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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I reached for Kitty, and pulled her to me. ‘I wish Walter were not waiting for us,’ I whispered - though, in truth, there was something rather thrilling about embracing her, in such a costume, with Walter so near and so unknowing. That thought - and the soundless kiss which followed it - made the trousers feel still stranger. When Kitty stepped away to see to her own suit, I looked at her a little wonderingly. I said, ‘How can you dress like this, before a hall of strangers, every night, and not feel queer?’ She fastened the clip of her braces, and shrugged. ‘I have worn sillier costumes.’ ‘I didn’t mean that it was silly. I meant - well, if I were to be beside you, in these’ - I took another couple of steps - ‘oh Kitty, I don’t think I should be able to keep from kissing you!’ She put a finger to her lips; then pushed at the fringe of her hair. She said, ‘You will have to get used to it, for Walter’s plan to work. Otherwise - well, what a show that would be!’ I laughed; but the words Walter’s plan had made my stomach lurch in sudden panic, and the laughter sounded rather hollow. I gazed down at my own two legs. The trousers, after all, were far too short for me, and showed my stockings at the ankle. I said, ‘It won’t do, will it, Kitty? He won’t really think that it will do - will he?’ He did. ‘Oh yes!’ he cried when we emerged at last together, all dressed up. ‘Oh yes, but what a team you make!’ He was more excited than I had ever seen him. He had us stand together, with our arms linked; then he made us turn, and do again the little stiff-legged dance that he had caught us at before. And all the time he walked about us with narrowed eyes, stroking his chin and nodding. ‘We shall need a suit for you, of course,’ he said to me. ‘A number of suits, indeed, to match Kitty’s. But that we can easily arrange.’ He took my hat from my head, and my plait fell down upon my shoulder. ‘Something must be done about your hair; but the colour, at least, is perfect - a wonderful contrast with Kitty’s, so the folk in the gallery will have no trouble telling you apart.’ He winked, then stood surveying me a little longer with his hands behind his head. He had removed his jacket. He wore a shirt of green with a deep white collar - he was always a fancy dresser — and the armpits of the shirt were dark with sweat. I said, ‘You really mean it, Walter?’ and he nodded: ‘Nancy, I do.’

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

  Until the early eleventh century, Jews had been fully integrated in Europe. 89 Under Charlemagne they had enjoyed imperial protection and held important public posts. They became landowners and craftsmen in all trades; Jewish physicians were much in demand. Jews spoke the same languages as Christians—Yiddish did not develop until the thirteenth century—and gave their children Latin names. There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side and bought houses from one another in London until the mid-twelfth century. 90 However, during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009, even though the caliph, who seemed to have been certifiably insane, had persecuted Jews and his fellow Muslims as well as Christians. 91 In consequence, Jews were attacked in Limoges, Orléans, Rouen, and Mainz. Linked with Islam in the Christian imagination, their position grew more precarious with each Crusade. After Richard I took the Cross in London in 1198, there were persecutions in East Anglia and Lincoln, and in York in 1193, Jews who refused baptism committed suicide en masse. The so-called blood libel, whereby the deaths of children were blamed on the local Jewish community, first surfaced when a child was killed in Norwich during the 1140s; there were similar cases in Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds, and Winchester (1192). 92 This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology, but it was also the product of social factors. During the slow transition from a purely agrarian to a commercialized economy, towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy, while some townsfolk had not only been reduced to abject poverty but had also lost the traditional support structures of peasant life. 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.

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

  The people would suffer if the laws kept changing, maintained the Legalist Han Feizi (c. 280–233), so a truly enlightened ruler “waits in stillness and emptiness” and “lets the tasks of themselves be fixed.” 110 He did not need morality or knowledge but was simply the Prime Mover, who remained immobile but set his ministers and subjects in motion: Having courage, he does not use it to rage He draws out all the warlike in his ministers Hence by doing without knowledge he possesses clear-sightedness By doing without worthiness he gets results By doing without courage, he achieves strength. 111 There was, of course, a world of difference between the two: Daoists deplored rulers who forced their subjects to conform to an unnatural fa; their sage king meditated to achieve selflessness, not to “get results.” 112 But the same ideas and imagery informed the thinking of political scientists, military strategists, and mystics. People could have the same beliefs yet act upon them very differently. Military strategists believed that their brutally pragmatic writings came to them by divine revelation, and contemplatives gave strategic advice to kings. Even the Confucians now drew on these notions: Xunzi believed that the Way could be comprehended only by a mind that was “empty, unified, and still.” 113 Many people must have been relieved when Qin’s victory put a stop to the endless fighting and hoped that the empire would keep the peace. But they had a shocking introduction to imperial rule. Acting on the advice of Prime Minister Li Si, the First Emperor became an absolute ruler. The Zhou aristocracy—120,000 families—were forcibly moved to the capital and their weapons confiscated. The emperor divided his vast territory into thirty-six commanderies, each headed by a civil administrator, a military commander, and an overseer; each commandery was in turn divided into counties governed by magistrates, and all officials answered directly to the central government. 114 The old rituals that had presented the Zhou king as head of a family of feudal lords were replaced by a rite that focused on the emperor alone. 115 When the court historian criticized this innovation, Li Si told the emperor that he could no longer tolerate such divisive ideologies: any school that opposed the Legalist program must be abolished and its writings publicly burned. 116 There was a massive book burning, and 460 teachers were executed. One of the first inquisitions in history had therefore been mandated by a protosecular state. Xunzi had been convinced that Qin would never rule China because its draconian methods would alienate the people. He was proved right when they rose up in rebellion after the death of the First Emperor in 210 BCE. After three years of anarchy, Liu Bang, one of the local magistrates, founded the Han dynasty.

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

  Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life. 34 Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit. Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere. 35 In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole, which it had previously permeated. True Christians, justified by a personal act of faith in God’s saving power, belonged to the Kingdom of God, and because the Holy Spirit made them incapable of injustice and hatred, they were essentially free from state coercion. But Luther knew that such Christians were few in number. Most were still in thrall to sin and, together with non-Christians, belonged to the Kingdom of the World; it was essential, therefore, that these sinners be restrained by the state “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes so that it cannot bite and tear as it would normally do.” Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. To attempt this would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everywhere.” 36 The only way the Kingdom of the World, a realm of selfishness and violence ruled by the devil, could impose the peace, continuity, and order that made human society feasible was by the sword. But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you know from past experiences that you have some triggers, it can help to name this up front and let your person know what they can do if you get triggered. This is also a good thing to ask a new lover: “Is there anything I might do that could trigger you?” Or, “If anything I’m doing doesn’t work for you, please say ‘stop’ or hold up your hands.” Take Time to Recover Let your breath return to normal, however long that takes. Notice if you are caught in a memory or if you are actually feeling unsafe in the present moment. Again, if you can speak, say “Something is coming up from my past, I need a moment.” If you can’t speak, closing your eyes can help you to establish a boundary around your attention and keep it on your own well-being and breath. Decide What to Share You are not obligated to disclose your past trauma. At this point, I generally assume that anyone I am beginning a situationship with has some sexual or other trauma in their history, and I try to be forthcoming about the fact that I do as well. But actually sharing the details of it in or right after the moment of trigger may not be appropriate for the connection or the moment or your healing. Or it might be exactly right. Some options: “I want to share more about my history of trauma with you but not right now.” Intimacy, yes, but I need time. This might include, “I’d like to continue—but can you avoid [if the trigger is a physical place or activity, name it as an emerging boundary]?” “Are you open to hearing about what’s coming up for me right now?” Hearing about other people’s trauma can be hard, even re-traumatizing for people. It can also be a swift transition from heavy petting to deep sharing. The connection may not be about that kind of depth, even if something is coming up in that moment. “I am feeling like myself again. I don’t want to talk about it. I would like to keep making out, if you’re down.” Sometimes the trigger is familiar, and once it passes I just want to keep going, not move into a big process moment. “Something is coming up for me‚ I’m not ready to share it, I think I [you] need to head home.” Let Your Body Follow Your Words/Desires If you want to leave or want your lover to go—make those moves. If you have a friend who can come and get you, call them up. You don’t need to drive when your system is taken over by trauma.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We are conceived from deceit. The second: Back on the island, Ba told me the moon was pregnant with a rabbit. You and your brother are obsessed with animal births. On the Animal Planet channel, you watch shows about animals that fuck outside of their species and give birth to babies that look like neither parent, that look more like unassembled pieces, bloodied and without a blueprint. Before you were born, I had dreams of giving birth to your head before the rest of your body. I thought I’d have to sew you together with floss, puzzle your bones back together. I understand animals that eat their runts. Better to swallow them back into your body than let them be taken, buried outside of you. You spend hours frying your eyes on a screen, sucking on suanmei and spitting the pits, impressed by 2-D animals that are 3-D where I’m born. The forest is lit by eyes, you say to the TV, which would be poetic if you weren’t wrong. That’s not a forest. It’s a jungle. You wouldn’t know the difference: A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death. I used to think our island floated on the sea like leaves, but nothing named a country is light enough. I say our island even though you were never with me: You’re here, watching bald-assed monkeys masturbate on TV. After the program on big cats, you and your brother decide to live nocturnally. Your brother’s learned at school that the sun is due to burn out someday, so we might as well live the darkness fully. We’re just pregaming the apocalypse, your brother says, lidding our windows with butcher paper. I’ve always wanted you to dodge the sun. Your brother is the light one, coin-bright, and you’re the rust clung to his side. I call every week and tell Ma to put Ba on the phone. I pretend to take out the trash so you won’t hear my voice, though the city is landfill anyway, and taking out the trash mostly means flinging it out the window. When you hear me speak to Ba, you look at me like you’re watching TV in a language you don’t speak. You move your mouth in sync with mine, trying to match the words to a preexisting key, but there are certain sorrows I’ve severed from you.

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

  When this was over, how to make my retreat was my concern; for, though I had been so extremely pleased with the difficult between this warm broadside, poured so briskly into me, and the tiresome pawing and toying to which I had owed the unappeased flames that had driven me into this step, now I was cooler, I began to apprehend the danger of contracting an acquaintance with this, however agreeable stranger; who, on his side, spoke of passing the evening with me and continuing our intimacy, with an air of determination that made me afraid of its being not so easy to get away from him as I could wish. In the mean time I carefully concealed my uneasiness, and readily pretended to consent to stay with him, telling him I should only step to my lodgings to leave a necessary direction, and then instantly return. This he very glibly swallowed, on the notion of my being one of those unhappy street-errants, who devote themselves to the pleasure of the first ruffian that will stoop to pick them up, and of course, that I would scarce bilk myself of the hire, by not returning make the most of the job. Thus he parted with me, not before, however, he had ordered in my hearing a supper, which I had the barbarity to disappoint him of my company too. But when I got home, and told Mrs. Cole my adventure, she represented so strongly to me the nature and dangerous consequences of my folly, particularly the risks to my health, in being so openlegged and free, that I not only took resolutions never to venture so rashly again, which I inviolably preserved, but passed a good many days in continual uneasiness, lest I should have met with other reasons, besides the pleasure of that rencounter, to remember it; but these fears wronged my pretty sailor, for which I gladly make him this reparation.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Even from her I felt distant, that night.So I was almost glad when, at about eleven o’clock, the mood of the party was changed, by Dickie calling for more light to be brought, for the lady on the piano to cease her playing, and for all the women present to gather round and pay attention.‘What’s this?’ cried one lady. ‘Why has it grown bright?’Evelyn said: ‘We are to hear Dickie Reynolds’ history, from a book written by a doctor.’‘A doctor? Is she ill?’‘It is her vie sexuelle!’‘Her vie sexuelle!’‘My dear, I know it already, it is terribly dreary ...’ This was from a woman who stood beside me in the shadows, garbed as a monk; as I turned to her she gave a yawn, then slipped quietly from the room in search of other sport. The rest of the guests, however, looked just as eager as Dickie could wish. She stood beside Diana; the book that Evelyn had referred to was in Diana’s hands - it was small and black and densely printed, with not a single illustration: it was not at all the kind of thing that people usually gave Diana, for her box. And yet, she was turning its pages in fascination. A lady dipped her head to read the title from the spine, then cried: ‘But the book’s in Latin! Dickie, whatever is the point of a filthy story, if the damn thing’s written in Latin?’Dickie now looked a little prim. ‘It is only the title that is Latin,’ she answered; ‘and, besides, it is not a filthy book, it is a very brave one. It has been written by a man, in an attempt to explain our sort so that the ordinary world will understand us.’A lady dressed as Sappho took the cigar from her mouth, and studied Dickie in a kind of disbelief. She said: ‘This book is to be passed among the public; and your story is in it? The story of your life, as a lover of women? But Dick, have you gone mad! This man sounds like a pornographer of the most mischievous variety!’‘She has taken a nom-de-guerre, of course,’ said Evelyn.‘Even so. Dickie, the folly of it!’‘You misunderstand,’ said Dickie. ‘This is a new thing entirely. This book will assist us. It will advertise us.’A kind of collective shudder ran right around the drawing-room.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She said the last letter felt incomplete, and we needed to metabolize metal this time. Metal, she told me, could be melted down into water, and the holes were always thirsting. We believed there were three letters, one for each daughter my Ama had left behind. All losses come in threes, Ben said, and I thought of my mother’s three toes in the cookie tin. When we lowered the cage into the 口, it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already. The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said. Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning. When I was the one who picked up the phone, Ama gave me marriage advice: No mainland men, she said. Agong and my father were born in neighboring provinces, and look how they were now: My husband is gone in the head and your father is gone everywhere else. She said men were synonymous with missing. Then she told me to ward off boys by holding a skinned ginger root between my knees while I slept. I stole the ginger from my mother’s cabinet. It swelled with my sweat and chafed me hairless, but I ground myself against it until my crotch burned and it prickled to piss the next day. My mother said Ama was corrupting me, but the cure worked. Boys in the neighborhood veered their bikes away from me, and even my brother said his tongue burned whenever he spoke to me. Other times, Ama told me about stealing the neighbor’s chickens, slaughtering and skinning and cooking them so that there was no evidence of the crime. Ama was the one who taught me the laws of ownership: It’s yours if you were the one to birth it, she said. Or the one to kill it.

• From The Art of Memoir

  going to happen. It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war. 1. Take it a phrase at a time. There was a map of Vietnam. If the current craze for over-the-top drama had affected the writing of Dispatches, Herr might have started with some fiery, guts-spilled war scene. Instead, he starts with a carnal object, and his reflection on it. A “true” thing—maps are meant to convey veracity. We should be able to find our way with them. He starts in a small, almost dull, everyday object that just happens to be left behind in his transient’s apartment. 2. too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. Herr doesn’t just tell us he’s tired; he gives us dramatic evidence of the extent. It’s another carnal moment of a type we all understand. 3. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. This is his interior interpretation of the map—it’s a marvel, some kind of miraculous phenomenon, which is a theme that occupies most of the book. The phrase introduces his notion of unreality or impermeable mystery of war. 4. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. Its antiqueness gives the map a kind of special radiance—a spiritual value, if you will. We also see Herr’s mind feeling for the truth, guessing that since it was made in Paris, a Frenchman had probably left it. It’s his first use of the word probably —the qualifier of a more truthful memoirist. He’s showing us his mind in action, his thoughtfulness, and how he tries to deduce the truth based on hard evidence. 5. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. This again is

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But she is a lovely girl. Her husband was the kindest man, and Emma says she is just about despairing that she will ever find another to match him. The only men who want to court her turn out to be boxers ...’ I smiled dully; I was not much bothered about Mrs Costello, really. While Annie talked I kept glancing over to Florence. She now stood at the far side of the tent, a handkerchief gripped between her fingers but her cheeks dry and white. However long and hard I looked at her, she would not meet my gaze. I had almost decided to make my way over to her, when there came a sudden clamour: the lady on the platform had finished her speech, and the crowd was reluctantly clapping. This meant, of course, that it was time for Ralph’s address; Annie and I turned to see him hover uncertainly at the side of the little stage, then stumble up the steps as his name was announced, and take up his place at the front of the platform. I looked at Annie and grimaced, and she bit her lip. The tent had quietened a little, but not much. Most of the afternoon’s serious listeners seemed to have grown tired and left: their seats had been taken by idlers, by yawning women and by more rowdy boys. Before this careless crowd Ralph now stood and cleared his throat. He had his speech, I saw, in his hand - to refer to, I guessed, if he forgot his lines. His forehead was streaming with sweat; his neck was stiff. I knew he would never be able to project his voice to the back of the tent, with his throat so stiff and tense. With another cough, he began. “‘Why Socialism?” That is the question I have been invited to discuss with you this afternoon.’ Annie and I were sitting in the third row from the front, and even we could hardly hear him; from the mass of men and women behind us there came a cry - ‘Speak up!’ - and a ripple of laughter. Ralph coughed yet again, and when he next spoke his voice was louder, but also rather hoarse. “‘Why Socialism?”

• From The Art of Memoir

  down (nobody has yet). I keep pages private till the book’s done, and at the end, I send work out to folks I wrote about long before type’s set. As a side note, it’s not my nature to write at any length about people I don’t like. Save portraits of a grandmother who pissed me off and two pedophiles, it’s mostly love that drives me to the page. My son was in junior high when my second memoir came out, and he took a stance he held for more than a decade: “I’m not ready to read your books.” This strikes me as wise. It’s one thing to know your mother was sexually assaulted, quite another to read the graphic scene. He prefers me as a dispenser of waffles, not a literary figure. But there’s nothing in my stories he doesn’t know in rough outline—we’re close, and I’d never want him to hear family traumas from pals. With my last book, Lit, I had him vet the first chapter, because he appeared there in his then-current, college-age permutation. He changed nary a word. I’d have preferred that his father scrutinize that manuscript for accuracy, but he preferred the blurring of a pseudonym. (I did send those chapters to our former marriage counselor, just to see if she felt it fair.) Glib as I once was in suggesting Lucy Grealy piss off her own family, I was much like her before I set out to write about my less- than-perfect clan. As a single mom far from home, I dreaded pissing anybody off. Before I ever started Liars’ Club, I kept phoning my mother and sister (my daddy had passed) to take their pulses about the project and warn them about possible public scrutiny, should I be so lucky as to draw any. Part of me hoped they’d shoo me off. Much as I worshiped the form of memoir, the project’s prospect shot me through with dread. I felt compelled to write it, yet broke a sweat when I realized how easy it would be to do it wrong. Truth was, I had a financial flamethrower on my ass: no car in Syracuse, where the snow’s measurable in yards, and child-care costs that precluded my making much on summer holidays. Maybe my mother and sister were so glib about the book because they were used to my small-press poetry efforts, with

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

  Just four years earlier the First Vatican Council (1870) had promulgated the new—and highly controversial—doctrine of papal infallibility. At a time when modernity was demolishing old truths and leaving crucial questions unanswered, there was a yearning for absolute certainty. Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new League of Nations, they saw the revival of the Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of Antichrist. 4 Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.” 5 The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence. Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with evolutionary theory. There was a widespread belief that German wartime atrocities were the result of the nation’s devotion to Darwinian social theory, according to which existence was a brutal, godless struggle in which only the strongest should survive. This was, of course, a vulgar distortion of Darwin’s hypothesis, but at a time when people were trying to make sense of the bloodiest war in human history, evolution seemed to symbolize everything that was most ruthless in modern life. These ideas were particularly disturbing to small- town Americans who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist elite—almost as though they were being colonized by a foreign power. This distress came to a head in the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, when the fundamentalists, represented by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, tried to defend the state legislature’s prohibition of the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They were opposed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow, supported by the newly founded American Civil Liberties Union. 6 Even though the state law was upheld, Bryan’s bumbling performance under Darrow’s sharp interrogation thoroughly discredited the fundamentalists’ cause. Their response to this humiliation is instructive. The press mounted a virulent campaign exposing Bryan and his fundamentalist supporters as hopeless anachronisms.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And she turned her face to the carriage window, where the moon showed - higher and smaller than before, but still quite pink, as if ashamed to look upon the wicked world to which it was compelled to lend its light. I, too, flushed at the lady’s words. What she had said was strange, was shocking - and yet, I guessed, might easily be true. In the bustle and swarm of the streets on which I plied my shadowy trade, a stationary or a lingering carriage would be unremarkable - especially to me, who attended to the traffic of the pavements rather than the roads. It made me horribly uneasy to think she really had been observing me, all those times ... And yet, was it not just such an audience that I had longed for? Had I not lamented, again and again, precisely the fact that my new nocturnal performances must be staged in the dark, under cover, unguessed? I thought of all the parts I had handled, the gents I’d knelt to and the cocks I’d sucked. I had done it all, as cool as Christmas; now, the idea that she had watched me went direct to the fork of my drawers and made me wet. I said - I didn’t know what else to say - I said, ‘Am I then so - special?’ ‘We shall see,’ she answered. After that, we spoke no more. She took me to her home, in St John’s Wood; and the house, as I guessed it must be, was grand - a high, pale villa in a well-swept square, with a wide front door and tall casement windows with many panes of glass. In one of these a single lamp sat gleaming; the neighbouring houses, however, presented only black, shuttered windows, and the clatter of our carriage sounded atrocious, to me, in the stillness - I was not then used to that total, unnatural hush which fills the streets and houses of the rich, when they are sleeping. She led me to her door, saying nothing. Her knock was answered by a grim-faced servant, who received her mistress’s cloak, looked once at me from beneath her lashes, but after that kept her eyes quite lowered. The lady paused to read the cards upon her table; and I, self-conscious, looked about me. We were in a spacious hall, at the bottom of a wide staircase winding up to darker, higher floors. There were doors - closed - to the left and the right of us. The floor was paved with marble, in squares of black and pink. The walls, to match it, were painted a deep, deep rose; and this darkened further, where the staircase curved and lifted, like the interior whorls of a shell.

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

  102 Khomeini liked to quote the hadith in which the Prophet announced after a battle that he was returning from the lesser to the “greater jihad,” the implementation of truly Islamic values in society, a struggle far more exacting than the “lesser” military one. As he looked at the ecstatic crowds that day, he must surely have felt apprehension at the more onerous jihad about to begin. It was indeed a struggle: almost at once, perhaps predictably, the fragile coalition of Marxists, liberals, and the devout seemed to unravel. There was opposition to the new constitution, in 1980 four separate plots against the regime were uncovered, and there were constant street battles between secularist guerrillas and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. A reign of terror ensued, not unlike those that followed the French and Russian Revolutions, when so-called revolutionary councils, which the government could not control, executed hundreds of people for “un-Islamic behavior.” As a crowning blow, on September 20, 1980, the southwest of the country was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces. During this turbulent period, the American hostage crisis proved a godsend to Khomeini. On November 4, 1979, three thousand Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taken ninety prisoners. It is not clear whether Khomeini knew of their plan beforehand, and everyone expected him to release the hostages immediately. But although the women hostages and the embassy’s Marine guards were allowed to return to America, the remaining fifty-two diplomats were held for 444 days. In the West, this disreputable affair seemed to epitomize Islamic radicalism. Yet Khomeini’s decision to retain the hostages was inspired not by an Islamic imperative but simply by politics. He could see that this focus on the Great Satan would unite Iranians behind him at his difficult juncture. As he explained to his prime minister Bani Sadr: This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, and then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs, we can let the hostages go. 103 As soon as they were no longer useful, the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the inauguration day of the new U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the departure of his “satanic” predecessor Jimmy Carter. Inevitably the hostage crisis tainted the image and idealism of the Islamic Revolution. Many Iranians were unhappy about it, even while appreciating its symbolism. A nation’s embassy is regarded as its sovereign territory on foreign soil, and some thought it apt that American citizens should be held there, just as for decades Iranians had felt imprisoned in their own country with the connivance of the United States.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For every ten paces of my journey that were illuminated by a pool of gas-light, there were a further twenty that were cast in gloom. The gloom lifted a little at Old Street itself, for here there were offices, and crowded bus stops and shops. As I walked towards the Hackney Road, however, it seemed only to deepen, and my surroundings to grow shabbier. The crossings at the Angel had been decent enough; here the roads were so clogged with manure that, every time a vehicle rumbled by, I was showered with filth. My fellow pedestrians, too - who, so far, had all been honest working-people, men and women in coats and hats as faded as my own - grew poorer. Their suits were not just dingy, but ragged. They had boots, but no stockings. The men wore scarves instead of collars, and caps rather than bowlers; the women wore shawls; the girls wore dirty aprons, or no apron at all. Everyone seemed to have some kind of burden - a basket, or a bundle, or a child upon their hip. The rain fell harder. I had been told by the tea-girl at the Angel to head for Columbia Market; now, a little way along the Hackney Road, I found myself suddenly on the edge of its great, shadowy courtyard. I shivered. The huge granite hall, its towers and tracery as elaborate as those on a gothic cathedral, was quite dark and still. A few rough-looking fellows with cigarettes and bottles slouched in its arches, blowing on their hands to keep the cold off. A sudden clamour in the clock tower made me start. Some complicated pealing of bells - as fussy and useless as the great abandoned market hall itself - was chiming out the hour: it was a quarter-past four. This was far too early to visit Florence’s house, if Florence herself was at work all day: so I stood for another hour in one of the arches of the market where the wind was not so cutting and the rain was not so hard. Only when the bells had rung half-past five did I step again into the courtyard, and look about me: I was now almost numb. There was a little girl nearby, carrying a great tray about her neck, filled with bundles of watercresses. I went up to her, and asked how far it was to Quilter Street; and then, because she looked so sad and cold and damp - and also because I had a confused idea that I must not turn up on Florence’s doorstep entirely empty-handed - I bought the biggest of her cress bouquets.

• From My People (2022)

  And though we moved back to the United States in 2012, we have traveled back from time to time, and South African friends visit us here in America and otherwise keep in touch. But in recent months the emails and Skype chats and talks with visiting friends have become intense and somber and worrying in a way that I haven’t previously experienced. Sooner or later, the conversation turns to disturbing reports of the direction of South African’s political culture, with accounts of ongoing corruption at the highest levels of the government of President Jacob Zuma. He is scheduled to remain in office until national elections in 2019, but is facing a revolt within his party. It is not of the same kind that drove his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, prematurely from office. Mbeki was not accused of personal corruption; what put him in jeopardy was his alleged effort to undermine Zuma’s chances of succeeding him. When the time came, Mbeki resigned rather than waiting to be removed, in part to avoid a political crisis ahead of the 2009 general election. (In South Africa, the president is chosen by Parliament immediately after an election.) At the time, Zuma had already fought off charges of corruption to win the leadership of his party, the African National Congress, and of the country. But the stigma and stain of corruption never went away; instead, they grew as Zuma financed a lavish renovation of his kraal (or homestead) in his home base, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal, with state money, and was subject to allegations of cronyism. Last week, South Africa’s public protector, an ombudsman with constitutional powers, issued what has become known as the “state-capture report.” It called for a full judicial inquiry into possible corruption and conflicts of interest involving Zuma, senior state officials, and members of the wealthy Gupta family. Reports indicate that the Guptas plan to defend themselves against the charges at the upcoming inquiry. Zuma has dismissed the report and seems ready to fight it in court. Ahmed Kathrada, a revered eighty-seven-year-old anti-apartheid activist who served time in prison with Mandela, wrote an open letter earlier this year about what he called “a crisis of confidence” in the leadership of the country. He called for Zuma to step down. A few months later, Jackson Mthembu, the chief whip of the ANC, who was once one of the staunchest supporters of his party—often coming down hard on journalists who questioned anything the ANC did—called on the entire ANC executive leadership, including himself, to step down. Mthembu was quoted in the City Press as saying, of his fellow leaders, that, in certain respects, “We are not only equal to the apartheid state, we are worse.” That may be an extreme statement, but it captures the frustration and disappointment of many in South Africa. And it reminded me of something F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, told me when I interviewed him in Johannesburg shortly before Mandela and the ANC assumed power, in 1994.

• From My People (2022)

  [W]e want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia, supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.” In the early days, I waited for the students to pile in with their stories. In the early days, they would demonstrate for part of the day, then get arrested so as to establish a case that could be argued at a later date in court and hopefully lead to a decision that would overthrow separate and not equal. Within hours, they would then get bailed out and many would come straight to the Holman basement to tell their stories to Julian Bond, who was one of the writers of the Committee on Appeal document, as well as managing editor of the paper. He had been a student at Morehouse College but had put that on hold for the time being. I bided my time rambling around the basement, looking over textbooks belonging to Holman, who wrote under the pen name Vox. In time, I felt the need to get out of the basement and into the streets myself—not as a participant but as an observing servant of the people. And in a few years I traveled from the streets of Atlanta to streets up and down the East Coast, where there may not have been Jim Crow laws, but the pattern and practice of racial discrimination had the same effect on my people. So, along with my clothes, I packed my racial consciousness. And while some of my clothes wore out from time, my people and their stories kept my consciousness fresh and responsive to their ongoing challenges. For while their consciousness kept them focused on how far they had come in many instances, it also helped them (and me) keep their eyes on what continued and continues to be an elusive prize: equality and justice for all. At one point in 1967, following four summers of riots protesting inequality around the country, a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to address the cause of the disturbances. The commission ultimately concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one white and privileged, one Black and unequal.” It included in the blame the mostly white media. And while corrective steps were taken in all areas, including the media, all these years later, inequality persists, even in many well-funded and well-staffed and even prize-winning news organizations. The protests sparked by police killings of Black people over the last few years have caused another period of soul-searching, a moment to dig deeper, as clearly the racist demons of our past still haunt us.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In those early days, I would occasionally glance at the pages she worked on; but whatever I saw, made me frown. ‘What does it mean, cooperative?’ I asked her once. It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place.And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle.Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place. And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle. Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’ There was always something like this - always some neighbour in trouble, and needing money, or help, or a letter writing or a visit to the police; and it was always Ralph and Florence that they came to - I had not been with them a week before I saw Ralph leave his supper and run along the street in his shirt-sleeves, to give some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against.