BEL MOONEY: How can my faith survive if religion is so twisted and abusive?
I never thought I'd be writing to an advice column but there is no one else I can talk to about this.
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
I spoke for my brother when he was too afraid to answer — now, he speaks in melodies, and I have learned to listen
When my brother was small, he barely spoke, and certainly never around strangers. He could speak, there was no developmental delay, he just mostly chose not to. We were close in age, under two years apart, and – out in the world – I spoke for him. This is, perhaps, a common dynamic: chatty big sister, quiet little brother. I was sometimes reprimanded by well-meaning strangers. 'Stop talking over your brother,' they'd chide. 'I asked him a question.' And I would quieten down, shamed. My brother would say nothing, but entreat me with frightened eyes to step in. As a small child, I felt my brother spoke without language. I heard his voice in my head, and I believed I was his translator. To me, this felt natural. It's easy to scoff – the delusions of childhood – but as toddlers we read everything around us. Through immersion in family, we acquire language. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Maybe, my brother's non verbal cues felt like language to me. So much of what is communicated between people involves attunement, a subtle reading of one another's emotional states, micro-expressions and non verbal cues. Perhaps I just hadn't learned to distinguish. Attuned, I read him as if he was speaking. We'd always been close, but in adolescence our world was engulfed by grief. We lost my sister and father to suicide, six years apart, while we staggered towards adulthood. I became quieter, but my brother was almost mute. During this time, he was learning guitar, and his music rose to fill the space. The language of loss, the language of yearning. So plaintiff, so expressive. There are other ways to speak. Unlike me, my brother doesn't remember much of our childhood. Trauma has erased it, the way it sometimes seems to. He has no memory of our sister, who we lost when he was 10. In this, we are opposites. For years now I have been writing about what happened in my family – in memoir, in fiction, in essays. Each memory glistens like a pearl on a string. Sometimes, I mourn that he has lost the memory of how adored he was. Baby brother, slant-eyed-smiler, boy of few words. Always the easiest of humans to love. When he read my memoir, Staying, he said, 'You've given me back my childhood'. I'm not so deluded that I don't see that I'd only given him mine. Nowadays, my brother is a man who leaves space for silence. If you want to hear him speak you must learn to be quiet. I have taught myself how to bite my tongue. And, there is always the music. Joy, wonder, melancholy, sadness, drama, so much drama. Tension, release, surprise, awe. My brother's music moves through many moods. In song, his vocabulary is vast, his story unique. All instrumental, it speaks of many influences. The sounds of our childhood. Dylan, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Neil Young, CNSY, Joe Cocker, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Holiday, early pre-disco Bee Gees, The Beatles, Bob Marley, early Paul Kelly, Paul Simon, Judy Garland, John Lennon, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, Sade, and Sting. Listening, you can catch hints of all this, plus the intensity of an inner world rarely expressed verbally. It's alive, it's pulsing. All the history, all the feeling. In books, I gave him my childhood. In music, he gives me his. Here I am, still talking for him! I hear those well-meaning adults from our childhood: 'I asked him a question.' Go! Go listen to his songs! Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning
Times
2 days ago
- Times
You've been digitally dumped — the great ghosting epidemic
Forget shark fins and leggy spiders, in our digital world there are few sights more nerve-racking than two grey ticks side by side, lurking underneath an unanswered WhatsApp message. Why hasn't so-and-so replied? What terrible thing have I done to provoke the silent treatment? Sometimes the answer is simply forgetfulness or a packed schedule, but when communication can so easily be instant, a person's failure to respond is often anxiously translated as: 'I hate your guts and I don't want to speak to you ever again so I'm just going to blatantly ignore you for the rest of time.' For all the sender knows, the recipient might as well be dead. This habit of people silently retreating from each other's lives — known as ghosting — is a familiar part of the modern age and a morbid symptom of the loneliness epidemic, digital devices having made it simpler to connect with people but simultaneously simpler to get rid of them without notice or reason. In his curious book Ghosting: On Disappearance the Australian author Dominic Pettman delves into the rules of disengagement. The definition of ghosting, added to the dictionary in 2012, is 'the action of ignoring or pretending not to know a person, especially that of suddenly ceasing to respond'. But Pettman, whose full job title is (take a deep breath here) university professor of media and new humanities and chair of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, has a more evocative take. Ghosting is the creation of empty space, he says, 'not unlike the chalk outline found at a murder scene'. Cutting off all contact allows the disappearing person to end their existence without any of 'the inconvenience of actually dying'. To help us to understand the origins of this universally depressing yet increasingly widespread digital habit, Pettman cobbles together a short history, emphasising that the 'ancient experience' is 'inscribed in Greek myths, Chinese sagas and African folk tales'. For many centuries, ghosting used to be a synonym for death, he reveals, a clever verb for ceasing to be alive. Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra writes: 'Julius Caesar/ Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted.' The first use of the term in its contemporary sense appeared in the 1983 novel Gardens of Stone by Nicholas Proffitt: 'Where's Wildman? If that sad sack is ghosting again, I'll have his butt on a biscuit for breakfast.' Our modern version, Pettman argues, of ignoring WhatsApps or secretly muting Instagram followers simply updates the phenomenon for 'fluorescent-lit modernity'. The most widely despised form of ghosting is romantic. In the analogue days it used to be relatively simple to fade into the background if a potential suitor did something to put you off. But since communication is now so rapid and so easy, 'a modern ghost must be diligent about ignoring calls, texts, emails, messages, pokes, prods'. Even with the most concerted efforts at disappearing, today's ghosters often fail to make themselves disappear completely. A plethora of other metaphoric verbs — orbiting, benching, submarining — describe how former flames with whom it is impossible to make contact still loom in our TikTok feeds and LinkedIn notifications. 'We have normalised the ubiquitous, ongoing half-lives of voices long gone, faces long vanished and thoughts long ceased.' Other kinds of ghosting — familial, platonic, professional, social — find a place in Pettman's guide too, each becoming increasingly common in 'our age of ever-loosening social ties'. From the 'deadbeat dad who abandons his family' — historical examples include Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 'who convinced his wife to abandon all five of their children at a foundling facility in Paris' — to companies failing to send follow-up emails after job interviews and friends who, while never actively breaking away, reduce their effort to the bare minimum, replying to messages 'belatedly, dutifully and perhaps even a little resentfully'. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Pettman tries hard to be literary. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn't. He describes the pain of getting ghosted, for example, as being 'washed ashore on the melancholy sands of our own solitude', which I could have done without. But he does seem to have a sense of humour, which ties the book together. His list of just about acceptable reasons for ghosting someone includes 'listening to Joe Rogan, admiring Elon Musk, or discussing the finer details of bitcoin' and among his conclusions about what is to be done about it is a 'global seance'. An eclectic series of case studies manages to incorporate both the Sex and the City TV series, specifically when Carrie gets dumped via Post-it Note, and the much misquoted Margaret Thatcher speech that 'there is no such thing as society', which he boldly claims 'inaugurated' our brutal culture of withdrawing without explanation. The most worthwhile parts of this study of ghosting are where Pettman gets specific about why ghosting is, and has always been, such a cruel act — the ghoster escapes 'with the entire relationship rolled up under their arm', leaving no tangible marker that the pair of you ever knew each other, no permanent proof 'locked on the railings of picturesque European bridges'. Ghosting, he argues, is 'a form of auto-gaslighting, as you begin to entertain the dreadful possibility that you simply invented an imaginary companion, even as a fully fledged adult'. I know I'm not the only one who will be glad someone finally put that strange feeling into words. Ghosting: On Disappearance by Dominic Pettman (Polity £12.99 pp110). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Real Madrid v Borussia Dortmund: Club World Cup quarter-final
Update: Date: 2025-07-05T19:00:17.000Z Title: Alex will be here shortly. Content: In the meantime here's Sid Lowe's latest dispatch.
