Paradise Of Love And Pain

Ellen Peng straddles two inescapable complexities in her young life and family – her status as the first born and role model for her younger siblings and her very complicated relationship with her mother, Lydia who’s chosen to jeopardize her own future and that of her entire family. Lydia orchestrates the death of her husband in order to accommodate Tom, a younger, able-bodied and attractive lover in her life. Her insatiable epicurean lifestyle, coupled with her longing for self-aggrandizement make up the ingredients for her atrocious choices. How would Ellen respond to Tom and Lydia’s cat and mouse games that potentially, could lead to abysmal psycho-social suffering for the family and the larger community?

The remarkable memoir of healing and forgiveness from Julie Chimes, who survived a horrific stabbing on her own driveway In 1986, Julie Chimes allowed an emotionally distressed acquaintance to wait in her cottage for Julie's doctor boyfriend to return. Before he could, the woman - who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and, unknown to all, had stopped taking her medication - attacked Julie with a carving knife. This book describes what happened in detail, and the long period of healing and coming to terms with the attack that followed. Julie tells of her out-of-body experiences during the crisis, as well as the dreams and premonitions leading up to it. She describes what it feels like to die, and then unforeseeably, to live to tell the tale. But most remarkably of all, she tells of her hardest journey: learning to forgive.

"A new collection of poetry by CAConrad"--

He collected beautiful things. Rare things. Ripped them out of their natural environment and preserved them in all of their dead splendor. The problem was I wasn't beautiful. I was all of the hideous and ugly realities of the world packaged into one broken human being. He came to kill me. That was his business. Death. He ripped me out of my natural environment, the prison I'd created, and locked me away with all of his beautiful dead things. I hated him. I still hate him. But if I was given the choice and the ability to leave this cage, come back to life, I'd stay dead. In all of my hideous splendor. Because my murderer can only possess dead things. And I can only be possessed by someone more broken and ugly than me.

Examines the ways in which the idea of an earthly paradise inspired English life and thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife One of Behavioral Scientist's "Notable Books of 2021" From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists—a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty—and worse than that, boring.