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

  interfered with his passion. 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

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

  Several years ago a kind-of-famous female singer married a kind-of-famous man-in-a-boy-band singer. This would not have been significant news except for the fact that the manager of the kind-of-famous female singer, who happens to be her father, had an idea. What if cameras recorded the first year of their marriage, and then the footage was edited into half-hour television episodes? How close could the cameras, and therefore the rest of us, get to their marriage? The show was a huge hit, making this kind-of-famous-as-individuals couple incredibly famous—for being married. I watched an episode and was riveted. It was kind of like that feeling you get when you pass a bad car accident and you look at the wreckage, only it lasted a half hour. And if you watched it, you were riveted too. Even if you deny it. The two of them discussing sandwich meat. The two of them arranging the clothes in their closets. The two of them riding in a car together, looking out the window. Enthralling television. Two people famous for being married. And then I was in the airport several weeks ago, and as I walked by a newsstand, who’s on the cover of half the magazines on the rack? The two of them, with the title above their picture: “Split.” I stood there looking at those magazine covers, sadly thinking, Too many people under the chuppah. Chuppah? The first time I saw a chuppah (HOO-pah), I was in Israel, sitting on the balcony outside my hotel room, when I saw that a wedding ceremony was going on right below me. I noticed that the bride and groom were standing under some sort of canopy or sheet, and that it covered only them. It looked like someone had attached a beach towel to four sticks. Standing under the chuppah is an ancient marriage tradition with roots in the book of Exodus, when the Hebrew people were in slavery in Egypt. God says, “I have heard the cry of my people.”1 These words are central to understanding the God of the Bible. God is the God of the oppressed, the poor, and the enslaved. There are over 2,100 verses in the Bible dealing with the poor and the oppressed. God is on their side. Always. God hears their cry. Some call this God’s preferential option for the poor.2 Exodus begins with the God of compassion, the God of justice, hearing the cry of slaves in Egypt and setting out to do something about it. God sends a man named Moses to rescue them, and it’s through Moses that God makes four promises to these slaves.3 “I will take you out.” “I will rescue you.” “I will redeem you.” “I will take you to me.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I don’t think so, but it was hard to judge at the time. “If there is nothing social to be gained,” he continued, “there’s little point in risking that people might lose the main plot and be confused by something that might be peripheral to them. Maybe better to pull them in, subversively, as the best pop music does. How many more people are now sympathetic to gay people’s issues because they responded to gay artists who didn’t obviously fly the flag but expressed universal human sentiments that appealed to all? We respond to a song’s humanity first, and that is what matters.” Twenty-seven years later—decades into her solo career—the pretense was dropped. Mann released an album, Charmer , which included the song “Labrador.” The music video was a shot-for-shot remake of “Voices Carry,” with the triteness heightened for comedic effect. The introduction—in which a greasy, boorish director admits he tricked Mann into doing the remake against her will—is genuinely funny. But the song itself is just as sad as “Voices Carry,” if not more so: the speaker can’t help but return to her abusive lover, doglike, over and over again. “I came back for more,” Mann sings. “And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in / Cause I’m a Labrador / And I run / When the gun / Drops the dove again.” The song opens addressed to someone Mann calls “Daisy.” Despite all of this—the suppressed representation, the hackneyed ’80s weirdness of the video—“Voices Carry” portrays verbal and psychological abuse in a clear and explicable way. The mania of abuse—its wild emotional shifts, the eponymous cycle—is in the very marrow of the music: dampened, minor-inflected verses without a clear key resolving into a shimmering major chorus before locking back down again. It is not the ironically upbeat prettiness of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”—produced in 1963 by Phil Spector, who later murdered actress Lana Clarkson for spurning his advances—though that is its own musical metaphor. Both songs, despite the darkness of their subject, are catchy and endlessly singable. And I do. Endlessly sing them, that is. Every time I reread this chapter while writing this book, “Voices Carry” was in my head—and my voice—for days afterward. While working on the final draft, I took a break to stand on a beach in Rio de Janeiro watching blue-green waves curl in toward the shore. Around me people were playing soccer and dogs were running into the surf chasing after sticks and the light was amber-soft, and I realized I was singing it. Hush hush , I sang to no one, keep it down now .

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Eugene Gendlin, the originator of the term felt sense, 154 conveys this with simplicity when he says, “Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.” This experiential process involves the capacity to hold the emotion in abeyance, without allowing it to execute in its habitual way. This holding back is not an act of suppression but is rather one of forming a bigger container, a larger experiential vessel, to hold and differentiate the sensations and feelings. “Going into” the emotional expression is frequently a way of trying to “release” the tension we are feeling, while avoiding deeper feelings. It is akin to a whistling teakettle letting off steam but really making no lasting change in its capacity to hold charge (as steam). If, on the other hand, one imagines a strong rubber balloon or bladder being filled with steam, you would see the size of the bladder expanding to contain this increasing “charge.” With containment, emotion shifts into a different sensation-based “contour” with softer feelings that morph into deepening, sensate awareness of “OK-ness.” This is the essence of emotional self-regulation, self-acceptance, goodness and change. Let’s take the example of anger. The feeling of anger is derived from the (postural) attitude of wanting to strike out and hit. However, if one begins to attack—hitting, kicking, tearing, biting—the feeling of anger then shifts rapidly to that of hitting, kicking, and so on. In other words, and contrary to common belief, as you execute the preparation for action, the underlying feelings are diminished if not lost. 155 When we cry, for example, our sadness often “magically disappears.” However, this may be more like the teakettle just letting off steam, without changing the underlying sadness. Some of the fundamental “expressive” therapies may fall into the trap of trying to drain the emotional swamp through undue emphasis on habitual venting. Yet, what may be visible when the very deepest wells of sadness are touched is a single, trickling tear. As for anger, recall a time when you shook your fist in anger at another person or were the recipient of such behavior. Was this a time when you really needed to defend yourself, or was it rather a way to let off steam and to bully the other person? This kind of intimidation is commonly seen in domestic violence. What was the effect of your action on their behaviors and theirs on yours? In any case, when we allow ourselves to be swept away into uncontained emotional expression, we may actually split off from what we are feeling.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  54 Lecture 13: T’ang Poetry T’ang Poetry Lecture 13 This lecture will deal with T’ang poetry or, more speci¿ cally, with three poets of the T’ang period [Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu] who people in later history decided were three of the best, the most important of the poets of that period. C hina achieved one of its Golden Ages during the T’ang period, so that in about 850 C.E. the four greatest centers of learning and art in the world were Constantinople, Alexandria, Baghdad, and Ch’ang-an, the capital city of China. From 690 C.E. on, poetry was part of the Chinese civil service examination, so that throughout the T’ang period—and well beyond it—every government of¿ cial would have been able to quote from The Book of Songs (which we looked at in Lecture 6) and to write respectable poetry for special occasions and events. The of¿ cial anthology of T’ang poetry contains 50,000 poems by 2,300 poets, a selection of the vast number of poems from which the editors had to choose. The Chinese theory of the way poetry means is a bit different from that of the Western world. A poem in Chinese theory is generated by something “intensely on the mind” which seeks expression in language. In other words, something happens to the poet, and he or she re À ects on it, which leads to a buildup of mental pressure that continues to build until the poet expresses it as a poem, The reader of a Chinese poem must work backwards from the words of the poem to the speci ¿ c situation that created the emotion that generated the poem, and then to the poet and to his or her entire world,making a Chinese poem “true” in an almost literal way that is different from the metaphorical truth we assume in a Western poem. A Chinese poem was understood as an authentic presentation of a historical experience. Formally, a Chinese poem from the T’ang period works in ¿ ve- or seven- character couplets which rhyme on even-numbered lines. Couplets can be

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

  topic and know about it, that will stop you from committing the error. I know it seems we’ve already spent a lot of time on stories about scaling mountains. But to demonstrate the difference between knowing and doing, please indulge me while I tell one more. This one is about an experienced outdoorsman and mountain climber named Jeffrey R., who had set a goal for himself of climbing the one hundred highest peaks in New England. In the climbing community, this is considered a significant achievement. Several of the peaks do not have official trails and can be reached only along snowmobile tracks, old logging roads, or herd paths. Some of those involve “bushwhacking,” where a climber has to force their way through forested or overgrown areas. Jeffrey R. had climbed ninety-nine of the peaks and was climbing the last one, Fort Mountain, in Maine. When the weather turned bad and a fog came in, his climbing partner decided to turn around. Jeffrey R. disagreed and continued climbing alone. His body was found several days later. He apparently fell to his death. Why am I telling you this story, so similar to some of the others? One person turns around. The other continues to go on, with tragic consequences. The Jeffrey R. in this story is Jeffrey Rubin, the same Jeffrey Rubin who, with Joel Brockner, studied the behavior of people waiting for a crossword puzzle dictionary that never came, and followed it up with an impressive and influential body of work on escalation of commitment right up to his death in 1995. If anybody understood the problem of being entrapped in a course of action, unable to cut your losses even in the face of clear signals that you ought to be quitting, it would have been him. Yet he became entrapped that day. This should be a warning to all of us. Don’t think that, just because you’ve read up to this point in the book or understand the sunk cost fallacy, this knowledge alone is going to help you overcome it. If Rubin was unable to quit, that should open our eyes to how hard it is for the rest of us. Knowing is not the same as doing. You Can’t Jedi Mind Trick Being Fresh to a Decision

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  107 Buddhist and the Taoist shocks to the reader as well as to the characters in the novel. The author shows great sympathy for the lovers and the other people of his book and encourages us to be interested in them. In The Story of the Stone we are encouraged to adopt two perspectives simultaneously: that of life itself, with its possibilities for grief and happiness, and that of eternity, in which none of earthly life matters. Bao-yu’s renunciation of life at the end of the novel is exemplary in religious terms but extremely problematic for readers, who can see how his Confucian duty to his family conÀ icts with his religious one to achieve detachment and renunciation. In many ways, the of¿ cial ending of the book does not square with the reader’s experience of it. Bao-yu’s ¿ nal experience with a maid named Skybright is touching, beautiful, and suggests something important about human relations. We also see the scene from the perspective of eternity, which calls into question everything that happens during it. The dual perspective makes this novel an extraordinarily rich experience for the reader. It is a Buddhist-Taoist call for renunciation, but it is also an ironic condemnation of that renunciation. Additionally, it shows how only the deepest engagement in human life can prepare one for renouncing it. It is a portrayal of the power and beauty of human relationships, and a tragic love story. It is the story of the fall of a great house, and it is a tribute to that moment when, in adolescence, young women are for Bao-yu the embodiments of celestial understanding. Ŷ Xueqin, The Story of the Stone. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel. Knoerle, The Dream of the Red Chamber. We … see everything in the novel from … the point of view of life … and the point of view of eternity, in which none of this matters. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 108 Lecture 25: Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone 1. Despite her obvious neurosis and the terrible trouble she gives Bao-yu, what makes Dai-yu so appealing as a heroine? Can she be defended in purely rational ways, or does her portrait touch both male and female readers in ways that transcend (or at least bypass) rationality? 2. Is there a villain in the novel? What or who is responsible for the rapid decline and fall of the Jia family in imperial China? Is their fall predicated on some À aw within the family itself, or is it the result of circumstance? Could adaptation on the part of the family have prevented what happened to it? Questions to Consider

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  87 Shakespeare Lecture 21 In a course that already deals with literary giants, [Shakespeare] is a giant among giants. … Perhaps … we’ll … pay homage to Shakespeare and, in the process, we hope, ¿ nd a couple of ways that we can make entry into the plays themselves … really the point of Shakespeare in the ¿ rst place. A lmost every culture has invented or reinvented drama, many of them prior to the Elizabethans and Shakespeare. The Greeks, whose tragedies we looked at in Lecture 7, were the ¿ rst, as early as the 5 th century B.C.E. India had its Golden Age of drama in the 4th and 5th centuries (the Gupta period), featuring KƗlidƗsa, who is sometimes called the Shakespeare of Indian theater. Chinese drama emerged in the 13 th century, and in Japan Nǀ drama À ourished two centuries before Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s own drama had a long prehistory in England. The origins of English drama were probably dramatized readings of the Gospels during Mass, which led to the mystery and morality plays. English drama also had strong roots in village festivals, which mocked town dignitaries and of ¿ cials. This purely native tradition produced some interesting—if relatively undisciplined—plays, but it was given shape and structure by the rediscovery of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca during the Renaissance. A group of young men known as the “university wits,” a group that included Christopher Marlowe, absorbed this classical in À uence at Cambridge and then came down to London to write plays a few years before Shakespeare began his career. No treatment of origins, however, can account for the achievement of Shakespeare, which in many ways de¿ es ordinary categories. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of his greatness is to do so through a consideration of his language. Each of Shakespeare’s many characters speak in individual accents and rhythms. Shakespeare seems to have understood each of his characters well enough to know what it would be like to see the world through their eyes; every speech is not just in character, but a revelation of character. John

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  115 is perhaps the closing down of the wild passions and dreams of Romanticism and a step on the way to the Realist novel. The technical aspect of the book that has intrigued readers and critics is its point of view. Point of view in ¿ ction is the angle of vision from which the story is presented to us. The forms of point of view are third-person omniscient, third- person limited, and ¿ rst-person limited. In the early days of the novel, the normative point of view was third-person omniscient (e.g., The Tale of Genji, Monkey, Don Quixote, and The Story of the Stone); the omniscient point of view was authorized by Henry Fielding in Tom Jones. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is narrated by a visitor from London named Lockwood, who hears the story from Nelly Dean, a servant at Wuthering Heights since childhood. Lockwood goes back to London and then returns to hear of Heathcliff’s death and the impending marriage of Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton—and also Nelly’s skeptical report of the ghosts that roam the moors. Nelly incorporates into her story letters and bits of narrative from Catherine, Heathcliff, and other characters within the story; Lockwood comes upon a few bits of material on his own. What is missing is an omniscient authority, or author, to help us evaluate what happens. The perspectivism seen in Don Quixote has become the method of Wuthering Heights. Every event in the story comes to us from someone’s point of view, and many of the events are given to us in multiple versions from multiple perspectives; how do we decide which, if any, version is the true one? The disappearance of a single author—the author’s replacement by a collection of narrative points of view—is a distinctive trait of the modern novel. The characteristics of the novel’s two principal narrators further complicate interpretation. Lockwood is a fashionable fop who is totally out of his depth in trying to understand a character like Heathcliff, whose capacity for love and hate is so much greater than his own. Nelly Dean is a conventionally religious woman, practical and commonsensical, who dislikes disorder, Catherine’s death happens about halfway through the book, and the second half . … takes a step or two further … toward the Realist novel.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: As stated in the [4760]FS, Q[109], AA[7],8; [4761]FS, Q[111], A[2], it belongs to grace to operate in man by justifying him from sin, and to co-operate with man that his work may be rightly done. Consequently the forgiveness of guilt and of the debt of eternal punishment belongs to operating grace, while the remission of the debt of temporal punishment belongs to co-operating grace, in so far as man, by bearing punishment patiently with the help of Divine grace, is released also from the debt of temporal punishment. Consequently just as the effect of operating grace precedes the effect of co-operating grace, so too, the remission of guilt and of eternal punishment precedes the complete release from temporal punishment, since both are from grace, but the former, from grace alone, the latter, from grace and free-will. Reply to Objection 3: Christ’s Passion is of itself sufficient to remove all debt of punishment, not only eternal, but also temporal; and man is released from the debt of punishment according to the measure of his share in the power of Christ’s Passion. Now in Baptism man shares the Power of Christ’s Passion fully, since by water and the Spirit of Christ, he dies with Him to sin, and is born again in Him to a new life, so that, in Baptism, man receives the remission of all debt of punishment. In Penance, on the other hand, man shares in the power of Christ’s Passion according to the measure of his own acts, which are the matter of Penance, as water is of Baptism, as stated above ([4762]Q[84], AA[1],3). Wherefore the entire debt of punishment is not remitted at once after the first act of Penance, by which act the guilt is remitted, but only when all the acts of Penance have been completed. Whether the remnants of sin are removed when a mortal sin is forgiven?Objection 1: It would seem that all the remnants of sin are removed when a mortal sin is forgiven. For Augustine says in De Poenitentia [*De vera et falsa Poenitentia, the authorship of which is unknown]: “Our Lord never healed anyone without delivering him wholly; for He wholly healed the man on the Sabbath, since He delivered his body from all disease, and his soul from all taint.” Now the remnants of sin belong to the disease of sin. Therefore it does not seem possible for any remnants of sin to remain when the guilt has been pardoned. Objection 2: Further, according to Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv), “good is more efficacious than evil, since evil does not act save in virtue of some good.” Now, by sinning, man incurs the taint of sin all at once. Much more, therefore, by repenting, is he delivered also from all remnants of sin.

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

  On the contrary, Sorrow for evil is contrary to pleasure in evil. But pleasure in evil is evil: wherefore in condemnation of certain men, it is written (Prov. 2:14), that “they were glad when they had done evil.” Therefore sorrow for evil is good. I answer that, A thing may be good or evil in two ways: first considered simply and in itself; and thus all sorrow is an evil, because the mere fact of a man’s appetite being uneasy about a present evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the response of the appetite in good. Secondly, a thing is said to be good or evil, on the supposition of something else: thus shame is said to be good, on the supposition of a shameful deed done, as stated in Ethic. iv, 9. Accordingly, supposing the presence of something saddening or painful, it is a sign of goodness if a man is in sorrow or pain on account of this present evil. For if he were not to be in sorrow or pain, this could only be either because he feels it not, or because he does not reckon it as something unbecoming, both of which are manifest evils. Consequently it is a condition of goodness, that, supposing an evil to be present, sorrow or pain should ensue. Wherefore Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. viii, 14): “It is also a good thing that he sorrows for the good he has lost: for had not some good remained in his nature, he could not be punished by the loss of good.” Because, however, in the science of Morals, we consider things individually—for actions are concerned about individuals—that which is good on some supposition, should be considered as good: just as that which is voluntary on some supposition, is judged to be voluntary, as stated in Ethic. iii, 1, and likewise above ([1337]Q[6], A[6]). Reply to Objection 1: Gregory of Nyssa [*Nemesius] is speaking of sorrow on the part of the evil that causes it, but not on the part of the subject that feels and rejects the evil. And from this point of view, all shun sorrow, inasmuch as they shun evil: but they do not shun the perception and rejection of evil. The same also applies to bodily pain: because the perception and rejection of bodily evil is the proof of the goodness of nature. This suffices for the Replies to the Second and Third Objections. Whether sorrow can be a virtuous good?Objection 1: It would seem that sorrow is not a virtuous good. For that which leads to hell is not a virtuous good. But, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 33), “Jacob seems to have feared lest he should be troubled overmuch by sorrow, and so, instead of entering into the rest of the blessed, be consigned to the hell of sinners.” Therefore sorrow is not a virtuous good.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Long after the video came out, in 1999 the song’s producer revealed that the initial demo of the song had used female pronouns—in the original version, Mann was singing about a woman. “The record company was predictably unhappy with such lyrics,” he wrote, “since this was a very powerful, commercial song and they would prefer as many of its components as possible to swim in the acceptable mainstream. I wasn’t certain what to think about the pressure to change the gender of the love interest, but eventually thought that it didn’t matter any to the impact of the song itself. Would a quasi-lesbian song have had any effect on the liberation of such homosexuals, then as now several difficult steps behind the gays on the path towards broad social acceptance? I don’t think so, but it was hard to judge at the time. “If there is nothing social to be gained,” he continued, “there’s little point in risking that people might lose the main plot and be confused by something that might be peripheral to them. Maybe better to pull them in, subversively, as the best pop music does. How many more people are now sympathetic to gay people’s issues because they responded to gay artists who didn’t obviously fly the flag but expressed universal human sentiments that appealed to all? We respond to a song’s humanity first, and that is what matters.” Twenty-seven years later—decades into her solo career—the pretense was dropped. Mann released an album, Charmer, which included the song “Labrador.” The music video was a shot-for-shot remake of “Voices Carry,” with the triteness heightened for comedic effect. The introduction—in which a greasy, boorish director admits he tricked Mann into doing the remake against her will—is genuinely funny. But the song itself is just as sad as “Voices Carry,” if not more so: the speaker can’t help but return to her abusive lover, doglike, over and over again. “I came back for more,” Mann sings. “And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in / Cause I’m a Labrador / And I run / When the gun / Drops the dove again.” The song opens addressed to someone Mann calls “Daisy.” Despite all of this—the suppressed representation, the hackneyed ’80s weirdness of the video—“Voices Carry” portrays verbal and psychological abuse in a clear and explicable way. The mania of abuse—its wild emotional shifts, the eponymous cycle—is in the very marrow of the music: dampened, minor-inflected verses without a clear key resolving into a shimmering major chorus before locking back down again. It is not the ironically upbeat prettiness of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)”—produced in 1963 by Phil Spector, who later murdered actress Lana Clarkson for spurning his advances—though that is its own musical metaphor. Both songs, despite the darkness of their subject, are catchy and endlessly singable.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Man vs. Self Your mother once owned a tiny, trembling schnoodle named Greta, whom she rescued when you were in college. Greta was rotund and gray and the most neurotic dog you’d ever met, prone to fits of ennui and anxiety. When Gibby, your family’s cockapoo, died from choking on a plastic bag, Greta mourned by moving elaborate piles of stuffed animals—some of them bigger than she was—around the house. “She just keeps doing that,” your mother said mildly when you asked her about the behavior. You once dogsat Greta when your mother was out of town and you were profoundly unnerved by her malaise; she spent most of the day lying in a particular spot on top of the couch, her face flattened into the fabric—except she wasn’t sleeping: her dark eyes were open and fixed on nothing. She looked dead. Every time you moved her, she dangled limply, not extending her feet when you put her on the ground. When you took her outside to use the bathroom, she went to the closest spot, keeping her eyes on you the whole time, and peed with more lassitude than you experienced in the entirety of your teenage years. When you were out walking her on a leash she would lie on the ground and refuse to move, and more than once you had to carry her home. One day, you picked her up, put her by the door, and opened it. “Greta,” you said, “go on! Be free! Run!” She just looked at you with the saddest, most mournful expression. She could have run. The door was open. But it was as if she didn’t even know what she was looking at.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  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. Minutes later they rushed to the scaffold to dip their hands in Louis’s blood and buy locks of his hair. — As the leader of the French Revolution, Danton now faced two rather daunting forces: the invading armies that kept pressing closer to Paris and the restiveness of the French citizens, many of whom

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  104 Lecture 25: Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone Lecture 25 In this lecture we’re going to pursue two of the themes that we’ve been pursuing since the beginning of our course. The ¿ rst is the development of the novel … and the second … is … the rise of vernacular literature in China. T he origins of the text of the novel is something of a puzzle. Cao Xueqin, its author, was born c. 1720 and died in 1763, but the novel was published in its ¿ nal form almost 30 years after the author’s death. During those 30 years, several manuscript versions were in circulation which had only 80 chapters. The men who published the 1792 edition (with 120 chapters) claimed that for the last third of the novel they had only edited material written by the author himself. It is the 120-chapter version that has had an enormous impact on Chinese literature, so we will treat it as a uni¿ ed work without worrying much about its textual provenance. The book seems to have been a project involving several members of the family, some of whose suggestions and interpretations have survived in the early manuscript; it has always been thought of as the work of more than one hand. The Story of the Stone is a ¿ ctionalized history of the decline and fall of the Cao family. The general outlines of the history have been validated by scholars. The novel charts the decline of a once-great family into survival in much-reduced circumstances, where it is even held in suspicion by the imperial power it had served for generations. The Story of the Stone is similar to Jane Austen’s novels, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Like Austen’s novels, it focuses on the domestic life of an extended family and pays particular attention to the life of women of various classes within the family. Like Proust, it remembers a way of life that, for this family, has since vanished, and like Mann, it portrays the decline of a great and powerful family.

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

  of patient care quality for twelve emergency departments in the hospital’s healthcare system. Over the course of those years, as her administrative responsibilities expanded, the negatives started to grow. While Dr. Olstyn Martinez clearly excelled at the additional position as director, as evidenced by the further expansion of her responsibilities in 2020, the mounting administrative tasks allowed her to work only six shifts as a doctor in the ER per month. That meant limited time doing the part of her profession she had originally fallen in love with. Because of her expanded workload, especially during a period of growing financial constraints in medical practice and administration and (of course) the pandemic, the stress of the job increased and took its toll. The boundary between her career and the rest of her life evaporated. This was no longer a job that she could leave behind at the end of an ER shift. She couldn’t turn her brain off. She received a nonstop stream of texts and emails, all representing fires she had to put out. There was no downtime. Increasingly, she felt she was not fully present in her personal life. That hurt her the most with her two young daughters. At eight o’clock one night, she became aware that her seven-year-old had been trying to get her attention, repeating, “Mom. Mom? Mom! MOM!!” When she finally looked up, her daughter said, “You aren’t listening to me because you’re looking at your phone. You’re always on your phone.” And she was right. Olstyn Martinez was used to handling a challenging load, but she knew it was negatively impacting her and her family. She was bringing it all home. She could feel it physically. She had trouble sleeping. Her hair actually started falling out. The equation of the things she loved about her work and its costs started to flip for her. She thought about quitting for over a year, but never acted on it. Then in 2021, a friend offered to recommend her for a job at an insurance company. Olstyn Martinez waltzed through the interview process, and it soon became clear she was going to have to make a decision, and fast. But she found herself unable to figure out whether or not to take the new position and quit her old one. That’s when I heard from Sarah. I wrote back and we soon got on a call.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  They made demands on each other that they didn’t want to give up on. There was a lot of pain, but at the same time there was a vibrancy that neither could deny. “I haven’t felt this lousy in years,” Rose tells me. “But underneath, I can see it needed to happen. I’ve always focused on the tangible stuff—the money, the house, the kids in college—thinking that’s what’s solid. But who says that what Charles is after is so frivolous? Maybe it’s another way of taking care of a marriage.” By refusing to acknowledge anything that falls outside the accepted range of behavior, Charles and Rose had achieved the opposite of what they were seeking. Rather than making their love more secure, they had, in fact, made it more vulnerable. But allowing both of them to reveal heretofore segregated parts of themselves was not without risk. The very foundation of their relationship was at stake. Each of them would have to tolerate the unfolding of the other, even if it took them beyond their range of comfort. Dismantling the Security System We often expect our relationship to act as a buttress against the slings and arrows of life. But love, by its very nature, is unstable. So we shore it up: we tighten the borders, batten down the hatches, and create predictability, all in an effort to make us feel more secure. Yet the mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often put us more at risk. We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom. The verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control. Stultified, couples are left wondering, “Whatever happened to fun? What ever happened to excitement, to transcendence, to awe?” Desire is fueled by the unknown, and for that reason it’s inherently anxiety-producing. In his book Open to Desire , the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein explains that our willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. When we resist the urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  What this means is the following: In the course of a day, our minds respond to thousands of stimuli in the environment. Depending on the wiring of our brain and our psychological makeup, certain stimuli—clouds in the sky, crowds of people—lead to stronger firings and responses. The stronger the response, the more we pay attention. Some of us are more sensitive to stimuli that others would mostly ignore. If we are unconsciously prone to feelings of sadness, for whatever reason, we are more likely to pick up signs that promote this feeling. If we have a suspicious nature, we are more sensitive to facial expressions that display any kind of possible negativity and to exaggerate what we perceive. This is the “readiness of the psyche to . . . react in a certain way.” We are never conscious of this process. We merely experience the aftereffects of these sensitivities and firings of the brain; they add up to an overall mood or emotional background that we might call depression, hostility, insecurity, enthusiasm, or adventurousness. We experience many different moods, but in an overall sense we can say that we have a particular way of seeing and interpreting the world, dominated by one emotion or a blend of several, such as hostility and resentment. This is our attitude. People with a largely depressive attitude can feel moments of joy, but they are more disposed toward experiencing sadness; they anticipate the feeling in their day-to-day encounters. Jung illustrates this idea in the following way: Imagine that on a hike people come upon a brook that must be crossed to continue the journey. One person, without much thought, will simply leap across, touching a stone or two, not worried at all about possibly falling. He loves the sheer physical pleasure of the jump and doesn’t care if he fails. Another person is excited as well, but it has less to do with the physical joy than with the mental challenge the brook represents. She will quickly calculate the most effective means of crossing and will gain satisfaction from figuring this out. Another person, of a cautious nature, will take more time to think it through. He takes no pleasure in the crossing; he is irritated by the obstruction, but he wants to continue the hike and he will do his best to safely cross. A fourth will simply turn back. She will see no need for crossing and will rationalize her fears by saying the hike has been long enough. No one simply sees or hears the rushing of water over rocks. Our minds do not perceive just what is there. Each person sees and responds to the same brook differently, according to their particular attitude—adventurous, fearful, et cetera. The attitude that we carry with us throughout life has several roots: First, we come into this world with certain genetic inclinations —toward hostility, greed, empathy, or kindness. We can notice these differences, for instance, in the case of the Chekhov children, who all

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  In this case the emotion was brought on not by the prospect of losing his freedom but by a song he kept playing on his new hi-fi—“The Everglades,” by the Kingston Trio. It told the story of a man who kills another man in a fight over a woman. Seeing what he has done, he takes to the glades, Where a man can hide, and never be found And have no fear of the bayin’ hound But he better keep movin’ and don’t stand still ’Cause if the skeeters don’t get him then the ‘gators will What the man doesn’t know, and of course will never find out, is that the jury has acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. This kicker is revealed in the last verse, and every time it came around Skipper lowered his eyes and shook his head mournfully. The other time I saw him choked up was when he got back from Mexico. We were eating dinner. The sound of the engine was unmistakable, and when we heard it Pearl and Norma and I jumped up and ran outside. Dwight and my mother followed a moment later. The family that shared our building came outside too, and so did some other neighbors, all of them struck speechless by the sight of the car. It looked as if it had been sandblasted. The paint was pitted and dull. The hubcaps and bumpers and Laker pipes were also pitted, and beginning to rust. It was a sad sight. Skipper told us what had happened. After he had the car upholstered he and Ray took a run down to Ensenada, and on the way back they got caught in a sandstorm. The sand was so thick they couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of them. They’d had to pull off the road and wait it out, which took the best part of a day. The sand fouled the engine, too—Skipper had been tinkering with it all the way home. He made jokes about the whole episode but his voice was close to breaking. He’d been holding it in all this time, probably putting up a show of nonchalance for Ray, but now the sight of his home and family was unmanning him. He did not break down, but he was close to it. While Skipper talked I circled the car, toting up the damage. I opened the driver’s door and poked my head inside. The floor had been carpeted in white. White leather covered the seats, side panels, roof and dashboard. The light inside was rich and creamy. I got in behind the wheel and closed the door. I breathed in the smell of the leather. I ran my fingers over the seats, then leaned back with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gear shift.

• 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.