Sublime

what you see on the surface is a child’s behavior and that what you don’t see is the child’s legitimate need for our shared support and regulation of those needs.

attention to what he was

Many men who have retired from jobs, particularly men over sixty in our culture, often feel that aging allows them to break free of the patriarchy. With time on their hands, they are often compelled by extreme loneliness, alienation, a crisis of meaning, or other circumstances, to develop emotional selves. They are the elders who can speak to young

The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man,” the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school pr

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words.

represented my worst fear; that I’d be seen as an inexperienced, faltering child when I wanted to be seen as an authoritative expert.

Freud’s centralizing of the Oedipus complex structures the human psyche around a question of personal guilt: “He . . . placed the questions ‘What have I done?,’ ‘Am I a criminal?,’ . . . at the heart of self-inquiry.”

for a deeply oral culture this interiority derives not from a belief that the mind is located within us, but from a felt sense that we are located within it, carnally immersed in an awareness that is not ours, but is rather the Eairth’s.

I began to ask myself questions like “What makes a group lively and engaged?” instead of “How good am I?” So palpable was the difference in my approach to conducting as a result of this “silent conductor” insight, that players in the orchestra started asking me, “What happened to you?”