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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Do you think so? Who's there?' asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman's dress at the door. 'It's I,' said a firm, pleasant woman's voice, and the stern, pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at the doorway. 'Well, what it it, Matrona?' queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to her at the door. Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost everyone in the house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna's chief ally) was on his side. 'Well, what now?' he asked disconsolately. 'Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is suffering so, it's sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her for giveness, sir. There's no help for it! One must take the consequences . . . ' 'But she won't see me.' 'You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God.' 'Come, that'll do, you can go,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing suddenly. 'Well now, do dress me.' He turned to Matvey and threw off his dressing-gown decisively. Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse's collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master. III W HEN he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocket-book, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office. He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a forest on his wife's property. To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest—that idea hurt him. When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper, and began reading it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  It seems to me he thinks all I want is to be married. Mother takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me to get me married off as soon as may be, and be rid of me. I know it's not the truth; but I can't drive away such thoughts. Eligible suitors, as they call them—I can't bear to see them. It seems to me they're taking stock of me and summing me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball-dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then! The doctor. . . . Then . . .' Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without the grossest and most hideous conceptions rising before her imagination. 'Oh well, everything presents itself to me in the coarsest, most loathsome light,' she went on. 'That's my illness. Perhaps it will pass off.' But you mustn't think about it.' 'I can't help it. I'm never happy except with the children at your house.' 'What a pity you can't be with me!' 'Oh yes, I'm coming. I've had scarlatina, and I'll persuade mamma to let me.' Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister's, and nursed the children all through the scarlatina, for scarlatina it turned out to be. The two sisters brought all the six children successfully through it, but Kitty was no better in health, and in Lent the Shtcherbatskys went abroad. IV T HE highest Petersburg society is essentially one. In it everyone knows everyone else, everyone even visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenin had friends and close ties in three different circles of this highest society. One circle was her husband's government, official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates, brought together in the most various and capricious manner, and belonging to different social strata. Anna found it difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence which she had at first entertained for these persons. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities, knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where they agreed and disagreed. But that circle of political, masculine interests had never interested her, in spite of Countess Lidia Ivanovna's influence, and she avoided it. Another little set with which Anna was in close relations was the one by means of which Alexey Alexandrovitch had made his career. The centre of this circle was the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  He too says that all self-regard is regard for certain objective things. He disposes so well of one kind of objection that I must conclude by quoting a part of his own words: First, the objection: "The fact is indubitable that one's own children always pass for the prettiest and brightest, the wine from one's own cellar for the best—at least for its price,—one's own house and horses for the finest. With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of benevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are to acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of 'extenuating circumstances'! How much more really comic are our own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear being repeated ten or twelve times over! How eloquent, striking, powerful, our own speeches are! How appropriate our own address! In short, how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us than in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit and vanity belongs here. "The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for everything of our own is indeed striking. Does it not look as if our dear Ego must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it please us? . . . Is it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, so consistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego, the self, which forms the origin and centre of our thinking life, is at the same time the original and central object of our life of feeling, and the ground both of whatever special ideas and of whatever special feelings ensue?" Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already noticed, that various things which disgust us in others do not disgust us at all in ourselves. "To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the chair warm from another's sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas there is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have been sitting ourselves." After some further remarks, he replies to these facts and reasonings as follows: "We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most cases please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because we know them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them more deeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shadings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines and rude averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one plays one's self is heard and understood better than when it is played by another.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  My fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray. [267] The kind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it be the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food the warm corner, the vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in our faces,—we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popularity or influence, for which he is greedy, he may in material ways subordinate himself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he is very apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the 'other-worldly' self which he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically,—even though he would rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul,—'saintliness' will probably be the name by which his selfishness will be called. [268] Lotze, Med. Psych. 498-501; Microcosmus, bk. II. chap. V §§ 3, 4. [269] Psychologische Analyzen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil II. IIte Hälfte, § 11. The whole section ought to be read. [270] Professor Bain, in his chapter on 'Emotions of Self,' does scant justice to the primitive nature of a large part of our self-feeling, and seems to reduce it to reflective self-estimation of this sober intellectual sort, which certainly most of it is not. He says that when the attention is turned inward upon self as a Personality, "we are putting forth towards ourselves the kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of other persons. We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of those about us, to set a higher value upon one man than upon another, by comparing the two; to pity one in distress; to feel complacency towards a particular individual; to congratulate a man on some good fortune that it pleases us to see him gain; to admire greatness or excellence as displayed by any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, like Love and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them, nor exercise them. By what means, then, through what fiction [!] can we turn round and play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtain any satisfaction by putting self in the place of the other party? Perhaps the simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by Self-worth and Self-estimation, based and begun upon observation of the ways and conduct of our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons among the individuals about us; we see that one is stronger and does more work than another, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more pay. We see one putting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and in consequence receiving more love. We see some individuals surpassing the rest in astonishing feats, and drawing after them the gaze and admiration of a crowd.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea. The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intellectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M. Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, when it is grasped—we hear the echo of the words as we catch their meaning. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there. [254] A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds that the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sentences are finished. [255] The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrine set forth here is in O. Liebmann's Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, pp. 427-438. [256] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's Microcosmus, Eug. tr. vol. I. p. 592 ff. [257] "Who filches from me my good name," etc. [258] "He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong motives on men . . . seems little skilled in the nature and history of mankind; the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or the magistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God's laws some, nay, most, men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many, whilst they break the laws, entertain thoughts of future reconciliation, and making their peace for such breaches: and as to the punishments due from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves with the hope of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of their censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one in ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a strange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy am I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have planted?"[262] Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope. The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who think they have committed 'the unpardonable sin' and are lost forever, who crouch and cringe and slink from noticean, d are unable to speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelings of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race, we can speak better when we have treated of— 3. SELF-SEEKING AND SELF-PRESERVATION. These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive impulses. We have those of bodily self-seeking , those of social self-seeking , and those of spiritual self-seeking . All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preservation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful in the same way.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In what capacity is it that I claim and demand a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of disdain? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it; it is as being an I who has always been treated with respect, who belongs to a certain family and 'set,' who has certain powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is what your disdain negates and contradicts; this is 'the thing inside of me' whose changed treatment I feel the shame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in consequence of your conduct, is collapsed; and this certainly is an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of shame is often more concrete even than this,—it is simply my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and without any reflection at all on my part works those muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together make up the 'expression' of shame. In this instinctive, reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire vehicle of the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we first took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in simple 'hoggishness,' a succulent morsel gives rise, by the reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find 'greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort of 'self-regard;' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior, which the bystanders call 'shame-faced' and which they consider due to another kind of self-regard. But in both cases there may be no particular self regarded at all by the mind; and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, and the feelings that immediately result from their discharge. After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual. But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for? My Soul-substance? my 'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'? my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus of cephalic adjustments? or my more phenomenal and perishable powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibilities, and the like? Surely the latter. But they, relatively to the central principle, whatever it may be, are external and objective. They come and go, and it remains—"so shakes the magnet, and so stands the pole." It may indeed have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is not identical with being loved itself. To sum up, then, we see no reason to suppose that self-love' is primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere principle of conscious identity . It is always love for something which, as compared with that principle, is superficial, transient, liable to be taken up or dropped at will.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Most of us, however, would prefer to doubt whether such abstract axioms as that 'a thing cannot tend to its own destruction' express ideal relations of an important sort at all.[572] Compare A. Riehl: Der Philosophische Kriticismus, Bd. II. Thl. I. Abschn. I. Cap. III. §6.[573] As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate idiosyncrasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. I would rather undergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger from rocks. It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread,—it is the hatred of a man; there is something in it so shocking that I would rather submit to any injury than incur or increase the hatred of a man by revenging it. . . . Another sufficient reason for suicide is that I was this morning out of temper with Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I did not betray myself in the least, but I reflected that to be exposed to the possibility of such an event once a year, was evil enough to render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an impatient word is to me overpowering." (Elton Hammond, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, vol. I. p. 424.)[574] Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. III. chap. XIII. §3.[575] A gentleman told me that he had a conclusive argument for opening the Harvard Medical School to women. It was this: "Are not women human?"—which major premise of course had to be granted. "Then are they not entitled to all the rights of humanity?" My friend said that he had never met anyone who could successfully meet this reasoning.[576] You reach the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point of view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to abstract classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice, consists in refusing to see that the case before one is absolutely unique. It is always possible to treat the country of one's nativity, the house of one's fathers, the bed in which one's mother died, nay, the mother herself if need be, on a naked equality with all other specimens of so many respective genera. It shows the world in a clear frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of affection, all swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immediate action becomes easy then—witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career. But the question always remains, "Are not the mists and vapors worth retaining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the mere law of their genus has made the drama of human history. The obstinate insisting that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life. Look at the Jews and the Scots, with their miserable factions and sectarian disputes, their loyalties and patriotisms and exclusions,—their annals now become a classic heritage, because men of genius took part and sang in them. A thing is important if any one think it important.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Such a man can for a time wind himself up, as it were, and determine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be manifested. Many instances are on record similar to that told by Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicêtre, having stood a long cross-examination, and given every mark of restored reason, signed his name to the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ,' and then went off into all the vagaries connected with that delusion. In the phraseology of the gentleman whose case is related in an early part of this [Wigan's] work he had 'held himself tight' during the examination in order to attain his object; this once accomplished he 'let himself down' again, and, if even conscious of his delusion, could not control it. I have observed with such persons that it requires a considerable time to wind themselves up to the pitch of complete self-control, that the effort is a painful tension of the mind. . . . When thrown off their guard by any accidental remark or worn out by the length of the examination, they let themselves go, and cannot gather themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine relates the story of a man who brought an action against Dr. Munro for confining him without cause. He underwent the most rigid examination by the counsel for the defendant without discovering any appearance of insanity, till a gentleman asked him about a princess with whom he corresponded in cherry-juice, and he became instantly insane."[511] To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea. There are at all times some ideas from which we shy away like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the volitional act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform. I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily a relation, not between our Self and extra-mental matter(as many philosophers still maintain), but between our Self and our own states of mind. But when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's object, I said something which the reader doubtless questioned at the time, and which certainly now demands some qualification ere we pass beyond.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be given if we could find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, but who, on being consulted, should say that no subjective emotional affection was felt. Such a man would be like one who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but who afterwards confesses that he had no appetite at all. Cases like this are extremely hard to find. Medical literature contains reports, so far as I know, of but three. In the famous one of Remigius Leins no mention is made by the reporters of his emotional condition. In Dr. G. Winter's case[419] the patient is said to be inert and phlegmatic, but no particular attention, as I learn from Dr. W., was paid to his psychic condition. In the extraordinary case reported by Professor Strumpell (to which I must refer later in another connection)[420] we read that the patient, a shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely anæsthetic, inside and out, with the exception of one eye and one ear, had shown shame on the occasion of soiling his bed, and grief, when a formerly favorite dish was set before him, at the thought that he could no longer taste its flavor. Dr. Strumpell is also kind enough to inform me that he manifested surprise, fear, and anger on certain occasions. In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one seems to have been thought of; and it always remains possible that, just as he satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have been accompanied by a quite cold heart.[421] Any new case which turns up of generalized anæsthesia ought to be carefully examined as to the inward emotional sensibility as distinct from the 'expressions' of emotion which circumstances may bring forth. Objections Considered. Let me now notice a few objections. The replies will make the theory still more plausible. First Objection. There is no real evidence, it may be said, for the assumption that particular perceptions do produce wide-spread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea?

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Modesty, Shame. Whether there be an instinctive impulse to hide certain parts of the body and certain acts' is perhaps even more open to doubt than whether there be an instinct of cleanliness. Anthropologists have denied it, and in the utter shamelessness of infancy and of many savage tribes have seemed to find a good basis for their views. It must, however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and that, as far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself works directly against it at times of excitement, and with reference to certain people; and that habits of immodesty contracted with those people may forever afterwards inhibit it any impulse to be modest towards them. This would account for a great deal of actual immodesty, even if an original modest impulse were there. On the other hand, the modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a singularly ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the presences that call it forth, and as regards the acts to which it leads. Ethnology shows it to have very little backbone of its own, and to follow easily fashion and example. Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of some sort of tribute to shame, however perverted—as where female modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty in appearing before strangers unpainted—and to believe it to have no impulsive root whatever. Now, what may the impulsive root be? I believe that, for one thing, it is shyness, the feeling of dread that unfamiliar persons, as explained above, may inspire us withal. Such persons are the original stimuli to our modesty.[409] But the actions of modesty are quite different from the actions of shyness. They consist of the restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the covering of certain parts; and why do such particular actions necessarily ensue? That there may be in the human animal, as such, a 'blind' and immediate automatic impulse to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring presences is a possibility difficult of actual disproof. But it seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of modesty are suggested to us in a roundabout way; and that, even more than those of cleanliness, they arise from the application in the second instance to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates. It is not easy to believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbor's eyes. Human nature is sufficiently homogeneous for us to be sure that everywhere reserve must inspire some respect, and that persons who suffer every liberty are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like such people, then, would be one of the first resolutions suggested by social self-consciousness to a. child of nature just emerging from the unreflective state. And the resolution would probably acquire effective pungency for the first time when the social self-consciousness was sharpened into a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom it was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion would of course go on to build its positive precepts upon this germ; and, through a variety of examples and experiences, the ritual of modesty would grow, until it reached the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by name.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “So we can open it up.” “I’ll get them,” Connie said. “Don’t miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry’s attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine. That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces. They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I’d seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-iam, like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr. “He’s always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing’s different. He can’t even drive anymore, I don’t think.” This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter’s face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn’t have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell? “It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.” “Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn’t turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.” “He’s proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That’s what’s crazy.” The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  He was very quick and throwing his head aside, escaped the full force of the blow; still the seam of the new ball grazed his cheek-bone and broke the skin: everyone stood amazed: only people who know the strength of English conventions can realise the sensation. Jones himself did not know what to do but took out his handkerchief to mop the blood, the skin being just broken. As for me, I walked away by myself. I had broken the supreme law of our schoolboy honor: never to give away our dissensions to a master, still less to boys and masters from another school; I had sinned in public, too, and before everyone; I’d be universally condemned. The truth is, I was desperate, dreadfully unhappy, for since the breakdown of the fags’ revolt the lower boys had drawn away from me and the older boys never spoke to me if they could help it and then it was always as “Pat.” I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters. However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it. The Mathematical Master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story. “I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school”, was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and “the little people” which had been taught us by our nurses and though only half believed in; yet enriched and glorified life,—all this was lost to me. My head in especial, was full of stories of Banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English. “I wish I had known that you were being fagged”, Stackpole said when he had heard all, “I can easily remedy that”, and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags’ list and wrote in my name in the First Mathematical Division. “There”, he said with a smile, “you are now in the Upper School where you belong. I think”, he added, “I had better go and tell the Doctor what I’ve done. Don’t be down-hearted, Harris”, he added, “it’ll all come right.”

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Vietnam wasn’t lost during Tet ’68; it was lost “in the pages of America’s newspapers, on our televisions, our college campuses—and eventually in the corridors of power in Washington.” For those who claimed to support the troops but not the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, North had nothing but contempt. Thankfully, President Bush never wavered in his support for the troops. His field commanders “were cut from the same tempered steel.” Real leaders knew to ignore “the bashing they got for being too aggressive.” They knew how to keep after the enemy.22 North had written American Heroes with the assistance of Chuck Holton. A one-time Airborne Ranger, Holton was a popular writer in the same genre. In 2003, Holton had begun reporting for the Christian Broadcasting Network as “adventure correspondent,” and that same year he published A More Elite Soldier . Stu Weber, stalwart of the evangelical men’s movement, called Holton’s book “Pilgrim’s Progress in camouflage”—an account of a soldier’s journey into manhood, and into spiritual maturity. According to Holton, “life is combat,” and combat wasn’t for the weak; in basic training, the weak were eliminated. When Holton put on his black beret it symbolized his status as a member of an elite group of warriors, a unit “set apart and held to higher standards” in order to defend the freedom of their countrymen, many of whom were oblivious to or ungrateful for their sacrifice. The pride Holton felt in being an elite soldier was inextricably linked to this concept of being set apart by God, “called out of the ranks of ordinary soldiers, and given a more difficult assignment to fulfill for Him.” In accepting this mission, Holton had entered a brotherhood of shared belief, hardship, and purpose. Of course war was distasteful, yet still “somehow glorious.” Most of life’s obstacles could be overcome “by exerting a little over ten pounds of pressure with a trigger finger.” Upon reflection, Holton realized that Jesus himself would have made “an outstanding NCO.”23 That same year Holton coauthored Stories from a Soldier’s Heart: For the Patriotic Soul . The book included stories from John McCain, Stu Weber, and Bill Gothard, along with a confessional written by a former Vietnam-era protestor who acknowledged the “extreme narcissism” of the counterculture and expressed regret for failing to properly honor the men who served their country. Eldredge’s influence on these authors was clear: “Deep down, all guys want to be warriors,” to engage in “an epic battle,” to be the hero. Braveheart ’s William Wallace offered words of wisdom: “Every man dies, but not every man truly lives.” The message of this collection was the same as that of Holton’s A More Elite Soldier : the American soldier modeled true Christian manhood.24 Like North, Chuck Holton tried his hand at fiction, too. His fictional universe was populated by heroic military men and vulnerable women drawn to their physical strength. It was a world where a diabolical Islamic menace posed an imminent threat.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  She’s probably seen my wedding ring. If she has, she’s read me. I see it now: a satin sash across my chest with the whole story embroidered on it. I’m straight, married for nearly a decade, with a house in the suburbs, a not-quite-three-year-old, a family dog, and two restaurants that I own with my husband. Shame creeps along my cheek like a spider. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] When I cannot watch her, I think about watching her. I think all the time about it. I leave the house each morning with my thermos of coffee, thinking. I walk down our street, turn the corner, walk a few more blocks, and board the bus, thinking. One morning mid-trial I catch the headline of a fellow bus rider’s newspaper: the Supreme Court had ruled on Obergefell vs. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal across the United States. I choke back a sob, elated, disbelieving. Then I want to cry for a different reason, and I cannot tell anyone why. I think about her wrists and her white teeth. I wonder what she thinks about me. Then I remember not to think about that, because she probably doesn’t think about me, and if she does, it cannot be good. I am a woman wearing a wedding ring while staring at a person who is not her spouse. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The judge is speaking again, and I’m not listening. I’m watching the woman in the suit. Under the crisp lapels of her jacket, there’s a swelling across her chest, a softness that says female. I wonder what it would feel like to put my arm around her. Her shoulders would be solid, more substantial than my own. If I think on it, I can feel them under my triceps, sound as a fence. I wonder what she wears when she’s not wearing this suit, on the weekends or after work. I wonder what her friends call her. I wonder what she would look like next to me in a photo. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I’ve had crushes since being with Brandon. A few, mostly little things, banal. We’d joke about them. For years, he nursed a crush on the actress Natalie Portman. It was like that. Safe. But I’d had another type of crush too, other men I’d wanted without saying a word. There were only one or two of them, but these men loomed over us. I never called his attention to their elephantine shadows. Telling him would have made them more real, made actual people out of these dark shapes, made distractions into danger. It would have frightened us both. Instead, I chipped away at the shadows privately, interrogated them into submission. Do I want to be someone who cheats? No. I don’t want to be someone who would do that. Am I willing to do that to Brandon? No. He doesn’t deserve that. Can I get what I want by cheating, without also getting what I don’t want? No. No, no. Always no.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  Most modern cultures, including ours, fall victim to the prevailing attitude that strength means endurance; that it is somehow heroic to be able to carry on regardless of the severity of our symptoms. A majority of us accept this social custom without question. Using the power of the neo-cortex, our ability to rationalize, it is possible to give the impression that one has come through a severely threatening event, even a war, with “nary a scratch”; and that’s exactly what many of us do. We carry on with a “stiff upper lip,” much to the admiration of other s - heroes, as if nothing had happened at all. By encouraging us to be superhuman, these social mores do great injustice to the individual and the society. If we attempt to move ahead with our lives, without first yielding to the gentler urges that will guide us back through these harrowing experiences, then our show of strength becomes little more than illusion. In the meantime, the traumatic effects will grow steadily more severe, firmly entrenched, and chronic. The incomplete responses now frozen in our nervous systems are like indestructible time bombs, primed to go off when aroused by force. Until human beings can find the appropriate tools and the support necessary to dismantle this force, we will continue to have unexplained blowups. Real heroism comes from having the courage to openly acknowledge one’s experiences, not from suppressing or denying them. Let Us Begi n— Calling the Spirit Back to the Body The disconnection between body and soul is one of the most important effects of trauma. Loss of skin sensation is a common physical manifestation of the numbness and disconnection people experience after trauma. To begin to recover sensation, the following awareness exercise will be useful throughout the mending process. The initial cost of $15 to $40 for a pulsing shower head is well worth the investment. Exercise For ten minutes or so each day, take a gentle, pulsing shower in the following way: at a cool or slightly warm temperature setting, expose your entire body to the pulsing water. Put your full awareness into the region of your body where the rhythmical stimulation is focused. Let your consciousness move to each part of your body as you rotate. Hold the backs of your hands to the shower head; then the palms and wrists; then both sides of your face, shoulders, underarms, etc. Be sure to include every part of your body: head, forehead, neck, chest, back, legs, pelvis, hips, thighs, ankles, and feet. Pay attention to the sensation in each area, even if it feels blank, numb, or painful. While you are doing this, say “this is my head, neck,” etc. “I welcome you back.” Another similar awakening is to gently slap the different parts of your body briskly. Again, this will help re-establish a sense of a body with skin sensation when done regularly over time. This simple exercise will begin to welcome the soul back to the body.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  One night she said I could touch her. I worked my hand slowly down the silk of her belly until I found the place where she was wet. A quiet flare of recognition behind my eyes: the body under my fingers felt like my own. This didn’t happen with a man, with a man’s body, because it couldn’t. She was a heat I wanted to be inside, a hot bath. Her pelvis rose under my hand, pressure meeting pressure. Her thighs shook as she came. In the dark I beamed, phosphorescent with her pleasure. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I never entered her, and I never tried. She was naked with me only once, the first time we had sex. On that occasion I’d cupped my hand around her breast, felt her flinch. Do you like this? I asked. Should I not? No, no—it’s fine. No, but do you like having your breasts touched? I want to know what you like. Yeah, she said. I do. But there was something here. Did she not feel safe? Had I done something, had something happened to her? Was there something about her body—her breasts, her vagina, the womanly costume of her skin? I tried to ask. Queer sex isn’t like straight sex, she said. You can’t just rip each other’s clothes off. Y-You can’t? I stammered. Could this be right? I know some queer people, I thought. I’ve read books, watched shows, seen movies. I’m pretty sure queer people do rip each other’s clothes off sometimes. Why make some broad claim about queerness? That can’t be true, can it? Irritation prickled at the back of my throat. If she needs sex to be a certain way, why doesn’t she just say it? Or maybe she is saying it. Yes. She is saying what she wants. She is telling me about herself to the best of her ability. I felt the irritation give way to shame, hard as a lozenge. I didn’t know how to be queer. I didn’t know anything. What do you mean exactly, I asked, about not ripping each other’s clothes off? I don’t understand. Are you talking about consent? Queer sex just doesn’t work this way, she said. I wanted our sex to be a conversation, but we talked more than we fucked. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Kind of gross, even dangerous, isn’t it, to bitch about a woman who won’t have sex with you? I felt gross for wanting anything. Nora could do, or not do, whatever she pleased with her body. She was a person, not my fantasy. Surely she’d be happier with a person who knew the rules. But I wanted to be her person, and she seemed to want me to be. I wasn’t good, but she could make me good. I should hurry to catch up, to get it right.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This statement raises difficult and disturbing questions about how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were interpreted within British colonial thinking and practice concerning the role of ‘favoured races’ in Australia and New Zealand. Wallace concluded his lecture with some significant reflections on where accepting ‘natural selection’ as a biological and cultural metanarrative pointed, including his suggestion that ‘it must inevitably follow that the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races.’9 Wallace’s lecture creates the impression that there is scientific justification for the historical inevitability of the triumph of intellectually and morally superior Europeans over ‘mentally undeveloped populations’ or ‘savages,’10 thus improving the human condition. Darwin himself entertained similar ideas. In a letter of 1862 to Charles Kingsley – to which the Darwin Correspondence Project wisely attaches a ‘Content Warning’ on account of the unsettling views it expressed – Darwin concurs with Kingsley’s remarks (which appear to have been widespread in educated British circles of this period) that in 500 years ‘the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.’11 Most evolutionary biologists today would reject these historically specific interpretations and applications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It is, however, important to note the intellectual plausibility and cultural prominence of these interpretations in the 1860s and 1870s, and the perception that they created or encouraged – namely, that colonialism would lead to the improvement of the human race. Wallace’s specific (and demeaning) references to ‘the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander’ can hardly be overlooked. What can be learned from this? For Coyne, the integrity of the natural sciences is at stake; for others, there is a real problem arising from the abiding historical memory of the way in which science was deployed as a legitimating resource by British colonial administrators and educationalists to suppress indigenous beliefs and peoples in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth century. Anyone concerned with the public understanding of science needs to confront the ways it has been exploited, abused and distorted in the service of political and social agendas. To indigenous populations, Darwinism turned out to be yet another aspect of the western colonial attempt to deny or eliminate ‘the knowledge and cultures of these populations, their memories and ancestral links and their manner of relating to others and to nature.’12 For these people, mātauranga Māori was identity-giving, essential to their future survival and flourishing, and part of their self-understanding as a distinct people group. It is not a ‘fixed’ form of detached knowledge, but is a form of embodied knowledge, understanding, wisdom and practices which is intergenerational, being expanded as it is passed on. Yet there are clear possibilities for dialogue with other approaches here – for example, in the emerging discipline of ‘ethnoastronomy’, which allows dialogue between the ancestral Polynesian astronomical knowledge systems and their western counterparts.13

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  You are not unique. You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship. It is only in the context of a kinder attitude toward ourselves that we can consider the importance of transcending the ego. The religions often speak of putting the self to death; Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion and teach a doctrine of “no-self” ( anatta ). Modern neuroscientists would agree: they can find nothing in the intricate activity of the brain that they can pin down and call a “self” or a “soul.” But anatta is primarily a mythos calling Buddhists to action: we have to live as though the self did not exist, cutting through the self-obsession that causes so much pain. When the masters of the spiritual life ask us to transcend the ego, they want us to get beyond the grasping, frightened, angry self that often seeks to destroy others in order to ensure its own survival, prosperity, and success. This is indispensable to enlightenment. When the Dalai Lama called for a spiritual revolution on the eve of the third millennium, he explained that this did not mean embracing a particular religious creed. Rather, it would be based on a “radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self.” 9 This does not mean that we should recoil from ourselves with disgust, put ourselves down at every turn, and become hyperconscious of our faults. If we do this, there is a danger that we will simply become excessively self- conscious, mired in the insecure ego we are trying to transcend. The faith traditions agree that compassion is the most reliable way of putting the self in its proper place, because it requires us “all day and every day” to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there. As the Dalai Lama made plain, the reorientation away from self is essentially “a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.” 10 Compassion, he said, was impossible without self-restraint, because “we cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.”

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín was born into a diverse parish where nearly 40% of the children were illegitimate and biracial, like him. His mother was a servant in the household of Isabel Garcia Michel. We can assume that as a young child, he would have accompanied her about her tasks: cooking, cleaning, and perhaps watching the family’s children. Martín left no writings of his own, as he remained illiterate throughout his life. We know about him primarily through the testimony and hagiographies written by his many admirers in the decades after his death. These are problematic, of course, in the ways already discussed for other saints: They frame his life in terms of common saintly tropes. But they add an additional layer of complexity, viewing Martín through their prejudices about Afro-Peruvians’ social status, piety, and abilities. Lima was a remarkably integrated city, and young Martín would’ve been familiar with Spaniards, Creoles, Indians, and free and enslaved Afro-Peruvians. Despite this spatial integration, the ugly racism that accompanied European conquests and the exploitation of native and African labor pervaded Limeño society and Martín’s life. At one end of the social spectrum were the wealthy Spaniards, European elites who could freely access government positions, higher education, and a bevy of legal rights. At the other end were enslaved Africans and their descendants. Indians occupied a middle status—not enslaved, but not possessing full legal status and rights. Free biracial or mixed-race people, such as Martín and Juana, inhabited a fluid middle sphere—barred from many career paths and opportunities but extended comparatively more privileges and access by the Spaniards than their enslaved and free Black relatives. The racist concepts that permeated early modern colonial society also permeated religious language and ideas. The only positive Black models Martín may have heard promoted in public discourse were “exemplary” servants and slaves who were compliant, diligent, subservient, and pious. These undoubtedly shaped his sense of self and damaged his self-worth. Martín seems to have shown an early interest in a career as a healer, and his mother’s employer helped him get an apprenticeship with either an apothecary or barber. Even if his father had sponsored his education, however, Martín would have been barred from a career as a doctor. 97 13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru 98