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

  It is significant that, even though the Catholic monarchs remained the pope’s obedient servants, they insisted that it remain separate from the papal inquisition. Ferdinand may have hoped thereby to mitigate the cruelty of his own inquisition and almost certainly never intended it to be a permanent institution. 20 The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian heretics but focused on Jews who had converted to Christianity and were believed to have lapsed. In Muslim Spain, Jews had never been subjected to the persecution that was now habitual in the rest of Europe, 21 but as the Crusading armies of the Reconquista advanced down the peninsula in the late fourteenth century, Jews in Aragon and Castile had been dragged to the baptismal font; others had tried to save themselves by voluntary conversion, and some of these conversos (“converts”) became extremely successful in Christian society and inspired considerable resentment. There were riots, and converso property was seized, the violence caused by financial and social jealousy as much as by religious allegiance. 22 The monarchs were not personally anti-Semitic but simply wanted to pacify their kingdom, which had been shaken by civil war and now faced the Ottoman threat. Yet the Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to achieve stability. As often happens when a nation is menaced by an external power, there were paranoid fears of enemies within, in this case of a “fifth column” of lapsed conversos working secretly to undermine the kingdom’s security. The Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations. Such interference with the religious practice of their subjects was entirely new in Spain, where confessional uniformity had never been a possibility. After centuries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims “living together” (convivencia), the monarchs’ initiative met with strong opposition. Yet while there was no public appetite for targeting observant Jews, there was considerable anxiety about the so-called lapsed “secret Jews,” known as New Christians. When the Inquisitors arrived in a district, “apostates” were promised a pardon if they confessed voluntarily, and “Old Christians” were ordered to report neighbors who refused to eat pork or work on Saturday, the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.” Many conversos who were loyal Catholics felt it wise to seize the opportunity of amnesty while the going was good, and this flood of “confessions” convinced both the Inquisitors and the public that the society of clandestine “Judaizers” really existed. 23 Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis. After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community.

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

  4, to be a reproof of her premature haste.777 In the same way Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great, and even Chrysostom, with all their high estimate of the mother of our Lord, ascribe to her on one or two occasions (John ii. 3; Matt. xiii. 47) maternal vanity, also doubt and anxiety, and make this the sword (Luke ii. 35) which, under the cross, passed through her soul.778 In addition to this typological antithesis of Mary and Eve, the rise of monasticism supplied the development of Mariology a further motive in the enhanced estimate of virginity, without which no true holiness could be conceived. Hence the virginity of Mary, which is unquestioned for the part of her life before the birth of Christ, came to be extended to her whole life, and her marriage with the aged Joseph to be regarded as a mere protectorate, and, therefore, only a nominal marriage. The passage, Matt. i. 25, which, according to its obvious literal meaning (the e{w" and prwtovtoko" 779), seems to favor the opposite view, was overlooked or otherwise explained; and the brothers of Jesus,780 who appear fourteen or fifteen times in the gospel history and always in close connection with His mother, were regarded not as sons of Mary subsequently born, but either as sons of Joseph by a former marriage (the view of Epiphanius), or, agreeably to the wider Hebrew use of the term ;aj cousins of Jesus (Jerome).781 It was felt—and this feeling is shared by many devout Protestants—to be irreconcilable with her dignity and the dignity of Christ, that ordinary children should afterward proceed from the same womb out of which the Saviour of the world was born. The name perpetua virgo, ajei; parqevno", was thenceforth a peculiar and inalienable predicate of Mary. After the fourth century it was taken not merely in a moral sense, but in the physical also, as meaning that Mary conceived and produced the Lord clauso utero.782 This, of course, required the supposition of a miracle, like the passage of the risen Jesus through the closed doors. Mary, therefore, in the Catholic view, stands entirely alone in the history of the world in this respect, as in others: that she was a married virgin, a wife never touched by her husband.783 Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy- ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes (kollurivde") to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  To keep him from sleepwalking, we knot three seatbelts around his limbs at night. Ba’s breath humidifies the whole car, and in the morning we wake with our windows steamed, our bodies hammocked in heat. Jie drives in a spine shape, swerving between lanes, uncontained. We pass Texas and unzip its border with New Mexico, which looks like the same state but thirstier, the cacti more nipplelike, asking for our mouths around them. The desert floor breeds rows of button cacti, and I’m tempted to wander out one night and undress them of their spines. Jie leans her head while she drives, half of her face frying against the window, the left half browning more than the right. I tell her she looks like two women splitting one mouth. Go deep-throat a cactus, she says. Go back to sleep. I dream it: my throat perforated with needle-holes, my throat turning into a sprinkler every time I try to drink. Jie and I buy corn dogs and packaged pies at convenience stores, where the clerks look at us like we’re a species of upright armadillo, yellow and armored. They watch through the window as Jie pumps gas, sometimes asking where we’re going, sometimes asking where we’re from. We say Taiwan even though we’ve never called it that, and the cashier grins big as a window: We see his missing teeth, we smell what he eats. He says he bombed Taiwan back during the war. Says it looked pretty from the air, a severed green finger floating in the sea. Jie tells him that Taiwan’s silhouette looks more like a finger flipping you off, then runs out of the store with a stolen lighter up her sleeve. The packaged fruit pies dye our spit different colors, and when Ba sleeps at night with his mouth ajar, I can see his tongue glowing blue-raspberry. We stop at a seafood restaurant somewhere left of Texas, though the closest sea is the one we dream. There’s a live fish tank two feet from our table, and when the waiter hears us speak his dialect he bags us a fish for the road even though we’ve got no fire to cook it. Finally, we fry it on the hood of our car, the sun seething through flesh. The fish tastes metallic, too much memory of the sea in its bones. On our maps, we pencil the line from Arkansas to LA: It’s straight all the way across, no excuse to get lost. Still, we get lost. In Arizona, we drive in circles around the same three cities until Ma lets us stop at a motel to ask directions.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Then the shark-holding guy (who was wearing pink rubber gloves of the type grandmas use to wash dishes) asked Daddy if his girls wanted to see the hammerhead, and Daddy said sure. I’d never seen a shark up close before, and what struck me was how chinless it was, its mouth drawn low down where its neck should have been. This gave it a deep, snaggle-toothed frown and kept it from looking very smart. Plus its whole body was one big muscle. It couldn’t have weighed more than fifteen or twenty pounds, but the guy was having to fight to hold it, yelling over to Bucky to hurry. The shark, meanwhile, was thrashing from side to side in the air. Finally, Daddy helped the man pin the thing on the sand with his foot so Lecia and I could feel how rough its skin was. I rubbed it the wrong way (exactly, Daddy pointed out to me, as he had told me not to do) and it chafed the skin off my fingers like sandpaper. In the black-and-white picture from Bucky’s Polaroid camera, Lecia is looking solemnly at the shark, which is blurred into a kind of swinging bludgeon in the fellow’s gloved hands, and Daddy is grinning a little bit too hard, and I am studying my bloody fingers like they’re some code I’m about to crack. What was on my mind was Mother vanishing up those steps to drink, taking herself Away. There’s no picture of that worry, of course. I can only guess it from the crease in my forehead. Farther down the beach, we hit a kelp bed full of dead men-of-war, which was what Daddy had wanted us to see. There were more of these tangled up in the brown ribbons of kelp than I’d ever seen in one place before. The storm had blown them in, and Daddy wanted us to look out for them. If you’ve never seen a man-of-war, it’s something right out of science fiction. The head’s a translucent globe about the size of a softball and full of air, so it floats on top of the water, clear in places, but full of sunset-type colors in others—royal blue and red-violet, the colors bleeding into each other. A bunch of men-of-war bobbing on a wave looks at a slant like water flowers—lily or lotus, even. The colors are that strong. You can poke the head with a finger and feel it give like a bubble-gum bubble. But the tentacles dangling down under the surface hold serious poison. They’re fuchsia and grow yards long. They sway around where you can’t see them just looking for a leg to wrap onto, or so Daddy told us that afternoon. We knew jellyfish better. They had short hard tentacles that stayed in one place. We’d both been stung by jellyfish, and it was about like a honeybee sting.

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

  Indeed, my exhaustion and my situation had beaten me down to the point of preferring death to the ordeal of keeping it at bay. We were then preparing to enter Dauphine, of a sudden six horsemen, galloping at top speed behind our coach, overtook it and, with drawn cutlasses, forced our driver to halt. Thirty feet off the highway was a cottage to which these cavaliers, whom we soon identified as constables, ordered the driver to lead the carriage; when we were alongside it, we were told to get out, and all three of us entered the peasant's dwelling. With an effrontery unthinkable in a woman soiled with unnumbered crimes, Dubois who found herself arrested, archly demanded of these officers whether she were known to them, and with what right they comported themselves thus with a woman of her rank. "We have not the honor of your acquaintance, Madame," replied the officer in charge of the squadron; "but we are certain you have in your carriage the wretch who yesterday set fire to the principal hotel in Villefranche"; then, eyeing me closely: "she answers the description, Madame, we are not in error - ; have the kindness to surrender her to us and to inform us how a person as respectable as you appear to be could have such a woman in your keeping." "Why, 'tis very readily accounted for," replied Dubois with yet greater insolence, "and, I declare, I'll neither hide her from you nor take her side in the matter if 'tis certain she is guilty of the horrible crime you speak of. I too was staying at that hotel in Villefranche, I left in the midst of all the commotion and as I am getting into my coach, this girl runs up, begs my compassion, says she has just lost everything in the fire, and implores me to take her with me to Lyon where she hopes to be able to find a place. Far less attentive to my reason than to my heart's promptings, I acquiesced, consented to fetch her along; once in the carriage she offered herself as my servant; once again imprudence led me to agree to everything and I have been taking her to Dauphine where I have my properties and family: 'tis a lesson, assuredly, I presently recognize with utmost clarity all of pity's shortcomings; I shall not again be guilty of them. There she is, gentlemen, there she is; God forbid that I should be interested in such a monster, I abandon her to the law's severest penalties, and, I beseech you, take every step to prevent it from being known that I committed the unfortunate mistake of lending an instant's credence to a single word she uttered."

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I raced up the concrete steps, even stopping short at the open screen before I slammed inside hollering I was home. I slung my book satchel over the sofa back and called again for Mother. The silence that came back was even heavier than the air outside. It lay across the coarse rugs like swamp gas. Maybe that quiet somehow kick-started my fretting. Maybe then I paused to consider the oddness of that open door. I ran into the kitchen with the test still in hand looking to show it to Mother. There was only the black fan sweeping a dull little wind over a cup of cold coffee. No other sign. Back in the living room, I found the last page of the letter from Grandma’s lawyer folded into about a dozen accordion pleats the way a kid would make a paper fan. Mother must have sat on the horsehair sofa using that fan to push a breeze across her face before dropping it there. I smoothed it out. The oddest details from that letter have stayed with me, while other things—such as the exact amount of Mother’s inheritance—have been sucked up into the void. Maybe the number was too large for my small skull to hold, being in the hundreds of thousands. (The figure also varies with Mother’s telling, from “only $100,000” to “over half a million” depending on the point she’s trying to make with the story. To this day, if pressed to give us the exact number, she presents a kind of walleyed expression with a loose-shouldered shrug that suggests such sums of money must be taken in stride, give or take a hundred thousand.) The stationery was thick and butter-colored. The page number was “6 of 6.” The lawyer promised to wire $36,000— about four times what Daddy could make in a year before overtime—from the sale of Grandma’s Lubbock house and farm to the Leechfield Bank, to thus-and-such an account number. We’d all expected that money. What this letter went on to describe that I didn’t expect was the money from a new oil lease. Apparently, Grandma hung on to the mineral rights for her land, keeping them in her name more from habit than any real hope of drilling oil there. Enough Dust Bowl crackers and dirt farmers out that way had sold their farms at fifty cents per acre one week only to watch a gusher spout all over the buyer’s Cadillac the next for a faint dream of oil money to lie embedded in every West Texan’s brainpan. You just did not sell mineral rights outright, ever. You held them. Even I knew that. You leased them for huge sums. (To my knowledge we still hold drilling rights on that land, though every inch of it has long since been proven bone-dry to the earth’s core.) Anyway, it turned out that loads of would-be drillers had hounded Grandma for two decades to start poking holes in her stretch of desert.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  AbbieI’ve been thinking more and more about my fantasies lately. I’ve even tried talking to my husband about them, that is, the ones I think wouldn’t make him angry. I wouldn’t dare tell him that I often think of my old boyfriend, of how it used to be with him, nor of my thoughts of some unknown man who has forced himself upon me, which in my imagination I seem to enjoy. For some odd reason, while having sexual relations with my husband I prefer him to be fully clothed, and while we are in bed, I’d rather not see his “parts.” I’d rather we have sex when I didn’t have to see his penis. Although he enjoys studying my “areas,” I cannot bring myself to do the same. It turns me on more when things are left to the imagination. But my husband tends to parade his “parts” in front of me, even though I’ve asked him not to, and mentioned that our sex life might improve if he didn’t. You may therefore find it strange that in my latest fantasy I tell my husband that I think I would enjoy watching him having sex with another woman. Not really someone we know—preferably some strange female. That way we’d know no relationship could come of it. But if it were to come true I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to allow it. Yet I keep thinking it would be fun. I also have fantasies of me with other women. But these women have no face, I mean they are no one in particular. These occur usually during masturbation, which is maybe two, three times a month. I don’t really have lesbian fantasies, because for me to do the act on a female, to me it seems repulsive, but the idea of a female doing it to me seems pleasurable. (Selfish, perhaps?) I know I began this letter by saying I do discuss some fantasies with my husband, but I’m afraid that even that is a fantasy! I can’t think of any fantasy we’ve discussed, but then we have a communication problem! [Letter]

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

  Zwingli and Oecolampadius died a few months after the publication of the book, but condemned its contents beforehand. Luther’s and Bucer’s views on it have already been noticed. Melanchthon felt the difficulties of the trinitarian and christological problems and foresaw future controversies. He gave his judgment in a letter to his learned friend Camerarius (dated 5 Id. Febr. 1533): — "You ask me what I think of Servetus? I see him indeed sufficiently sharp and subtle in disputation, but I do not give him credit for much depth. He is possessed, as it seems to me, of confused imaginations, and his thoughts are not well matured on the subjects he discusses. He manifestly talks foolishness when he speaks of justification. peri; th'" triavdo" [on the subject of the Trinity] you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise. Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come: ei[ ejstin uJpovstasi" oJ logvo" [is the Logos an hypostasis]? ei[ ejstin ujpovstasi" to; pneu'ma [is the Holy Spirit an hypostasis]? For my own part I refer to those passages of Scripture that bid us call on Christ, which is to ascribe divine honors to him, and find them full of consolation."1051 Cochlaeus directed the attention of Quintana, at the Diet of Regensburg, in 1532, to the book of Servetus which was sold there, and Quintana at once took measures to suppress it. The Emperor prohibited it, and the book soon disappeared. Servetus published in 1532 two dialogues on the Trinity, and a treatise on Justification. He retracted, in the preface, all he had said in his former work, not, however, as false, but as childish.1052 He rejected the Lutheran doctrine of justification, and also both the Lutheran and Zwinglian views of the sacrament. He concluded the book by invoking a malediction on "all tyrants of the Church."1053 § 142. Servetus as a Geographer. As Servetus was repulsed by the Reformers of Switzerland and Germany, he left for France and assumed the name of Michel de Villeneuve. His real name and his obnoxious books disappeared from the sight of the world till they emerged twenty years later at Vienne and at Geneva. He devoted himself to the study of mathematics, geography, astrology, and medicine. In 1534 he was in Paris, and challenged the young Calvin to a disputation, but failed to appear at the appointed hour. He spent some time at Lyons as proof-reader and publisher of the famous printers, Melchior and Caspar Trechsel. He issued through them, in 1535, under the name of "Villanovanus," a magnificent edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, with a self-laudatory preface, which concludes with the hope that "no one will underestimate the labor, though pleasant in itself, that is implied in the collation of our text with that of earlier editions, unless it be some Zoilus of contracted brow, who cannot look without envy upon the zealous labors of others." A second and improved edition appeared in 1541.1054

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

  It was forbidden under pain of death to write against the Interim. Nevertheless, over thirty attacks appeared from the "Chancellery of God" at Magdeburg. Bullinger and Calvin wrote against it. Calvin published the imperial proclamation and the text of the Interim in full, and then gave his reasons why it could never bring peace to the Church. He begins with a quotation from Hilary in the Arian controversy: "Specious indeed is the name of peace, and fair the idea of unity; but who doubts that the only peace of the Church is that which is of Christ?" This is the key-note of his own exposition on the true method of the pacification of Christendom. Elector Maurice of Saxony, who stood between two fires,—his Lutheran subjects and the Emperor,—modified the Augsburg Interim, with the aid of Melanchthon and the other theologians of Wittenberg, and substituted for it the Leipzig Interim, Dec. 22, 1548. In this document the chief articles of faith are more cautiously worded so as to admit of an evangelical interpretation, but the Roman ceremonies are retained, as adiaphora, or things indifferent, which do not compromise the conscience nor endanger salvation. it gave rise to the Adiaphoristic Controversy between the strict and the moderate Lutherans. Melanchthon was placed in a most trying position in the midst of the contest. In the sincere wish to save Protestantism from utter overthrow and Saxony from invasion and desolation by imperial troops, he yielded to the pressure of the courtiers and accepted the Leipzig Interim in the hope of better times. For this conduct he was severely attacked by Flacius, his former pupil, and denounced as a traitor. When Calvin heard the news, he wrote an earnest letter of fraternal rebuke to Melanchthon, and reminded him of Paul’s unyielding firmness at the Synod of Jerusalem on the question of circumcision.885 Protestantism in Germany was brought to the brink of ruin, but was delivered from it by the treason of the Elector Maurice. This shrewd, selfish politician and master in the art of dissimulation, had first betrayed the Protestants, by aiding the Emperor in the defeat of the Smalkaldian League, whereby he gained the electorate; and then he rose in rebellion against the Emperor and drove him and the Fathers of Trent out of Tyrol (1551). He died in 1553 of a deadly wound which he received in a victorious battle against his old friend Albrecht of Brandenburg.886 The final result of the defeat of the Emperor was the Augsburg Treaty of Peace, 1555, which for the first time gave to the Lutherans a legal status in the empire, though with certain restrictions. This closes the period of the Lutheran Reformation. § 122. Against the Worship of Relics. 1543.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  To believe that she’d lost those kids was to believe that on any day our mother could vanish from our lives, back into the void she came from, that we could become another secret she kept. In short, when Grandma told me that I could be Sent Away for badness, that threat had the hard, dull sound of truth to it. After Grandma’s threat, I started to watch Mother even more closely for signs of Nervous. But until Hurricane Carla hit, I saw nothing, which is—I’ve since come to know—perhaps the surest sign of Nervous there is. I watched her. She in turn watched the hurricane tracking reports every evening on the weather. We had a little portable TV that she had broken the antennae off of in some temper fit. It was rigged up with coat hangers for rabbit ears and produced a pale-blue and ash-white picture. The weatherman wore the shimmery full-body halo of indifferent reception. This was before satellite pictures where stop-action clouds swirled across the honest-to-God coastline. The weatherman, who also hosted an afternoon kids’ show called Cattleman Bill , stood before a white greaseboard map of the Gulf drawing in Magic Marker. Little spirals were tropical storms. He drew fleets of arcing black arrows to indicate the general direction of the storm (which invariably blew at the east Texas coast either northwest from the Caribbean or northwest across the Florida Keys). When a spiral got big enough—once it took up a hundred miles of coastline and had winds of about a hundred and fifty miles per hour—it was a hurricane. Then the game became guessing where the storm would hit, or, in local parlance, “go in,” as if it were some stray relative in search of lodging. Pull into any gas station and the grease monkey would invariably start the pump, then lean into your window to ask where you thought it was going in. Guessing the hurricane’s point of entry was a town-wide sport every fall, easily as popular as high school football. Anybody who worked on the Gulf—a shrimper or a fellow tending some offshore oil rig—became an oracle overnight. When one of these guys hit the door of the American Legion, the bartender would crank down the TV or jukebox and draw a free cold beer while the patrons got all quiet and spun around on their stools or lifted their pool cues from the table. Most of the fishermen played it to the hilt. Their pronouncements took on the imagery of some voodoo chieftain: “Hit was a yellow rang around the moon last night,” one Cajun shrimper said. “Dat storm’s coming in right here at Sabine Pass.” The offshore guys were tamer in their premonitions: old So-and-so out on the rig off of Morgan City, Louisiana, had a football knee start paining him like never before.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Time magazine published a scathing cover story titled “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter Richard Behar. The exposé revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the Church of Spiritual Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged in the article. Hubbard himself was described as “ part storyteller, part flimflam man.” The Feshbach brothers were the “terrors of the stock exchanges,” who spread false information about companies in order to drive down their valuations. Behar quoted a former church executive as saying that John Travolta stayed in the church only because he was worried that details of his sex life would be made public if he left. The article asserted that Miscavige made frequent jokes about Travolta’s “allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.” When Behar queried Travolta’s attorney for the star’s comment, he was told that such questions were “bizarre.” “Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist,” Behar wrote. “ Those who criticize the church—journalists, doctors, lawyers, and even judges—often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up, or threatened by death,” Behar noted. He accused the Justice Department of failing to back the IRS and the FBI in bringing a racketeering suit against the church because it was unwilling to spend the money required to take the organization on. He quoted Cynthia Kisser, head of the Cult Awareness Network in Chicago: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen.” After the Time article appeared, Miscavige was invited to appear on ABC’s Nightline , a highly prestigious news show, to defend the image of the church. He had never been interviewed in his life. He rehearsed for months, as much as four hours per day, with Rathbun and Rinder. He would prod them to ask him questions, then complain that they didn’t sound like Ted Koppel, the show’s courtly but incisive host. Miscavige would ask himself the questions in what he thought was Koppel’s voice, then respond with a hypothetical answer. He sorted through what seemed to his aides an endless number of wardrobe choices before settling on a blue suit with a purple tie and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. Finally, on Valentine’s Day 1992, he went to Washington, DC, where the show would be broadcast live. The interview was preceded by a fifteen-minute report by Forrest Sawyer about Scientology’s claims and controversies. “The church says it now has centers in over seventy countries, with more on the way,” Sawyer said. Heber Jentzsch, the president of the Church of Scientology International, was featured, claiming a membership of eight million people.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I also dream about having intercourse with one of my pupils. Some of my thoughts and indeed my actions are very diverse and queer, and I find it hard to put on paper. I have never before told anyone about these things. Sometimes I feel frustrated and I would like to know if my practices are very unusual. I would be elated if you could give me some information on what other girls think. It would make me feel easier to know that others like me exist. P.S. I find it difficult to get the type of whips that I would like here in Ireland, so I would be grateful if you could help me. [Letter] StellaMy sexual fantasy goes back to an actual event that happened to me when I was about eleven. On the way home from school a group of girls and boys began picking on me. At one point the leader, who was very good looking, grabbed me by the arm and told me I would have to do whatever he ordered me to do. He told me that from that day on whenever he ordered me to follow him I would do so, and that he would then tell me what his wishes were. Then he let me go. Afterward, whenever I saw him my heart would leap into my mouth, but he never seemed to notice me again, never ordered me to follow him or to do any of the things I thought I would dread doing. During my early teenage years I used to dream about what he might have asked me to do to him. I imagined all sorts of things, and still do. This is what all my fantasies go back to, that I am forced by this good-looking man to perform all sorts of sexual acts, incredible things that no man has ever asked me to do, but which would give me a great deal of pleasure—if I were forced. This is my fantasy, even when I am with my lover. I only began to masturbate eight months ago, although I am twenty-four. My fantasies are different during masturbation, either imagining that I am using a dildo, which I don’t have the nerve to buy, or that one or two women and I are making love with a dildo. Oddly enough, the only other thing that turns me on is if I see a very nice male posterior. I can’t help imagining how it would be uncovered. [Letter]

• From Going Clear (2013)

  At any hour of the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere. The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes for hours. Gale Irwin, who had been on the Apollo when she was sixteen years old and had risen to being the head of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly paranoid, and his only line of communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men. Nearly every one of the original Messengers who had joined Hubbard on the Apollo had been purged. David Mayo, who was Hubbard’s personal auditor, had also been shut off from contact. He, too, became suspicious of Miscavige and ordered him to be security-checked, but Miscavige refused this direct order from a superior. Gale Irwin says she confronted him, and Miscavige knocked her to the ground with a flying tackle. (The church denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.) Brousseau got a call from Irwin. She was agitated. She told him that Miscavige had gone psychotic. She said she had to contact Pat Broeker right away for a meeting. When Brousseau asked to talk to Miscavige, Irwin began shouting orders at him, saying that Miscavige was raving and had to be restrained. In no way could Brousseau talk to him! He must arrange the meeting with Broeker immediately! Brousseau drove her to a prearranged pay phone outside a Denny’s restaurant in San Bernardino, which was used only for emergencies. As they waited for the call from Broeker’s driver, a black Dodge van came barreling into the parking lot and slammed to a halt between Brousseau’s car and the phone booth. The doors blew open and half a dozen men spilled out of the van, including David Miscavige. Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable. Miscavige ordered Irwin into the van, and she meekly acquiesced. With this action, the coup was accomplished: Miscavige and Broeker were now fully and defiantly in control of Scientology. The founder was isolated, caged by his notoriety and paranoia. No one knew if the orders coming from over the rainbow were from Hubbard or his lieutenants, but now it no longer mattered. Irwin was busted. A year later, in 1984, Miscavige declared her a Suppressive Person, which would happen to nearly every one of the original Messengers, the most trusted circle of Hubbard’s advisers. David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out. There was one last obstacle that Miscavige had to remove.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  For several years, the leaders of the church, including Hubbard, Miscavige, and Broeker, had been targets of an IRS criminal investigation. Church lawyers persuaded Broeker that while the investigation was still ongoing he should confine himself to another ranch near Creston that Hubbard had purchased. Broeker was content with that arrangement. He seemed more at home with the quarter horses that he so lovingly purchased with the church’s money than he did with the bureaucrats in the church hierarchy. He continued shopping for exemplary breeding stock even after Hubbard’s death, claiming he was carrying out the founder’s vision. He seemed to think he could run the church from the sidelines. Other than Hubbard’s imprimatur, Broeker had few assets on his side. He had the unfortunate combination of being garrulous without being articulate. Many of the executives he had been close to had been forced out of the church or had fled. Even people who didn’t like him, however, were fond of Annie. She was in many ways her husband’s opposite. She was measured where he was goofy and impetuous. Sweet and shy, with a fragile beauty that some compared to the actress Jessica Lange, Annie had been born into Scientology and was one of the few original Messengers who hadn’t been purged. In 1982, Hubbard had made her Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, the highest post in the church bureaucracy, in charge of protecting the sanctity of Scientology’s spiritual technology. It was a job she was ill suited for, by nature and also by circumstance, as she was not an auditor, and for years she had been living at the remote ranch as Hubbard’s caretaker, away from the administration of church affairs. In March 1987, Miscavige seized control of the RTC, making himself the Chairman of the Board. He downgraded the Inspector General’s post by dividing it into three parts. His new lieutenant and henchman, Marty Rathbun, became the IG for Ethics. Still, both Pat and Annie remained untouchable because of Hubbard’s final decree. And, most tantalizingly, only Pat seemed to know where the new OT levels—which he now claimed went all the way up to XV—were hidden. They were his insurance. Nothing could be more precious in the world of Scientology—to its members, who sought to gain Hubbard’s final revelations on the Bridge to Total Freedom, and to the organization, which profited from that journey. At Miscavige’s direction, Rathbun hired a team of private investigators to follow Broeker and dig into his private life. One of them was a former cop who met Broeker at a gun show, then began frequenting Broeker’s favorite tavern. He would chat him up whenever he came in. They got to be so friendly that at Christmas the ex-cop gave Broeker a cordless phone. Because such phones emit a weak radio signal, Rathbun’s minions were able to record Broeker’s calls. The detectives followed him everywhere, but there was no clue as to where the secret OT levels might be hidden.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  His secretary booked a direct flight that would arrive at Boston only twenty minutes after Annie’s, and just twenty minutes before her connecting flight to Bangor. It was winter and snowing in Boston when he landed, at ten at night, when most of the air traffic had ended. He ran through the nearly empty corridors of Logan Airport to the gate for the Bangor flight. There was a stairwell that led downstairs, and a door that opened to the tarmac. Rathbun rushed outside into the frigid air. The passengers were still on the ramp; Annie was only six feet away from him. “Annie!” he cried. She turned around. As soon as she saw who it was, her shoulders slumped, and she walked toward him. Rathbun talked to Miscavige and said that he would get a couple of hotel rooms in Boston and bring Annie back in the morning, but Miscavige was unwilling to risk it. He told Rathbun that he had already arranged for John Travolta’s jet to pick them up a few hours later. Annie and Jim Logan were finally divorced on August 26, 1993. He never saw her again. (She died in 2011 of lung cancer, at the age of fifty-five.) [image file=Image00010.jpg] BY HIS ACTIONS , Miscavige showed his instinctive understanding of how to cater to the sense of entitlement that comes with great stardom. It was not just a matter of disposing of awkward personal problems, such as clinging spouses; there were also the endless demands for nourishment of an ego that is always aware of the fragility of success; the longing for privacy that is constantly at war with the demand for recognition; the need to be fortified against ordinariness and feelings of mortality; and the sense that the quality of the material world that surrounds you reflects upon your own value, and therefore everything must be made perfect. These were qualities Miscavige demanded for himself as well. He surrounded Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with an approving and completely deferential environment, as spotless and odorless as a fairy tale. A special bungalow was prepared for their stay at Gold Base, along with a private rose garden. When the couple longed to play tennis, a court was rehabilitated, at significant expense. Miscavige heard about the couple’s fantasy of running through a field of wildflowers together, so he had Sea Org members plant a section of the desert; when that failed to meet his expectations, the meadow was plowed up and sodded with grass. Miscavige assigned them a personal chef, Sinar Parman, who had cooked for Hubbard, and had a high-end gym constructed that was mainly for the use of Cruise and himself. When a flood triggered a mudslide that despoiled the couple’s romantic bungalow, Miscavige held the entire base responsible, and ordered everyone to work sixteen-hour days until everything was restored to its previous pristine condition. In July 1990, Cruise’s involvement with the church became public in an article in the tabloid Star .

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

  Absolutely resolved to profit from the aid Heaven seemed to have sent me, I help Roland to get up, I give him my arm while we walk, and indeed, after progressing two leagues we find the inn he had mentioned. We take supper together, 'tis very proper and nice; after our meal Roland en following day we set off on two mules we have rented and which are led by a boy from the inn; we reach the frontier of Dauphine, ever heading into the highlands. We were not yet at our destination when the day ended, so we stopped at Virieu, where my patron showed me the same consideration and provided me with the same care; the next morning we resumed our way toward the mountains. We arrived at their foot toward four in the afternoon; there, the road becoming almost impassable, Roland requested my muleteer not to leave me for fear of an accident, and we penetrated into the gorges. We did but turn, wind, climb for the space of more than four leagues, and by then we had left all habitations and all traveled roads so far behind us I thought myself come to the end of the world; despite myself, I was seized by a twinge of uneasiness; Roland could not avoid seeing it, but he said nothing, and I was made yet more uncomfortable by his to a castle perched upon the crest of a mountain; it beetled over a dreadful precipice into which it seemed ready to plunge: no road seemed to lead up to it; the one we had followed, frequently by goats only, strewn with pebbles and stones, however did at last take us to this awful eyrie which much more resembled the hideaway of thieves than the dwelling place of virtuous folk. "That is where I live," said Roland, noticing I was gazing up at his castle. I confessed my astonishment to see that he lived in such isolation. "It suits me," was his abrupt reply. This response redoubled my forebodings. Not a syllable is lost upon the miserable; a word, a shift of inflection and, when 'tis a question of the speech of the person upon whom one depends, 'tis enough to stifle hope or revive it; but, being completely unable to do anything, I held my tongue and waited. We mounted by zigzags; the strange pile suddenly loomed up before us: roughly a quart separated it from us: Roland dismounted and having told me to do likewise, he returned both mules to the boy, paid him and ordered him to return. This latest maneuver was even more displeasing to me; Roland observed my anxiety.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Having stumbled upon what remained disconcerting questions, Tennyson bundles the whole thing toward an awkward conclusion, for he seems to have an uneasy prescience that the entire system he calls “love” is in some danger. Princess Ida has flatly refused to marry the prince. The poet complicates the plot with side issues of “colorful” antiquarian character such as wars of rapine, property interests as big as kingdoms, forced marriages arranged by contract in childhood, and that species of masculine vanity called honor. The poet’s choice of a pseudo-medieval setting in which to “debate” the “problem of woman” and her very present demand for educational opportunity has the effect of diluting a contemporary issue nearly to the point of insipidness. To fend off the troublesome implications he intuits lie in his subject, Tennyson is reduced to the expedient of having his hero wounded in a tournament and require the decorous attentions of a nursemother in order to recover. Ida is beaten when he plays dead. By feigning infantile helplessness he can convert his virago into the glowing image of mama, which the poem repeatedly exalts. This (to the Victorian sensibility) is perhaps safely asexual. In any case it fends off the peril of competition. As fantasy is the only vehicle which Tennyson can use to conduct his discussion, Ida is a shadowy princess abiding in a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land college from which all men are rigidly excluded. Having invaded the sanctuary anyway, the prince has fallen desperately in love with her according to the hyperbole of chivalrous stereotype; her hair is somehow “a stately fretwork in the sun,” despite the fact that it is black, and her companions are “a hundred airy does”…all step with “tender feet, light as air,” and so forth. But when the bargaining begins, and the prince shifts from courting to the marriage contract, the submission he wants to impose upon Ida is not forthcoming. Yet the conditions of the union are ones our poet and his readers would regard as just. With commendable logic Ida still refuses the swain who would coerce her. Tennyson then grows so nervous he turns Ida into an Amazon caricature. To complicate things and obscure the issue even further, the prince is fitted out with a father who is a male supremicist of the most vulgar and abusive variety: Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head, and woman with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey; All else confusion. The irascible old man sees in Ida a likely breeder of warriors, and advises his son to get her: Man is the hunter; woman is his game. The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us for it and we ride them down.

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

  I wished, I doated, I could have died for him; and yet, I know not how, or why I dreaded the point which had been the object of my fiercest wishes; my pulses beat fears, amidst a flush of the warmest desires. This struggle of the passions, however, this conflict betwixt modesty and lovesick longings, made me burst again into tears; which he took, as he had done before, only for the remains of concern and emotion at the suddenness of my change of condition, in committing myself to his care; and, in consequence of that idea, did and said all that he thought would most comfort and re-inspirit me. After breakfast, Charles (the dear familiar name I must take the liberty henceforward to distinguish my Adonis by), with a smile full of meaning, took me gently by the hand, and said: “Come, my dear, I will show you a room that commands a fine prospect over some gardens”; and without waiting for an answer, in which he relieved me extremely, he led me up into a chamber, airy and lightsome, where all seeing of prospects was out of the question, except that of a bed, which had all the air of recommending the room to him. Charles had just slipped the bolt of the door, and running, caught me in his arms, and lifting me from the ground, with his lips glued to mine, bore me trembling, panting, dying with soft fears and tender wishes, to the bed; where his impatience would not suffer him to undress me, more than just unpinning my handkerchief and gowns, and unlacing my stays. My bosom was now bare, and rising in the warmest throbs, presented to his sight and feeling the firm hard swell of a pair of young breast, such as may be imagined of a girl not sixteen, fresh out of the country, and never before handled: but even their pride, whiteness, fashion, pleasing resistance to the touch, could not bribe his restless hands from roving; but, giving them the loose, my petticoats and shift were soon taken up, and their stronger center of attraction laid open to their tender invasion. My fears, however, made me mechanically close my thighs; but the very touch of his hand insinuated between them, disclosed them and opened a way for the main attack.

• From The Art of Memoir

  head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle.” That always is a kind of plaintive cry. Forgive me for getting all Freudian here, but for the father with one testicle to have a gun that is always drawn does sound like a son’s own desperate wish for a macho old man. One mark of capital-M Modernism is writers commenting self- reflexively on the fact that they’re writing, as when a theater character breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience. In a conflict such as Crews’s, the process of telling a story in a way solves the psyche’s core problem—in this, there’s a poetic marriage of form and content. The medium is the message. Again, we hear Mantel in Giving Up the Ghost wrestling with her ability to incorporate her experience of the supernatural in a time when she’d be adjudged mad for the belief: So now I come to write a memoir. I tell myself, just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it. But this story can only be told once, and I need to get it right. Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? Margaret Atwood says, “The written word is so much like evidence—like something that can be used against you.” I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong. Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any? A writer sets personal reasons for the text at hand, and her struggling psyche fuels the tale. Here’s me in my first book, trying to explain how what I didn’t know about my past haunted me: When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But the ghost of the event may stay in your head. Then, like a smudge of a bad word wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. . . . The night’s major consequences for me were internal. The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not Rightness.

• From The Art of Memoir

  supermarket displays. Plus she was a portraitist trained in New York, so she understood how point of view and feeling shape reality. She knew my voice would ground the reader in subjective reality, not feign absolute authority. It was my in-some-ways conformist sister who came off as way too devil-may-care—but with an edge. A local insurance agent, she cussed like a sailor and acted the badass. But she’d always colored in the lines way more than the rest of us—somebody had to, I guess. She’d been naive enough to quip, repeatedly and with cheer, “I didn’t have to go to therapy because you went for me.” She belonged to Rotary and the women’s Masonic organization. Even in the 1970s, her jeans had military creases. During her first marriage to a guy we called the Rice Baron, she once forbade me to visit their country club in my thrift-store clothes: “I wouldn’t sod my yard dressed like that.” I was left, she was hard right. I was a boho loner, she a southern business owner with a Christmas card list in the high hundreds. But despite schisms between us well into adulthood, in childhood she’d been my hero, and so would she be in the book. After a few days in Texas, I brought up the only news the book would carry, which didn’t involve them, really—two childhood sexual assaults I’d kept to myself. The morning I unburdened myself, the news went by in the blip I’d expected. Mother said, somewhat fiercely, “Those sons of bitches.” Then, after a brief lull, Lecia grabbed her purse. “I could really go for some Mexican food.” Over lunch she talked about a guy who’d tried to force himself on her and how she’d physically overthrown him. Otherwise, that ended the discussion until the night before I left, when some business acquaintance of Lecia’s I barely knew came by and wanted to talk to me about the assaults. Lecia had told him the whole story. His sole question—“Were you penetrated?”—felt coldly prurient. But I figured if I were going to write a memoir, I’d better get used to it. You can’t sign up to play football then whine you’ve been hit.