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 The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I don’t want you to fall in love with someone else, he said. Let’s buy some books about this, I repeated. We can learn about it and talk. Set some rules. But is this something that’s true, that’s real? he asked. Like, you actually just want to explore this? Or is this an excuse to leave me? The road was climbing now; we were nearly at the pass. I’m open to trying this if it’s really what you say it is, he said. But not if it’s an excuse to ease yourself out the door. I mean what I say, I said. I’m not going anywhere. 10During our engagement, before we were married, Brandon and I both had dreams about being hit on by others. I remember feeling horrified by my suitor’s advances, thrusting out my hand and yelling, “STOP! I’M MARRIED!” In the morning we’d laugh about it. I did not want to cheat, not then and not now. Whatever this was, it would not be that. What I wanted was a work-around, a pass. I wanted a pass to be with a woman. Brandon too would have a pass. This would not be a threesome, not a fun kink to “spice things up.” This would be separate from us—cordoned off, but permitted. I didn’t want to hide it from him. Isn’t that what cheating is: Something you hide, because you’re breaking the rules? Then let’s rewrite the rules. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I ordered books on nonmonogamy. The most famous book in the category is The Ethical Slut, but I didn’t buy that one. My reasoning: the title felt too glib. I didn’t feel like a slut, not in a good way or a bad way. The word didn’t fit, no matter how thoroughly it might have been reclaimed, liberated, reframed on its own terms. Love in Abundance had a similar linguistic problem: the title had the word love in it, and we were hoping to avoid that. I also passed on When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous, because when I Googled the phrase “when someone you love is,” the first suggestion that popped up to complete it was “making bad choices.” The first book I bought was Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. This struck my ears as hopeful and appropriately sober. I also got More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory, though it sounded possibly too sober, like a grad school seminar. That would be good, though—a degree and diploma, a seal of approval, something sturdy to assure me that we could do this. Opening our marriage, the books said, would require a tremendous amount of talking. We would have to commit to clear and often radically open communication. The fabric of any relationship needs tending and, over time, mending, and if we made our relationship nonmonogamous, it would require more attention, not less. The weave of our fabric would become more complex, requiring adroit management to avoid knots and fraying.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The growth of the parish system was fanning them out across the continent, often alone in charge of a rural community, contrasting for instance with the community life of an Anglo-Saxon minster church. In the past, the general understanding had been that married clergy would go on living with their wives after they progressed from minor orders to become a priest, even though they now abstained from sex; in a minster the convention could be quietly policed by colleagueship. That was not so easy in rural isolation, in a village where the neighbours would take for granted marriage of whatever status. The centralizing Church bureaucracy was determined to change all this. [26] There was more than one level of ecclesiastical anxiety at work in the Gregorian move to ban clerical marriage. One practical motive was to defend clerical property: clerical marriage and the ties of paternal love expected of any family might disperse land and goods given to the Church. Reformers of monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Churches had shown the same concern, tidying up tangles of family and monastic property that had resulted in much appropriation by the secular aristocracy (above, Chapter 11). Neurosis on this matter explains the extraordinary level of hostility to clerical children among the eleventh-century reformers. The Synod of Pavia convened by Pope Benedict VIII in 1022 started a long effort by the Church authorities to have these unfortunates declared as serfs belonging to the Church, which among other consequences meant that they could not be ordained. The programme took a crazy though logical step in the order of the Synod of Bourges in 1031 to ban clerical children from getting married at all. Although that particular proposal went nowhere, all this was an obvious hit at the ancient institution of clerical dynasties, and it was allied to a general prohibition on illegitimate men becoming priests that lasted in Roman Catholic canon law until the twentieth century; part of a general stigmatization of illegitimacy in Western Christianity that has rarely been equalled in intensity in any other culture. [27] A yet more potent fear was theological. In a pattern that will be familiar by now, the stimulus came particularly from Cluny, through exhortations of Abbot Odilo that united Augustine’s reservations about all sexual activity with Cluny’s promotion of a high theology of Eucharistic presence. If even marital sex was by its nature impure, the ritual purity or impurity of a priest was a threat to his proper celebration of the Mass. Latin theologians emphasized with increasing precision that in this liturgical drama, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The notion of a ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist, common to Eastern and Western Christianity, was soon to crystallize for Westerners into definitions of a ‘transubstantiation’ of the Eucharistic elements in the Mass. This reflected Western scholars’ rediscovery of philosophical texts by Aristotle, with their discussions of categories of ‘substance’.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Despite having served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, however, he opposed the war in Vietnam and proposed large cuts in military spending and amnesty for draft dodgers. In his acceptance speech, McGovern issued a prophetic critique of the nation and its culture of militarism. He promised to end bombing in Indochina on Inauguration Day, and within ninety days to bring every American soldier home: “There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools” and no more Americans sent to die “trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.” He called on Americans to live with more faith and less fear. Countering those who said “America—love it or leave it,” he instead urged Americans to work to change their nation for the better, “so we may love it the more.” A small group of Evangelicals for McGovern rallied around the Democratic candidate, but they were a tiny minority. Powerful evangelicals like Graham and Ockenga publicly endorsed Nixon, and when McGovern spoke at Wheaton College, he was greeted with resounding boos.25 Evangelical support for Nixon was manifest at Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72. With an eye toward reelection, Nixon had been looking for ways to reach evangelical youth. At Graham’s urging, Nixon aide (and ordained Southern Baptist minister) Wallace Henley reached out to Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, to convince him to join in a media strategy to advance the conservative cause. By “media strategy,” Henley meant “doing things like syndicated news columns, developing evangelical-oriented radio and television spots, undertaking a specific effort to land some of the big names on Christian talk shows.” The possibilities were vast.26 Timed to the run-up to the election, Explo ’72 attracted 80,000 evangelical young people to Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. At a time when hippies were taking to the streets to protest the war, young evangelicals were celebrating Flag Day by applauding more than 5000 parading military personnel, saluting the Stars and Stripes, and cheering the South Vietnamese flag. Such overt displays of patriotism troubled some evangelicals; Jim Wallis and other members of the People’s Christian Coalition unfurled a banner lamenting the “300 GIs killed this week in Vietnam.” African American evangelist Tom Skinner said he didn’t have a problem with Flag Day, “but to associate God with that is bad news.” But most in attendance shared the organizers’ conservative values. They favored Nixon over McGovern by more than five to one; they also supported stronger penalties for marijuana possession and felt that American attitudes toward sex were “too permissive.” The event closed with an eight-hour Christian music festival, a “Christian Woodstock” attended by between 100,000 and 200,000 students, featuring “Righteous Rocker” Larry Norman, recent convert Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and other Christian musicians. Evangelicals had long rejected rock ’n’ roll, which they associated with drug culture and youthful rebellion, but by offering a Christian version of popular music, Explo ’72 helped pave the way for what would become a thriving Christian contemporary music industry.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  By the end of Reagan’s second term, in the absence of a common enemy, the power of the Christian Right appeared to be ebbing away.3 THE MOST URGENT ORDER OF BUSINESS was to elect a new president, but there was no clear heir apparent, despite the fact that one of their own had thrown his hat into the ring. Sometime in the mid-1980s, God had told Pat Robertson to run for president, according to Pat Robertson. In 1987 he announced his candidacy, but his campaign got off to a rough start when journalists uncovered the fact that he had been lying about his wedding date to disguise the fact that his wife had been seven months pregnant when they tied the knot. The media also discovered that, contrary to his claims, he’d never seen combat—his father, a United States senator, had apparently pulled strings to keep him out of harm’s way. These two significant issues aside, Robertson seemed to check all the boxes.4 Campaigning to “Restore the Greatness of America Through Moral Strength,” Robertson placed foreign policy front and center. He opposed arms control, denounced “Godless communism,” called for “the defeat of Marxist regimes in the Third World,” and vowed to “never negotiate with Communists or terrorists.” Robertson didn’t just talk the talk when it came to foreign policy. During the Reagan administration, he had expanded his evangelistic empire into Central America, and he came to support brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; CBN also became “the largest private donor to the Nicaraguan contra camps in Honduras” and a powerful advocate for aid to the Contras in Washington. On the campaign trail Robertson extolled the virtues of Christian America and railed against what he saw as an assault on Christian faith and values.5 Robertson’s CBN had an estimated annual viewership of 16 million and collected $2.4 million in contributions in 1986, and he hoped to translate this into political support, into an “invisible army.” Due to the improbability of his campaign, opponents and journalists used the term derisively, but Robertson embraced it. His army consisted primarily of charismatics, Pentecostals, and “spirit-filled” Christians, a subset of white evangelicalism, but he failed to win the support of most evangelicals. Falwell, LaHaye, Kennedy, Robison, and Dobson all declined to endorse him. This may have been due in part to professional rivalries, but it had also never seemed that Robertson had much of a chance of winning. For those who wanted access to the Oval Office for the next four years, backing the establishment candidate seemed a safer bet. But there was also the fact that Robertson’s occupation as a clergyman was seen by some as a detriment. It wasn’t just that he was a televangelist launching a campaign amid a slew of televangelist sex scandals, but many Christians themselves didn’t seem entirely confident that a pastor could provide the robust leadership necessary on the national stage. Certainly, Robertson paled in comparison to Reagan. Most evangelicals ended up backing George H. W.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Others are anti-religious – such as the sensational theory that COVID-19 was a synthesised form of cobra venom that was intentionally being spread via drinking water and vaccines, possibly as part of a plot by the Catholic Church to turn everyone into a ‘hybrid of Satan’. 3 Most, however, are based on cultural and political beliefs – such as an alleged London paedophile ring run by political elites, or the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ which holds that an indigenous white European population is being replaced by non-European immigrants. These theories often function as rallying points for social groups, especially minorities that are perceived or treated as marginalised outsiders. The rise of the Internet has led to uncontrolled dissemination of such conspiracy theories, which, on account of their ‘ubiquity and repetition on the net, have assumed a veracity divorced from reality.’ 4 As might be expected, these theories have attracted a lot of academic attention. Why do so-called ‘free thinkers’ believe such weird things? Although these were initially seen as pathological, perhaps resulting from ‘brainwashing’, 5 more recent studies have seen them as indicative of neglected aspects of human reasoning that illuminate how people arrive at beliefs, and enact these in their lives. Such theories tend to attract people looking for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and who are unwilling or unable to think critically. 6 Studies of followers of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ theory, for example, suggest that they were unable or reluctant to consider alternatives, or engage the evidence suggesting it might be a fake. Once they believed it, they couldn’t be swayed. A dispassionate observer of conspiracy theories might suggest that they indicate the danger of belief – people see logic where there is none and then refute anything that contradicts their views, sometimes to dangerous and violent ends. Conspiracy theories are certainly indicators of gullibility, the disturbing capacity of human beings to believe weird things. 7 Yet the best way to counter this is not to suppress belief as a general category, but to foster the emergence of a critical belief – that is to say, a belief that is affirmed knowing its vulnerabilities, in the light of an individual’s critical judgement that this represents the best way of making sense of things in comparison with a range of possibilities. The rise of a post-truth world has exposed a major concern – the public assertion of ideas that people want to be true, and retrospectively developing arguments in their support. As the satirist Hasan Minhaj observed, ‘emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.’

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The attorneys stand one by one to introduce themselves and their clients. The prosecutor wears a tailored skirt suit, and the male defense attorney has a swoop of hair that lays across his forehead like a paper fan. The second defense attorney is a woman in a men’s suit. I know it is a men’s suit because of the way it hangs straight at her hips. When she rises to speak, a smile blooms shyly across her mouth. Her teeth are gardenia-white. She’s said her name already, but I missed it. The judge presents the case, and then the attorneys ask us questions in rotation, calling us by the numbers in our plastic sleeves, weeding us out. They explain that this process has a name, voir dire, and that they’re looking to uncover our biases. There are so many of us, it takes hours. Finally, the prosecutor calls my number. She smiles and asks where I get my news. We banter a little about NPR. It turns out we’re both Terry Gross fans. She asks what I do for a living, what kind of writer I am. I am a writer who listens to public radio. Of course I’ll be eliminated. But they’re coming to the end of the numbers, and I’m still in the pew. They excuse another number, another. At the end of the day, there are eight of us left, and I’m given a new number, Juror #1, assigned to the first seat in the back row of the jury box. We’re to reconvene the next morning. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I catch an early bus and find I have a half hour to spare. I’ve worn a linen dress that I bought a couple of years before June was born. Usually I only ever wear jeans, but now that I’m on a jury, I decide to look like someone who takes this seriously. I sit down in a stripe of weak sunlight on a bench outside the courthouse and pull out a thermos of coffee and my magazine from yesterday. The defendant is arriving, and he sits with his attorneys on a low wall outside the front door. I watch them over my magazine. They huddle like football players, eyes closed. It looks like they’re praying. The testimony takes four days. It’s a civil disobedience case, and the judge has told us not to talk about it with anyone outside the courtroom, not even our families. We’re not supposed to look up news stories about it or Google anyone involved. Each morning we wait in the assembly room, and the bailiff takes us to a restricted-access elevator at the back of the building, careful not to cross anyone else bound for the courtroom. I didn’t want to be here, but since I am, I will do this right. I tune my body like an antenna, listen and take notes.

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

  In a letter, written to friends in Bohemia on the eve of his departure, Huss expressed his expectation of being confronted at Constance by bishops, doctors,

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  100 Lecture 14: Life under Siege o Archaeological surveys of the Judean hill country show that under Hezekiah, many new settlements were established and the developed area of the capital city of Jerusalem was expanded. The most logical explanation for these new settlements is that some of the northern Israelites escaped deportation and fled south to Judah. Again, this explains how we get northern Israel’s history preserved in southern Judah’s Bible. o The biblical account of Hezekiah’s reign that begins in 2 Kings 18 spends little time describing this decade of prosperity. Instead, it moves almost immediately to Hezekiah’s military encounter with Assyria (2 Kings 18:7). Although this might suggest that Hezekiah’s rebellion occurred almost from the beginning of his reign, it is likely to have occurred after the death of Sargon II in 705, when Assyria was seen to be weak. • As a result of Hezekiah’s rebellion, Sennacherib comes to Judah to reassert his control. Hezekiah sends a message to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying, “‘I have done wrong; withdraw from me; whatever you impose on me I will bear’” (2 Kings 18:13–14). • The biblical account does not stress Hezekiah’s military preparedness for an attack, but the archaeological record suggests that he anticipated a siege on Jerusalem. o An excavated city wall on the western side of Jerusalem suggests that Hezekiah had fortified the walls of the city in anticipation of an Assyrian attack. o Hezekiah also completed the Siloam tunnel, which would supply water to the city from the Gihon spring. o In addition, evidence in the form of hundreds of royally stamped storage jars suggests that Hezekiah stockpiled provisions of oil and grain in preparation for a long siege.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  ‘ { 4 13 RR | \ ZZ VA Then the wide countryside opened out again, and all the time I was looking out I never saw a vehicle on the roads, or a single human being except for the stationmasters who, whether from boredom or habit or because of some regulation which they had to observe, had come out on the platform at even the smallest stations such as Holoubkov, Chrast, or Rokycany in their red uniform caps, most of them, it seemed to me, sporting blond moustaches, and determined not to miss the Prague express as it thundered by on this pallid April morning. All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  My family was kind. I knew the conversation wasn’t easy for anyone in it. But I hated the questions they asked me, the fact that they thought they could. One asked how Brandon was doing “with it all.” I seethed, though the question was understandable. Brandon’s okay, I said; we still care a lot for each other. All I can say, replied my family member, is that Brandon is an unusually good man. When I was straight, I did not have to come out. Like my white skin, my being straight was a convenient default. There was a nice slip to it, an absence of friction. There was also privacy: when straight, I rarely had to disclose anything about my sex life. Even pregnancy, the visible fact of a baby protruding from my abdomen, unavoidable evidence of sexual activity, didn’t say anything about my sexuality. Only those who don’t fit norms have to put a name to their difference. The world has gay politicians and legal same-sex marriage, but there is still a thing called coming out. Now there would be endless occasions to out myself, whether I wanted to or not. Like at my dermatologist’s office one afternoon, when he inquired about my preferred method of birth control. Oh, I don’t need any, I said. Why not? he asked, swiveling abruptly from his computer and peering at me over his reading glasses. I’m dating a woman, I said. Ah! He laughed, visibly relieved. He’d worried that I would extoll the virtues of the rhythm method or prayer. I was glad for his mirth. I wondered how this conversation might go in a less progressive town. I knew I was fortunate to have other concerns. I was afraid people would think I’d been hiding it, that I’d been faking my way through life. I was afraid people would think that everything I’d been and done was a lie. I had written two memoirs featuring Brandon, our courtship, and our marriage. I built my career as a writer on a certain image, because that image had been true. But now the story I have to tell seems to undo all the ones that came before, the ones people have come to know me by. How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished? I wanted to be believed, though I struggled to explain myself. And if they—family, friends, readers—did believe me, wasn’t it almost worse? Then they’d see me as some kind of a contagious illness, something they or their spouses could catch. I’d seen the thought pass over friends’ faces as I spoke. I was a harbinger of unwelcome news: Look out, straight people! This could happen to you AT ANY TIME. On a weekend getaway, a friend confessed to me that her husband had joked that she would “go off into the woods with Molly and come back gay.” We both laughed. What else was I supposed to do.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  curiously remote state of mind induced by the drugs I was being given; both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain. Later, when there had been some improvement in my condition, I looked through a telescope given to me by one of the nurses and watched the foxes running wild in the cemetery in the gray dawn. I would see squirrels dodging back and forth, or sitting quite still, arrested, as it were, in mid-motion. I studied the faces of those solitary people who visited the graveyard now and then, or I observed the slow wingbeats of an owl in its curving flight over the tombstones at nightfall. Occasionally I talked to one of the other hospital patients, a roofer, for instance, who said he could recollect with perfect clarity the moment when, just as he was about to fix a slate in place, something that had been stretched too taut inside him snapped at a particular spot behind his forehead, and for the first time he heard, coming over the crackling transistor wedged into the batten in front of him, the voices of those bearers of bad tidings which had haunted him ever since. While I was there I also thought quite often of Elias the minister lapsing into madness, and of the stone-built asylum in Denbigh where he died. But I found it impossible to think of myself, my own history, or my present state of mind. I was not discharged until the beginning of April, a year after returning from Prague. The last doctor whom I saw at the hospital advised me to look for some kind of light physical occupation, perhaps in horticulture, she suggested, and so for the next two years, at the time of day when office staff are pouring into the City, I went out the other way to Romford and my new place of work, a council- run nursery garden on the outskirts of a large park which employed, as well as

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  38 Politics thus often morph into forms of religion , claiming the right to define the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. The result is inevitable – a tendency towards intolerance and violence when these secular ‘objects of worship and devotion’ are challenged or threatened. Ontologically, they are secular; functionally, they are divine – and divisive. On Coping with Difference I noted earlier Charles Taylor’s remark that ‘understanding the “other”’ is the greatest social challenge that we face today. While I think he’s right, I’m not sure he offers us a solution to this problem – more a way of understanding how it arises, and how we might learn to live with it. It’s better than nothing. But dare we hope for more? The central problem is this: our defining beliefs – especially about ultimate questions, such as the nature of justice or the question of meaning in life – remain obstinately resistant to philosophical or scientific justification. There is no Archimedean point from which such beliefs can be evaluated. The modern period has witnessed a surge of alternative beliefs (often carefully packaged and presented as reliable certainties), rather than a solution to how we live with a plurality of informing and controlling beliefs, and cope with the social tensions that inevitably arise from this. Belief systems are often an extension or an essential component of what Hélène Cixous describes as ‘the battle for mastery’ that rages everywhere between social classes and people groups. Paradoxically, many of those who challenge their social, political or intellectual ‘masters’ simply propose an overcoming of those specific masters and their replacement with alternatives – a process that Julietta Singh describes as ‘an overcoming, a mastering of that which masters’. 39 Singh’s concern is that this appears to concede ‘the inescapability of mastery as a way of life’. A similar pattern underlies critiques of beliefs. The problem, we are told, is that we have the wrong set of beliefs; once we adopt the right set, everything will be just fine. For reasons we have explored, there are good reasons for accepting the ‘inescapability of belief as a way of life’. Yet this does not resolve the question of how we cope with such diversity and learn to live with the ensuing uncertainty. Individuals often find a sense of intellectual achievement and inner stability when they feel that they have found a way of holding together multiple aspects of their lives and when they can accept the tensions between their and others’ views. Yet when confronted by the fact of an irreducible plurality of beliefs, a liberal society needs to navigate a set of shared public values. Or so John Rawls argued in his impressive manifesto of egalitarian liberalism A Theory of Justice (1971), demanding that we find and impose principles of fairness that are independent of people’s different and contestable conceptions of what is ‘good’.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As we went up to the third floor in the cramped lift, which scraped against one side of the shaft, in silence and with a sense of awkwardness because of the unnatural physical proximity into which one is forced in such a box, I saw a gentle pulsation in the curve of a blue vein beneath the skin of her right temple, almost as fast as the throbbing in a lizard’s throat when it lies motionless on a rock in the sun. We reached Mrs. Ambrosova’s office by walking down one of the galleries encircling the courtyard. I hardly dared glance over the balustrade to the depths below where two or three cars were parked, looking curiously elongated from above, or at least much longer than they would appear in the street. The office which we entered straight from this gallery was full of stacks of papers tied up with string, not a few of them discolored by sunlight and brittle at the edges, crammed into roll-front cupboards, deposited on shelves that sagged under their weight, piled high on a rickety little trolley which seemed to be specially intended for the transport of files, on an old-fashioned wing chair pushed against the wall, and on the two desks facing each other in the room. There were a good dozen houseplants among these mountains of paper, in plain clay flowerpots or brightly colored majolica jardiniéres: mimosas and myrtles, thick-leaved aloes, gardenias, and a large hoya twining its way around a trelliswork frame. Mrs Ambrosova, who had very courteously pulled out a chair for me beside her desk, listened attentively with her head tilted slightly to one side as, for the first time in my life, I began explaining to someone else that because of certain circumstances my origins had been unknown to me, and that for other reasons I had never inquired into them, but now felt compelled, because of a series of coincidental events, to conclude or at least to conjecture

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  zoo where large animals from the African colonies had once been put on display, said Austerlitz, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, dromedaries, and crocodiles, although most of the enclosures, decked out with pitiful remnants of natural objects—tree stumps, artificial rocks, and pools of water—were now empty and deserted. On these walks it was not unusual for us to hear one of the children whose adult companions still took them to the zoo calling out, in some exasperation: Mais il est ou? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort? I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm. Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said something which I have never forgotten, she said that captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another a travers une bréche d’incompréhension. Marie spent every second or third weekend, continued Austerlitz, his narrative taking another direction, with her parents or wider family, who owned several estates in the wooded country around Compiégne or further north in Picardy. At those times when she was not in Paris, which always cast me into an anxious mood, I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city, taking the Métro out to Montreuil, Malakoff, Charenton, Bobigny, Bagnolet, Le Pré St. Germain, St. Denis, St. Mandé, or elsewhere, to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realized only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind. It was on such a suburban expedition, one unusually oppressive Sunday in September when gray storm clouds were rolling over the sky from the southwest, that I went out to Maisons-Alfort and there discovered the museum of veterinary medicine, of which I had never heard before, in the extensive grounds of the Ecole Vétérinaire, itself founded two hundred years ago. An old Moroccan sat at the entrance, wearing a kind of burnoose, with a fez on his head. I still have the twenty-franc ticket he sold me in my wallet, said Austerlitz, and taking it out he handed it to me over the table of the bistro where we were sitting as if there were something very special about it. (754115 ry On ereaet saake | see * . CHEQUE Postaunx DATE : BRL VIE KER Om a VERSEMENT | CHEQUES Se daaatin Nacasien |_OfsiGnANON DES PROoUTs | YESSENENT hancares

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We owe it to our own nation and to others to develop a wider, more panoptic knowledge and understanding of our neighbors. First, recall the seventh step and remind yourself yet again of how little we know. People often pontificate about foreign affairs from a position of dangerous ignorance. The media are not always reliable: some newspapers or television channels have political or social agendas that slant their coverage of world events. The same is often true of politicians. In Britain during the buildup to the Iraq war, the government told the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could use to attack British bases in Cyprus at forty minutes’ notice. Later it transpired that this was not the case. Many of the people who believed in the war were unaware that Western governments had supported and armed Saddam for years and therefore bore a measure of responsibility for the suffering he had inflicted on his people. The effort of getting to know one another demands sound information and a willingness to question received ideas. We may not have Socrates to goad us into self-knowledge and an appreciation of the profundity of our ignorance, but we can make a serious effort to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. If you belong to a reading discussion group, you could use it to study books and articles that challenge some preconceived notions and discuss your reactions. Again, we begin with ourselves. We often have a myopic view of the history of our own country or religious tradition and criticize others for behavior of which “we” have been guilty in the past or even continue to be in the present. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I was often taken aback by the way some Christians berated the violence and intolerance they attributed to Islam, showing not only an embarrassing ignorance of Muslim history but a surprising blindness to the crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and wars of religion that had scarred their own faith. I often felt that alongside programs titled “Understanding Islam” there should be a parallel course called “Understanding Christianity.” There was also a worrying lack of awareness about Western behavior during the colonial era, which had contributed to some of our current problems. A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party. All participants in a conflict have sown bad karma in the past, and we are all now reaping the results. When we are about to criticize another nation or religious tradition, we should get into the habit of catching ourselves and asking whether our own country may have been responsible for a similar abuse in the past.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  in the following phrase, which reports a story of Maximilian’s, via Vera RySanova, via Austerlitz, and collapses the three names: “From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Treplitz in the early summer of 1933 ...” Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: “As usual when I go down to London on my own,” the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, “a kind of dull despair stirred within me in that December morming.” Or, for instance, when Austerlitz describes how moths die, he says that they will stay where they are, clinging to a wall, never moving “until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death.” In Thomas Bernhard’s work, extremity of expression is indistinguishable from the Austrian author’s comic, ranting rage, and his tendency to circle obsessively around madness and suicide. Sebald takes some of Bernhard’s wildness and estranges it—first, by muffling it in an exquisitely courteous syntax: “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.” Second, Sebald makes his diction mysterious by a process of deliberate antiquarianism. Notice the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths: “until the last breath is out of their bodies ... the place where they came to grief ...” In all his fiction, Sebald works this archaic strain (sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter) into a new, strange, and seemingly impossible composite: a kind of mildly agitated, pensive contemporary Gothic. His characters and narrators are forever finding themselves, like travelers of old, in gloomy, inimical places (East London, Norfolk) where “not a living soul stirred.” Wherever they go, they are accompanied by apprehensions of uneasiness, dread, and menace. In Austerlitz, this uneasiness amounts to a Gothicism of the past; the text is constantly in communion with the ghosts of the dead. At Liverpool Street Station, Jacques Austerlitz feels dread at the thought that the station is built on the foundations of Bedlam, the famous insane asylum: “I felt at this time,” he tells the narrator, “as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.” In Wales, the young Jacques had occasionally felt the presence of the dead, and Evan the cobbler had told the boy of those dead who had been “struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life.”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  26. English Roman Catholic public schools readily reflected the general educational ethos of military maleness created by their Anglican equivalents. Here the Downside Officer Training Corps (created 1909) poses with sundry monks of the Benedictine Abbey and a field gun. The ideal products of Victorian public schools were obedient but resourceful officers in the armed forces, or colonial administrators programmed to endure lonely leadership amid alien cultures. Socialization even with female siblings, let alone any other variety of female, was not on the syllabus. Instead, the inevitable consequences of an all-male adolescent environment lent a peculiar anxiety to British elite attitudes to masturbation and homosexuality, particularly because of the widespread conviction that (in the words of an old Etonian and noted cricketer, who returned to Eton as Headmaster) ‘animal desires [are] far stronger in the male than in the female, at least in England’. [29] A Classical school curriculum brought public schools the usual problems in dealing with literary references to ancient Mediterranean sexual mores, and additionally there were some difficulties in handling the Christian message itself. The New Testament was little help in instilling martial manliness, and even the Saviour himself needed careful treatment by theologians who were worried that Victorian Christianity had less appeal to men than to women. Jesus’s sacrifice, nailed helpless on the cross, needed to be reframed as a specialized ideal of what the prolific writer on morality and church affairs Charles Kingsley termed ‘true manhood’; the scholar and preacher F. D. Maurice complained of the widespread perception that the Sermon on the Mount had a ‘passive or feminine character’. [30] The Hebrew Bible was a good deal more promising, but amid its descriptions of military heroes and armed mayhem well up to the standards of British imperial warfare lurked the obstinate problem of David and Jonathan. In most respects they could be seen as the perfect archetype for a Captain and Vice-Captain of Games, but rarely were they found in the myriad stained-glass windows that the Victorians commissioned for British church buildings, and their appearance always suggests an interesting agenda to investigate (Plate 20). [31] It is notable that a standard multi-volume and multi-author English biblical commentary edited by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol in the 1880s showed a rare openness to interfaith dialogue in dealing with this problematic Old Testament couple. Canon Spence, the commentator on 1 Samuel, reached gratefully for a quotation by one of his commentary colleagues Dean Payne Smith from the liberal German rabbi and biblical scholar Ludwig Philippson (whose parallel Hebrew/German edition of the Hebrew Bible was later much esteemed by Sigmund Freud): We may indeed wonder at the delicacy of feeling and the gentleness of the sentiments which these two men in those old rough times entertained for one another.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) had an ‘uncanny ability to give expression to the emotional and intellectual problems of his time’, offering penetrating reflections on the cultural disturbances of his age.1 In 1926, Hesse published an article in UHU magazine, a modernist journal established in 1924, aimed at an urban bourgeois liberal readership in Weimar Germany.2 Weimar Germany was an intellectual and creative hothouse, the home of Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, and new institutes for sexuality. But frequent economic shocks, millions of war wounded and escalating political violence left Germans anxious, unable to anchor themselves in the present. Hesse set out to explain why so many Germans yearned for a coherent worldview and why it was so difficult to find one.3 Traditional answers to this craving for a secure basis for human existence were being cast aside, discredited by the devastation of the war. But the latest intellectual fashions were simply a synthesis of the values au courant at that moment, lacking in depth, substance and stability, all things that emerge from having been subjected to critical evaluation over an extended period. Hesse also argued that the trend of privileging novelty has resulted in a precipitate dismissal of the wisdom of the past and the unquestioning adoption of new and untested ideologies in a ‘frenzied search for new interpretations of human life’. It’s an important point. The Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty later offered an insightful critique of such a dangerous preoccupation with the transient truths of the present moment. The wise person, he suggests, is not someone who walks ahead of humanity, but behind it, ‘picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future’ that might well prove to be yet another costly failure.4 It is not difficult to work out which ideologies Hesse had in mind. Marxism and Nazism were in open competition for the spiritual and intellectual soul of Germany at that time, a struggle that grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Germany had undergone a transformation. An untested new ideology was in the ascendancy. UHU did not survive this development and published its last issue in September 1934. Human beings, according to Hesse, experience a ‘primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives’ that is ‘as old and as important as the need for food, love and shelter.’ Many commentators have failed to grasp the importance of this yearning for meaning and significance. George Orwell, for example, complained that ‘all “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.’5 The rise of Nazism in Germany, he remarked, showed the falsity of this view. People seemed to want a deeper vision of life that speaks of meaning, significance and purpose, that might require sacrifice on their part, rather than merely meeting their physical needs.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  At home, I fumbled in the dark on the side of the house, jammed the boots into the garbage bin. I knew I’d never get the smell out. I went inside in my socks. I must have offered some excuse to the babysitter. I brushed my teeth and stood in the doorway to June’s room. She had no idea what I’d been up to lately, what her father and I were doing. How could I ever want anything but to be here with her? The light from the hall touched her round cheek, pale as the moon. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Nausea woke me at midnight. Now I knew what to do. I bolted to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and got on my knees. I could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Brandon was home. I was breathing hard. I pressed the length of my forearms into my thighs and leaned over the bowl, but nothing came up. In my lap, I noticed that my hands were closing. I tried to open my fingers, using one hand to tug at the other, but they were stuck. We’d taught American Sign Language to June as a baby: milk, water, please, flower, book, more. More, my hands said. I was panting. More air, need more air. Are you okay? Brandon said. He was in the doorway. What’s wrong, babe? I puked tonight, I said, after my talk at the UW. I was whispering. My bathrobe was too hot. Somehow I was wearing my bathrobe. The tops of my feet hurt, mashed into the floor under my folded-over body. Are you okay? he asked again. He stood behind me now, one foot on either side of my knees. There was his sock, gray at the toe. There were his hands in my hair. The space behind my eyes was too small. I decided to sit down, no more kneeling. I rocked onto one hip, braced against the wall of the bathtub with one of my clamped-up hands, which were now buzzing like they’d fallen asleep. My wrists were busy cramping now too, each contracting inward. I slid my feet out from under me, tried to wiggle my ankles, but look! there they went too, my ankles like my wrists, curling in, yanking each heel toward the other. This must be a seizure. I’m having a seizure. Someone was gasping, a sucked-in half-sob. I had to tell Brandon. He needed to see this, what was happening. What was happening? June’s room was across the hall, maybe five steps away. I imagined her standing in the doorway in her floral-print underwear from Target, eyes frosted with sleep, blinking into the bathroom. Please don’t let her wake up. How could she not wake up? My head was too loud. I gave a croak. Brandon said something, and I worked to hear it.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  concourse fifteen to twenty feet below street level, was one of the darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the underworld, as it has often been described. The ballast between the tracks, the cracked sleepers, the brick walls with their stone bases, the cornices and panes of the tall windows, the wooden kiosks for the ticket inspectors, and the towering cast-iron columns with their palmate capitals were all covered in a greasy black layer formed, over the course of a century, by coke dust and soot, steam, sulfur, and diesel oil. Even on sunny days only a faint grayness, scarcely illuminated at all by the globes of the station lights, came through the glass roof over the main hall, and in this eternal dusk, which was full of a muffled babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people passed in great tides, disembarking from the trains or boarding them, coming together, moving apart, and being held up at barriers and bottlenecks like water against a weir. Whenever I got out at Liverpool Street Station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz, I would stay there at least a couple of hours, sitting on a bench with other passengers who were already tired in the early morning, or standing somewhere, leaning on a handrail and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time. I knew that on the site where the station stood marshy meadows had once extended to the city walls, meadows which froze over for months on end in the cold winters of the so-called Little Ice Age, and that Londoners used to strap bone runners under their shoes, skating there as the people of Antwerp skated on the Schelde, sometimes going on until midnight in the flickering light of the bonfires burning here and there on the ice in heavy braziers. Later on, the marshes were progressively drained, elm trees were planted, market gardens, fish ponds, and white sandy paths were laid out to make a place where the