The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

the origin of the sarcasm is anxiety—

he was seized, however briefly, by an experience of prosody.

as psychotherapists, they were much less afraid of open conflict than of the prospect of a kid withdrawing, disappearing into his room, into himself, a lost boy. As long as there was language, there was processing;

When you have looked at a shiny, new automobile, have you ever stopped to think that, through all the countless thousands of generations that preceded this century, not even the most powerful kings on earth could have owned one like it?

this vacuum at the heart of privilege,

Klaus was always joking; Klaus was never joking—what underwrote the irony was a sense of the absurdity of having survived, or the absurd suggestion that anyone survives, even if they go on breathing, or the absurdity that language could be much more than noise after the coop, after the camps.

whenever I admired a painting or something, she’d say, “Take it, it’s yours, I’d love you to have it”—as if she were saying goodbye to the world, divesting.

could express to you how wonderfully Sima handled silence, how she calibrated it, how she somehow made you feel heard, met you wherever you were

From a family systems perspective, a lot has been lost with landlines. Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.

deep—a bone-deep—allergy to anything that smacked of mystification, to the way professional jargon—especially, but not only, of the analytical sort—could be deployed to dismiss women as hysterics; this was related to what had happened with my father, all the secrecy and gaslighting abuse involves.

archaic regression of overkill, a term that dates from 1946; every opponent must be spread; every offense, however minor, leads to holocaust.

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them. More often we fed them.

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you.

(The child is father to the man.)

But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air,

what a particularly insane century to have spanned, to be born in the early days of automobiles and airplanes and now to be FaceTiming