Shame

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)

  Wrapped in Euphemism In February 2019, Lindsey Vonn, one of the world’s most famous athletes, announced on Instagram that she was retiring from ski racing: “My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of. My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.” After detailing her most recent series of injuries, surgery, and rehabilitation (much of which she had not previously disclosed), she added the following message: “I always say, ‘Never give up!’ So to all the kids out there, to my fans who have sent me messages of encouragement to keep going . . . I need to tell you that I’m not giving up! I’m just starting a new chapter.” In the first part of Vonn’s statement, she very clearly, in all caps, says she is stopping competitive skiing. (Translation: She’s quitting.) But then, in the second part of the statement, she gives a full-throated denial of the very quitting that she just announced, instead wrapping it in the euphemism “starting a new chapter.” If anybody has earned the right to proudly quit without their mettle or stick- to-itiveness questioned, it’s Lindsey Vonn. Stories of her comebacks from serious crashes are almost as impressive as her unrivaled record of success. After being airlifted to a hospital from a horrible crash at the 2006 Olympics, she tried to sneak out before being cleared by doctors and competed two days later. In 2013, after suffering a torn ACL and MCL and another fracture, having surgery, and working through a grueling rehabilitation, she reinjured both reconstructed ligaments and went through the same process again. She missed the Sochi Olympics and most of 2014 yet returned to win another twenty-three World Cup races between late 2014 and early 2018. If Lindsey Vonn finds it so hard to just say that she’s quitting, imagine what it’s like for us mere mortals to do so. The idea of quitting is such a bitter pill to swallow that we have to take it with a spoonful of sugar. Or, in this case, a spoonful of euphemism, the most famous of which is “pivot.” If you search any major bookselling website, you will see that titles with pivot in them are awfully popular. Many books are simply titled Pivot (plus one titled Pivot!). There is also The Big Pivot, The Great Pivot, Pivot with Purpose, Pivot to Win, and Pivot for Success, among countless others.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  In sum, just as there was no Judaism in Paul’s day, no authority could decide who was “in” or “out.” Just as the choice to join the Judaeans did not obliterate one’s Idumean or Adiabenian birth identity, becoming lax in relation to Judaean customs or following Greek or Roman ways to some extent could not stop one being Judaean—even if it caused rupture and scandal with family and friends. Paul was indisputably a Judaean, 45 This standard reading is challenged by Jason Zurawski, “Paideia: A Multifarious and Unifying Concept in the Wisdom of Solomon,” in Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism (ed. Karina M. Hogan; Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2017), 195–214. Even if he is right that this passage does not reflect an internal divide between more and less righteous Judaeans (I am not yet convinced), I stand by my general observations about human difference, ancient and modern. 46 Cicero ( Div. 2.33 [70]) and Pliny ( Ep. 4.8) were both members of Rome’s prestigious College of Augurs, with no belief at all in the divination behind it. Cf. Polybius 6.56.7–12; Diodorus 1.2.2; 34/35.2.47 on the importance of traditions connected with superstitious belief for public order. 26 26 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles for that was his ethnos by birth, and he faced the criticism of compatriots if he seemed so disloyal as to badmouth Judaea’s ancestral traditions (Acts 21:21–36). The path he chose, including his posture toward the laws of Moses and ancestral custom, needs to be understood for itself, not as certifying his membership in a system constructed by modern scholarship or late-antique Christians. The next section suggests the beginnings of an approach to the historical Paul in his unique situation. Paul’s Euangelion in Relation to Judaeans and Their Ancestral Traditions In asking how Paul presented himself to his groups, I follow four standard principles of historical research, which I lack the space to defend, namely: begin at the beginning, distinguish rhetoric from true beliefs, do not multiply entities unnecessarily, and work from the known to the unknown. These principles together recommend that we begin with 1 Thess, try to understand it (not Paul’s psychology or formative influences) as his first audiences might have done, and work from what is clearest to what becomes foggier in his later letters.

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

  Which got me thinking about a conversation I had recently with a group of friends. Somehow we got on the subject of how we were first told about sex. One friend heard about it from his dad, who used ticket stubs to show how . . . well, actually, he doesn’t remember how the ticket stubs fit into his dad’s explanation. He was so traumatized by the subject that he stopped listening partway through. Other than his experience, which made us laugh, and a few others, it was striking how many in the group did not hear about sex from their parents. In fact, as the conversation continued, it turned out that a good number of the group were raised in homes where sex was not talked about at all. How can a parent ignore something this big? A man I’ve known for years was recently telling me about some of his challenges running a youth camp over the past year. The biggest one involved a fifteen-year-old girl. It had recently come out that she had been having sex with a man in the area. Which, among other things, got the man in trouble with the law. But when my friend and the girl’s dad got involved, it turned out that she’d been having sex with, well, lots of men in the area. My friend said that as the truth began to come out, her dad was shocked. He had no idea that she was this involved with anybody, let alone with this many men. How can a father be that clueless? But as many of us read that last sentence, we were thinking, Lots of parents are that clueless. Parents who don’t talk with their kids about sex, ever? College students who have been dating for years who simply have no physical attraction for each other? Think about the woman who has just gotten married and she’s trying to figure out what it means to be true to her new husband and yet she doesn’t want to have sex with him. She’s got a million confusing messages about sexuality and obligation and love and him and her and it, and so instead of talking about it and getting it out into the open and dealing with it and learning and being open and honest she just stuffs it. And he’s got images and pictures and fragments of stories floating around in his head about what a woman is supposed to be and do for him, and this woman he’s just married who’s supposed to do that and be that and perform a certain way simply isn’t delivering. His temptation is to deal with his frustration through all sorts of other channels that will only drive the two of them farther apart. Denying and stuffing and repressing never work because it’s a failure to acknowledge what is central to being a human being.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 20. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.2, Transformation to stone for breaking taboo.21. One Halloween, when you were in middle school, you went as a stick of gum, a costume you built yourself from cardboard and tin foil and pink paint, with holes for your arms and your face. Your cheeks felt hermetically sealed in the face hole, which was a bit too small and resembled those child-sized photo boards at tourist attractions. The words ORIGINAL FLAVOR were painted vertically down your torso. It was a brilliant costume, huge and funny, but when you got on the school bus you realized you couldn’t sit down in it, and were forced to kneel on the ground. All day you knelt through every class, your teachers mercifully not saying anything. At lunch, kids kept striking the back of the costume, but when you turned—laboriously—you could never tell who was doing it. During the last period, as you went to the bathroom, a teacher you’d never met stopped you in the hall. “Congratulations,” she said. “You won the costume contest!” She gave you a tiny booklet of movie passes. You felt pleased, even though you hadn’t realized there was a contest. It made everything worth it.22. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C462, Taboo: laughing at sight of ghosts.Dream House as Lost in TranslationHow to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way. Dream House as the River LetheLater that fall, she asks you to join her at the Harvard-Yale football game. It is a favorite tradition of hers, and she has flown there for the occasion, but she needs to be back in Indiana earlier than expected. “If you drive there, you can bring me back,” she says. You drive from Iowa to Connecticut to meet her. And so after a day of autumn temperatures and flask sips and people in furs and expensive bottles of champagne rolling around on the muddy ground like Budweiser cans, you sleep hard in an uncomfortable hotel bed. The next afternoon—after delays, and brunch with her friends, and more delays—you prepare to leave. She is a reckless driver—nothing has changed since that trip to Savannah—so you get behind the wheel of your car without asking.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 27. “I go to sleep at night in the arms of my lover dreaming of lesbian paradise. What a nightmare, then, to open my eyes to the reality of lesbian battering. It feels like a nightmare trying to talk about it, like a fog that tightens the chest and closes the throat…. We are so good at celebrating our love. It is so hard for us to hear that some lesbians live, not in paradise, but in a hell of fear and violence” (Lisa Shapiro, commentary in Off Our Backs, 1991).28. “What will it do to our utopian dyke dreams to admit the existence of this violence?” (Amy Edgington, from an account of the first Lesbian Battering Conference held in Little Rock, AR, in 1988).29. From a review of Behind the Curtains, a 1987 play about lesbian abuse: “By writing the play [and] by portraying both joy and pain in our lives, [Margaret Nash rejects the] almost reflex assumption that lesbians have surpassed the society from which we were born and, having come out, now exist in some mystical utopia” (Tracey MacDonald, Off Our Backs, 1987).Dream House as InventoryShe makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break. You can be an incorrigible snob. You value intelligence and wit over other, more admirable qualities. You hate it when people say stupid things. You have an ego: you believe you are good at what you do. You’re neurotic and anxious and self-centered. You get impatient when people don’t understand things as quickly as you do. You’ve definitely done some dumb things because of horniness—embarrassing things. You’ve degraded yourself in front of more than one person. You secretly want to be a man, not because of any doubts about your gender identity, but because you want people to take you more seriously. You love squeezing zits. You’d rather have an orgasm than do most things. Occasionally—and often without warning—your ability to give a fuck drops to exactly zero, and you become useless to anyone who needs you. You’ve had sexual fantasies about the majority of your friends. You wish someone would call you a genius. You’ve cheated at board games. You once went to an emergency doctor’s appointment on Christmas Day because you thought you had herpes, but it was just a zit. As a child, you were a tattletale, and you remain an unflinching rule follower. You’re a prude about drugs. You’re a hypochondriac. The only way you can focus during prolonged meditation is thinking about an orgy. You love a good fight. Dream House as Tragedy of the CommonsShe is always trying to win.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Inventory She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break. You can be an incorrigible snob. You value intelligence and wit over other, more admirable qualities. You hate it when people say stupid things. You have an ego: you believe you are good at what you do. You’re neurotic and anxious and self-centered. You get impatient when people don’t understand things as quickly as you do. You’ve definitely done some dumb things because of horniness—embarrassing things. You’ve degraded yourself in front of more than one person. You secretly want to be a man, not because of any doubts about your gender identity, but because you want people to take you more seriously. You love squeezing zits. You’d rather have an orgasm than do most things. Occasionally—and often without warning—your ability to give a fuck drops to exactly zero, and you become useless to anyone who needs you. You’ve had sexual fantasies about the majority of your friends. You wish someone would call you a genius. You’ve cheated at board games. You once went to an emergency doctor’s appointment on Christmas Day because you thought you had herpes, but it was just a zit. As a child, you were a tattletale, and you remain an unflinching rule follower. You’re a prude about drugs. You’re a hypochondriac. The only way you can focus during prolonged meditation is thinking about an orgy. You love a good fight. Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand? Dream House as Epiphany Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Inner Sanctum I often think about how special it is for children to have their own rooms; the necessary sacredness of private space (of the body, of the mind). I am, my friends tell me, a traditional Cancer in this way: I love to nest, to make areas mine. I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim. Once, wanting space from my parents after a fight, I closed and locked my bedroom door. My mother made my father take the doorknob out. And while I’m sure they remember this horrifying moment very differently, all I remember is the cold sensation in my body as the doorknob—a perfect little machine that did its job with unbiased faithfulness—shifted from its home as the screws fell away. The corona of daylight as the knob listed to one side. How, when it fell, I realized that it was two pieces, such a small thing keeping my bedroom door closed. I was lucky in that moment that the deconstruction of my door was a violation of privacy and autonomy but not a risk to my safety. When the door was opened, nothing happened. It was just a reminder: nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Appetite You make a mistake early on, though you don’t know it at the time. You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros. You’ve been this way as long as you can remember. You’ve always found this quirk of your personality to be just that, a quirk, and she laughs and says she’s charmed by it. Over the course of your relationship, she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: your roommate, your roommate’s girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven’t even met yet, a dozen of her friends, not a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and—in perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise—her father. Also, an untold litany of strangers: people on the subway and in coffee shops, waiters at restaurants, store clerks and grocery store cashiers and librarians and ticket takers and janitors and museumgoers and beach sleepers. The problem is that denial sounds like confession to her, so the burden of proof is forced upon you. To show that you have not been fucking those people, you become adept at doing searches on your phone, providing evidence that you haven’t been in contact with anyone. You stop talking about a promising student in one of your classes, because she becomes fixated on the idea that you have a crush on a nineteen-year-old who has just learned how to balance exposition and scene. One day, as she rubs her fingers over your clit, and you close your eyes in pleasure, she grabs your face and twists it toward her. She gets so close to you, you can smell something sour on her breath. “Who are you thinking about,” she says. It is phrased like a question but isn’t. Your mouth moves, but nothing comes out, and she squeezes your jaw a little harder. “Look at me when I fuck you,” she says. You pretend to come.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Inventory She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break. You can be an incorrigible snob. You value intelligence and wit over other, more admirable qualities. You hate it when people say stupid things. You have an ego: you believe you are good at what you do. You’re neurotic and anxious and self-centered. You get impatient when people don’t understand things as quickly as you do. You’ve definitely done some dumb things because of horniness—embarrassing things. You’ve degraded yourself in front of more than one person. You secretly want to be a man, not because of any doubts about your gender identity, but because you want people to take you more seriously. You love squeezing zits. You’d rather have an orgasm than do most things. Occasionally—and often without warning—your ability to give a fuck drops to exactly zero, and you become useless to anyone who needs you. You’ve had sexual fantasies about the majority of your friends. You wish someone would call you a genius. You’ve cheated at board games. You once went to an emergency doctor’s appointment on Christmas Day because you thought you had herpes, but it was just a zit. As a child, you were a tattletale, and you remain an unflinching rule follower. You’re a prude about drugs. You’re a hypochondriac. The only way you can focus during prolonged meditation is thinking about an orgy. You love a good fight. Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other. Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand? Dream House as Epiphany Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

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

  Let’s not be fooled into thinking that this saturation reflects enlightened sexual attitudes. The blatant marketing of sexual images may be more excessive than progressive, and it has at its roots profit and the freedom of the market rather than freedom of thought. In short, it’s more about opening your wallet than opening your mind. Perhaps this is why our culture’s underlying “city on a hill” morality remains unsoiled by all the graphic images that flicker on our screens: the central idea that sex is dirty remains unchallenged. Nowhere is our profound discomfort with sex more apparent than in the way we approach teenage sexuality. A sizable group of Americans believe that limiting access to birth control and sex education will steer our teenagers away from the temptations of the flesh. Campaigns like “Not Me, Not Now” encourage abstinence as a means of avoiding teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and our public health policies reflect the idea that adolescent sexuality is deviant behavior that should be prevented. No matter how liberated the media may appear, to many Americans sexuality is considered deeply dangerous—a risk factor. Europeans, in contrast, view adolescent sexuality as a normal developmental stage on the way to healthy adult sexuality. Sex is not a problem; being irresponsible about sex is. Hence the European counter-slogan to “Not Me, Not Now” is “Safe Sex or No Sex.” It’s also worth noting that in Europe, teenagers engage in sexual activity an average of two years later than their American counterparts, and the rate at which teenagers give birth is a staggering eight times less. How is it that American society, with such a clear bias against teen sex, produces such a statistical embarrassment? Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex. A society that sees sex as soiled does not make sex go away. Instead, this kind of anxious atmosphere breeds guilt and shame in its more extreme version, or a generalized discomfort in its more ubiquitous expression. Sex is divorced from emotional and social continuity. What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person. Want to Hook Up Tonight?

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

  For Dylan, a retail manager in his twenties, emotional security feels altogether impossible, with or without sexual excitement. His mother, who died when he was twelve, was the emotional linchpin of their family. When his eyes filled with tears at her funeral, his father said to him, “I hope you’re not going to fall apart on me.” In order to stay close to his father he had to excise his entire emotional life. He explains, “All feelings were a sign of weakness in our house.” The minute Dylan has feelings for someone he lashes out at himself with self-loathing, hoping to control his unbearable vulnerability. His solution? Twice a week he goes to the clubs to pick up men he will never know and who—more important—will never know him. In anonymous sex there are no feelings, and Dylan is protected from repeating the humiliations of his childhood. At the same time he gets to experience the delicious thrill of being wanted, being chosen by many at once. One aspect of the erotic blueprint that illustrates the irrationality of our desire is that what excites us most often arises from our childhood hurts and frustrations. The sex therapist Jack Morin explains that the erotic imagination is ingenious in undoing, transforming, and redressing the traumas of the past. In other words, the experiences that caused us the most pain in childhood sometimes become the greatest sources of pleasure and excitement later on. Let’s take a look at Melinda. Her father is a philanderer. And while she empathizes with her mother’s despair, she also doesn’t want to be like her mother: broken, miserable, bereft. Instead she has become the seductress, the opposite of the abandoned wife. Melinda sets out to best men at their own game. Desire is stoked by unavailability in Melinda’s mind, and once she’s seduced a man he is instantly less attractive. In order to reconfirm her own power she must set her sights on the next man, and the next, and the next. If there is no obstacle to clear, she has no way to gauge her value. Almost nothing is more exciting than conquering a powerful, aloof man; but the ultimate thrill is in dumping him—sure proof that she has avenged the past. In heartlessly dismissing these men, Melinda seeks to confirm that, unlike her mother, she is strong and independent, the one calling the shots, making the choices, picking up or discarding lovers as suits her fancy. Of course, by ruthlessly purging vulnerability from her life, she perversely ends up just as lonely and unloved as her mother.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Without explaining why, he asked her to leave the office and reenter. She seemed annoyed but complied, and he studied her walk closely, as well as her posture as she settled into the chair. He then asked her to explain her problem. “My husband is taking me a-broad in September and I have a deathly fear of being on an airplane.” “Madam,” Erickson said, “when a patient comes to a psychiatrist there can be no withholding of information. I know something about you. I am going to ask you an unpleasant question. . . . Does your husband know about your love affair?” “No,” she said with astonishment, “but how did you?” “Your body language told me.” He explained how her legs were crossed in a very tight position, with one foot completely tucked around the ankle. In his experience, every married woman having an affair locks her body up in a similar way. And she had clearly said “a- broad” instead of “abroad,” in a hesitant tone, as if she were ashamed of herself. And her walk indicated a woman who felt trapped in complicated relationships. In subsequent sessions she brought in her lover, who was also married. Erickson asked to see the wife of the lover, and when she came, she sat in the exact same locked position, with the foot under the ankle. “So you’re having an affair,” he told her. “Yes, did my husband tell you?” “No, I got it from your body language. Now I know why your husband suffers from chronic headaches.” Soon he was treating them all and helping them out of their locked and painful positions. Over the years, his observation powers extended to elements of nonverbal communication that were nearly imperceptible. He could determine people’s states of mind by their breathing patterns, and by mirroring these patterns himself he could lead the patient into a hypnotic trance and create a feeling of deep rapport. He could read subliminal and subvocal speech as people would mouth a word or name in a barely visible manner. This was how fortune-tellers, psychics, and some magicians would make a living. He could tell when his secretary was menstruating by the heaviness of her typing. He could guess the career backgrounds of people by the quality of their hands, the heaviness of their step, the way they tilted their heads, and their vocal inflections. To patients and friends it seemed as if Erickson possessed psychic powers, but they were simply unaware of how long and hard he had studied this, gaining mastery of the second language. • • • Interpretation: For Milton Erickson, his sudden paralysis opened his eyes to not only a different form of communication but also a completely different way of relating to people. When he listened to his sisters and picked up new information from their faces and voices, he not only registered this with his senses but also felt himself experiencing some of what was going on in their minds. He

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all. You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it. To sleep, go to this page . To dream about the past, go to this page . To dream about the present, go to this page . To dream about the future, go to this page . The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe. Go to this page . It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to. Go to this page . You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t— Go to this page .

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I can’t decide whether to argue or not. The only light is coming from the living room, and she has her glasses off. Her eyes look weak and vulnerable, but her lips look like blades. “He embarrassed me to death tonight,” she says. Uh-oh. Why did I come out here; what was I thinking? “In front of everyone,” she continues. “Embarrassed. To death .” She looks pretty alive to me, but if the truth be known, I’ve been embarrassed by him myself. Slumped and staggering, or sleeping all night in the passenger seat of the car, parked in the driveway, because he can’t manage the back steps. Disappearing into the garage at odd times during the day, sipping from a sack and staring at the back of the house through the dark doorway, thinking no one can see him. We see him. “There we all are,” she says in a low voice. “Playing cards, trying to have fun , drinking a few cocktails, and he sits there for two hours drinking orange juice . Holier than thou; won’t even have a drink on a Saturday night when we’re at a tavern.” I think about this, standing on one foot. The dark kitchen, her cigarette going, the bitten-off words. It’s hard to know what expression to put on my face. From the living room comes the sound of a fuse burning and then a theme song starts up. “Mission Impossible is on,” I tell her. She turns back to her ashtray and I return to the sofa. Linda is explaining the gist of the show to my dad. “They all have different identities, and they have impossible missions,” she tells him. “I see,” he says agreeably. “All different identities and missions.” “Impossible ones,” she stresses. “They aren’t impossible , the people just think they are,” I explain. “They seem impossible, until the different-identity guys take over,” he clarifies. “Is that it?” We nod. He’s drinking a glass of milk. “Want me to get you a bottle of beer?” I ask him. Linda swivels her head around to stare at me but my dad keeps watching the television. After a minute he shakes his head no. I want to go back to my book and leave them to their show, my mother to her dark kitchen, but I can’t. My words are still hanging in the air of the living room, drowning out the TV. My dad is staring at Mission Impossible but he’s no longer watching it. Eventually, he shifts his weight and Yimmer stands up on his lap. She turns around and stares him in the face with her ears folded back and her tail going. He kisses her on the forehead, sets her on the floor, and stands up. Out to the kitchen. The refrigerator door opens, closes. Yimmer’s ears go up as she listens. Linda looks at me and I look at my book. Then the familiar, inevitable sound of a bottle being opened.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Inner Sanctum I often think about how special it is for children to have their own rooms; the necessary sacredness of private space (of the body, of the mind). I am, my friends tell me, a traditional Cancer in this way: I love to nest, to make areas mine. I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room , it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim. Once, wanting space from my parents after a fight, I closed and locked my bedroom door. My mother made my father take the doorknob out. And while I’m sure they remember this horrifying moment very differently, all I remember is the cold sensation in my body as the doorknob—a perfect little machine that did its job with unbiased faithfulness—shifted from its home as the screws fell away. The corona of daylight as the knob listed to one side. How, when it fell, I realized that it was two pieces, such a small thing keeping my bedroom door closed. I was lucky in that moment that the deconstruction of my door was a violation of privacy and autonomy but not a risk to my safety. When the door was opened, nothing happened. It was just a reminder: nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine. Dream House as Lost in Translation How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  close friends behind their backs, indulged in wild bouts of paranoia and revenge fantasies, waffled over the simplest decisions. He was a man who greatly feared the slightest internal leak and suspected betrayal in almost anyone around him, and yet he entrusted his fate to tapes that he believed would never be made public in an unedited form. Even when it seemed that they could become public and he was advised to destroy them, he held on to them, mesmerized by this other Nixon that had emerged. It was as if he secretly desired his own punishment, the child and the dark side taking revenge for being so deeply denied. Understand: The story of Nixon is closer to you and your reality than you might like to imagine. Like Nixon, you have crafted a public persona that accentuates your strengths and conceals your weaknesses. Like him, you have repressed the less socially acceptable traits you naturally possessed as a child. You have become terribly nice and pleasant. And like him, you have a dark side, one that you are loath to admit or examine. It contains your deepest insecurities, your secret desires to hurt people, even those close to you, your fantasies of revenge, your suspicions about others, your hunger for more attention and power. This dark side haunts your dreams. It leaks out in moments of inexplicable depression, unusual anxiety, touchy moods, sudden neediness, and suspicious thoughts. It comes out in offhand comments you later regret. And sometimes, as with Nixon, it even leads to destructive behavior. You will tend to blame circumstances or other people for these moods and behavior, but they keep recurring because you are unaware of their source. Depression and anxiety come from not being your complete self, from always playing a role. It requires great energy to keep this dark side at bay, but at times unpleasant behavior leaks out as a way to release the inner tension. Your task as a student of human nature is to recognize and examine the dark side of your character. Once subjected to conscious scrutiny, it loses its destructive power. If you can learn to detect the signs of it in yourself (see the following sections for help on this), you can channel this darker energy into productive activity. You can turn your neediness and vulnerability into empathy. You can channel your aggressive impulses into worthwhile causes and into your work. You can admit your ambitions, your desires for power, and not act so guiltily and stealthily. You can monitor your suspicious tendencies and the projection of your own negative emotions onto others. You can see that selfish and harmful impulses dwell within you as well, that you are not as angelic or strong as you imagine. With this awareness will come balance and greater tolerance for others. It might seem that only those who project continual strength and saintliness can become successful, but that is not at all the case. By

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  196 Lecture 45: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Lecture 45 In this lecture, we’re going to consider another non-Western writer [Chinua Achebe] who [in his novel Things Fall Apart] uses Realism … to record another collision between Europe and a traditional culture and some of its consequences for his people. R ealism in literature has almost always implied a social agenda. Flaubert, Ibsen, and (to a lesser extent) Chekhov criticized the middle classes; Dostoevsky attacked Utilitarian Utopianism and Romantic sentimentality; and Mahfouz implicitly endorsed the need to work for social justice. Achebe has a social agenda as well, based on his shock at discovering how Africans were depicted in novels about Africa by white authors—as savages with the undeveloped minds of children. His ¿ rst novel, Things Fall Apart, was written to refute this notion and to show what colonialism feels like from the inside. He demonstrates that Africans had a rich and complex culture before the coming of Westerners, one which— along with their dignity—was mostly lost in the colonial period. His hope was to restore some of that dignity by reminding his people of their own pre-colonial culture; it is part of the complexity of the situation that the book should be written in English, with its title taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats. The ¿ rst two-thirds of the novel gives a picture of life among the Igbo people before the coming of the missionaries, and its focus is on one of the most powerful and important men in the village: Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a man driven to achieve at everything. Because his father was a failure, Okonkwo lives his life proving that he is not his father. He worries about his son, Nwoye, who seems to take after his grandfather too much. In a raid he captures another boy, Ikemefuna, who comes to live with Okonkwo and who turns out to be a nearly perfect son, even stimulating Nwoye into behavior that pleases his father. The village oracle decrees that Ikemefuna must be killed; the village elders caution Okonkwo that since the boy calls him “father,” he should not take part in the ritual killing. Okonkwo, not wishing to appear weak, kills the boy with his own hands, and Nwoye is devastated.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  All right, she said, rising slowly from the desk, as if loath to leave her coffee; have you had any symptoms, she asked, any sores, using the word rani , wounds, and when I said that I hadn’t, or none I had noticed, I knew they could be painless and small, she asked why I had gotten tested in the first place, whether I had any reason to think I might be infected. I hadn’t anticipated the question, and I paused before responding. A friend came to see me, I said finally, he told me that he had this sickness, he said that I should be tested. She raised her eyebrows just slightly at this, and then she said So you had contact with this person, using that word, which is the same in the two languages, kontakt ; and I repeated it back to her, looking her directly in the eyes, Yes, I had contact with him. I wouldn’t accept the shame she seemed to want me to feel, and she acknowledged this, I thought, dropping her gaze as she reached past me to open the door. Dobre , she said, all right, follow me. She made quick work of me in a room across the hall, not speaking as she swabbed and drew blood, and once again I was surprised by the lack of gloves. Then she ushered me out with the promise that someone would see me when I returned that afternoon for my results. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending hours in that long hallway with its bare benches, still occupied by the same patients, or would-be patients, who hadn’t moved and seemed resigned to a long wait. I needed to walk, even if it was hard going in the snow, so I exited through the door next to the registration office and descended a long ramp leading to the street. The air had warmed, it looked to be a beautiful day, sunny and clear as few had been that season, and already the snow and ice had softened, the surface giving way just slightly, slick and wet. I thought of Mitko and his new shoes, the old ones would already have been soaked through.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  If, he said, staying just a moment longer the sentence he would pronounce, if what you say about yourself is true, you’re not welcome in my house. It was my turn to be silent now, at first because I didn’t understand what he meant, and then because I did. I had a sense of something beginning, of a great weight dislodged and moving in the single direction it could. What are you talking about, I said finally, and my father answered, he told me that they had found, my stepmother and he, a notebook in my room. I knew the notebook he meant, a journal I had started keeping not long before, in which I had written about K. and what I had felt in his room, what I had learned about myself there. I had been careful to hide the journal; if they had come across it it was because they had searched, though my father gave no account or explanation of this. They had found it and seen what I had written, he said simply, they had read it weeks ago. What they learned about me had brought the two of them together, I realized, they were a united front, and I imagined they had spent weeks plotting how best to use what they knew. I was sure it was my stepmother who had searched my room, my father would never have bothered, and as he spoke I realized how entirely I had played into her hand. Is it true, he asked when he had finished speaking, giving me a choice, or the semblance of a choice. He presented it to me as if it were something that might be spoken away and made right, but I couldn’t speak it away, I realized; to speak it away would have been to speak myself away, what else could it have meant, and so Yes, I said, laying claim to myself, it is true, yes. My father exhaled again, sharply this time, so that even before he spoke I flinched, and I could see my mother stiffen as she watched me, standing at the sink with a cigarette in her hand.

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

  This would be less of an issue if our erotic imagination were better behaved, more in line with our public persona. In our internal erotic geography, we all have places that are dear to us. Chances are that at least some of them are places we must sneak into, eluding the watchdog of our conscience. The man who relishes making tender love to his wife has no need for concealment—ditto the woman who fantasizes about a dozen roses from her lover strewn over her bed. Nothing about their romantic aspirations is cause for discomfort or guilt. We should all be so lucky. An imagination peopled with little ladies and gentlemen, so considerate and polite, would easily slip by our internal board of ethics. But the erotic mind is rarely so docile. What turns us on often collides with our preferred self-image, or with our moral and ideological convictions. Ergo the feminist who longs to be dominated; the survivor of sexual abuse who infuses her personal erotics with her traumatic experiences; the husband who fantasizes about the au pair (the stripper, the masseuse, the porn star) in order to boost his enjoyment with his wife; the mother who finds the skin-to-skin contact with her baby sensuous and, yes, erotic; the wife who masturbates to images of hot sex with the psychopathic boyfriend she knew she was never going to marry; the lover who needs to think about the hunk he spotted at the gym in order to get off with his boyfriend. We think that there must be something wrong with us for having such prurient thoughts—that this kind of fantasy doesn’t belong in the erotic life of the happily married woman, that domination and objectification have no legitimate place in the mind of an upstanding husband and father. The greater our discomfort with the content of our erotic imagination, the greater the guilt and shame we feel, and the more powerful our internal censors. Ralph has been living with Sharon for fifteen years. By all accounts they are a very happy pair. But soon after they got together, Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater. For Ralph, his inner life is like a tribal war: the tender lover on one side and the lecherous groper on the other. He confessed one day, “This doesn’t sit right with me. I would never touch a seventeen-year-old. I see myself as a decent person, and I can’t connect the dots. There’s no way I can admit this to Sharon. I can hardly admit it to myself.”