost all our decisions involve the same kinds of uncertainty. Should we quit the job? Should we change the strategy? Should we abandon the project? Should we turn around on the mountain? Should we shut down the business? These are hard problems. We’re not omniscient. We don’t have crystal balls or time machines. All we have is our best assessment of an uncertain and changing landscape and the hope that we have honed our quitting skills enough to walk away when conditions turn against us. This is the fundamental truth about grit and quit: The opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue. Chapter 1 Summary We tend to celebrate people who respond to adversity by soldiering on. The quitters, in comparison, are invisible. If we don’t notice the decision-making of the quitters, it’s hard to learn from them. Quitting a course of action is sometimes the best way to win in the long run, whether you’re cutting your losses at the poker table or getting to climb another day. Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision. Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been. Having the option to quit helps you to explore more, learn more, and ultimately find the right things to stick with. CHAPTER 2Quitting On Time Usually Feels Like Quitting Too EarlyFrom Stewart Butterfield’s first exposure to the internet as a college freshman in 1992, he was drawn to its potential to facilitate human interaction, especially beyond the limits of geographic boundaries. A decade later, in 2002, he cofounded a company to build a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. The concept was called Game Neverending , where players accumulated objects by working cooperatively to create an entire world. Thousands of players loved the prototype, but the company found the funding environment unfriendly in the immediate wake of the dot-com crash. As Butterfield told me, “Not very many people were interested in investing in anything to do with the internet, but especially not something frivolous like a game.” In 2004, unable to secure capital, the venture ran out of money.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  turner’s special blend Twice in the 1970s Scituate will be written up in Time magazine as the second most alcohol-consuming town, city or r.f.d. zone in the United States. A sidebar, no explanation, folded into a larger article on the scourge of sniffing glue or drunk driving. The first is some seaside Steinbeck hole in California no one’s ever heard of. In Scituate every other business in the small string of stores we call the Harbor is either a bar or a package store, “package” being puritan code for “liquor.” From an early age you cannot help but wander the aisles, gaze eye-level into the amber. The mothers, though drinkers themselves, warn their children of the dangers, the risks. My mother says it’s in our family, says it will destroy my muscle tone, says she will throw me out of the house. On drives through the neighboring towns she points out the bars my grandfather can no longer enter—that one for swinging on a chandelier, that one for throwing a drink in the owner’s face. She tells the story of learning to drive one snowy night in Montana, underage, her father sloshed in the backseat with a drinking buddy, instructing her to just keep it between the rock face and the drop off. Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink. My grandmother, the one divorced from this grandfather before I was born, the woman who looks after my brother and me when my mother’s at work or on a date, calls ahead to the package store for her half gallon of Turner’s Special Blend, sends me in to pick it up. An electric eye bongs as you break a light beam upon entering, I take to jumping over it to surprise the man behind the counter. Dimly lit, aisle of amber, aisle of clear, Turner’s is cavernous, a crypt. Each real bottle has its own promotional bottle—plastic, dusty, oversized—lined up on a shelf along the back wall. The iconic Jim Beam, a massive Jack Daniel’s. When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turner’s Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesn’t want to be caught short. My brother remembers her at Christmas one year, an especially weepy time for her, when she put her hands around his neck and murmured, My little angel, you wouldn’t be so hard to kill . And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily. In fifth grade I write a report that I spent the weekend skiing in “Vermouth” with my grandfather, that “Vermouth” was a beautiful state. My teacher did not correct this—maybe we were all skiing in a state of Vermouth.