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 Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  After three days of almost constant arousal, Greg found himself handing the car keys to the valet at Franco’s. Audrey had picked out his clothes — a royal blue silk shirt and black wool pleated trousers, a black sport jacket and no tie. The shirt contrasted beautifully with his dark hair and set off his blue eyes to best advantage. Audrey looked amazing in a black raw silk pencil skirt and a white silk blouse with silver cuff links. The skirt fell just below her knees and the blouse fell open almost to the middle of her chest. Her honey-colored hair had been slicked back in a tight chignon at the nape of her neck. She was devastating. She patted his ass and gave it a little squeeze when he met her at the front door to the restaurant. “Ready?” Butterflies were swept into a hurricane in his stomach and bees buzzed in his balls as he nodded his head and opened the door for her. As they walked in, he glanced towards the bar but didn’t see Moira. The fluttering subsided a bit until Audrey gave their name to the maitre d’, who nodded and said, “Yes, madam, your party is waiting for you at the table. This way please.” Just as Greg recognized Moira, seated at a three-quarter ‘banquette, her blond and suntanned companion stood for Audrey as they approached. Ian looked like a kid, but a pretty impressive kid. He had tousled hair that looked like he’d just gotten out of bed and 436 D. L. King a trimly muscled chest, tapering to a small waist, all shown off by the fitted green sweater he was wearing. Audrey had said ten years younger, which put him at about twenty-nine. God, had he ever looked that good? His wife’s eyes were sparkling. “Why don’t you sit here, by me,” Moira said, patting the booth next to her. Her hair fell in waves, past her shoulders. Greg couldn’t see past her waist, but she was wearing a softly gathered black halter- top, which appeared to be silk. As she turned to him and smiled he caught a glimpse of her nipples poking against the fabric and his butterflies woke up again. The two couples shared a light dinner, accompanied by a nice champagne. Audrey ordered for them both, as did Moira for Ian. They ate lightly, so as not to be too full for the activities ahead and Audrey plied Greg with enough wine to help loosen him up. Throughout dinner, Moira touched or caressed Greg’s thigh for emphasis or attention and, as the evening wore on, he began to feel more and more comfortable with the whole idea. The butterflies were still there, but they seemed more like excited butterflies, rather than nervous butterflies.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The Boss produced a glass of whisky and told me to drink it: I didn’t want to take it; but he insisted and I drank it off. “Did it burn?” he asked: “No, ’twas just like water!” I replied and noticed that the Boss and Reece exchanged a meaning look. At once the Boss declared I must walk up and down and each taking an arm they walked me solemnly round and round for half an hour. At the end of that time I was half asleep; the Boss stopped and gave me another jorum of whisky: for a moment it awakened me, then I began to get numb again and deaf. Again they gave me whisky: I revived but in five minutes I sagged down and begged them to let me sleep. “Sleep be d—d!” cried the Boss, “you’d never wake. Pull yourself together,” and again I was given whisky. Then, dimly I began to realise that I must use my will-power and so I started to jump about and shake off the overpowering drowsiness. Another two or three drinks of whisky and much frisking about occupied the next couple of hours, when suddenly I became aware of a sharp, intense pang of pain in my left thumb. “Now you can sleep,” said the Boss, “if you’re minded to; I guess whisky has wiped out the rattler!” The pain in my burnt thumb was acute: I found too I had a headache for the first time in my life. But Peggy gave me hot water to drink and the headache soon disappeared. In a day or two I was as well as ever, thanks, to the vigorous regimen of the Boss; in the course of a single year we lost two young men just through the little prairie snakes that seemed so insignificant. The days passed quickly till we came near the first towns in southern Texas: then every man wanted his arrears of salary from the Boss and proceeded to shave and doll up in wildest excitement. Charlie was like a madman. Half an hour after reaching the chief saloon in the town, everyone of them save Bent was crazy drunk and intent on finding some girl with whom to spend the night. I didn’t even go to the saloon with them and begged Charlie in vain not to play the fool. “That’s what I live for”, he shouted, and raced off.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Anaïs placed a folded hand under her delicate chin. “I’m thinking of telling Hugo that the ranch owner was so annoyed at people calling to leave messages for guests that she had the phone disconnected, and that the phone company assigned the number to the men who answered.” “Excellent plan,” Renate said. “And with Tristine and the lecture series, you are now covered for the next two years.” So that was why Anaïs had made me change the invitation letter to a series of lectures! She could no longer tell Hugo that she was writing at the California rest ranch, but she could say repeatedly that she was coming to give the pre-arranged lectures at USC and staying with me. As this last piece fell into place, the chill I’d felt was encompassed by blackness, as if I were inside the freezer and someone had closed the door. Did they expect me to lie to Hugo for the next two years? I would have to memorize every detail of what Anaïs had told him. Renate had been able to pull off their ruse for seven years, but eventually even she had screwed up. Anaïs asked me, concerned, “Do you think you can do this?” “Yes,” I said with a conviction I didn’t feel. I didn’t have sufficient experience with lying. I was unqualified for this assignment, but now it was too late to tell Anaïs. “So, everything is settled.” Renate rose, indicating it was time for us to leave. But when Anaïs and I stood, Renate commanded, “We must make an oath with Tristine.” Alarmed, I looked to Anaïs. She simply shrugged and nodded with a resigned smile that I should humor Renate. “Put your hand over mine,” Renate instructed me. She extended her elevated right hand. I placed mine over hers. Anaïs placed her right hand over mine. Her hand was soft and cold. Renate stacked her left hand over Anaïs’s, and we followed suit until our six hands were piled like pancakes. Renate began, “Tristine swears not to repeat what she has learned or may learn about Anaïs’s life. She may discuss it only with Anaïs or Renate.” I felt a frisson of excitement. “Say ‘I swear,’” Renate urged, and I did. Renate continued, “We vow to keep Anaïs’s secrets, revealed now or in the future, under pain of personal disaster. The person who betrays this oath, unless released by Anaïs, shall be visited with betrayals increased in magnitude to the tenth degree. Repeat after me: ‘This I swear in the name of Archangel Raphael to the East, Uriel to the North, Gabriel to the West and Michael to the South. So be it. Amen.’” We repeated Renate’s words, but Anaïs’s voice was so faint, I heard only my own. The hocus pocus reminded me of the silly solemnity of my ADPi sorority initiation, and I was tempted to giggle—but the chill from Anaïs’s hand penetrated mine, and I could tell that Renate was completely serious. CHAPTER 15

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

  93 Money, in common use by the late eleventh century, came to symbolize the disturbing changes caused by this rapid economic growth that undermined the traditional social structure; it was seen as “the root of all evil,” and in popular iconography the deadly sin of avarice inspired visceral loathing and dread. 94 Originally Christians had been the most successful moneylenders, but during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money. 95 The Jew in Peter Abelard’s Dialogue (1125) explains that because Jews’ land tenure is so insecure, “the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to strangers. But that just makes us more hated by those who think that they are oppressed by it.” 96 Jews, of course, were not the only scapegoats of Christian anxiety. Since the Crusades, Muslims, once regarded with vague indifference in Europe, had now come to be regarded as fit only for extermination. In the mid-twelfth century Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, depicted Islam as a bloodthirsty religion that had been propagated entirely by the sword—a fantasy that may have reflected hidden guilt about Christian behavior during the First Crusade. 97 Disquiet about nascent capitalism and the growing violence of Western society, both of which were so obviously at odds with the radical teachings of Jesus, also surfaced in the “ heresies” that the Church had begun to persecute actively in the late twelfth century. Again, the challenge was political rather than doctrinal. The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem. 98 Some had become rich in the towns, but population growth had fragmented inheritances and multiplied the numbers of landless villagers roaming the countryside desperately seeking employment. The structural violence of the “three estate” system was the cause of much anxious soul-searching among Christians. In orthodox as well as heretical circles, the well-to-do were coming to the conclusion that the only way to save their souls was to give away their wealth, which they now regarded as sinful. After a serious illness, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty; it increased rapidly in membership. Francis’s rule was approved by Pope Innocent III, who hoped thereby to retain some control of the poverty movement that threatened the entire social order. Other groups were not such loyal adherents of the Church.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  About two o’clock in the morning I passed a log-house and soon an American rode up beside me and wanted to know who I was, where I had brought the cattle from and where I was going! I told him the owner was behind me, and the boys and I were driving them straight ahead because some greasers had been interfering with us. “That’s the shooting I heard”, he said. “You have driven them across the river: haven’t you?” “I’ve driven them from the river,” I replied; “some of them were getting a drink.” I could feel him grin though I was not looking at him. “I guess I’ll see your friends pretty soon,” he said, “but this raiding is bad business. Them greasers’ll come across and give me trouble. We border-folk don’t want a fuss, hatched up by you foreigners!” I placated him as well as I could; but at first was unsuccessful. He didn’t say much but he evidently intended to come with me to the end because wherever I rode, I found him right behind the herd when I returned. Day had broken when I let the cattle halt for the first time. I reckoned I had gone twelve miles from the ford and the beasts were foot-sore and very tired; more and more of them requiring the whip in order to keep up even a walk. I bunched them together and came back to my saturnine acquaintance. “You are young to be at this game”, he said. “Who is your Boss?” “I don’t keep a boss”, I answered, taking him in with hostile scrutiny. He was a man of about forty, tall and lean with an enormous quid of tobacco in his left cheek—a typical Texan. His bronco interested me; instead of being an Indian pony of thirteen hands or so it was perhaps fifteen and a half and looked to be three-quarters bred. “A good horse you have there”, I said. “The best in the hull country,” he replied, “easy.” “That’s only your conceit”, I retorted. “The mare I am on right now can give him a hundred yards in a mile.” “You don’t want to risk any money on that, do you?” he remarked. “Oh, yes”, I smiled. “Well, we can try it out one of these days, but here comes your crowd”, and indeed, although I had not expected them, in five minutes Bent and Bob and Charlie rode up. “Get the cattle going”, cried Bob, as he came within earshot. “We must go on. The Mexicans have gone back but they will come right after us again. Who is this?” he added, ranging up beside the Texan. “My name is Locker”, said my acquaintance; “and I guess your raiding will set the whole border boiling. Can’t you buy cattle decently, like we all have to?” “How do you know how decently we paid for them?” cried Bent, thrusting forward his brown face like a weasel’s, his dog teeth showing.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Women and Love”, Edmond de Goncourt writes in his journal, “always constitute the subject of conversation wherever there is a meeting of intellectual people socially brought together by eating and drinking. Our talk at dinner was at first smutty (polissonne) and Tourgueneff listened to us with the open-mouthed wonder (l’étonnement un peu medusé) of a barbarian who only makes love (fait l’amour) very naturally (très naturellement).” Whoever reads this passage carefully will understand the freedom I intend to use. But I shall not be tied down even to French conventions. Just as in painting, our knowledge of what the Chinese and Japanese have done, has altered our whole conception of the art, so the Hindoos and Burmese too have extended our understanding of the art of love. I remember going with Rodin through the British Museum and being surprised at the time he spent over the little idols and figures of the South Sea Islanders: “Some of them are trivial”, he said, “but look at that, and that, and that—sheer masterpieces that anyone might be proud of—lovely things!” Art has become coextensive with humanity, and some of my experiences with so-called savages may be of interest even to the most cultured Europeans. I intend to tell what life has taught me, and if I begin at the A. B. C. of love, it is because I was brought up in Britain and the United States; I shall not stop there. Of course I know the publication of such a book will at once justify the worst that my enemies have said about me. For forty years now I have championed nearly all the unpopular causes, and have thus made many enemies; now they will all be able to gratify their malice while taking credit for prevision. In itself the book is sure to disgust the “unco guid” and the mediocrities of every kind who have always been unfriendly to me. I have no doubt too, that many sincere lovers of literature who would be willing to accept such license as ordinary French writers use, will condemn me for going beyond this limit. Yet there are many reasons why I should use perfect freedom in this last book. First of all, I made hideous blunders early in life and saw worse blunders made by other youths, out of sheer ignorance: I want to warn the young and impressionable against the shoals and hidden reefs of life’s ocean and chart, so to speak, at the very beginning of the voyage when the danger is greatest, the ‘unpath’d waters’. On the other hand I have missed indescribable pleasures because the power to enjoy and to give delight is keenest early in life, while the understanding both of how to give and how to receive pleasure comes much later, when the faculties are already on the decline.

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

  A more remarkable fact still is that the patient will often answer anyone whom his operator touches, or at whom he even points his finger, in however concealed a manner. All which is rationally explicable by expectation and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's movements.[538] He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if the latter is out of the room. A favorite experiment of Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the subject's hands through an opaque screen, and cause the operator to point at one finger. That finger presently grew insensible or rigid. A bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective rapport with their operator had been developed in these trained subjects during the hypnotic state, but the phenomenon then occurred in some of them during the waking state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in animated conversation with a fourth party.[539] I confess that when I saw these experiments I was impressed with the necessity for admitting between the emanations from different people differences for which we have no name, and a discriminative sensibility for them of the nature of which we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance.—The enigmatic reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even if they be due, as many contend, to unintentional suggestion on the operator's part, certainly involve hyperæsthetic perception, for the operator seeks as well as possible to conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into play, and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in away difficult to understand, but may develop effects which (in the first instance certainly) the operator did not expect to find. Unilateral contractures, movements, paralyses, hallucinations, etc., are made to pass to tile other side of the body, hallucinations to disappear, or to change to the complementary color, suggested emotions to pass into their opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the French ones, and the upshot is that if unconscious suggestion lie at the bottom of this matter, the patients show an enormously exalted power of divining what it is they are expected to do. This hyperæsthetic perception is what concerns us now.[540] Its modus cannot yet be said to be defined.

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

  That was the “qualifying life event” that enabled us to join the Newsweek health plan outside of the annual open enrollment period. “Look,” I say, “if you can just push back my end date and keep me on for a few months, I’ll at least be able to keep my health insurance, and I promise I’ll get another job and get out of here.” But Abby, my old friend, a woman I’ve known since we were both in our twenties and starting out in the journalism business, says no, she can’t do it. In two weeks I’m done, and that’s that. I hang up the phone, go downstairs, and tell Sasha what just happened. She’s stunned. Wasn’t I just telling her that it was safe for her to quit her job, because my Newsweek job was secure? “I thought Abby was your friend,” Sasha says. “I thought so, too.” Sasha still has the vacation folder with the brochures and plane tickets and hotel and car rental confirmations out on the table. “Maybe we should cancel the trip,” she says. There’s no sense in that, I tell her. Some of the money has already been spent, in deposits that we can’t get back. “We should go,” I say. “We’ll go, and we’ll use the time to think about what we’re going to do next. We can do anything, right? We can start over. We can move someplace new. It’s a fresh start.” I talk about Vermont. We’re always saying how cool it would be to live there. Our friends did that—one day they sold everything and moved to Vermont. They love it! Or there’s Boulder. Or Bozeman. We could live in the Rocky Mountains! We should make a list of the best places to live, rent a Winnebago, visit each one, and then decide. We could spend the whole summer traveling around the country! We could see the Grand Canyon, and Zion, and Yellowstone, and Yosemite. In a way this whole thing is a gift. Because now we have all this free time! When are we ever going to have a chance like this again? Sasha knows that I’m full of shit, and she also knows I’m panicking, because this is what I do when I’m panicking—I talk and talk and talk. But even as I’m reeling through my list of fantasy mountain towns where I can wear plaid shirts and drive a pickup truck and grow a beard, Sasha has arrived at the truth of our situation, which she feels the need to explain to me, as if by speaking the words out loud she might feel more in control of the situation. “Let’s just talk about where we are right now,” she says.

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

  I ask some of them, who give me a strange look and say, “Uh, college?” I stop asking that question. They’re all women, they’re all white, and they’re all wearing jeans and sporting the same straight, shoulder-length hair. They all seem baffled by my presence. What is this old guy doing here? I smile and realize that I already cannot remember anyone’s name. Next, Zack introduces me to the blog team, the people I will be working most closely with—Marcia, Jan, and Ashley. I’ve read their work already. They say things like totes magotes and awesomesauce, and produce blog articles like “5 Ways to Make Your Landing Pages Awesome,” and “7 Tips to Improve Your Lead Quality.” They write in a folksy style: “Hey, blogging’s hard, right? You don’t have to tell us!! But didya know there’s a remedy for those summer blogging blues? Well, there is, and we’re gonna tell you about it, so read on!” I’m not sure what my relationship to these women will be. I’m not their boss. Zack is. Zack points to an empty desk. “I guess you can sit there,” he says. Instead of a chair, there is a big rubber ball—orange, of course—on a rolling frame. I’m not quite sure what to do. If I ask for a chair, I risk looking like an old fart who doesn’t know how to sit on a bouncy ball or like a prima donna demanding some kind of special treatment. But if I do sit on this thing I’m pretty sure that I will immediately fall off. I imagine myself, age fifty-two, toppling off an orange bouncy ball and onto the floor, as a bunch of young women look on and try not to laugh. Some awkwardness ensues as I ask Zack if it might be possible to find an actual desk chair. We scavenge a chair from a desk in another room. The crisis is averted. Zack goes to his desk and gets to work on whatever it is that Zack does, while I take my seat at my little desk, which is empty save for a new MacBook Air. Is this really it? Is this my job? Will I really go to work every day and sit at this shitty little desk in this shitty little room? Are these people now my colleagues? Will I have to sit in meetings with them and listen to them talk? What exactly is my actual job? Once I finish doing all the first-day paperwork, once I have my picture taken and get my ID badge and set up my parking garage pass, what am I supposed to do? Zack seems to have no idea. He’s so new that he hasn’t even figured out what his job is, let alone mine. I spend the day filling out paperwork and trying not to freak out.

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

  Tragically, however, when the imperial troops marched into a Donatist basilica to carry out the edict, the unarmed congregation resisted, and a massacre followed. At once the Donatists loudly complained that the Christian emperor was persecuting his fellow Christians and that despite Constantine’s conversion, nothing had changed since the days of Diocletian. 17 Constantine was forced to revoke the edict, left the Donatists in peace, and instructed orthodox bishops to turn the other cheek. 18 He would have been uneasily aware that the Donatists had gotten away with it. Henceforth he and his successors would be wary of any theological or ecclesiastical discourse that threatened the Pax Christiana on which the security of the empire, they believed, now depended. 19 Constantine was reluctant to promote his Christianity in the sparsely Christianized West, but his arrival in the East marked his political conversion to the faith. There could as yet be no question of making Christianity the official religion of the empire, and pagans still held public office, but Constantine closed down some pagan temples and expressed his disapproval of sacrificial worship. 20 Christianity’s universal claims seemed ideally suited to Constantine’s ambition to achieve world rule, and he believed that its ethos of peace and reconciliation were in perfect alignment with the Pax Romana. But to Constantine’s horror, the eastern churches, far from being united in brotherly love, were bitterly divided by an obscure—and to Constantine, incomprehensible—theological dispute. In 318 Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, had put forward the idea that Jesus, the Word of God, had not been divine by nature. Quoting an impressive array of biblical texts, he contended that God had simply conferred divinity upon the man Jesus as a reward for his perfect obedience and humility. At this point there was no orthodox position about the nature of Christ, and many of the bishops felt quite at home with Arius’s theology. Like their pagan neighbors, they did not experience the divine as an impossibly distant reality; in the Greco-Roman world, it was taken for granted that men and women regularly became fully fledged gods. 21 Eusebius, the leading Christian intellectual of his day, taught his congregations that God had revealed himself in human form before, first to Abraham, who had entertained three strangers at Mamre and discovered that Yahweh was participating in the conversation; later Moses and Joshua had similar theophanies. 22 For Eusebius, God’s Word, or Logos—the divine element in a human being 23 —had simply returned to earth once more, this time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 24 But Arius was vehemently opposed by Athanasius, his bishop’s young, combative assistant, who argued that God’s descent to earth was not a repetition of previous epiphanies but a unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable act of love.

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

  This time a vocal minority spoke out against the war. The Quakers, who had first arrived in Boston in 1656 and had themselves been the victims of Puritan intolerance, vigorously condemned the atrocities. John Easton, governor of Rhode Island, accused the Puritans of Plymouth of arrogance and overconfidence in provocatively expanding their settlements and mischievously playing the tribes off against one another. John Eliot, a missionary to the Indians, argued that this had not been a war of self-defense; the real aggressors were the Plymouth authorities who had fudged evidence and treated the Indians with rough justice. As in Virginia, flagging piety meant that gradually more rational and naturalistic arguments would replace theological ones in their politics. 23 As is often the case, a general decline in religious fervor tends to inspire a revival from some dissatisfied element of society. By the early eighteenth century, worship had become more formal in the colonies and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York and Boston. But to the horror of these polite congregations, a frenzied piety had erupted in the rural areas. The Great Awakening broke out first in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734, when the death of two young people and the powerful preaching of its minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) whipped the town into a devotional fever that spread to Massachusetts and Long Island. During Edwards’s sermons, the congregation screamed, yelled, writhed in the aisles, and crowded around the pulpit, begging him to stop. But Edwards continued inexorably, never looking at the hysterical masses, offering them no comfort, but staring rigidly at the bell rope. Three hundred people experienced a wrenching conversion, could not tear themselves away from their Bibles, and forgot to eat. Yet they also experienced, Edwards recalled, a joyous perception of beauty that was quite different from any natural sensation “so that they could not forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.” 24 Others, broken by the fear of God, would sink into an abyss of despair only to soar to an equally extreme elation in the sudden conviction that they were free of sin. The Great Awakening showed that religion, instead of being an obstacle to progress and democracy, could be a positive force for modernization. Strangely enough, this seemingly primitive hysteria helped these Puritans to embrace an egalitarianism that would have shocked Winthrop but was far closer to our present norms. The Awakening appalled the Harvard faculty, and Yale, Edwards’s own university, disowned him, but Edwards believed that a different order—nothing less than the Kingdom of God—was coming painfully to birth in the New World. Edwards was, in fact, presiding over a revolution. The Awakening flourished in the poorer colonies, where people had little hope of earthly fulfillment. While the educated classes were turning to the rational consolations of the European Enlightenment, Edwards brought the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness to his unlettered congregation in a form that they could understand and prepared them for the revolutionary upheavals of 1775.

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

  At work, Trotsky sometimes swings by my desk just to talk. Apparently the women on the blog team have noticed that Trotsky and I are getting to be friends, and this bugs them. They don’t like Trotsky. Neither does Spinner, for that matter. Spinner complains to Cranium that Trotsky and I are getting too friendly. Cranium tells Trotsky that he needs to stop hanging out with me at work. That, anyway, is what Trotsky tells me. “The women on the blog team don’t like it,” he says. I can’t believe it. “What is this, middle school?” I say. “Well,” he says, “it’s not just that.” Spinner has told Cranium that some of our banter is making the women who sit near me uncomfortable. One woman who overheard one of our conversations felt it was inappropriate. Trotsky won’t say which woman complained, but he does tell me which conversation it was. We were talking about child care. Trotsky’s wife works full time. They’ve tried day care but are thinking about hiring a nanny. We’ve dealt with the same issue, and first hired a nanny and then resorted to getting au pairs to live with us and watch the kids. It turns out that having a nineteen-year-old German girl living in your house is maybe not the greatest idea. Nothing inappropriate ever happened, but it drove my wife nuts, I tell him. Trotsky says no way would his wife even entertain having an au pair live with them. This conversation has made someone uncomfortable. That person confided in Spinner, who reported us to Cranium. To me the whole thing seems stupid. But Trotsky takes it seriously. “You can get fired for almost anything and survive,” he says. “But the one thing you cannot survive is getting fired for sexual harassment. If that happens, you’ll never work again.” From then on I steer clear of Spinner and the women on the blog team. I say hello when I come to work and goodbye when I’m leaving, and that’s about it. Trotsky’s trouble with Spinner is just beginning, however. For whatever reason, she has decided that she hates him, and she’s waiting for another reason to pounce. One night, foolishly, he gives her an opportunity. It starts when Trotsky writes a Facebook post about the Ban Bossy campaign that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is promoting. Sandberg wants everyone to stop using the word bossy to describe girls. Trotsky says that instead of using her bully pulpit to pursue something as trivial as the word bossy, Sandberg should dedicate herself to more important issues, like the plight of the African elephant, which is on the verge of extinction. Trotsky loves elephants. He’s always ranting about the awful poachers who kill them for their ivory. I have no idea how elephants became so dear to him, or how his mind makes the illogical leap from Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist crusade to the issue of elephant poaching. I also don’t care.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I got up and washed and returned to bed; the cold water had quieted me; but soon by thinking of Lucille and her soft, hot, hairy “pussy”, I grew randy again and in this state fell asleep. Again I dreamed of Lucille and again I was trying, trying in vain to get into her when again the spasm of pleasure overtook me; I felt my seed spirting hot and—awoke. But lo! when I put my hand down, there was no seed, only a little moisture just at the head of my sex—nothing more. Did it mean that I could only give forth seed once? I tested myself at once: while picturing Lucille’s sex, its soft hot roundnesses and hairs, I caressed my sex, moving my hand faster up and down till soon I brought on the orgasm of pleasure and felt distinctly the hot thrills as if my seed were spirting, but nothing came, hardly even the moisture. Next morning I tested myself at the high jump and found I couldn’t clear the bar at an inch lower than usual. I didn’t know what to do: why had I indulged so foolishly? But next night the dream of Lucille came back again, and again I awoke after an acute spasm of pleasure, all wet with my own seed. What was I to do? I got up and washed and put cold water in a sponge on my testicles and sex and all chilled crawled back into bed. But imagination was master. Time and again the dream came and awakened me. In the morning I felt exhausted, washed-out and needed no test to assure me that I was physically below par. That same afternoon I picked up by chance a little piece of whipcord and at once it occurred to me that if I tied this hard cord round my penis, as soon as the organ began to swell and stiffen in excitement, the cord would grow tight and awake me with the pain. That night I tied up Tommy and gave myself up to thoughts of Lucille’s private parts: as soon as my sex stood and grew stiff, the whipcord hurt dreadfully and I had to apply cold water at once to reduce my unruly member to ordinary proportions. I returned to bed and went to sleep: I had a short sweet dream of Lucille’s beauties but then awoke in agony. I got up quickly and sat on the cold marble slab of the washing-stand. That acted more speedily than even the cold water; why? I didn’t learn the reason for many a year. The cord was effective, did all I wanted: after this experience I wore it regularly and within a week was again able to walk under the bar and afterwards jump it, able too to pull myself up with one hand till my chin was above the bar. I had conquered temptation and once more was captain of my body.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Such people tend to think in highly polarised terms, preferring reductive simplifications over acknowledging the complexity of the world and life, and adopting an ‘arrogant, dismissive communication style’, talking at others rather than with others, and preferring personal disparagement to serious engagement with the issues – precisely because such an engagement is seen as threatening. As Johnson points out, this sort of ‘defensive cognitive closure’ leads to rival or conflicting ideas being judged immediately and automatically as ‘ridiculous’. People holding rival views are not simply wrong; they are often denigrated as ‘stupid’ as well. What can be done about this? My training as an academic immediately suggests a set of solutions. Go where the evidence takes you – and be honest if you are going beyond it. Be willing to confront ambiguity and live with uncertainty. Talk to people with opposing views, partly to ensure you have grasped their positions, and partly because of the importance of maintaining personal relationships in the face of disagreements. As a scholar, I make a point of reading works advocating alternative perspectives and talking to those who hold such views, partly to ensure I have understood them properly – but more importantly, to ensure I can hold my own views with integrity in the face of rival beliefs. But this won’t work in the face of dogmatism because the problem is ultimately psychological, not evidential. The issue is an ‘intolerance of ambiguity’, 29 which leads certain individuals to perceive an ambiguous situation ‘rigidly in black or white’, often leading to rapid evaluations and unreliable foreclosures of complex issues – such as medical diagnosis. 30 An ability to tolerate ambiguity is increasingly being linked with wellbeing. Perhaps we shall see more research on how to confront and cope with dogmatism in the future, as a way to help us understand others and achieve greater social cohesion. When Worlds Collide: Believing and Violence Growing up in Belfast during the late 1960s, I was surrounded by sectarian tensions arising from Ireland’s complex and troubled political history, which often involved religion. It was not difficult for me to frame these persuasively within my early atheist worldview: if there was no religion, there would be no religious violence. I never gave much thought to the consequences of my emerging teenage belief that religion was evil, and thus ought to be eliminated or excluded from society.

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

  Upon visiting Thomas Road, Frances FitzGerald remarked that “sports, the oldest of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions for the sublimation of male violence and male sexual energies, might stand as a metaphor for the whole social enterprise of the church.” In Falwell’s words, “God wants you to be a champion.”11 In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.” Still, sports and military metaphors could function in similar ways, critics pointed out. In a world destabilized by modern feminism, sports offered disaffected men a masculine haven. Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated. Both sports and the military, too, reinforced a dualistic view of the world. In athletics, as in battle, there were winners and losers. In this way, sports-infused rhetoric and pageantry allowed Promise Keepers to address male anxieties while maintaining the semblance of benevolent patriarchy.12 It was when the evangelical men’s movement elevated sports as the preferred metaphor for Christian manhood that “racial reconciliation” emerged as a guiding purpose. Under McCartney’s leadership, Promise Keepers was one of the few white Christian organizations in the country willing to take on racism. Critics viewed Promise Keepers’ focus on racial reconciliation with skepticism. Some accused leaders of “jumping on the racial reconciliation bandwagon, in part because it allows them to sound supportive of people of color, without actually having to support any of the political and social policies that would benefit people of color.” Framing racism as a personal failing, at times even as a mutual problem, PK speakers routinely failed to address structural inequalities. In this way, the pursuit of racial reconciliation could end up serving as a ritual of self-redemption, absolving white men of complicity and justifying the continuation of white patriarchy in the home and the nation. Several African American pastors critiqued this unwillingness to address deeper structural questions and called out the organization for racial tokenism. Yet, far more than other evangelical organizations, Promise Keepers provided a platform for African American voices. Black pastors like Tony Evans, Wellington Boone, and E. V. Hill, and sports stars like Reggie White frequently appeared at PK rallies.13 Promise Keepers’ pursuit of racial reconciliation did amount to more than mere posturing. Its 1996 book Go the Distance: The Making of a Promise Keeper (published by Focus on the Family) included chapters by Charles Colson, Bill McCartney, Stu Weber, and other white evangelicals, but it also included an unsparing critique of white Christianity penned by African American pastor and civil rights activist John Perkins. How much this commitment to racial reconciliation trickled down to the rank and file is difficult to gauge.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The community of belief helps us to expand our vision of this landscape, and encourages us to go ‘further up and further in’ (C. S. Lewis) to this way of thinking and living. Communities of faith provide an environment in which their underlying beliefs – again, whether political, religious or cultural – can be studied, internalised and appropriated. Particularly in religious communities – such as churches, synagogues and mosques – education is seen as integral to achieving a mature faith, capable of engaging the world and sustaining a meaningful life. This typically takes the form of explaining the core beliefs and defining practices of a community and pointing to exemplars who are able to enact and model the community’s distinctive ethos. There is now a growing awareness of the need to prepare communities of belief for the challenges of living in a pluralist western context, in which there are no universally accepted norms of truth, justice or goodness, and in which nobody is seen as having privilege in matters of belief. While some communities of belief are trying to find an appropriate place and voice within wider culture, re-reading their histories to see if the past might help them navigate the stormy seas of the present, others isolate themselves from the complexities of our social world to maintain the myth of their totalising truths. This isolationism is a source of concern because it detaches such communities from the cultural mainstream, often leading to the perception that they are at war with, or threatened by, wider society. This can easily lead to alienation or even radicalisation within these communities, which result in political or religious extremism. Some Islamic communities in secular France or alt-right networks in Germany provide illuminating examples of this problem, for which there appears to be no obvious solution. Charles Taylor noted the ‘fragilisation’ of belief in the modern period, which was catalysed by a growing awareness of alternative possibilities. The emergence of a pluralist culture ‘fragilises’ belief systems – whether religious or atheist – by undermining their self-evident correctness. ‘If my view of the world is right, why do other views exist?’ The hostility of certain forms of secular atheism to continuing religious belief in a supposedly secular culture is partly a response to the threat that they pose to its plausibility, heightened by the growth and enhanced visibility of religious immigrant communities in many western nations. ‘If my theory is right, religion ought not to exist.’ Peter Berger concurs: ‘The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because its very existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.’ 12 Communities of belief thus serve an important role in maintaining the plausibility of their own position in the face of a cultural milieu that suggests that their views are not as secure and self-evident as they might like to believe they are.

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

  The suspicious man inside stood with his arms folded while I used the phone in the entryway. On the wall was a gallery of Navy photos. I scanned from them to the crudely rendered tattoos on his forearms. On one was an anchor. On the other was a nude woman drafted in thick, tasteless lines. It was much too crude to be a portrait. It was more symbolic, like the anchor. I finished the call and waited. It was probably only ten minutes but it seemed like two hours, as I anticipated what I would receive when I got home. Dad was going through his black and blue period and had been for as long as I could recall. “Scott, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” was his mantra. On this occasion he would be right. He broke two bones in his hand. But before he drove me home for the inevitable, Dad paused to admire the gallery of Navy ships. The ex-sailor eyed Dad’s upper arm. Dad proudly pulled his sleeve up to reveal a dark green and red dragon tattoo. “That’s a beauty.” The sailor grinned. Dad smiled, but his eyes glared at me. “Thanks.” Leeny shrugged. Her hand disappeared in her pocket and she pulled out the ten. “I'll keep the five for my trouble.” Her coat gave the soft groan of hardened old leather as one arm disappeared inside it. I looked at that sturdy but very feminine body and her pale skin. That hair and those eyes. Damn. “No, wait.” She turned back and waited. I nodded softly, and she set the coat back down on a rusty Samsonite chair. I pointed to the brightly lit chaise longue. It was my models’ favorite platform back in the day. Canvas Back 383 It had a pristine carved frame and its richly padded sangria red velvet covering was comfortable enough to sleep on. I was glad I’d decided not to sell it for noodles during one of my many “I’d eat cockroaches” periods. Leeny kicked off her ratty tennis shoes and looked at the black fabric draped all around the chaise. She reached her hand under the lights, testing their warmth like the shallow end of a pool. She nodded then unbuttoned her jeans and let them fall. She hooked a prehensile big toe in one belt loop and ably tossed the jeans to the seat of the Samsonite. She peeled her tank top and tossed it atop the jeans. There was no hesitation to her stripping. There was a crude art to how she moved.

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

  It’s like living in Argentina during the 1970s. Every week someone else is no longer sitting at their desk, and we get an email from Cranium telling us that so-and-so has graduated, and hey ho, let’s all wish them well. One guy, who worked with Trotsky at his last company, and whom Trotsky recruited, lasts only for a few weeks and then gets the axe when someone decides they don’t need him after all. So many people are being let go that at one of our weekly marketing department meetings someone submits an anonymous question to Cranium: “Over the last two months, we have lost at least one male employee every week. Are the remaining males safe?” Cranium tries to make a joke of it. He assures us that HubSpot is not cutting costs, that companies make adjustments all the time. He says he is actively hiring, and the company is growing, and everything is awesome. In our next one-on-one beanbag chair bull session, I tell Trotsky that it seems to me that the company is trying to cut costs. I realize that I’m probably being paid more than most of the young people in our department, and it makes sense to cut me loose, I will understand. “All I ask,” I say, “is that you give me a little bit of warning. I’m asking this not as an employee, but as a friend. Just give me a little time, and I’ll go find another job. I’ll get out of your hair.” Trotsky assures me there is no pressure on him to cut his budget, but if things change, he will let me know. For a few months in the first half of 2014, things actually get better. I’m now working up on the fourth floor, in a newly renovated space, a world away from the ring of hell that is the telemarketing room. I’m writing e-books aimed at venture capitalists and chief marketing officers, which isn’t as fun as being a columnist at Newsweek, but it’s better than explaining HTML to Marketing Mary. I’m also helping write an update to Inbound Marketing, the book that Halligan and Dharmesh published in 2009. On the side, I’ve started picking up some freelance work, writing articles for Newsweek Japan on topics like robotics and artificial intelligence. Sure, there are still days when I go home and tell Sasha about some astonishingly stupid thing that some bozo has done, but most of the time I can just tune things out. The best thing is that I no longer have to work with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley, the women on the blog team, or Wingman. The only person I deal with is Trotsky, and he and I are becoming pals. I like Trotsky so much that one weekend I invite him and his family to a cookout at my house. I cook steaks and our kids play together.

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

  As an evangelist to America’s youth, Graham hadn’t shied away from addressing the younger generation’s lax sexual morality, but in Cold War America the stakes suddenly seemed higher. With greatness thrust upon the nation, it was imperative that the nation’s citizens also pursue goodness. A strong nation was a virtuous one; sexual morality was an issue of national significance.23 For Graham, the stability of the home was key to both morality and security: “A nation is only as strong as her homes.” In the evangelical worldview, Satan and the communists were united in an effort to destroy the American home. And for Graham, a properly ordered family was a patriarchal one. Because Graham believed that God had cursed women to be under man’s rule, he believed that wives must submit to husbands’ authority. Graham acknowledged that this would come as a shock to certain “dictatorial wives,” and he didn’t hesitate to offer Christian housewives helpful tips: When a husband comes home from work, run out and kiss him. “Give him love at any cost. Cultivate modesty and the delicacy of youth. Be attractive.” Keep a clean house and don’t “nag and complain all the time.” He had advice for men, too. A man was “God’s representative”—the spiritual head of household, “the protector” and “provider of the home.” Also, husbands should remember to give wives a box of candy from time to time, or an orchid. Or maybe roses.24 Not all evangelicals in Graham’s day embraced such patriarchal teachings. Some believed Christ’s atonement had nullified any “curse” placed on Eve in the Book of Genesis, opening the way to egalitarian gender roles; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelicals in this tradition had been enthusiastic proponents of women’s rights. Graham’s patriarchal interpretation reflected the more reactionary tendencies of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism. He added a new twist, however, by wedding patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism. In the late 1940s, there was nothing altogether unique about Graham’s instructions to husbands and wives. Many other Americans, too, celebrated “traditional” gender roles in Cold War America. The communist threat positioned women and men in distinct ways; men were to provide for their families and defend the nation, while women were deemed vulnerable and in need of protection. In this way, Cold War masculinity was intimately connected to militarism, to the point that they could seem inseparable. In the fall of 1949, then, Graham’s message resonated within and beyond the evangelical fold. But it wasn’t until the conversion of one of the city’s most famous latter-day cowboys that Graham’s revival would take hold in a way that would set the evangelist on course to become one of the most influential figures in the twentieth century.25 When Graham arrived in LA, the little-known thirty-three-year-old revivalist caught the eye of Stuart Hamblen, the hard-drinking “cowboy singer.” One of Hamblen’s biggest hits, “(I Won’t Go Huntin’, Jake) But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women,” had released that year.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For example, the growth of online ‘echo chambers’ providing selectively curated information that is consistent with an in-group’s ideology or identity is not merely heightening cultural tensions; it is making it increasingly difficult to mediate between factions and tribes, who see the perpetuation of their favoured stereotypes as simply articulating ‘their truth’. As noted earlier, this problem is becoming especially significant within the political domain, as an increasingly toxic culture emerges, particularly in the United States. Fewer politicians are willing to socialise across party lines, or even partner with opponents in a variety of other activities. Ideological distance, based on what people believe , is now being supplemented by personal antagonism, based on how people feel about members of other communities. If we are to rebuild social cohesion and mitigate the negative social impact of ‘affective polarisation’ in western culture, 29 there is a clear need for public intellectuals to become diplomats, explaining one specific community’s idea without condemning or ridiculing others. In view of the importance of this issue, we shall reflect more on the role of ‘public intellectuals’ in mediating between communities of belief. Communal Mediation: The Role of the Public Intellectual So how do communities of belief communicate with a wider culture? Or with other communities of belief? As human knowledge expands, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to know what else is going on in the world of thought, how can these communities ensure that their ideas or perspectives are known to and appreciated by their peers in the world at large? The answer seems to lie, at least in part, in the idea of a public intellectual – a term that was first used in 1987 to explore the changing role of intellectuals in American public life. For Russell Jacoby, the term referred to ‘writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.’ 30 It has since taken on a number of meanings, including the justification of the academic life to a sceptical public, the defence of a specific discipline in the face of its critics (who wants to study classics in a scientific age?), or an individual without academic affiliation who speaks and writes intelligibly and engagingly on issues of public importance (such as Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, or Naomi Klein, before her appointment as professor at the University of British Columbia in 2021).