Anxiety

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 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Now he’s coming to HubSpot, and although he’s arriving late to the party, he has taken a small salary and loaded up on stock options. He doesn’t need to be super rich. He just wants to make enough money to pay off his mortgage, buy a vacation house, and “put enough money in the bank that I just don’t have to take shit from anyone,” he says. Trotsky is a wildcatter. Hire him, and he’ll work your oil field and see if he can strike it rich. If he doesn’t, he’ll move on. Silicon Valley is filled with people like this who spend their careers jumping from one tiny dysfunctional company to another, chasing a pot of gold. “I was stunned when I was doing recruiting in the Valley,” a former software executive recalls. “Everyone is a mercenary. Every resume you’d look at had all these stints of a year here, a year there. Like if they didn’t hit the jackpot in a year, they’d go place a new bet.” I think of this as a kind of mental disorder—the Start-up Disease. I know the symptoms, because I am suffering from them myself. But Trotsky has an even more severe case, and he’s been afflicted for a lot longer. Trotsky says the clock is ticking down on him and his career. He’s already too old to be working in tech. If he doesn’t strike it rich at HubSpot he’ll get one more chance, maybe two. By then he will be fifty, and nobody will hire him. He tells me that his first impression of HubSpot is that it reminds him of Logan’s Run, the dystopian sci-fi movie where people are killed when they reach the age of thirty, in order to prevent overpopulation. Even Trotsky has never worked in a place that is so exaggeratedly young. He tells me how Penny, the receptionist, who is twenty-three but looks seventeen, told him when she first met him, “I think it’s cool that they’re starting to hire some older people now.” Trotsky was startled both by the sentiment and by her lack of tact. Bemused, he asked Penny what age she considers old. Where is the cutoff between young people and old people? “I guess about thirty,” she said. I tell Trotsky that if he thinks HubSpot feels weird to him, imagine working there at my age. A few months ago I turned fifty-three. When I was fifty-two I could almost deal with HubSpot, because the average employee is twenty-six, and so I was exactly double the average. Now I’m more than twice the average, and somehow this feels worse. “It seems like a line you don’t want to cross,” I say. I tell him about Zack and his crazy memos in ALL CAPS about CONQUERING THE WORLD. I kvetch about Cranium’s latest management innovation, a service called TINYpulse that bombards us with weekly happiness surveys.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The philosophy of the period reflected the agonistic quality of political life, as well as the Greek yearning for poise and harmony. This was especially evident in the work of Heraclitus (540–480), a member of the royal family of Ephesus, who was known as the “riddler” because he presented his ideas in lapidary, baffling maxims. “Nature,” he once said, “loves to hide”; things were the opposite of what they seemed.72 The first relativist, Heraclitus argued that everything depended upon context: seawater was good for fish, but potentially fatal for men; a blow was salutary if delivered as a punishment, but evil if inflicted by a murderer.73 A restless, unsettling man, Heraclitus believed that even though the cosmos seemed stable, it was in fact in constant flux and a battlefield of warring elements. “Cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens.”74 He was especially fascinated by fire: a flame was never still; fire transformed wood into ash, and water into steam. Fire was also a divine force that preserved order by preventing any one of the competing elements from dominating the rest—in rather the same way as the clash of opinions in the council maintained the equilibrium of the polis. Yet beneath this cosmic turbulence, there was unity. Flux and stability, which seemed antithetical, were one and the same; night and day were two sides of a single coin; the way up was also the way down, and an exit could serve as an entrance.75 You could not rely on the evidence of your senses, but must look deeper to find the logos, the ruling principle of nature. And that also applied to human beings. Heraclitus had discovered introspection, a new activity for the Greeks. “I went in search of myself,” he said.76 You could learn a little about human nature by studying dreams, emotions, and people’s individual qualities, but it would always remain an enigma: “You will not find out the limits of the soul by travelling, even if you travel over every pole.”77 In their political reform, the Greeks had found that it was possible to jettison traditional institutions without calling down the wrath of the gods, and some began to question other time-honored assumptions. Xenophanes (560–480), another philosopher from the Ionian coast, rejected the Olympian gods as hopelessly anthropomorphic. People thought that gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own.” They were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception. It was clear that people had simply projected their own human form onto the divine. Horses and cows would probably do the same.78 But, he believed, there was only “one god, greatest among gods and men,” who transcended all human qualities.79 Beyond time and change, he governed everything with his mind (nous); no sooner did he think of something than it was done.80

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Part of me figures that if Brandon the pool installer can become Brandon the multimillionaire author and motivational marketing speaker, why can’t I? To become a marketing wizard, I will first have to survive here for a few years, and that means finding a way to fit in, which won’t be easy, not only because I’m fifty-two years old, which is exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, but also because the atmosphere is so different from that of a newsroom. I had expected the transition might be rough, but even so, I’m taken aback by how much I’m struggling. The weird language and the relentlessly chipper attitudes are both the polar opposite of the world I know. Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders. Another challenge is that HubSpot has so many meetings. Like most journalists—and, I would argue, most sane people—I detest meetings. At HubSpot they have meetings all the time, even for little things. Instead of just pulling up a chair and talking for five minutes, at HubSpot people will scan your calendar—everyone keeps their calendars online—and send you an invitation for a meeting in a block of time that you’ve left open. Anyone can call a meeting for pretty much any reason. I don’t want to look like a grumpy old man, so I just click yes on every invitation. Some mornings I come to work and find my calendar packed with back-to-back meetings for random things that have nothing to do with my job: brainstorm with the funnel team; learn what the e-book team has planned for next quarter; listen in on a conference call with our “social media scientist,” a competitive weightlifter who lives in Las Vegas and basically does nothing; talk to a salesperson who thinks she can sell our software to a newspaper in Orange County, California. I attend everything. I’m here to learn. I want to be a team player. At HubSpot people use Gmail calendar invites for everything, even for making lunch plans. One Monday morning, Zack, who sits facing me, asks me if I’ve been to the burrito place on First Street. I tell him I haven’t. He says maybe we can go there tomorrow, on Tuesday. Sure, I say. “Great, I’ll send you a calendar invite,” he says. “No need,” I say. “We can just go. I’ll be free.” “But this will remind you.” “I won’t forget. It’s tomorrow. I can just put in my calendar myself. See? I just did it. It’s now on my calendar.” “I’ll send you one anyway.” He does, and a few seconds later the email arrives, and I click yes, and now the appointment is on my calendar twice.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They’re in their early fifties and once held senior-level positions, and then got downsized only to discover that no one wants them. Those guys have all been where I am now—freshly out of work, still hopeful, going on interviews. But six months goes by, and then a year, and at some point people stop taking your calls. I’m not there yet. I’ve landed some freelance work, I’m still making money doing speaking gigs, and my lecture agent has promised that he will try to keep me working, but he also has warned me that without the word Newsweek in front of my name those speaking gigs are probably going to dry up. What happens then? Sure, we have savings. But those won’t last forever. For now we’re doing our best to economize. The kids know what’s going on. We don’t talk about it a lot around them, but I have to say something. I don’t know if talking makes things better or worse. I get the sense that they are a bit freaked out, especially my son. He’s a sensitive kid. One night when I’m putting him to bed I recognize something in his eyes that I’ve never seen before—it’s not that he’s scared, it’s that he knows what I’m going through and he feels sorry for me. It’s almost too much to take. “Come here, dude,” I say, and I give him a hug and try to make him laugh, and he does laugh, and I laugh, too, but I’m also trying not to cry. I realize that the way he sees me now is different from the way he saw me before. For the rest of my life I’m going to remember that flash of pity in his eyes. That look is going to haunt me. I need a job. Any job. Soon enough, I get one. This happens in September 2012. It’s not a great job. It’s not even a good one. There are a lot of drawbacks, chief among them that the job will take me away from home, but I don’t hesitate. I jump on it. Suddenly I am the editor-in-chief of a struggling technology news website called ReadWrite, a tiny blog with three full-time employees and a half-dozen woefully underpaid freelancers. ReadWrite is based in San Francisco, which means I fly out on Monday and take a redeye back to Boston on Thursday or Friday. On weeks when I’m not in San Francisco I’m either in New York, where ReadWrite’s parent company is based, or in some other city, making sales calls, trying to get tech companies to buy ads from us. It’s not a lot of fun, but I’m making a paycheck and keeping my eyes open for something better. ReadWrite’s offices are on Townsend Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, where all of the hot tech start-ups are located—Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  In a way I actually start to feel bad for her, even though I’m the one getting fired. I tell her I understand. I’m a business reporter, after all. This is the stuff I write about—legacy companies getting disrupted by new technologies, slowly going under, laying off workers. If I were running a magazine that was losing money, I would be looking to cut costs, too. I’d get rid of the expensive old guys and hire a bunch of hungry young kids. It makes sense. I went into this job knowing that it probably wouldn’t last forever. Back in 2008, when I joined, Newsweek veterans were being offered buyouts and early retirement packages. And it wasn’t just Newsweek. Newspapers and magazines were dying out all over the place, disrupted by the Internet. Despite all that, Newsweek was still an amazing place, and even if the magazine only had a few years left in it, I still wanted to work there. Now, on this sunny Friday morning, it’s over. My last day will be in two weeks, Abby says. I will get no severance package, just two weeks of pay and whatever vacation time I’m owed. At the end of two weeks I’ll also lose my health insurance, but the HR people will help me figure out how to set up COBRA to continue my benefits. Some of my colleagues who left when the magazine was sold in 2010 received packages equal to a year’s salary. I’d expected that if or when I got cut, I’d be given enough severance to provide a cushion. Two weeks seems inordinately harsh. I try to bargain. I ask Abby if they will keep me on for six months while I look for a new job. That will let me save face and make it easier for me to find my next job. Sorry, she tells me, but no. I offer to take a pay cut. That won’t fly either, she says. How about I take a different job, I say. It doesn’t have to be much, but it will keep me on staff, with benefits, while I look for something else. Abby is not having any of it. “Abby, I have kids.” There’s a quaver in my voice. I take a breath. I don’t want to sound panicked. “I’ve got twins. They’re six years old.” She says she’s sorry, she understands, but there’s nothing she can do. I tell her that my wife has just left her teaching job. I’ve just finished sending in the paperwork to move us from Sasha’s insurance to the insurance plan offered by Newsweek. The HR department at Newsweek must be aware of this.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  These developments were positive but also unsettling. Urbanization involved massive social change that left many people feeling obscurely disoriented and lost. Some families had become rich and powerful, others had started to decline. Towns and trade encouraged greater personal mobility, and while it was stimulating to make new contacts with people in other regions, this also undermined the smaller, more parochial communities. There were new class divisions. Brahmins and kshatriyas tended to band together against vaishyas and shudras. The old rural elites felt alienated from the emerging urban classes, which had strong vaishya and shudra elements. The rich vaishyas, who had become merchants and bankers, were increasingly estranged from the agricultural vaishyas in the countryside. The rules that had governed relations between the four classes now seemed incongruous, and people had to learn fresh ways of living together. The loss of tribal identity left some feeling bereft and cast into a void. These social tensions were particularly acute in the east, where urbanization was more advanced, and it was in this region that the next phase of the Indian Axial Age began. Here the Aryan settlers were in a minority, and indigenous traditions were still very much alive. People felt free to explore novel solutions. The rapid material developments in the towns made city dwellers more conscious of the pace of change than in the countryside, where people did the same thing at the same time, year after year. Life probably seemed even more ephemeral and transient, and this confirmed the now-ingrained belief that life was dukkha, as did the prevalence of disease and anomie in the crowded, disturbing cities. Traditional values had crumbled, and the new ways seemed frightening and alien. The cities were exciting; their streets were crowded with brilliantly painted carriages; huge elephants carried merchandise to and from distant lands; and merchants from all parts of India mingled in the marketplace. The urban class was powerful, thrusting, and ambitious. But the gambling, theater, dancing, prostitution, and rowdy tavern life of the towns seemed shocking to people who leaned toward the older values.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings. Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number- one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else! As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast. “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.” “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?” Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says. Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it. Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project? Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments? Once I do create that document, why am I not responding to comments immediately? Where are my responses to the list of comments that Trotsky has placed into the document? We’re creating a dedicated web page for the podcast. It looks great, but the designers miss their deadline and ask for a few extra days. I tell them that’s fine. Why did I do that? Why did I tell them they could have those days? Why did they miss the deadline in the first place? Did I fail to communicate the deadlines clearly enough to them? There’s a person I think would be great as a guest on the show. I send an email to Cranium asking him what he thinks. Trotsky leaps in: Why am I writing directly to Cranium? Why am I asking him to get involved in minor details like this?

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

  In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed. 11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer. 12 To understand the Saudi influence, one must reckon with what may seem a contradiction. On the one hand, after the Iranian Revolution, the kingdom had become one of America’s chief regional allies. On the other hand, it subscribed to an extremely reductive form of Islam, which had been developed in the eighteenth century by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Ibn Abd al- Wahhab had preached a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet and repudiated such later developments as the Shiah, Sufism, Falsafah, and the jurisprudence (fiqh) on which all other Muslim ulema depended. He was particularly distressed by the popular veneration of holy men and their tombs, which he condemned as idolatry. Even so, Wahhabism was not inherently violent; indeed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had refused to sanction the wars of his patron, Ibn Saud of Najd, because he was fighting simply for wealth and glory. 13 It was only after his retirement that Wahhabis became more aggressive, even to the point of destroying Imam Husain’s shrine in Karbala in 1802 as well as monuments in Arabia connected with Muhammad and his companions. At this time too, the sect insisted that Muslims who did not accept their doctrines were infidels (kufar). 14 During the early nineteenth century, Wahhabis incorporated the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah into their canon, and takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, which Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself had rejected, became central to their practice. 15 The oil embargo imposed by the Gulf States during the 1973 October War had sent the price soaring, and the kingdom now had all the petrodollars it needed to find practical ways of imposing Wahhabism on the entire ummah. 16 Deeply disconcerted by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran, which threatened their leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis intensified their efforts to counter Iranian influence and replaced Iran as the chief ally of the United States in the region.

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

  In 258, however, Valerian was the first emperor to target the Church specifically, ordering that its clergy be executed and the property of high-ranking Christians confiscated. Once again, not many people seem to have been killed, and two years later Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians and died in captivity. His successor, Galienus, revoked the legislation, and Christians enjoyed forty years of peace. Clearly Valerian had been troubled by the Church’s organizational strength rather than by its beliefs and rituals. The Church was a new phenomenon. Christians had exploited the empire’s improved communications to create an institution with a unity of structure that none of the traditions we have discussed so far had attempted. Each local church was headed by a bishop, the “overseer” who was said to derive his authority from Jesus’s apostles, and was supported by presbyters and deacons. The network of such near-identical communities seemed almost to have become an empire within the empire. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons (c. 130–200), who was anxious to create an orthodoxy that excluded aggressive sectarians, had claimed that the Great Church had a single Rule of Faith, because the bishops had inherited their teaching directly from the apostles. This was not only a novel idea but a total fantasy. Paul’s letters show that there had been considerable tension between him and Jesus’s disciples, and his teachings bore little relation to those of Jesus. Each of the Synoptics had his own take on Jesus, and the Johannines were different again; there were also a host of other gospels in circulation. When Christians finally established a scriptural canon—between the fourth and sixth centuries—diverse visions were included side by side. Unfortunately, however, Christianity would develop a peculiar yearning for intellectual conformity that would not only prove to be unsustainable but that set it apart from other faith traditions. The rabbis would never attempt to create a single central authority; not even God, much less another rabbi, could tell another Jew what to think. 130 The Buddha had adamantly rejected the idea of religious authority; the notion of a single rule of faith and a structured hierarchy was entirely alien to the multifarious traditions of India; and the Chinese were encouraged to see merit in all the great teachers, despite their disagreements. Christian leaders would make the Church even more threatening to the authorities during the forty peaceful years after Valerian’s death. When Diocletian finally established his palace in Nicomedia in 287, a Christian basilica was clearly visible on the opposite hill, seeming to confront the imperial palace as an equal. He made no move against the Church for sixteen years, but as a firm believer in the Pax Deorum at a time when the fate of the empire hung in the balance, Diocletian would find the Christians’ stubborn refusal to honor the gods increasingly intolerable.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  She sends us this email: We’ve got a brilliant team and, at times, it can be hard to innovate due to fear of failure and the pressure of our day-to-day goals. That’s why we’re creating this day to exist in total isolation to work on ANY project that you’re passionate about. The only goal: Be Fearless. I read the email and forget about it. A couple weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk when Ashley from the blog team suddenly asks me, “So what are you going to do for Fearless Friday?” “Oh,” I say, “when is that?” “It’s tomorrow!” Her big eyes widen with alarm. “Did you not sign up? You were supposed to sign up! Each team is doing a different project.” “I think I’m going to skip it.” “You can’t skip it! You have to pick one of the activities.” “What are the choices?” I say, filled with dread. “It’s all on the wiki,” she said. “I’ll send you a link.” “No, look, you can just tell me.” She is, after all, sitting right next to me. “No, I’ll send it to you,” she says. I guess she thinks it will be good for me to learn how to do these things by myself. I pull up the link. The idea of Fearless Friday is that we will break into small teams and spend the day doing something fearless . That can be anything we want, but there is one thing we cannot do, which is our actual job. No matter how busy you are, the prime directive is this: No working on your actual job. There’s no getting out of this. There are no exceptions. I have no idea by whose authority we are commanded to do these things. Jordan is not my boss, but here she is, making us all stop work for a day. After doing some research, I discover that Jordan was one of Cranium’s first hires, and that in fact he knew her before he came to HubSpot. They worked together at a software company where Cranium was a marketing manager and Jordan was a college intern. At that company, Jordan’s uncle was the VP of marketing. He was the one who hired Cranium. He’s also a longtime HubSpot customer. In other words, at HubSpot Jordan can do anything she wants. In this case, I believe Jordan wants to demonstrate her leadership abilities by appointing herself the leader of our whole group for a whole day. Marketing people are obsessed with leadership. Attend any marketing conference and you will find someone giving a speech to an auditorium full of glassy-eyed marketing drones, telling them that they are all leaders. Jordan has added a clever twist by attaching her exercise to Sandberg’s feminist manifesto. Tech companies like HubSpot are sensitive, and rightfully so, about having so few women in top positions.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We could live in the Rocky Mountains! We should make a list of the best places to live, rent a Winnebago, visit each one, and then decide. We could spend the whole summer traveling around the country! We could see the Grand Canyon, and Zion, and Yellowstone, and Yosemite. In a way this whole thing is a gift. Because now we have all this free time! When are we ever going to have a chance like this again? Sasha knows that I’m full of shit, and she also knows I’m panicking, because this is what I do when I’m panicking—I talk and talk and talk. But even as I’m reeling through my list of fantasy mountain towns where I can wear plaid shirts and drive a pickup truck and grow a beard, Sasha has arrived at the truth of our situation, which she feels the need to explain to me, as if by speaking the words out loud she might feel more in control of the situation. “Let’s just talk about where we are right now,” she says. She’s working hard to remain calm. “The reality is that I just quit my job, and I can’t get that job back. They’ve already hired someone else. And now you’ve been fired.” “Laid off,” I say, because that sounds better. “Point is, we’re both unemployed, and we have six-year-old twins, and no health insurance, and no income. And we’re about to go on a really expensive vacation.” “Well,” I say, “when you put it like that.” “How else would you put it?” I launch back into my spiel about moving to the mountains, but she cuts me off. None of that is going to happen, and we both know it. We’re not going to spend the summer cruising around the United States in a Winnebago like the Griswolds on some zany adventure. “Look,” I say, “I’ll get another job. I’m going to start hitting the phone today. Right now. I’m going to email everyone I know. I’ve got a bunch of speeches booked, which should keep us going into the fall. And I can pick up some freelance work.” I’m trying to sound confident. But the truth is that I’m fifty-one years old and I have never gone looking for a job before. I’ve always had a job and then moved to a better one. I’ve never had to call my friends and ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of anything. I’ve always been the guy on the other end of that call, and I’ve always felt bad for those friends who were calling me. Sure, I told them, I’ll pass the word around. I’ll keep an eye open. I’m sure you’ll find something. But we all know the reality of our situation. Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As Wundt and others agree with Helmholtz here, and as their conclusions, if true, are irreconcilable with all the sensationalism which I have been teaching hitherto, it clearly devolves upon me to defend my position against this new attack. But as this chapter on Space is already so overgrown with episodes and details, I think it best to reserve the refutation of their general principle for the next chapter, and simply to assume at this point its untenability. This has of course an arrogant look; but if the reader will bear with me for not very many pages more, I shall hope to appease his mind. Meanwhile I affirm confidently that the same outer objects actually FEEL different to us according as our brain reacts on them in one way or another by making us perceive them as this or as that sort of thing. So true is this that one may well, with Stumpf,[221] reverse Helmholtz's query, and ask: "What would become of our sense-perceptions in case experience were not able so to transform them?" Stumpf adds: "All wrong perceptions that depend on peculiarities in the organs are more or less perfectly corrected by the influence of imagination following the guidance of experience." If, therefore, among the facts of optical space-perception (which we must now proceed to consider in more detail) we find instances of an identical organic eye-process, giving us different perceptions at different times, in consequence of different collateral circumstances suggesting different objective facts to our imagination, we must not hastily conclude, with the school of Helmholtz and Wundt, that the organic eye-process pure and simple, without the collateral circumstances, is incapable of giving us any sensation of a spatial kind at all. We must rather seek to discover by what means the circumstances can so have transformed a space-sensation, which, but for their presence, would probably have been felt in its natural purity. And I may as well say now in advance that we shall find the means to be nothing more or less than association—the suggestion to the mind of optical objects not actually present, but more habitually associated with the 'collateral circumstances' than the sensation which they now displace and being imagined now with a quasi-hallucinatory strength. But before this conclusion emerges, it will be necessary to have reviewed the most important facts of optical space-perception, in relation to the organic conditions on which they depend. Readers acquainted with German optics will excuse what is already familiar to them in the following section.[222] Let us begin the long and rather tedious inquiry by the most important case. Physiologists have long sought for a simple law by which to connect the seen direction and distance of objects with the retinal impressions they produce. Two principal theories have been held of this matter, the 'theory of identical points', and the 'theory of projection'—each incompatible with each other, and each beyond certain limits becoming inconsistent with the facts. The Theory of Identical Points.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I masturbate with the regularity of a civil servant. When I wake, or during the day, with my back up against a wall, my legs spread and slightly bent, never at night. I take just as much pleasure in doing it when I am well shafted for real. In those instances, it takes me longer to come; I find it more difficult concentrating on my fantasy narrative, because the organ lodged inside me does not exclude the one I imagine. The real one stands ready, motionless and patient until I give the signal, a ‘yeh’ of total acquiescence or a toss of my head, and the spasms that I have provoked meet the charges of the penis at its most powerful. Can I really be bringing together two such very different forms of pleasure, the one that is felt so distinctly that I can almost feel my internal space expanding in the same way that I would watch the tide rising over the beach, and the other far more diffuse pleasure, as if my body were reverberating like a muted gong because, like when we suffer extreme pain, the mind distances itself from it? I have never identified the contractions of my vagina when making love. I have remained completely ignorant on that subject. Is it because I don’t recognise that sort of orgasm in those circumstances? Is it because, filled by my partner’s organ, my own does not have the same elasticity? Still, happily, I did eventually realise that it was one manifestation of the female orgasm. I was over thirty when a male friend and I had one of those intimate conversations which are very rare in life. He was worrying about how one could tell when a woman had come. ‘Is it when she has spasms? Is that the only proof?’ he asked me. Hesitantly, but not wanting to look a fool, I said yes. I kept to myself the fact that I was thinking: ‘so that’s what it is.’ Until then, when my body had emitted these sorts of signals, I had not identified them as such, even if it was while I was masturbating with the precision I have described. Having not knowingly striven for the thing they signified, I could not recognise them as signs. Some caresses made me feel good, some positions were better than others, and that was it. I now understand that that laconic conversation (with a man – and this is not a coincidence – with whom I hadn’t had a sexual relationship) must have sown in me the seed of an anxiety which took many long years to develop into the state of dissatisfaction which came up at the end of the first chapter of this book.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Under the Zhou, the Chinese had made great progress in clearing the land, cutting down woods and forests, and developing more land for cultivation. But this positive development had a worrying consequence. 93 There was now less territory available for hunting and the breeding of sheep and cattle. By destroying the natural habitat of many species, deforestation was also decimating the rich wildlife of the region. In the eighth century, the Chinese returned from their hunting expeditions with far fewer animals than in the old days of plenty. Sheep and cattle breeding had also greatly diminished. The Shang and the early Zhou had slaughtered hundreds of beasts at their lavish sacrifices without giving the matter a second thought, convinced that their resources were inexhaustible. They gave generous gifts and consumed copious amounts of meat at their banquets, without a flicker of anxiety. But the new scarcity seems to have made people look askance at this extravagance. There were no more mass killings of sacrificial victims; the number of animals was now strictly controlled by ritual law. The ritualists also attempted to regulate hunting, trying to limit it to a carefully defined season. By 771, funerals were already more tightly controlled, and the old ostentation was frowned upon. A new spirit of moderation was gradually transforming the lives of the noble families in the cities. Because there was less game and fewer cattle, their wealth now depended upon agriculture rather than on hunting and raiding. The aristocrats remained warriors at heart, but as we shall see in the next chapter, their wars became more ritualized and less violent than before. Because there were fewer military and hunting expeditions, the junzi (“the gentleman”) spent more time at court, increasingly preoccupied with protocol, etiquette, and the minutiae of ritual. 94 Restraint, control, and moderation were now the watchwords. Life had to be more carefully regulated. In place of the old orgy of gift giving, potlatch style, there must be a minutely organized system of exchange, supported by documentary evidence of precedent. 95 All the activities of the noble class were transformed into an elaborate ceremony. Whatever you did, there was a correct way of doing it. Over time, the nobility in the Zhou cities had evolved customs designed to promote social harmony and the welfare of the group. As in all societies, these traditions had developed more by trial and error than by conscious deliberation. These patterns of behavior had probably taken centuries to evolve, and were passed from one generation to another. 96 The junzi lived by an elaborate code of manners: there were some things that he did and other things that he did not do. Now, during the Spring and Autumn period, this customal law began to be written down and made into a coherent system. In this time of transition and uncertainty, people wanted clear directives. They had to rethink their religion.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Not quite at the Scientology point along the influence continuum, Shambala’s exit costs didn’t threaten her physical safety or all-out decimate her life; in a way, her departure felt anticlimactic, like a balloon idly trickling to the floor. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue a master’s in social work, and now she practices a less hierarchical form of Buddhism. Abbie attends a variety of meditation groups and then goes home to her own apartment, which she shares with three roommates (“so I still get the communal aspect,” she laughs). She has a mini altar in her room, and sometimes privately draws on teachings she learned in Vermont. “I try to take what I liked and leave the rest,” she said. “I’m still figuring out what to make of everything that happened.” Cathy Schenkelberg, too, dabbles in alternative spirituality, keeping a healthy distance from Scientology and all her old relationships from that time. After leaving the organization, she had to replace everyone in her life—her friends, her agent, her manager, her accountant, her dentist, her chiropractor—because they were all in the church. But sometimes, when she least expects it, Cathy will overhear a Scientology term out in the world, and those pangs of paranoia she felt for so many years suddenly crackle through her nervous system. “I have a visceral reaction when fellow ex-Scientologists use the terminology. It’s PTSD to me,” Cathy confessed. “I say, ‘Out of respect, could you please not use Scientology language? It upsets me.’ Here, I’ll use a word: It enturbulates me.” My old Scientology confrère Mani and I haven’t seen each other much since our personality test “kidnapping” nearly ten years ago, but I reached out to her as soon as I began writing this chapter. She’s still in LA, doing the acting thing. I realized I’d never gotten her take on that day’s events. I started to fear that maybe my amygdala had caricatured the memory and she’d long ago forgotten it. “Do you ever think about that experience?” I texted her. Her response arrived quickly, in all caps: “I DO ALL THE TIME.” My most crystallized recollection from the ordeal was Mani’s inexplicable calm and endurance. She just cheerfully went along with the whole thing for hours, like fully committing to a hammy acting bit—with me, the wet blanket foil, begging to bail. But Mani recalls being far more distressed. “I remember how they kept us separated,” she messaged back. “I remember a woman telling me (sternly) that it would be very quick (it wasn’t), not to be afraid to be truthful with myself as this was the only way they could properly assess what I would need, and that ‘me and my friend would be back together before we knew it.’” Mani revealed that over the past decade, she’s had other, more frightening Scientology encounters.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  The more sociable I became, the better I cultivated my innate pragmatism in all aspects of sexual exchanges. Having, in the early days, tested various partners’ receptivity to triangular games, I adapted the words I used. A faint, luxurious aura around me was enough for some whereas others, as I have illustrated, wanted to enjoy by proxy every last fingering. Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always indexed by the way feelings have evolved. I was very talkative with Jacques at first but then I had to cope, more or less well and anyway belatedly, with the ban imposed on sexual adventures and accounts of these adventures the moment our relationship was perceived and lived as one of love, even though more than once I read descriptions of erotic scenes in Jacques’ books which could only have been reworkings of anecdotes I had told him. Of all the men that I saw for any length of time, only two brought my panoramic exposés to an abrupt halt. And even then I am pretty sure that these details they didn’t want to know, and which were therefore not mentioned, still formed a central part of our exchanges.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I met Éric when I was twenty-one, not before his existence had been ‘announced’ to me; some mutual friends had frequently assured me that, given my predispositions, he was just right for me. After the holiday in Lyon I had continued having group sex with Claude. With Éric, the regime intensified, not only because he took me to places where I could, as I have just shown, make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises, but more particularly because the sessions were well organised. To my way of thinking, there has always been a clear-cut difference between, on the one hand, the more or less improvised situations which lead a group of people to redistribute themselves amongst the beds and sofas after a dinner, or which induce an excited gang of friends to drive around the porte Dauphine in their car until they make contact with other cars and all the passengers end up intermingling in a large apartment, and, on the other hand, the soirées curated by Éric and his friends. I preferred the inflexible sequence of the latter, and their exclusive goal: there was no rush and no tension: there were no outside factors (alcohol, demonstrative behaviour…) to impede the flow mechanics of bodies. Their comings and goings never strayed from their insect-like determination. Victor’s birthday parties impressed me the most. At the entrance to his property there were guards with dogs, talking into walkie-talkies, and I was intimidated by the crowds of people. Some women had dressed for the occasion, they wore transparent blouses or dresses, I was envious of them, and as people arrived and met up, sipping their champagne, I stood to one side. In fact, I only really relaxed once I had removed my dress or my trousers. My true clothing was my nudity, which shielded me.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  The most difficult period for everyone was the groping, confused, highly emotional beginning of the process—the initial large-group session. Imagine, if you can, an enormous circle of eight hundred people, ten to fifteen deep, sitting in chairs or on the floor. Place yourself randomly in this crowd, as did the five of us from the United States. Three of us have interpreters by our side to help understand the gushing flow of Portuguese. Four persons with microphones on long wires stand in the open space, passing one to each person desiring to speak. Perhaps some of the chaotic, disconnected aspect of these beginning meetings can be suggested by quoting statements from a reporter who published an almost verbatim account of one of these sessions. Here is some of his account: The tension starts to increase. The atmosphere heats up. Rogers appears to collect himself in silence. Many who take the microphone ask him to lecture. He does not respond. A woman speaks. “I came to listen to Rogers, not to listen to questions without answers. Let’s all leave.” Another woman: “Listen. I came here to give, not just to receive. I want to give something here.” A young man: “This is not a lecture, folks, this is an experience, and I think we should do something together.” A man, far back in the audience: “It’s always like this. Everybody is expecting someone to come and tell us what to do. We are always eager to receive packaged knowledge. I think we should go back to ourselves and look within ourselves for the answer as to what we want to do.” A woman: “We have to do something. We have to take the initiative. We have to overcome our anxiety instead of letting it overcome and guide us. We don’t need answers, but to do something.” The audience is nervous, excited, tense, silent and expectant. A woman: “I know! Let’s sing songs that everybody knows.” Laughter and protests. Others speak up, again asking Rogers to lecture “because we all paid.”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Those jobs supposedly draw on the same set of skills that you develop as a journalist, meaning that you can write and you can work on deadline. And frankly, by the standards of corporate America, you’re cheap. Zack thinks it might be helpful if he explains how the marketing department is organized. We go to a conference room and he begins drawing an org chart on the whiteboard. Zack, I will discover, loves to write on whiteboards. At the top of the marketing department he puts Cranium, the chief marketing officer. Below Cranium are Wingman and three other people. Each of these people has a team or set of teams organized underneath them. On and on Zack goes, creating a tree structure that keeps getting bigger and soon fills the white board. There’s product marketing, web marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, customer marketing, conversion marketing. There are people who do demand generation, others who do customer advocacy. There are people who do sales enablement and lead nurturing. There’s something called the funnel team, and another group called brand and buzz, which oversees the public relations team and runs the annual customer conference. Finally, off to one side, is the content team. It comprises the people who write for the blog and another group who write e-books. That’s where I will be working. I notice something: On the chart, Zack’s name is located above the content team, right below Wingman. I’m no expert in corporate organization, but based on the arrangement of this chart, I think—or, rather, I fear—that this guy who I thought was some kind of administrative assistant might actually be my boss. “Wait a minute,” I say. “I’m confused.” I look at Zack. “Zack,” I say, “what do you do here? What’s your job?” “Oh,” he says, “I run the content team.” “So if you run the content team,” I say, in a halting voice, “does that mean that you’re my boss?” I’m trying not to sound alarmed. “Do I work for you?” Zack says he doesn’t know if he would actually call himself my boss . Strictly speaking, as he understands it, my official manager will be Wingman. But on a day-to-day basis, well, it’s true that I will be working on the team that Zack manages. Fuuuuuuck , is what I say to myself. “Okay, cool,” is what I say out loud. Zack wants to take me to see where I will be working. I get up, feeling dizzy, and follow him out of the conference room, down a hallway past people who suddenly all seem way too young, like high school kids. They’re everywhere, all over the place. They’re rushing around carrying laptops, sitting in groups in little glass-walled meeting rooms, drawing on whiteboards, looking at PowerPoint presentations on giant monitors, drinking coffee, taking notes. I think I may be having a panic attack. Or an acid flashback. Part of me wants to dash for the door.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Isabel had spoken to Owen just two or three times — once when he assured her she hadn’t caused Rita’s heart attack, once when she rode the elevator with him after only he and not she had carried an umbrella in that morning’s thunderstorm and she had tried to laugh off the water literally dripping from her hair and clothes and pooling on the marble floor of the car and he had smiled, politely, seeming, she thought, repelled, and another time she couldn’t remember — he hadn’t even hired her; it had been an obese woman named Cybil in Human Resources. So she had been startled when Owen poked his head in her and Martin’s office, only a few minutes after Martin had excused himself to clean up in the men’s room. Owen had an open and expectant look, as if about to ask if she wanted anything at the store, he was making a run (“T’ll fly if you buy,” they used to say in college) but that couldn’t be it, of course. When she walked to his office later, it was with trepidation — an instinctive reaction to being summoned by someone in authority, she thought — but she also had a flickering hope that she was about to be fired, though if the cause was her office adventures with Martin, that might turn out to be embarrassing, maybe even featured on the evening news, then splashed all over the internet, where her parents could see it. When she sat opposite him, though, Owen didn’t mention Martin and only wanted her to do some special project on a freelance basis; he would understand if she were too busy. “Busy?” She was unable to keep a tone of comic debelies from her voice and immediately sorry about it. “I mean, no, I don’t think so. All right. Thank you.” Isabel needed the money, after all — and she tuned out when Owen explained about the mild tax complications that “freelance” would mean, “estimated’’, or whatever. She concentrated instead on looking at Owen, who was forty-two but whom she thought was either thirty- five or fifty. He had a boyish, snub-nosed face surrounded by graying hair, reminding her of a modern painting in a gilded frame from The Dead End Fob oid another century. He didn’t meet her eyes as he spoke yet what he said couldn’t have been more simple, innocent, and non-incriminating. Was he avoiding something else of which he was ashamed? She didn’t know. She had walked in wondering why he’d chosen her and left convinced it could have been her or someone else; maybe he’d just stopped by her office after counting to ten.