Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

 "Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other."

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

"Not a single cell of his body was the same as it had been in 1995, but he was still himself, just  as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there."

"I could still tell you a few of them, the stalwart trees of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodroot. 

"Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light"

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

 "It was a precious gift when another person loved your child. You yourself felt loved."

"Every bookish girl in the world in the world is Jane Eyre. Every girl who wants to be good, anyway."

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

 “Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult… I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine, where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the drying room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them.”

Flat Share by Beth O’Leary

 “We all descend into the kind of silence that comes after you’ve talked about something difficult, half grateful for it being over, half relieved to have managed it at all.”

Between Us

 "Emotions are part and parcel of our social and cultural lives, and they are shaped by our cultures and communities. The differences in emotions go beyond merely superficial differences in manifestation--emotions not only look different; the differences pertain to the very constituent processes and the course of the emotion itself.

"But wait. Is it possible that people across cultures have different emotions? Doesn't the human body prepare us for emotions? It does and it doesn't. Our brains and bodies do not come pre-wired for certain emotions, but they do prepare us each to have emotions that maximally serve us in our respective social and material lives--emotions that are adjusted to our communities and cultures. Int he most up-to-date science, nature is no longer contrasted with nurture; it is equipped for nurture" (18). 

"Any community that provides a set of experiences, understandings of the world, relationship practices, moral sensitivities, and values and goals may shape the emotions we have as individuals. Different cohorts, different socioeconomic groups, different religions, different gender cultures, and even different family cultures may provide emotions with their meaning" (20).

"When people come to the conclusion that others have feelings just like them, that conclusion may stem from their own projections" (21). 

"Emotions--our own included--are as dependent on our cultures as our clothes, our language, and the foods we feed our children" (22). 

MINE model:

OURS model

"..a MINE model of emotions prevails in Western contexts. Having the emotions that are required by others or by the setting is thought to be demanding and unnatural in MINE contexts. It is quite the norm in contexts that favor an OURS model" (42-43). She gives the example of a Buddhist family who just found out their family member's illness was terminal. "Despite the general state of devastation, Sen's relatives 'crafted their emotions so that they could accept what happened... Sen's father and sister went to the temple to make offerings every morning. His sister, brother, relatives, and friends, at least at first, for the most part, displayed what seemed to be blank faces: faces that did not show emotion at all.' Cassanti assures us that the blank faces of Sen's friends and family neither meant that they were indifferent, nor that they just faked it for others' benefit. Instead, she writes, they were working towards a state that they felt to be appropriate--to accept what happened (tham jai) and to be calm (jai yen)" (43). Later she describes this as "they did what needed to be done, and their feelings mostly followed. The emotion was outside in" (45). 

"When an OURS model of emotions prevails, emotional acting is Situated: individuals accommodate to the social norms, expectations, and roles in their social context. What matters is whether your emotions match up to others' needs and expectations, whether you fit with the norms, and whether you fulfill your role" (45). 

Ifaluk- Micronesian island in southwest Pacific-fago- mix of compassion, love, and sadness

"A final reflection on the terms emotional expression and emotional suppression is that they may themselves be suggestive of a MINE model of emotions. They imply that there is a deep inner feeling that wants to come out, or alternatively, has to be actively suppressed. Expression and suppression privilege a view of emotions as inside the person, and naturally wanting to come out. When emotions are conceived of as acts between people, rather than feelings within, then no 'expression' is naturally privileged over another. There is no essence to be expressed. There is no reason to assume that any emotional act is more authentic, or to the contrary, less. There is also no reason to think it is unnatural to meet social expectations. If emotions live between people, then why would yelling in anger be any more natural than Hiroto and Chiemi's accommodation to the expectations of their environments? Why would silently mourning by yourself be any more natural than wailing with the professional mourners?" (49)

"Consistently, where MINE models dominate, emotion suppression is both less frequent and more harmful to psychological and relational well-being than where OURS models dominate. When a culture's focus is inward, emotions are different from when it is outward" (50).

"There are several striking examples from research within Western Europe and the United States showing that emotions that are rewarded will become habitual. Temper tantrums occur more among children whose parents give in to their desires...." (53, emphasis mine).

"In a culture where happiness, success, and excitement are central goals, feeling good about yourself is indispensable" (56, emphasis mine). 

"[In Minangkabau and Taiwanese children cultures] Shame highlights your proper place in an unalienable social network, rather than focusing on rejection or isolation. It reminds you how to behave in the network, but it does not push you out....Shame strengthens the bonds between people, rather than reflecting a potential threat to them" (62).

"Implicit is the shame-sharing: the child's shameful behavior reflects badly on their parents and family... the bond between the child and the parent remains intact. It is not the mom rejecting the child, but the child and the mom jointly having to meet external demands. There is a basic alliance between the child and their parents (or relatives). This alliance makes for the wider impact of norm violations, but also means that shame is not nearly as threatening as it is in Western cultures" (63).

"Having shame is seen as a virtue: it reveals that you have a sense of social norms, and it will prevent you from violating these norms...[and] keeps you from misconduct that would have led to social exclusion" (63-64). 

"Becoming part of a culture means having certain kinds of emotions rather than others. Which kinds of emotions are foregrounded depends on the type of adult that is valued. In communities that foreground individual achievement, children need to feel good about themselves (pride). In communities that value obedience, or view the world as a dangerous place, children need to know fear. Communities focusing on propriety encourage shame. Inducing a given emotion is never good or bad in broad terms, but good or bad in a certain cultural context of community, depending on the goals of child-rearing. Beating and inducing fear, are not bad in general, but bad in a culture that values self-confident and self-propelled children. (White American middle-class families constitute one such context)" (81, emphases mine). 

What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry

"To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound" (7).

"It is despair that sees the work failing in one's own failure.

This despair is the awkardest pride of all" (13).

Quoting the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:  "Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as they servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men."

"What is astonishing about this prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations now are divided,almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior" (101).

"The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess or which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators. We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us are even unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. IN my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous 'necessities' as possible--and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and 'appliances' designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away" (127). 

"I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of 'more jobs' as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it" (128).

"'This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.' Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837... When he uttered it, he may well have been remembering Romans 4:11: 'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' That God created 'all things' is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things over others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so. That God created all things for his pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please him, is a formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible from the 'anthropocentric' utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians" (138). 

"It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that ehse are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, an dour dwelling places to consumption. And this accounts for the accelerating division of our country into defeated landscapes and victorious (but threatened) landscapes.

"More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that is we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement... We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them" (140).

"The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp" (151).

"To have everything but money is to have much" (159).

"In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another. When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of 'raw material,' human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more interest in salaries and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers--which may be true, but education cannot be improved, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition of excellence--and this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed 'career preparation' designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.

"Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this education have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological. 

"The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That was the old norm.

"The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.

"And its interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and occupational distance between parents and children may account for the peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates parental rule, and to look on its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis on 'this year's model,' or the preoccupation of the professional 'educators' with theoretical and methodological innovation. Similarly, in modern literature we have had for many years an emphasis on 'originality' and 'the anxiety of influence' (an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say to Spenser's filial admiration to Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.

"But if the new normal interrupts the development of the relation between children and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community, destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place. It does not good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that make up local cultures and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store--because they cannot know--the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of local culture and that  brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead" (166). 

"Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of 'macho' men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs-- they mutter, 'Thank God it's Friday' and 'Pretty good for Monday'--but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness...These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they will do whatever they are told. They know that their ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be somebody else's tool. Is it any wonder that they talk rough and worship athletes and cowboys? Is it any wonder that some of them are violent?" (185).

"A broader, deeper criticism is necessary. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else" (185). 

"The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers" (198).

"Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or to the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, 'the least of these my brethren.' Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when it is compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded" (200).

"We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.

"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do" (201).