Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The steps drew nearer, and nearer, and nearer yet. Would she pass by and go on to the other room? No, the hinges creaked, and at the door her tall, graceful, languid figure appeared. In her face, in her eyes, a timidity, an insinuating expression, which she tried to hide, but which I saw, and of which I understood the meaning. I came near suffocating, such were my efforts to hold my breath, and, continuing to look at her, I took my cigarette, and lighted it. “‘What does this mean? One comes to talk with you, and you go to smoking.’ “And she sat down beside me on the sofa, resting against my shoulder. I recoiled, that I might not touch her. “‘I see that you are displeased with what I wish to play on Sunday,’ said she. “‘I am not at all displeased,’ said I. “‘Can I not see?’ “‘Well, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. Only to you every baseness is agreeable, and I abhor it.’ “‘If you are going to swear like a trooper, I am going away.’ “‘Then go away. Only know that, if the honor of the family is nothing to you, to me it is dear. As for you, the devil take you!’ “‘What! What is the matter?’ “‘Go away, in the name of God.’ “But she did not go away. Was she pretending not to understand, or did she really not understand what I meant? But she was offended and became angry. “‘You have become absolutely impossible,’ she began, or some such phrase as that regarding my character, trying, as usual, to give me as much pain as possible. ‘After what you have done to my sister (she referred to an incident with her sister, in which, beside myself, I had uttered brutalities; she knew that that tortured me, and tried to touch me in that tender spot) nothing will astonish me.’ “‘Yes, offended, humiliated, and dishonored, and after that to hold me still responsible,’ thought I, and suddenly a rage, such a hatred invaded me as I do not remember to have ever felt before. For the first time I desired to express this hatred physically. I leaped upon her, but at the same moment I understood my condition, and I asked myself whether it would be well for me to abandon myself to my fury. And I answered myself that it would be well, that it would frighten her, and, instead of resisting, I lashed and spurred myself on, and was glad to feel my anger boiling more and more fiercely. “‘Go away, or I will kill you!’ I cried, purposely, with a frightful voice, and I grasped her by the arm. She did not go away. Then I twisted her arm, and pushed her away violently. “‘What is the matter with you? Come to your senses!’ she shrieked. “‘Go away,’ roared I, louder than ever, rolling my eyes wildly. ‘It takes you to put me in such a fury.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “He’ll be all right,” she said. But she was lying. Her eyes always got darker in the middle when she lied. She was a Spokane Indian and a bad liar, which didn’t make any sense. We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we’ve been lied to. “He’s really sick, Mom,” I said. “He’s going to die if we don’t take him to the doctor.” She looked hard at me. And her eyes weren’t dark anymore, so I knew that she was going to tell me the truth. And trust me, there are times when the last thing you want to hear is the truth. “Junior, sweetheart,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any money for Oscar.” “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I promise.” “Honey, it’ll cost hundreds of dollars, maybe a thousand.” “I’ll pay back the doctor. I’ll get a job.” Mom smiled all sad and hugged me hard. Jeez, how stupid was I? What kind of job can a reservation Indian boy get? I was too young to deal blackjack at the casino, there were only about fifteen green grass lawns on the reservation (and none of their owners outsourced the mowing jobs), and the only paper route was owned by a tribal elder named Wally. And he had to deliver only fifty papers, so his job was more like a hobby. There was nothing I could do to save Oscar. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So I lay down on the floor beside him and patted his head and whispered his name for hours. Then Dad came home from wherever and had one of those long talks with Mom, and they decided something without me. And then Dad pulled down his rifle and bullets from the closet. “Junior,” he said. “Carry Oscar outside.” “No!” I screamed. “He’s suffering,” Dad said. “We have to help him.” “You can’t do it!” I shouted. I wanted to punch my dad in the face. I wanted to punch him in the nose and make him bleed. I wanted to punch him in the eye and make him blind. I wanted to kick him in the balls and make him pass out. I was hot mad. Volcano mad. Tsunami mad. Dad just looked down at me with the saddest look in his eyes. He was crying. He looked weak. I wanted to hate him for his weakness. I wanted to hate Dad and Mom for our poverty. I wanted to blame them for my sick dog and for all the other sickness in the world. But I can’t blame my parents for our poverty because my mother and father are the twin suns around which I orbit and my world would EXPLODE without them.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: It’s going to happen. And also in the Native American world, the Internet has made the tribalism and the tribal peer pressure even greater. The movie is going to become a big thing, a big cultural moment. And I can’t even imagine the ways in which it’s going to be judged harshly by the Native American intellectual world, who are going to be nitpicking it. I think of Thunder Boy Jr. , my picture book which was published, and one page was about a kid dreaming of a powwow and there were critiques that it wasn’t an accurate representation of a powwow because there were three drums and animals were drumming. There’re not three drums at a powwow. JW: Do you know how hard it is to teach an animal to drum, to keep the same rhythm? SA: [ Laughs ] So at readings, I’ve been mocking those Native American critics, those fundamentalists, by saying, “I have to speak to all you non-Natives in the crowd that if you do happen to attend a powwow expecting—because of my picture book—to see a bear, a coyote, and a snake drumming, it’s not going to happen. Now, you might see three drummers nicknamed Bear, Coyote, and Snake, but you’re not going to see the actual animals, so I’m sorry for that cultural misrepresentation. I’m sorry if I’ve given you a stereotypical racist example of what could happen at a powwow.” True Diary got some of that also ten years ago, but the culture has changed so dramatically in terms of not just judging non-Native representations of Native-ness, but harshly judging Native representations of ourselves. This is my story, this stuff actually happened to me, and I get judged for telling the story of the real-life decisions I made. JW: I wondered about that, that’s another thing in the last decade, if Native American representations in films and books have changed in some way, or if those battles are still fought in the same way. SA: We’re still underrepresented in every art form. You know, I was in New York recently and doing an interview, we’re in MoMA, that was part of the interview, and I was walking through MoMA, and I said every museum in the country could also be called the Museum That Excludes Native American Thought. That could be the subtitle of every museum in the country. So the fact remains that we are not seen as contemporary. And the sneaky thing about colonialism is that I think far too many indigenous peoples don’t think of themselves as being contemporary. In fact, they all too often romanticize their own past. I think nostalgia is a terminal condition among the indigenous.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  But I figured I’d just look like a terrified idiot having an arm seizure. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. “You want to hear a joke?” “Sure,” I said. “Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?” I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I’d ever heard in my life. Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn’t let them get away with that shit. I wasn’t just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face. He wasn’t laughing when he landed on his ass. And he wasn’t laughing when his nose bled like red fireworks. I struck some fake karate pose because I figured Roger’s gang was going to attack me for bloodying their leader. But they just stared at me. They were shocked . “You punched me,” Roger said. His voice was thick with blood. “I can’t believe you punched me.” He sounded insulted. He sounded like his poor little feelings had been hurt. I couldn’t believe it. He acted like he was the one who’d been wronged. “You’re an animal,” he said. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target. “You meet me after school right here,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I couldn’t believe he was so stupid. “Because we’re going to finish this fight.” “You’re crazy,” Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serial killer, and then they followed their leader. I was absolutely confused. I had followed the rules of fighting. I had behaved exactly the way I was supposed to behave. But these white boys had ignored the rules. In fact, they followed a whole other set of mysterious rules where people apparently DID NOT GET INTO FISTFIGHTS. “Wait,” I called after Roger. “What do you want?” Roger asked. “What are the rules?” “What rules?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there red and mute like a stop sign. Roger and his friends disappeared. I felt like somebody had shoved me into a rocket ship and blasted me to a new planet. I was a freaky alien and there was absolutely no way to get home. Grandmother Gives Me Some Advice I went home that night completely confused. And terrified. If I’d punched an Indian in the face, then he would have spent days plotting his revenge.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  You count upon an avenging God; cease to be a gull, Therese, disabuse yourself, the God you fabricate for yourself is but a fiction whose stupid existence is never found elsewhere but in the heads of the crazed; 'tis a phantom invented by human wickedness; the solitary purpose of this illusion is to deceive mankind or to create armed divisions among men. The service it were possible to render humankind would have been instantly to cut the throat of the first impostor who took it into his head to speak of God to men. How much blood that one murder would have spared the universe! Get on, get on with you, Therese, perpetually active Nature, Nature acting always, has no need of a master for her government. And if indeed this master did exist, after all the faults and sins with which he has stuffed creation, would he, think you, would he merit anything from us but scorn and outrage? Ah, if he exists, your God, how I do hate him! Therese, how I abhor him! Yes, were this existence authentic, I affirm that the mere pleasure of perpetually irritating whatever I found that bore his impress or bespoke his touch would become for me the most precious compensation for the necessity in which I would find myself to acknowledge some belief in him.... Once again, Therese, do you wish to become my confederate? A superb possibility presents itself, with courage we can execute the thing; I'll save your life if you'll undertake it. This Monseigneur to whose house we are going, and whom you know, lives alone in the country house where he gives his parties; their species, with which you are familiar, requires isolation; a single valet lives with him when he takes up residence there for the sake of his pleasures: the man riding ahead of the coach, you and I, dear girl, that's three of us against two; when that libertine is inflamed by his lecheries, I'll snatch away the saber with which he decapitates his victims, you'll hold him, we'll kill him, and meanwhile my man will have done in the valet. There's money hidden in that house; more than eight hundred thousand francs, Therese, I'm sure of it, the thing's well worth the trouble...

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Then, turning with astonishing energy from one enemy to the other, he appeared before the Little Council on the 2d of September to protest most earnestly against their protection of Berthelier, who intended to present himself on the following day as a guest at the Lord’s table, and by the strength of the civil power to force Calvin to give him the tokens of the body and blood of Christ. He declared before the Council that he would rather die than act against his conscience. The Council did not yield, but resolved secretly to advise Berthelier to abstain from receiving the sacrament for the present. Calvin, ignorant of this secret advice, and resolved to conquer or to die, thundered from the pulpit of St. Peter on the 3d of September his determination to refuse, at the risk of his life, the sacred elements to an excommunicated person. Berthelier did not dare to approach the table. Calvin had achieved a moral victory over the Council.1183 In the mean time Servetus had, within the space of twenty-four hours, prepared a written defence, as directed by the Council, against the thirty-eight articles of Calvin. It was both apologetic and boldly aggressive, clear, keen, violent, and bitter. He contemptuously repelled Calvin’s interference in the trial, and charged him with presumption in framing articles of faith after the fashion of the doctors of the Sorbonne, without Scripture proof.1184 He affirmed that he either misunderstood him or craftily perverted his meaning. He quotes from Tertullian, Irenaeus, and pseudo-Clement in support of his views. He calls him a disciple of Simon Magus, a criminal accuser, and a homicide.1185 He ridiculed the idea that such a man should call himself an orthodox minister of the Church. Calvin replied within two days in a document of twenty-three folio pages, which were signed by all the fourteen ministers of Geneva.1186 He meets the patristic quotations of Servetus with counter-quotations, with Scripture passages and solid arguments, and charges him in conclusion with the intention "to subvert all religion."1187 These three documents, which contained the essence of the doctrinal discussion, were presented to the Little Council on Tuesday the 5th of September. On the 15th of September Servetus addressed a petition to the Council in which he attacked Calvin as his persecutor, complained of his miserable condition in prison and want of the necessary clothing, and demanded an advocate and the transfer of his trial to the Large Council of Two Hundred, where he had reason to expect a majority in his favor.1188 This course had probably been suggested to him (as Rilliet conjectures) by Perrin and Berthelier through the jailer, Claude de Genève, who was a member of the Libertine party.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  There were roofing nails embedded in her cheek, throat, and shoulder, slick with blood, and her black hair was plastered in whorls to her brow and neck. Blood diluted by rainwater ran over her milky skin. Her eyes widened. Beth let her fingers slip off of the bowstring. The arrow caught Teach in the mouth. Bloody chips of tooth enamel flew. She jerked back, one eye rolling up into her head so that only pale sclera showed, and slid down the wall until she came, twitching, to rest, one leg folded beneath her and the other stuck straight out. She’d left a long, dark smear of blood along the concrete. Her good eye followed Beth as she came slowly down the steps, letting her bow drop with a clatter. Beth turned to face the gagging thing, bracing herself against the sides of the door. Rain lashed her back. Teach smiled at her around the splintered shaft. Her thin, bloodless lips twitched. “Branden,” she croaked, the word slurred and horribly babyish on her split and bloody tongue. “ Bwannnden. ” No. She slammed her boot into the other woman’s grisly smirk. The arrow snapped. Bone gave between wall and hardened rubber. Beth drew her leg back, cocked her knee, and kicked out hard again. A gurgling laugh came from the ruined face. The lone remaining eye, pale and unblinking, stared at her through a mask of blood and broken skin. Her knuckles popped where she held tightly to the doorframe. She brought her leg up a third time. The woman’s hand came with it, fingers clinging weakly to the gory sole, and still that horrible wet grunt of a laugh, huh-huh-huh , and black blood pouring from the ruined mouth. How did she know? Beth jerked her foot away from Teach’s feeble grip, then drove it back down like a piston with a final awful crunch. She turned and lurched out blindly through the door into the rain, suddenly desperate to get clear of that dead, staring eye. She fell to her hands and knees and vomited onto the bloody flagstones, heaving and retching until there was nothing left to come up. Until there was nothing left at all. How did she fucking know? Robbie held her. He was kneeling at her side while she keened in the bitter, blowing rain. Oh, Fran. Oh, God.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The revolution began on January 8, 1978, when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a preposterous attack on Khomeini.93 The next day four thousand unarmed students in Qum demanded a revival of the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, and the return of Khomeini. Throughout, Iranians showed that they had fully absorbed the modern ethos, demanding the independence, liberty, and constitutional rule that they had been consistently denied by the shah’s secular government and the international community. Seventy of these students were killed. With this massacre, the regime crossed a line. A pattern now emerged. Forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds gathered for the traditional mourning ceremonies for the dead, and more people were shot down. Forty days later there were more ritualized rallies in honor of the new martyrs. Marxists, secularists, and liberals who opposed the shah but knew that they had no grassroots appeal joined forces with the religiously minded revolutionaries. This was not a violent uprising, however. Cinemas, banks, and liquor stores—symbols of the “great shaytan”—were attacked, but not people.94 By now the jails were full of political prisoners, and the mounting death toll showed the world that the shah’s secular regime, lauded in the West as progressive and peaceful, was slaughtering its own people. The revolution was experienced as a religious as well as a political event. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Karbala, and every day is Ashura,” convinced that they were following Husain in their struggle against oppression.95 They spoke of the revolution as a transforming and purifying experience, as if they were purging themselves of a debilitating poison and regaining authenticity.96 Many felt as though Husain himself were leading them and that Khomeini, like the Hidden Imam, was directing them from afar.97 On the last night of Ramadan, September 4, vast crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, but—an important turning point—this time the army did not open fire. Even more significant, the middle classes began to join in the protests, marching with placards reading: “Independence, Freedom and Islamic Government!”98 At six a.m. on September 8, martial law was declared, but the twenty thousand demonstrators who were already gathering in Jaleh Square did not know it; when they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. As many as nine hundred people may have died that day.99

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Not reconciliation; internally each kept the hatred for the other, but it was absolutely necessary for the moment to end the scene in some way, and life began again as before. These scenes, and even worse, came now once a week, now every month, now every day. And invariably the same incidents. Once I was absolutely resolved to fly, but through some inconceivable weakness I remained. “Such were the circumstances in which we were living when the man came. The man was bad, it is true. But what! No worse than we were.” CHAPTER XXII. “All that day I did not speak to my wife. I could not. Her proximity excited such hatred that I feared myself. At the table she asked me, in presence of the children, when I was to start upon a journey. I was to go the following week to an assembly of the Zemstvo, in a neighboring locality. I named the date. She asked me if I would need anything for the journey. I did not answer. I sat silent at the table, and silently I retired to my study. In those last days she never entered my study, especially at that hour. Suddenly I heard her steps, her walk, and then a terribly base idea entered my head that, like the wife of Uri, she wished to conceal a fault already committed, and that it was for this reason that she came to see me at this unseasonable hour. ‘Is it possible,’ thought I, ‘that she is coming to see me?’ On hearing her step as it approached: ‘If it is to see me that she is coming, then I am right.’ “An inexpressible hatred invaded my soul. The steps drew nearer, and nearer, and nearer yet. Would she pass by and go on to the other room? No, the hinges creaked, and at the door her tall, graceful, languid figure appeared. In her face, in her eyes, a timidity, an insinuating expression, which she tried to hide, but which I saw, and of which I understood the meaning. I came near suffocating, such were my efforts to hold my breath, and, continuing to look at her, I took my cigarette, and lighted it. “‘What does this mean? One comes to talk with you, and you go to smoking.’ “And she sat down beside me on the sofa, resting against my shoulder. I recoiled, that I might not touch her. “‘I see that you are displeased with what I wish to play on Sunday,’ said she. “‘I am not at all displeased,’ said I. “‘Can I not see?’ “‘Well, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. Only to you every baseness is agreeable, and I abhor it.’ “‘If you are going to swear like a trooper, I am going away.’ “‘Then go away. Only know that, if the honor of the family is nothing to you, to me it is dear.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  In the park around the amphitheater’s tiered concrete bowl, a flock of mourning doves swept from one maple to another in a rush of iridescent feathers. A few of the boys looked up at the disturbance, but most kept their eyes on Teach. A few mothers sat in the audience. More waited back at the trucks. This was something for the sissies, the ladyboys, the not-quite-men who were all that remained of the patriarchy. Ramona had seen Teach speak to them before, in Philly and in Baltimore and once in Long Island, across the Sound from the haunted wreckage of the city, and the mothers seldom came. Maybe they didn’t like it, thinking of what else their sons might have been. “A male body is a time bomb,” she continued. “The male temperament inclines you to toss that bomb from hand to hand, to take foolish risks, to behave without thought to the greater consequences. No matter how real your girlhood, if you tell yourself you’ve had one, may feel, you have been raised as men. You have been raised to brutalize, to steal, to disregard the women who raised you and sacrificed their own lives to protect yours.” Her breath plumed in the cold air. She leaned forward over the podium. “You may think that you’ve remade yourself, that believing in your own womanhood makes you a woman, but between your legs is a weapon of war that has terrorized us for a hundred thousand years.” Some of them were getting up and leaving now. The Legion women at the exits would note their names. Ramona remembered doing that in Rockaway, making sure the kids who left saw her with her notepad. Making sure they knew that they were being watched. She scanned the faces of the crowd, thinking back on those other boys, frightened and angry and resentful as they fled the movie theater where they’d held the rally. Acne and baby fat. Greasy hair and blackheads. They might have been the same crowds, unstuck from time. Just make a list, Molly had told her that morning over trail mix and instant coffee in the ruined lobby of a Marriott. Most of them wise up, check in with our people, take the deal. What about the rest? They know the stakes, kid. You want something to be sad about, think what the ones we don’t get do to your sisters. “You can go, of course,” said Teach, her deep voice mild. “You can tell yourself, ‘What does this transphobic cunt know?’ and walk out of here.

• From Between Us

  In my cultural context, being angry is acceptable under these circumstances. Communicating to my husband that I am angry may not be pleasant in the moment, but it tells him to respect me, and ultimately may result in a more honest and satisfying relationship between us, one in which both of us get our needs met. The act of nonacceptance can be “right” when the relationship goal is that both partners express their own needs, and that each makes sure that their individual goals are met. Anger is considered a useful and normal, if not pleasant, emotion in many Western European and American contexts. In adolescence, anger and conflict are often accepted as necessary steps towards the important developmental goal of independence (see chapter 3). Even beyond adolescence, anger has a good role to play in a variety of relationships, private and public: it sets clear boundaries in both. It is the “normal” response to goal-blockage or frustration: a representative study of middle-aged U.S. Americans reportedly acted angry more often, the more frustration they met. Anger has not always been an acceptable emotion, not even in the United States. In the nineteenth-century Victorian era, women’s selfless love was the cornerstone of marriage. Had I been a Victorian woman, I would have shouldered the inconvenience of my husband being late without ever becoming angry. My dignity would have consisted of meeting my role obligations and serving my husband selflessly. I would have had no reason, but also no justification, for being angry. And the slightest reference to anger might have prompted condemnation. Before the end of the seventeenth century, Western diarists had difficulty describing themselves as angry; they lacked the entitlement that is foundational to anger. Roger Lowe, a seventeenth-century shopkeeping apprentice who kept a diary, described many situations that were noxious and arousing, but he never described himself as angry. Some of his most difficult interactions were with his master, who did not do much to teach him the art of shopkeeping: “I thought it sad for me to be ingaged 9 yeares . . . to sell my Master’s ware . . . and get no knowledge.” When his master promises and then refuses to give him a new set of clothes, he also describes his feelings as grief: “soe I would have none and parted with grieve.” Grief is also his go-to emotion in situations with equals: A woman starts some malicious gossip about him, and he is “in some greefe” about it. Lowe does not see himself as angry, because anger was not “right.” God could be angry, but ordinary citizens could not. Entitlement and nonacceptance were not acceptable relationship acts. Instead, Roger Lowe and his contemporaries pray to the Lord to help them “walk humbly.”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I had a flight booked, Senna. On Christmas Day. I was supposed to leave that morning and go home to see my family. I was on my way to the airport when I turned my car around and went home. I don’t fucking know why I did it. I just felt like I needed to stay. I went for a jog to clear my head and there you were, running out of the trees.” I stare at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Would you have believed me?” “Believed what? That you went for a jog instead of hopping on a plane?” He leans forward. “No. Don’t make me feel stupid for thinking that there is purpose. We aren’t animals. Life isn’t random. I was supposed to be there.” “And I was supposed to get raped? So that we could meet? Because that’s what you’re saying. If life isn’t random then it was in someone’s plan for that bastard to do what he did to me!” I am out of breath, my chest heaving. Isaac licks his lips. “Maybe it was in someone’s plan for me to be there for you…” “To keep me alive,” I finish. “No. I didn’t say—” “Yes, that’s exactly what you’re saying. My savior, sent to keep the pathetic, sniveling, Senna from killing herself.” “Senna!” he slams his fist on the table, and I jump. “When we found each other we were both pretty dead and defeated. Something grew despite that.” He shakes his head. “You breathed life back into me. It was instinct for me to be there with you. I didn’t want to save you, I just didn’t know how to leave you.” There is a long pause. Not even Nick did that. Because Nick didn’t love me unconditionally. He loved me so long as I was his muse. So long as I gave him something to believe in. “Isaac…” his name falls flat. There is something I want to say but I don’t know what it is. There is no real point in saying anything at all. Isaac is married and our situation leaves little room for anything but survival. “I need to go get some wood,” I announce. He smiles sadly, shakes his head. I cook dinner that night. Red meat; I don’t know what kind it is until I smell it in the skillet and know it’s some type of game. Who took the time to hunt these animals for us? Bag them? Freeze them?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I'd complain no more; the unique consolation which may remain to the luckless one bred up in this den of savage beasts, his one comfort is the hope of leaving it soon. The next day I heard nothing and resolved to abandon myself to Providence, I languished and would touch no food. The day after that, Cardoville came to question me; I could not repress a shudder upon beholding the nonchalance wherewith that scoundrel walked in to execute his judiciary duties Ä he, Cardoville, the most villainous of mortals, he who, contrary to every article of the justice in which he was cloaked, had just so cruelly abused my innocence and exploited my misery; it was in vain I pled my cause, the dishonest man's artfulness devised more crimes than I could invent defenses; when all the charges had been well established in the view of this iniquitous judge, and when the case was made, he had the impudence to ask me whether I knew in Lyon one Monsieur de Saint-Florent, a wealthy and estimable citizen; I answered that I knew him, yes. "Excellent," said Cardoville, "no more is needed. This Monsieur de Saint-Florent, whom you declare you know, also has a perfect knowledge of you; he has deposed that he saw you in a band of thieves, that you were the first to steal his money and his pocket- book. He further deposes that your comrades wished to spare his life, that you recommended they take it from him; nevertheless, he managed to escape. Saint-Florent adds that, several years later, having recognized you in Lyon, he yielded to your importunings and permitted you to come to pay him a call at his home upon condition you would give him your word to behave well in future and that, while he was delivering a lecture on manners to you, while he was seeking to persuade you to persist along the paths of righteousness, you carried insolence and crime to the point of choosing these moments of kindness to steal a watch and one hundred louis he had left lying upon the mantel...." And, profiting from the resentment and anger such atrocious calumnies provoked in me, Cardoville ordered the court clerk to write that my silence and my facial expressions were ample acknowledgment of my guilt and were tantamount to a confession.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Either, with the aid of the rascally doctors, she will try to prevent conception, and descend, not to the level of an animal, but to the level of a thing; or she will be what she is in the great majority of cases,—sick, hysterical, wretched, without hope of spiritual progress.” . . . “But why that?” I asked. “Oh! the most astonishing thing is that no one is willing to see this thing, evident as it is, which the doctors must understand, but which they take good care not to do. Man does not wish to know the law of nature,—children. But children are born and become an embarrassment. Then man devises means of avoiding this embarrassment. We have not yet reached the low level of Europe, nor Paris, nor the ‘system of two children,’ nor Mahomet. We have discovered nothing, because we have given it no thought. We feel that there is something bad in the two first means; but we wish to preserve the family, and our view of woman is still worse. “With us woman must be at the same time mistress and nurse, and her strength is not sufficient. That is why we have hysteria, nervous attacks, and, among the peasants, witchcraft. Note that among the young girls of the peasantry this state of things does not exist, but only among the wives, and the wives who live with their husbands. The reason is clear, and this is the cause of the intellectual and moral decline of woman, and of her abasement. “If they would only reflect what a grand work for the wife is the period of gestation! In her is forming the being who continues us, and this holy work is thwarted and rendered painful . . . by what? It is frightful to think of it! And after that they talk of the liberties and the rights of woman! It is like the cannibals fattening their prisoners in order to devour them, and assuring these unfortunates at the same time that their rights and their liberties are guarded!” All this was new to me, and astonished me very much. “But if this is so,” said I, “it follows that one may love his wife only once every two years; and as man” . . . “And as man has need of her, you are going to say. At least, so the priests of science assure us. I would force these priests to fulfil the function of these women, who, in their opinion, are necessary to man. I wonder what song they would sing then. Assure man that he needs brandy, tobacco, opium, and he will believe those poisons necessary.

• From Between Us

  5 (2000): 560–74. 88 song (“justifiable anger”): Lutz, Unnatural Emotions. 88 report angry behaviors: Park et al., “Social Status and Anger Expression.” 89 anger . . . in Japan is . . . healthy: Shinobu Kitayama et al., “Expression of Anger and Ill Health in Two Cultures: An Examination of Inflammation and Cardiovascular Risk,” Psychological Science 26, no. 2 (2015): 211–20. Expressing anger was associated with less biological health risk in Japan, whereas it was associated with more biological health risk in the U.S. Participants were subsamples of representative studies of middle-aged Japanese and U.S. Americans. Biological health risk was measured by two inflammatory measures and two measures of cardiovascular malfunction. The authors suggest that the different meanings of anger, as an index of power or dominance in Japan and as an index of frustration in the U.S., may be responsible for the culturally different association. It is a good hypothesis (which I have adopted in the main text) that deserves follow-up study. 89 anger as a power move may pay off: Larissa Z. Tiedens, “Anger and Advancement versus Sadness and Subjugation: The Effect of Negative Emotion Expression on Social Status Conferral,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80, no. 1 (2001): 86–94. 90 “showed bad character, pure and simple”: Quoted come from Stearns, American Cool, 25. Anger was condemned in men too, but “an angry woman was worse than an angry man” (also on p. 25). 90 struck by the fate of another Clinton: Victoria L. Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 3 (2008): 268–75. The quote is from Maureen Dowd, “Who’s Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?,” New York Times, February 8, 2006, as cited on Brescoll and Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?,” 2008, p. 268. 90 there is an emotional glass ceiling: Among female job applicants, those who did not express any emotion, rather than being either sad or angry, were perceived to be most effective leaders. Angry men were perceived effective, as were neutral-looking men (Brescoll and Uhlmann, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?”). 90 Davin Phoenix makes this point precisely: Davin Phoenix, “Anger Benefits Some Americans Much More than Others,” New York Times, June 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/opinion/george-floyd-protests-anger.html?referringSource=articleShare. 91 anger among the Kaluli . . . is a power move: Edward L. Schieffelin, “Anger and Shame in the Tropical Forest: On Affect as a Cultural System in Papua New Guinea,” Ethos 11, no. 3 (1983): 181–91. The quote appears on p. 183. It is not clear if the anger dynamics of Kaluli women are the same as those of men.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Gays in the church were frequently pressed to buy courses or take additional auditing in order to handle their condition. The ambivalence in the church over the question of sexual orientation is evident in its treatment of Travolta. Over the years, the church has acted to protect his reputation. Marty Rathbun has said there were many allegations that he helped “ to make go away.” He sometimes worked in concert with Travolta’s attorneys, attempting to keep stories out of the press. In 2003, a gay artist, Michael Pattinson, sued the church, Travolta, and more than twenty other individuals, claiming that the star had been held up as an example of how Scientology can cure homosexuality. Pattinson said that he spent twenty-five years in the church, and half a million dollars, trying to change his sexual orientation, without success. (That case was voluntarily withdrawn following an avalanche of countersuits. Both Pattinson and his attorney say they were driven into bankruptcy.) Haggis identified with homosexuals because they were a minority. They were the underdogs. They were also two of his daughters. The backers of Proposition 8 were using scare tactics to drive their campaign, claiming that homosexuals were going to take over the schools and teach people to be gay. Lauren Haggis actually heard people saying that. Then someone pointed her to a website that listed the proposition’s backers. The Church of Scientology of San Diego was on the list. “ I was just floored,” she said. “And so I sent an e-mail to my sisters and my dad saying, um, what’s going on?” Haggis began peppering Tommy Davis with e-mails, demanding that the church support efforts to reverse the marriage ban. “I am going to an anti Prop 8 rally in a couple of hours,” he wrote on November 11, 2008, a week after the initiative passed with 52 percent of the state’s voters. “When can we expect the public statement?” Davis responded with a proposed letter that would go to the San Diego media, saying that the church had been “erroneously listed among the supporters of Proposition 8.” “ ‘Erroneous’ doesn’t cut it,” Haggis fired back. “The church may have had the luxury of not taking a position on this issue before, but after taking a position, even erroneously, it can no longer stand neutral.” He demanded that the church openly declare itself in favor of gay rights. “Anything less won’t do.” Davis stopped responding. When Haggis prodded him again, Davis admitted that the correction to the San Diego media was never actually sent. “To be honest I was dismayed when our emails (which I thought were communications between us) were being cc’d to your daughters,” he wrote. Davis was frustrated because, as he explained to Haggis, the church avoids taking political stances.1 Davis insisted that it wasn’t the “church” in San Diego that adopted a position against Prop 8.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The following year, however, Theodosius died, and the monks lost their imperial support. A new council met at Chalcedon in 451 to reverse Second Ephesus and create a neutral theological middle ground.103 The “Tome” of Pope Leo, which declared diplomatically that Jesus was fully God and fully man, now became the touchstone of orthodoxy.104 Dioscorus was deposed, and the roaming Syrian boskoi reined in. Henceforth all monks were required to live and remain in their monastery, forbidden to participate in both worldly and ecclesiastical affairs, and were to be financially dependent on and controlled by the local bishop. But Chalcedon, hailed as the triumph of law and order, was actually an imperial coup. At the beginning of the fourth century, Christians had denounced the presence of imperial troops in their churches as sacrilegious; but after the horror of Second Ephesus, the moderate bishops begged the emperor to take control. Consequently a committee of nineteen of the highest military and civil officials of the empire presided over Chalcedon, set the agenda, silenced dissenting voices, and enforced correct procedure. Henceforth in the Syrian-speaking world, the Chalcedonian Church was known as Melkite—“the emperor’s church.” In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage. Opponents of this imperialized Christianity espoused Eutyches’s Monophysitism in protest. In fact, the theological difference between Monophysites and Nicenes was minimal, but the Monophysites could point to other Christian traditions—not least Jesus’s stance against Rome—to claim that the Melkites had made an unholy alliance with earthly power. The debates about the nature of Christ had been an attempt to build a holistic view of reality, one with no impregnable division between the physical and the spiritual realms or the divine and the human. In human society too, the emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) believed, there should be a symphonia of church and state, a harmony and concord based on the incarnation of the Logos in the man Jesus.105 Just as the two natures—human and divine—were found in a single person, there could be no separation of church and empire; together they formed the Kingdom of God, which would soon spread to the entire world. But there was, of course, a massive difference between Jesus’s kingdom and the Byzantine state.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She is a wonderful woman, and I love her more than ever. * * * * * For dinner at six she has invited a small group of men and women. I serve, but this time I do not spill any wine over the table-cloth. A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly, especially when the instruction is by the way of a small woman’s hand. * * * * * After dinner she drives to the Pergola Theater. As she descends the stairs in her black velvet dress with its large collar of ermine and with a diadem of white roses on her hair, she is literally stunning. I open the carriage-door, and help her in. In front of the theater I leap from the driver’s seat, and in alighting she leaned on my arm, which trembled under the sweet burden. I open the door of her box, and then wait in the vestibule. The performance lasts four hours; she receives visits from her cavaliers, the while I grit my teeth with rage. It is way beyond midnight when my mistress’s bell sounds for the last time. “Fire!” she orders abruptly, and when the fire-place crackles, “Tea!” When I return with the samovar, she has already undressed, and with the aid of the negress slipped into a white negligee. Haydée thereupon leaves. “Hand me the sleeping-furs,” says Wanda, sleepily stretching her lovely limbs. I take them from the arm- chair, and hold them while she slowly and lazily slides into the sleeves. She then throws herself down on the cushions of the ottoman. “Take off my shoes, and put on my velvet slippers.” I kneel down and tug at the little shoe which resists my efforts. “Hurry, hurry!” Wanda exclaims, “you are hurting me! just you wait—I will teach you.” She strikes me with the whip, but now the shoe is off. “Now get out!” Still a kick—and then I can go to bed. * * * * * To-night I accompanied her to a soiree. In the entrance-hall she ordered me to help her out of her furs; then with a proud smile, confident of victory, she entered the brilliantly illuminated room. I again waited with gloomy and monotonous thoughts, watching hour after hour run by. From time to time the sounds of music reached me, when the door remained open for a moment. Several servants tried to start a conversation with me, but soon desisted, since I knew only a few words of Italian. Finally I fell asleep, and dreamed that I murdered Wanda in a violent attack of jealousy. I was condemned to death, and saw myself strapped on the board; the knife fell, I felt it on my neck, but I was still alive— Then the executioner slapped my face.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.” Lauer was taken aback by Cruise’s aggressiveness, but he pressed on. “Do you examine the possibility that these things do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses, and yes, maybe they’ve gone too far in some areas. Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin. Maybe electric shock—” “Too many kids on Ritalin?” Cruise said, shaking his head. “Matt.” “Aren’t there examples where it works?” “Matt, Matt, Matt, you don’t even—you’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is.” He said there were ways that Shields could solve her depression—he mentioned diet and exercise—other than drugs. “And there are ways of doing it without that, so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn’t understand in the same way that you don’t understand it, Matt.” SCIENTOLOGY ’S HISTORY OF psychiatry holds it responsible for many of the ills that have affected humanity—war, racism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism—all in the pursuit of social control and profit. The church has opened an exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It describes the often grisly and benighted practices that have characterized the evolution of the profession, including madhouses, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs to treat spurious diagnoses. Scientology views this history as a long march by psychiatrists to manipulate human behavior and institute world government. Although it’s not included in the exhibit, Hubbard’s chronology of psychiatry actually begins “ five billion years ago” with the development of a particular technique that was developed “in the Maw Confederation of the Sixty-third Galaxy”: Take a sheet of glass and put it in front of the preclear—clear, very clear glass—which is supercooled, preferably about a −100 centigrade. You got that? Supercooled, you know? And then put the preclear right in front of this supercooled sheet of glass and suddenly shove his face into the glass.… Takes about twenty seconds, then, to accomplish a total brainwash of a case. Now, if you wish to play God, as the whole-track psychiatrist did at that time, all you have to say at this time is, of course, “Go to Earth and be president,” or something like that, you know? And a thetan, being properly brainwashed now, will take off, and that’s that. Hubbard also blamed psychiatrists, allied with the tyrant Xenu, for carrying out genocide in the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. There are obvious parallels in this legend with the Nazi regime, which used doctors, including psychiatrists, to carry out the extermination of the mentally ill, along with homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews; and also by the Soviet government, which employed psychiatrists to diagnose political dissidents and lock them away. Hubbard lived through these shameful events, and they no doubt colored his imagination. After Hubbard’s death, Miscavige continued the campaign.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Assuming that Haggis was in the condition of Doubt, Beghe knew that the proper formula required him to provide information. He told Haggis that in the late nineties he began having emotional problems. The church prescribed more auditing and coursework. In retrospect, Beghe felt that it had done no good. “I was paying money for them to fuck me up,” he said, estimating that he had spent as much as $600,000 in the process, and nearly $1 million in his thirteen-year Scientology career. When he finally decided to leave the church, he told Tommy Davis that the church was in a condition of Liability to him. Ordinarily, when a Scientologist does something wrong, especially something that might damage the image of the organization, he has to make amends, often in the form of a substantial contribution. But now the situation was reversed, Beghe maintained. He proposed that the church buy some property and lease it to him at a negligible rate. “You guys don’t have any policies to make up the damage, so I’m doing this for your own good—and for mine,” he explained to Davis and others. “Because I don’t have a policy of taking it in the ass.”4 While talking to Haggis, Beghe was reluctant to use the word “brainwashing”—“whatever the fuck that is”—but he did say that somehow his mind had been taken over. “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are L. Ron Hubbard’s,” he explained. “You think you’re becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing, which is You the Scientologist.” Haggis was disturbed by Beghe’s account of what had happened after he left the church. He claimed that none of his Scientology friends would talk to him, his son had been kicked out of school, he was being followed by private investigators and threatened with lawsuits. Perhaps because Haggis had never been as much of a true believer as some members, he didn’t nurse the same sense of betrayal. “I didn’t feel that some worm had buried itself in my ear, and if you plucked it out you would find L. Ron Hubbard and his thought,” he said. But he did feel that he had been cautioned. “TOMMY,” HAGGIS ’S LETTER of August 19, 2009, abruptly begins. “As you know, for ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego. Their public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” The tone of the letter is both aggrieved and outraged, mixing Haggis’s personal experiences with the results of his one-man investigation into the church.