Jonathan Rosen Quotes

Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.

Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.

Hollywood culture is a universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to recieve new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for

Balzac’s assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime,

The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.

There are no true animal models for the disease. You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder.

Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.

It was easy to say that Michael had lost his mind, but his mind was the only instrument he had for locating what he’d lost. Knowing and not knowing were gray areas to begin with, shot through with ignorance and denial.

In my tradition, God revealed Himself in words and lives in stories and, no, you cannot touch or even see Him. The Word, in Judaism, was never made flesh. The closest God came to embodiment was in the Temple in Jerusalem...But the Temple was destroyed. In Judaism, the flesh became words. Words were the traditional refuge of the Jewish people - Yochanan ben Zakkai led a yeshiva, my father became a professor. And little boys, in the Middle Ages, ate cakes with verses inscribed on them, an image I find deeply moving and, somehow, deeply depressing. This might help explain a certain melancholy quality books in general, for all their bright allure, have always had for me. As many times as I went down to my parents' library for comfort, I would find myself standing in front of the books and could almost feel them turning back into trees, failing me somehow.

Try to be one of the people,” said Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost.” As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.

There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to 'go back eighteen rows,' and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: 'It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.' Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can't resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will.

The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?

As it turned out, Mary Jo White and other attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue had been quietly negotiating with the Trump administration for months. Inside the DOJ, the line prosecutors who had assembled both the civil and the criminal cases started to experience tremendous pressure from the political leadership to wrap up their investigations of Purdue and the Sacklers prior to the 2020 presidential election in November. A decision had been made at high levels of the Trump administration that this matter would be resolved quickly and with a soft touch. Some of the career attorneys at Justice were deeply unhappy with this move, so much so that they wrote confidential memos registering their objections, to preserve a record of what they believed to be a miscarriage of justice. One morning two weeks before the election, Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy attorney general for the Trump administration, convened a press conference in which he announced a “global resolution” of the federal investigations into Purdue and the Sacklers. The company was pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as to two counts of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-kickback Statute, Rosen announced. No executives would face individual charges. In fact, no individual executives were mentioned at all: it was as if the corporation had acted autonomously, like a driverless car. (In depositions related to Purdue’s bankruptcy which were held after the DOJ settlement, two former CEOs, John Stewart and Mark Timney, both declined to answer questions, invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.) Rosen touted the total value of the federal penalties against Purdue as “more than $8 billion.” And, in keeping with what had by now become a standard pattern, the press obligingly repeated that number in the headlines. Of course, anyone who was paying attention knew that the total value of Purdue’s cash and assets was only around $1 billion, and nobody was suggesting that the Sacklers would be on the hook to pay Purdue’s fines. So the $8 billion figure was misleading, much as the $10–$12 billion estimate of the value of the Sacklers’ settlement proposal had been misleading—an artificial number without any real practical meaning, designed chiefly to be reproduced in headlines. As for the Sacklers, Rosen announced that they had agreed to pay $225 million to resolve a separate civil charge that they had violated the False Claims Act. According to the investigation, Richard, David, Jonathan, Kathe, and Mortimer had “knowingly caused the submission of false and fraudulent claims to federal health care benefit programs” for opioids that “were prescribed for uses that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary.” But there would be no criminal charges. In fact, according to a deposition of David Sackler, the Department of Justice concluded its investigation without so much as interviewing any member of the family. The authorities were so deferential toward the Sacklers that nobody had even bothered to question them.

Call it the Darwinian contradiction. We come down from the trees and walk upright and what do we get for it? Foot pain! Bad backs! We cease living sexual lives regulated by mating seasons, by hormonal tides or the rotation of the earth and what happens? Marital misery. Divorce. Rape.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for life.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.

All mankind is of one author and is one volume,” John Donne wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. “When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.

Ninety minutes later, at the end of class: ‘Here’s your first exercise. I know this will surprise you a little. But I want you to each write a poem about your crime.’ ‘What?’ says Abe Rosen. 
 ‘About your crime, specifically.’ ‘A poem about fraudulent bank applications?’ asks Nadler.

The disappearance of rugelach. Blintzes. Then Dmitri. Then his deli. It’s all a little Kafkaesque,’ says Abe Rosen gloomily.

The psychiatrists lobbying for the Durham decision had broadened their own mandate from illness to mental health, and from the individual to society, and were arguing for a system that would treat crime the same way. If crime was a symptom of illness, then perpetrators were also victims, or at least bystanders of their own behavior. Doctors would act like lawyers, offering exonerating explanations of illness, while lawyers would become like doctors, demanding treatment in place of prison for those who could be healed instead of punished. As expert witnesses, psychiatrists would explain to the jury how a particular disorder, in combination with specific environmental factors, had produced behavior for which a defendant could hardly be held responsible. They would also provide the remedy, which would allow the perpetrator turned patient to return quickly to society as a productive member.

After watching Huxley turn his model psychosis into a spiritual journey, Dr. Osmond agreed that hallucinatory distortions were in fact something more than mere symptoms. With Huxley’s assistance, he came up with the word “psychedelic,” which means “mind manifesting.

these are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality.

came away with a few metaphorically memorable concepts, including the bizarre proposition that two particles could become “entangled” at the quantum level in such a way that anything you did to one particle would happen to the other. Even if they were banished to opposite ends of the universe, they behaved like reciprocating voodoo dolls or invisibly conjoined twins bound to each other’s fate despite billions of light-years between them. Quantum entanglement was so weird that Einstein called it “spooky actions at a distance,

The children of divorce often had a jilted, defiant aura I envied. They’d learned from warring, unfaithful, self-actualizing mothers and fathers to grab what they could, combining middle-aged desperation and adolescent impulse. Their boldness propelled them toward experiences everyone wanted, even as it set them apart, and you could never be entirely sure whether they were pursuing pleasure or self-destruction. The confusion was part of the fascination.

He was in his thirties by the time he found the courage, with the help of a psychiatrist, to quit his job, move to San Francisco, live an openly gay life, and write about how he saw “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Most Beat writers had hatched out of asylums, and it was never clear to me if they were the best minds before that happened or because of it.

If it turned out stories really did write me, instead of the other way around, let me at least choose the ones that spoke to my soul.

The protesters who had tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, with the aid of Allen Ginsberg’s chanting, had somehow lifted up the Kremlin and tipped it over instead. It wasn’t their politics; it was their blue jeans. And the music, which hadn’t died after all.

In other words, I knew the family wasn’t a bourgeois impediment to progress, or a tool of capitalist oppression, but a life raft of resistance in a sea of state tyranny. It was how you preserved and passed on values worth dying for, and was itself one of those values.

in the timelessness of God, future people are as important as we are.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. . . . —Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back,

It was one thing to recognize the terrible toll they could take on the people inside them, and that, thanks in part to new medications, a majority of people with schizophrenia no longer needed to live there. It was something else to know what could replace the state system without destroying the idea of asylum that had given rise to it in the first place, or harming the people the system had been created to help. Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.

cure, but 25 percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recovered completely within the first two years, a surprising and hopeful statistic often drowned out by the dread sound of the diagnosis.

delusion is only a delusion if you don’t think it’s a delusion.

Michael had carried a knife, and slept with a baseball bat, because he thought his parents had been replaced by surgically altered Nazis who had murdered them and wanted to kill him.

The welfare office made the DMV look like a Swiss bank,

His pride had always been in being among the facilitators of other people’s civil rights, not the beneficiary of their advocacy.

Soloveitchik,

These dramatic cases—Weston, Laudor, Ted Kaczynski or John Hinckley—are not the typical stories of schizophrenia. Mostly it is a story of quiet suffering.

Michael wanted out of his prison but he also wanted to confess his crimes. He’d been “riding high on a certain presentation of myself,” he said.

Dr. Ferber had arrived at the melancholy conclusion that there were some people who could not be healed even by a spiritual community dedicated to love, but needed to go to the hospital for treatment.

schizophrenic,’ ” Foderaro

As my father sometimes said, quoting a Hasidic story about a rich man who lives like a poor man out of sympathy, it was better for the rich to eat cake, because when they ate only bread, the poor ate stones.

the aftermath of Watergate, the Senate’s Church Committee discovered five administrations’ worth of spy agency malfeasance, including the revelation that the CIA had tested mind-altering drugs on American citizens without their knowledge, a veritable Bay of Guinea Pigs sparked by fears during the Korean War that Chinese and Soviet scientists were brainwashing captured American soldiers. One former CIA agent testified that the illicit doping continued long after it was clear there were no mind-control chemicals, because the movie version of The Manchurian Candidate came out, and it “made something impossible look plausible.” Michael and I were children of a time when a “thought experiment” meant something more than Einstein imagining a beam of light on a trolley. A movie about a foreign conspiracy to brainwash Americans and destroy the country had served as

Madness calls literature’s bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time. When Bloom wrote that “schizophrenia is bad poetry, for the schizophrenic has lost the strength of perverse, wilful, misprision,” he meant that in order to read something “wrong,” there had to be a way to read it right. There had to be truth, whether or not you acknowledged it, instead of mere illusion.

Art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies.

In that twilight mood it was impossible for me to think about anyone without becoming them for a moment, a frighteningly porous state I feared was a kind of madness in itself, until morning came and dispelled it.

One generation’s brainwashing was another generation’s mental hygiene. This, too, shaped our world. The psychiatrist’s office ransacked in 1971, with its broken file cabinet (now in the Smithsonian), turns out to be a fitter symbol than the hotel burgled in 1972, not only of the decade’s political fiascoes, and the years leading up to them, but of disasters yet to come whose seeds were already planted.

When I told my Berkeley therapist that I was having panic attacks in the elevator of International House, he asked me why, as if they were voluntary. He cut me off before I could point the finger at childhood beatings, the Holocaust, or the Freudian saga of the dwarf cherry tree from Cooper’s Nursery that turned out to be full-size, outraging my mother, who had me lop the top off every fall. “Here’s why,” he said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against the dome of his conveniently shaven head, high above his eyes. “They’re called frontal lobes.” I laughed but he did not. It was a simple fact, he said, that the brain had evolved in stages and the parts fit together badly. Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble. Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.

how a cruel culture betrays its best minds and drives them into conformity and madness.

Along with his familiar confidence, there was an unfamiliar undertow of agitation pulling everything he said in the opposite direction. He

I thought the salt was arsenic,” Michael told me once. “I thought pepper was the ashes of our people.” “What do you do with a thought like that?” I asked him. “Suffer.

G.I. Joes or cap guns, as if the war were sustained by the passions of boys rather than the cold calculations of Ivy League technocrats scheduling our deaths.

To which the guru, much like R. D. Laing, had replied that for the sensitive and intelligent person living in a crazy world, the choices were madness, suicide, or becoming a sannyasin, a follower of his teaching.

it was a “fact of social evolution,” as Nunn put it in 1920, that “spiritual leadership is the work of the few” to feel rightfully singled out.

Thinking

The aesthetics alone are inspiring. New York–based photographer Richard Barnes, best known for his starkly artistic portraits of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, released a captivating collection of black-and-white images of starling flocks over Rome in 2005. His photos are carefully framed against urban horizons. Some are simply beautiful, others sinister and Hitchcockian, but all are somehow magnetic (more on that later). In a statement accompanying Barnes’s images, author Jonathan Rosen observes, “Part of the fascination of the starlings is the way they seem to be inscribing some sort of language in the air, if only we could read it.

I understood that theory was a tool of my new profession, but at Berkeley the handle was bigger than the pot. It was also more exciting.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had served on President Kennedy’s mental health task force as a young assistant secretary of labor, had also received a pen at the signing of the bill, which he’d helped draft. Years later, as a senator from New York, he looked back at that moment with deep regret. In a letter to the Times, written in a city “filled with homeless, deranged people,” he wondered what would have happened if someone had told President Kennedy, “Before you sign the bill you should know that we are not going to build anything like the number of community centers we will need. One in five in New York City. The hospitals will empty out, but there will be no place for the patients to be cared for in their communities.” If the president had known, Moynihan wrote, “would he not have put down his pen?

Without a fuller understanding of the nature of serious mental illness, how could people help those who suffered from it? Or appreciate the way prisons were replacing mental hospitals if they didn’t understand the elevated risk of violence among a portion of the population with serious mental illness who didn’t take medication when they needed it, didn’t know they needed it, or didn’t respond to it if they did take it? Or understand that using recreational drugs, including marijuana, increased the odds of becoming psychotic for those already predisposed, and the chances of becoming violent for those already ill?

Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system. The wall dividing many things—including the asylum and the street—had come down while we were growing up. So had the distinction between severe mental illness and what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life.

The Center Cannot Hold,

I lay in bed listening to the keys of her manual machine rapping on the paper like heavy rain falling on a tin roof.

The curse of Greek tragedy, “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” was erased. Now, madness was the first step to recovery, even if it sounded more like philosopher-assisted suicide.

Still, the story hangs over her memoir, and over the history of law and psychiatry, whose marriage, divorce, and rapprochement are still wending their slow, uncertain way through the courts. The young man had needed psychiatric help but had received legal help. Now he needed legal help. Perhaps in jail he would receive psychiatric help.

He carries me on his back the way Aeneas carried Anchises,

I would rather have Zelda a sane mystic than a mad realist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald told his wife’s psychiatrist.

that being a man was itself a risk factor for violence,

gamine

The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.

The only people for me are the mad ones.

Lose your mind to come to your senses.

Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble.

shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones.

They’re called “phylacteries” in English, a Greek word Michael and I turned into “prophylacteries”—spiritual condoms—which we found hilarious.

Progressive Era reformers saw themselves as the ones needing protection, like the native plants and animals they did so much to save from invasive species. Accordingly, they granted themselves asylum, turning universities, neighborhoods, and as much of the country as possible into a walled garden. They also created hospitals, graduate schools, and public institutions, but blurred science and social science, illness, intelligence, and inferiority, and kept for themselves the power to define which was which.

Tall and ruddy in the white cable-knit fishing sweater her mother had given him for Christmas, its collar thick as an Elizabethan ruff, Michael arrived like someone carrying gifts even though his arms were empty.

At a highway lookout I stood in the oceanic updraft feeling what Jack Kerouac called “end of the continent sadness.

My mother had told me more than once about James Joyce bringing his daughter Lucia to see Carl Jung after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The writer protested that Lucia was simply doing what he did, playing with language, but Jung told Joyce that he was diving to the bottom of a river; his daughter was sinking.

Michael told me he avoided the library because the only history of England he’d found devoted many pages to Gladstone and only a few to Disraeli, which he took as evidence of antisemitism. But he said he couldn’t read anymore anyway.

You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder. Instead of a hoped-for solitary gene “causing” schizophrenia, hundreds of predisposing genes have been identified, interacting in complex and as-yet-unknown ways with environmental factors. The brain has billions of interconnected neurons.

For me, the appeal of Prozac was that it addressed the brain but required no thinking. There was no talking your way out of neurosis, no deciphering clues or tracing conflict back to unconscious childhood desire. You took a pill.

cosmetic pharmacology

Freud had insisted that every stray thought was meaningful, and even told you what the meaning was, which made the unconscious more like Levittown than an uncharted deep; you could put up your own posters but the floor plan was poured concrete. In that sense it was, like Marxism, an anti-intellectual magnet for intellectuals. Prozac wasn’t about finding meaning in mental discomfort, or thinking at all. That’s what I found so exciting.

As Eddie saw it, there are very few things that really matter in life, and if you have a few, it’s a lot.

I was aware of being afraid of Michael even as I felt love for him. Hugging him goodbye was like putting my head in the mouth of an old and toothless lion, softened by age but still capable of crushing me.

Madness calls literature’s bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time.

If the key to reducing stigma is the normalization of mental illness as a disease and not a character flaw, then surely a discussion of symptoms, treatments, and interventions is part of the process.

all the reasons people with serious mental illness were ignored: they don’t contribute to society, they don’t make money, they’re difficult, they’re disenfranchised—who’s going to pay attention to them? Until something tragic happens; then it’s a nightmare. This was the nightmare.

a comprehensive system of mental-health services, including support for parents with sick adult children who refuse treatment, doesn’t exist

He did not believe that the one thousand deaths caused each year by people with unmedicated schizophrenia should indict the vast population of those suffering from the illness, but he did want to prevent those deaths, a greater number of suicides, a growing number of mentally ill homeless people, and a prison population swelled by people suffering from mental illness who received no care.

It's true I didn't love the job, but I did want the money. If I was too incompetent for ordinary work, I would have to do something extraordinary or face destruction.

he’d recited the words that Adam speaks to Eve after she’s eaten the forbidden fruit. Adam is still unfallen but determined to share Eve’s fate.

self-confidence and faith were aspects of intelligence.

Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.